Easter Egg-travaganza

It's been a busy bank holiday weekend here in Eton. The Eton Traders got together to hold an Easter Egg Hunt (with lettered eggs hidden in shop windows which spelt out a secret phrase), the Easter Bunny was out and about giving out vouchers for a free chocolate treat and Ildiko's Chocolates were at Tastes Delicatessen offering samples of their amazing chocolates. The weather wasn't exactly on our side, but it only snowed a little bit, for a little while, and by Monday afternoon the sun was shining.

Despite the bitter cold, everyone was in holiday spirit. The chocolate tasting was a huge success.  Delicious chocolate, beautifully hand decorated with fruits, nuts and flowers. What's not to like? Children were rushing up to the shop window all weekend shouting "B" (the letter on the egg I had hidden as part of the hunt). Adults also took part in the hunt, but were more restrained with their excitement! The Easter Bunny had children squealing in delight and adults clamouring for photographs.  In my role as Bunny's assistant on Monday I even got to see the changing of the guard at Windsor Castle for the first time! Now I know what the visitors see after I give them directions to the castle. My view was slightly obscured by the 6 foot white rabbit, but that made it even more memorable.

I hope everyone who visited Eton this weekend, went home with some lovely memories (along with their free Easter treat!).

Seasonal events are taking place in Eton throughout the year. For more information take a look at the Visit Eton facebook page.

Chocolate Tasting

On Saturday 30th March Ildiko, of the delicious Ildiko's Chocolates, will be coming here, to Tastes Delicatessen in Eton. She'll bring samples of her wonderful chocolate slabs for you to try (free of charge). Ildiko's chocolates (and her chocolate bunnies) make an ideal Easter treat! Hope to see you!

Easter in Eton

Eton's very own Easter Bunny will be greeting people in and around the town on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. It’s worth saying hello to him as he is handing out vouchers for a FREE Easter treat to be collected from participating shops (including JaM, Hush, Tastes Delicatessen, ReallyFabCards, roost, The Eton Fudge Shop & Zero 3 Cafe).

Furthermore, an Easter Egg hunt will be running throughout the long weekend (from Good Friday until Bank Holiday Monday). Eggs with letters on them will be hidden in shop windows up and down Eton High Street. Wander the historic high street, spot the eggs and work out the words to enter the competition for a chance to win a £40 food voucher for The Henry VI pub and kitchen.

Hop along to Eton for an egg-cellent weekend!

For further information visit the Visit Eton facebook page.

Old Nick's Got a New Friend

We've been selling St. John & Dolly Smith's "Old Nick" Scotch Bonnet Sauce for nearly two years. It's popular. People come back for it time and time again. It's hot, but with a really good flavour as well. Some time ago Chris (who makes the sauce) gave me a bottle of his new sweet and hot sauce to try. I'm not sure when it was, or what was going on, but I have to admit that I forgot all about it. Sorry Chris! I did however, find the bottle just before Christmas and took it home to try.

We used it a lot. It seemed to work with everything. Made with Birds Eye chillies it is sweet, but with a serious kick. It made a fantastic dipping sauce and marinade. Stirred into Jay's homemade hummus gave an "unusual" flavour, which was surprisingly moorish. We always finished the spicy hummus before the plain. And so now Sweet and Hot has appeared on the shelves here at Tastes Delicatessen.

Irresistible Ildiko

A week ago @IldikosChocolat started following me (@TastesDeli) on twitter.

Ildiko had started her own chocolate company (Ildiko's Chocolate) in Walton-on-Thames just before Christmas and was looking for local outlets. This week, I met Ildiko and her husband Tamas. I saw, and sampled, their chocolates and was well and truly hooked.

Ildiko makes slabs of the finest Belgium Chocolate, beautifully decorated with fruits, nuts and flowers. These really are stunning. No topping has been thrown or dolloped here. Each item is delicately positioned and the result is chocolate art! But not only do they look too pretty to eat, but the tastes are fantastic. Unusual flavour combinations which work really well; milk chocolate with coconut chips and crystallised violet petals; dark chocolate with raspberries, pistachios and pink peppercorns; white chocolate with freeze dried cherries and rose petals....

It's two weeks before Easter, so the shop is not exactly short of chocolate, but these really were impossible to resist. I hope my customers feel the same! These mini bars are in stock now: £1.99 each.

Why Didn't The Chicken Cross the Road?

For the past few months, every time I have driven down the lanes behind Bloomfield Hatch Farm there have been Bloomfield Hatch chickens exhibiting their free-range status by meandering carelessly across the road. Apparently, this group of "ladies" are particularly adept at escapology. More so than any of their predecessors. They escaped from the fields so often that the farmers had given up on trying to keep them in. They seemed to be able to get home at night anyway.

So this week, I was telling a customer about the habits of the chickens which lay our eggs, and she said I should post a picture on facebook. Always keen to find something to post about that might actually be interesting, the very next day I set off to collect our eggs and armed myself with a camera. And what did I find? Not a single chicken on the road anywhere. None. And no obvious reason why not. So I can't even tell you why the chicken did, and then didn't, cross the road. Sorry.

I had to settle for snapping a picture of a chicken not crossing the road. Enjoy!

It's Official: we sell some of the best cheese in the world!

The 2012 World Cheese Awards were apparently the closest contest ever, with judges needing to sample two cheeses again before deciding on the world champion (well that's what they said anyway!). Two thousand seven hundred cheeses were judged. A world champion was selected, along with 15 other cheeses to make up the list of the world's top 16 cheeses.

In that list there were two British cheeses (along with 4 Swiss cheeses, 3 Spanish, 3 from the USA, 2 French, 1 Italian and 1 from the Netherlands). Incredibly BOTH of the British cheeses were made in Berkshire (and are obviously stocked by Tastes)! We couldn't be more proud to be stockists of Barkham Blue from Two Hoots Cheese near Wokingham and Spenwood from Village Maid Cheese nearer Reading. Well done cheese-makers!

Windsor Honey & Windsor Bees

As readers of this blog will no doubt be aware Tastes Delicatessen sells local honey from hives in and around Windsor. The honey is delicious, and our customers come back time and time again for more. I find the lives of the bees who produce the honey fascinating, and it seems I may have encouraged Stephen-the-beekeeper to start a blog!

Whether it is my fault or not, I certainly find the blog interesting. So for those of you who want to know more about bee hives, bee predators large and small, bee-havior, bee-conomics, (I think I should stop now - you get the idea), you can follow the lives of the Windsor Bees at http://windsorhoney.blogspot.co.uk. At the moment, I am anxiously awaiting news that the cautious West colony have survived the cold snap.

Coffee Week: How to Choose the Right Coffee

In the third part of our Coffee Week blog series, Edward Grace offers us some tips on how to select the right coffee.

Choosing Coffee Beans

How should one go about choosing coffee beans? Well, tastes differ and this makes it a slightly tricky question to answer, however, as it is often the case, whatever the taste, there are always some basic principles to observe if you are on a quest to find the most delicious coffee.

Your Coffee Must Be Fresh

First and foremost, your coffee must be fresh. If stored properly (see my previous post), roasted coffee beans are at their best for about a month after roasting. Again, if stored properly, the life of roasted coffee can be extended somewhat, but fading of taste and aroma will be increasingly noticeable with every new day. Any respectful speciality roaster puts the roasting date on the bag, if the roasting date cannot be found on the bag - this is usually not a good sign and suggests the roaster prioritises operational efficiencies (afforded by long sell by dates) above the quality of your coffee.

Ground coffee loses its freshness incredibly fast. Coarsely ground coffee (say ground for cafetiere) will lose most of its freshness in about three days. Fine ground coffee (e.g. ground for espresso) will lose half of its freshness in about 15 minutes! Whatever brewing method you choose, we recommend grinding coffee immediately before brewing. Even using the cheapest of blade grinders is immensely better than using ground coffee, however, if you are serious about your coffee, we recommend getting a burr grinder (my earlier post, how to brew the perfect cup of coffee, includes some inexpensive burr grinder recommendations). Burr grinders are designed to grinds coffee into particles that are significantly more uniform in shape and size than those achieved with a blade grinder – this in turn allows uniform extraction of coffee preventing excessive bitterness and allowing consistent control of brewing times.

Coffee is an agricultural product and as such its freshness is not limited by how recent the roasting date is. The green coffee used by the roaster should be seasonally fresh. Once harvested and processed, depending on the quality of processing and the method of storage green coffee is at its best for a period of up to nine months. It is the responsibility of the roaster to ensure that the coffee they roast is fresh. Very unfortunately some roasters often use green coffees that are well past their seasonal glory, usually hiding the unpleasant signs of green coffee age behind the darkness of its roast. It is much harder to hide the age of coffee in a lighter roast, so, generally, if you like your coffee and it is roasted in the light to medium-dark range, the chances are it is seasonally fresh.

Pay Attention to Varietals, Origin and Processing

There are dozens of varietals of Arabica coffee and, complemented by environmental and climatic factors, they all have different taste. In addition to varietals and environmental factors, the processing of coffee has a major impact on its taste. Washed coffees tend to have very clean taste, whilst natural processed coffees are often more earthy, sometimes gamey, sometimes overtly fruity or slightly (and sometimes not so slightly) fermented. Nothing beats tasting when choosing a coffee, but once you have paid attention to the cultivars, origin, altitudes and processing, you will find it immensely easier to select coffees that you really like.

Coffee Strength

Finally, what about your coffee strength? To be honest, "coffee strength" is as misleading a term as a sell by date. Coffee strength refers to the degree of roast, i.e. "stronger" coffee is a darker coffee. However, the darkness of coffee has nothing to do with how strong (in terms of coffee flavours or caffeine extraction) your beverage is. It is simply a reference to body resultant from the progressively increasing (with a degree of roast) presence of roasty flavours. Generally, a darker roast hides the subtleties present in the lighter roasts and this is precisely why the majority of most delicate and exquisite coffees are roasted light. This is not to say that a dark roast is necessarily bad; some coffees take a darker roast well, preserving their acidity and taking on a very interesting character, but most coffees, unless they have too many defects or show signs of age that need to be hidden, do better as a lighter roast.

Darker coffee does not contain more caffeine. The process of roasting does not add or remove caffeine from the coffee beans. True, as coffee is being roasted darker, everything else being equal, it loses more of its moisture content and by weight darker coffee will have slightly more caffeine, but this effect is marginal and generally it is negated by a plethora of other variables such as varietals, elevation (higher grown coffees are denser and lose less weight through roasting than lower grown ones) and so on.

Extraction of coffee, expressed as percentage of the final brew, is probably the only way to measure correctly how strong your coffee is. However, coffee, unlike tea, has a very narrow sweet spot – it does not taste great if it is under or over-extracted. This is precisely why most of the speciality coffee associations, and there are quite a few of them on both sides of the Atlantic, including SCAA (Speciality Coffee Association of America based in the US) and SCAE (Speciality Coffee Association of Europe based in the UK), recommend almost identical extraction ratios for brewed coffee. It really does not matter how light or dark your coffee is, to get the best taste of your coffee you need to consistently extract about 20% of coffee to achieve about 1.35% concentration of coffee in your ready brew. Needless to say, this is easier said than done and this is why coffee brewing is often considered to be nearly as much of a science as coffee roasting.

Don't forget - Coffee Tasting with The Beanberry Coffee Company - at Tastes Delicatessen, 92 High Street, Eton - on Sunday 9th December - between 11am and 3pm.

Coffee Week - How to store coffee

In the second part of our Coffee Week blog series, Edward Grace tells us how to store freshly roasted coffee beans.

There appears to be a lot of confusion among coffee drinkers as to how roasted coffee should be stored. Almost everybody heard or read that coffee should be stored in a cool dry place, but what does it actually mean?

Well, roasted coffee loses freshness incredibly fast. Contact with air, high temperature, moisture and exposure to light are all contributing to the loss of flavour and aroma. Good storage is nothing else but limiting these factors as much as possible and this is where key storage principles come into play.

Storage principles:

1. The lower the temperature, the slower the loss of freshness.

2. Humidity is a huge problem. Coffee beans are meant to be dry.

3. If humidity issue is addressed, fridge or freezer is good, freezer is better.

Generally, we do not recommend using fridge or freezer to keep the bag of coffee which is constantly being pulled out, opened, closed and put back. Condensation will start building up immediately upon retrieval from the fridge/freezer and that is not good.

If you have just bought enough coffee to last for a week, it is just best to keep it in a tight container or a bag somewhere in the larder, away from sources of light and heat. However, if you have more coffee than you can enjoy in a matter of days, you have to start thinking about how to retain freshness of the coffee that you will be having later on.

If coffee is just put away for a long time, and particularly if it is still in the sealed coffee bag, we recommend putting that bag into a couple of zipped plastic bag (to further increase impermeability) and store it in the freezer. Once retrieved from the freezer, we would leave it on the counter in all its wrappings until the temperatures have equalised before opening the coffee bag. We do not recommend putting the coffee bag back.

With this in mind, if you do not consume your coffee fast or you have ended buying more coffee than you can have in a week, we would recommend splitting your coffee into 7-day portions and keeping them in the freezer (properly wrapped and sealed) until their turn comes up. Once out, store the beans in a sealed jar somewhere in the larder and enjoy them before they get stale.

Another good way of storing coffee, once the sealed coffee pouch was opened or the coffee has been removed from the freezer, is in an old clean and dry wine bottle – we would use a rubber cork and a degassing hand pump set (most supermarkets carry those sets for about £3.50 or so). Coffee goes in, cork is inserted and all the air is pumped out. The bottle should be stashed away (into the larder) to keep coffee away from the light - this is a great method to keep it fresh.

Don't forget - Coffee Tasting with The Beanberry Coffee Company - at Tastes Delicatessen, 92 High Street, Eton - on Sunday 9th December - between 11am and 3pm.