A 3D printer at Makerscafe. Photograph:Kristen Batey
New technology and coffee are two of the things Shoreditch does best, and an enterprising new cafe allows its customers to indulge in both simultaneously.
MakersCafe intends to bring 3D printing to the masses. It’s a space that encourages imagination, discussion and the prototyping of ideas whilst drinking coffee from 3D printed cups.
The concept is simple. Grab a coffee from Old Shoreditch Station, take a seat and brainstorm a creative project. After coming up with an idea, you can discuss it with staff who will help make a simple concept a 3D reality there and then.
Have the prototype made on the spot using 3D printing or laser cutting, then take the piece back to the table and continue to discuss, play and collaborate.
The beauty is that anyone from digital whizz kids to novices are welcome. I arrived knowing little about the process, but laser-cutting aficionado Hazim Sami was at hand to explain all.
MakersCafé can provide a consultancy service to get drawings ready for 3D printing and laser cutting or – for those in the know – you can save work as an SDL file on software like SketchUp.
“We wanted to create a sociable environment, where anyone could come in and discuss limitless ideas, opening doors to new possibilities through using our technology.” says Sami.
The team also run regular creative workshops, including an introduction to 3D printing.
Haile recommended: Ethiopian cuisine. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
The Beatles said it all: John, Paul, Ringo and George inadvertently gave a name to the first near-human in history. In 1974 anthropologists who located and reconstructed the female skeleton of a hominid who lived over three million years ago, rejoiced, in their encampment in Hadar in the Awash Valley, to a euphoric tape of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’; hence her name. Our Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, had her origins in Ethiopia all those years ago, while Hackney citizens were mere blobs of ectoplasm in the primeval ooze of stream and swamp.
Later the great kingdom of Ethiopia, with its unparalleled wealth, its powerful rulers, magnificent scenery and amazing natural resources, was renowned for its jewels and rare perfumes. A sophisticated cuisine evolved to match this splendour, and even now, despite the tangled politics of its recent past, a search for Ethiopian food is for us an insight into a strange and wonderful history.
Pearl of great price
This cuisine is so far beneath the radar of ‘fine dining’ that it’s hard to locate all the places in Hackney where it can be sampled, but once you know what to look for, there is much to enjoy. The foundation of an Ethiopian meal is injera, a wondrous thing that is probably the most visually unprepossessing food ever invented, a sludge-coloured, floppy, slightly clammy pancake, with a porous sponge-like texture, but enough tensile strength and pliability to act as wrap, shovel, spoon and mopper-upper.
A batter is made from the fermented dough of a flour made from teff, the seed of a grass found only in Ethiopia and Eritrea, which is cooked on a metal disk about 50cm across. This forms the base on which the components of a meal are served; the various items are plonked on this absorbent layer, which soaks up the juices, and can also be torn into receptacles for mouthfuls of the different thick stews, wat, or zigni. Injera is nutritionally a pearl of great price, with no gluten whatsoever, but an impressive range of amino acids, vitamins, calcium, minerals, protein, carbohydrates and fibre. Its enigmatic flavour, due to days of fermentation, is neither sour nor acid, but has a distinct tang, a tasty catalyst for the flavour of the spicy meat and vegetables that are eaten with it.
Spice and veg
Vegetables are not mere ‘sides’ but an important item in the diet of the main Ethiopian religions, which have many non-meat days in the year. So vegetable stews are complex and delicious, holding their own with the meaty ones. Dried pulses and lentils, often spiced as they are dried, are cooked in rich dishes, with more flavouring from one of the many different spice mixtures. Spinach or chard is often combined with lentils, cabbage gets a crisp pungency. Sometimes cheese is added, but every vegetable dish has its distinct characteristics.
The spice mixtures used in Ethiopian cuisine are not dissimilar to North Africa and the Middle East, but have their own distinct personalities, mainly from the use of certain items like fenugreek and a rare kind of cardamom, and of course chilli, but with moderation; berbere spice powder is one of the best known, or awaze, a red chilli paste. You could use harissa, or some of the Turkish tomato and chilli pastes, but the effect is not quite the same. Here is a tired woman in a hurry’s cheat:
Zigni Wat
400g good quality minced beef
2 or 3 red onions, peeled and chopped
2 tablespoons of Turkish chilli
and red pepper paste
fenugreek, cardamom and
black cumin ground together
ginger, chopped
garlic, chopped
spiced butter
salt to taste
Cook the onion slowly in a heavy bottomed pan until soft and just changing colour. Add the ginger and garlic, then the spice paste and the ground spices. Put in a little water and stir well. Then put in the meat and cook gently until done.
But there are two other factors: the ‘dry’ cooking of ingredients at the start of preparation, where onions, peeled and finely chopped, are cooked slowly without water or fat, until soft and slightly coloured, and then added to the rest of the ingredients. Meat too, is given the same treatment. Unctuousness and flavour are imparted by another magical element, spiced butter, which is added as a flavouring in the course of cooking, not used as a frying medium. Clarified butter is simmered with ginger, garlic and chopped red onion, and a mixture of herbs and spices, then cooled and strained. Again, there is no substitute for this, but it doesn’t take too long
to do.
What is it about the frozen Nordics that we find so enchanting? From the way we furnish our homes to the bleak noir crime series from Sweden and Denmark playing across our TV screens, there’s something about Nordic style we can’t get enough of.
Capturing the Scandi-fever Zeitgeist as the city’s carousel of Christmas eating and drinking swings into action, is the Nordic Yulefest – a pop-up banqueting hall festooned with greenery and lined with birch trees that will be magicked into life next month.
The Yulefest is built around a rolling feast of rich courses – think plates piled with juicy meatballs, platters of gleaming gravadlax, apple-stuffed hams and marzipan pigs.
Anyone who’s a fan of Fika on Brick Lane will know you’re in safe hands, with head chef Daniel Cohen at the reins. He says the food will be a Scandinavian twist on Christmas staples and if the tastings are anything to go by, citizens, wear forgiving clothes because you’re in for a treat.
Festive tipples include Sandy Claws, Nutty Sours and Yule Smacks, not to mention glass Tomte (Santa) boots full of steaming Gluewein and hot chocolate cocktails.
There are sittings for brunch or dinner and only six dates to pick from next month, as well as private hire, so get in there quick.
If you just want to slip in for a drink but don’t want to go the whole hog that’s no problem, with the bars open once the feasting is done.
There’s also music, dancing, entertainment and games, plus sheepskin-lined nooks to digest in. Skål!
Where Lea Bridge Road meets the River Lea is The Princess of Wales pub, like the proud gatekeeper of Hackney, welcoming in commuters, travellers and lorries from Leyton, Walthamstow and beyond.
A few years ago The Princess got a makeover and on a dark autumn evening the pub is a warm and welcome respite from the frantic traffic of the nearby road.
At the heart of the pub is a stove fire (a rarity in London’s boozers) and the interior is light and warm – almost nautical, befitting its canal side situation. We sat in the dining area, which was snug like a living room, all mismatched retro furnishings and dark aubergine walls. There is a terrace facing the canal and picnic tables out by the towpath, making it an ideal summer watering hole.
The wine menu offered an impressive selection, including a Dorset cuvée and house Viognier. There were ales and Aspall cider on tap, being enjoyed by a number of punters propping up the bar.
For starters was a generous board of charcuterie, which came with fresh leaves and strips of sweet grilled peppers. The large prawns that came with my partner’s calamari were juicy and well-seasoned.
For mains he had sirloin steak medium rare, which came on a wooden chopping board atop a pile of dressed leaf salad and triple dipped chips. It was excellent: the steak succulent and pink, and the chips alone were worth the visit – with skins on, crunchy and piping hot. The quail, if a little overcooked, was beautifully presented and came with a delicious butternut squash puree. We managed to secure the last slice of pecan pie, which was sweet and nutty – just as it should be.
This pub does the pub grub options well – our neighbouring table was tucking in to good-looking fish and chips; the steak is worth returning for, not to mention the triple dipped chips, which are some of the best in Clapton at least.
It’s a nice, mixed crowd at Princess of Wales, lacking the pomp of some other East London gastro pubs and with the advantage few others have of being tucked away by the canal.
Doing her wurst: Gillian Riley. Photograph: Jason Fidler
The people of our fair borough cowered in the bushes as the Roman legions stormed up Kingsland Road to subdue barbarians and rebellious tribes up north.
Sausages were what kept these centurions going, portable and long- keeping, tasty and nutritious, and can still be had along our end of the Great North Road where Gallo Nero imports them from Italy or has them made up in London to a traditional recipe.
Turkish stores have a variety of sucuk, beef sausages. Polish delis offer cured and fresh delicacies, and once upon a time Godfrey’s the English butchers (now flourishing in Highbury Barn) had a fine selection.
But if the legions had deviated a little from the long straight track north, and meandered westwards along the high ground that is now Stoke Newington Church Street, they might have hit Meat N16, and refused to move.
Hadrian’s Wall would never have been built, and British history might have taken a different course. This small independent local butcher sells organic meat and fowl, and an array of sausages that demand critical assessment.
These are made to standard recipes, Cumberland, Toulouse and plain pork, and in more adventurous mixtures with herbs, spices and additions like leeks (with lamb), funghi porcini, sun-dried tomatoes, juniper berries.
Customers submit recipes every autumn and gather for a greedy tasting; the Master Butcher chooses the winner, and adds it to his imaginative range. This year’s winner has pigeon, smoked pancetta and prunes, a wonderful combination.
Hackney tribes along Kingsland Road might well have sniffed aromas of the famous North Italian sausage Luganega from the mess kitchens of the Roman legionaries. It is said to have been brought all the way from Lucania (now Basilicata, a part of Calabria in the south of Italy) as vital supplies for the invincible Roman military machine. These sausages lasted all the way to Lombardy and Veneto in the north, where the subdued tribes took them to their hearts, and have been making them ever since.
By the time the exhausted and footsore Roman squaddies had got as far as the Vale of Pickering, on their arduous trek to Cawthorne Camp then over the North Yorkshire Moors to Whitby, they might have found solace in the splendid sausages of what is now Grange Farm in Levison, near Pickering, where breeds similar to today’s Tamworth ginger pigs, and the dark Berkshires, might well have been reared during the four centuries of peaceful Roman occupation, after the defeat of the wild Brigantes, my ancestors.
Today recipes vary but mainly consist of the cheaper, fattier cuts of pork, well seasoned with garlic salt and pepper, and sometimes coriander, cinnamon and cloves as well. But thankfully, we can once again drool over whiffs of the conqueror’s pig products, for today we have the Ginger Pig butcher in Lauriston Road, where meat from Grange Farm is for sale, along with a range of eight or more delicious sausages. These include an imaginative use of onion and black pudding, a peppery pork mixture, and a chunky Old Spot, all meat and fat but no breadcrumbs, for casseroles and stews; there is a home made smoked chorizo and a stonking merguez.
Sausages, those ubiquitous links, can be a delicacy, made from quality cuts, or a shameful repository for unmentionable and unhygienic body parts, slaughterhouse slurry, padded out with all kinds of stuff. Dubious ingredients can be fed into a processor and stuffed into casings, along with preservatives and synthetic flavourings, to become an anonymous wodge, and sometimes a health hazard as well as a gastronomic crime.
Horsemeat is the least of our worries. We need to be sceptical about cheap mass-produced sausages, and critical, in a good way, of what gets into our designer sausages. Fortunately this column is all about good things, not the murky politics of food fraud, so we celebrate here the benign aspects of the sausage.
Throughout history sausages have been made to be eaten fresh, or preserved in some way or other, wind dried, smoked, salted, fermented, or cured in tubs of lard. The content varies depending on the process. Once preserved they can be sliced or cut into chunks, eaten as they are, or added to stews and soups and sauces.
A sausage made with prime lean pork would be a sad and sorry offering on the plate, for fat (where the flavour is) and something cereal like breadcrumbs to absorb it as it cooks, are essential for an unctuous softly chewable result. Trimmings from posh cuts, with their fat, and meat that can’t be sold as an item, are all useful.
Surprising things like tripe, offal, kidneys, liver and lights all get used. Perhaps the ultimate use of fat is in a version of the Jewish kishka, where matzo meal and schmalz (wonderfully tasty chicken fat) are combined with unctuous effect.
One spin-off from pig killing was the collection and coagulation and then cooking of the blood to make black pudding, at its best in French boudin noir, and Spanish morcilla. Tasty fat and something like rice or barley to soak up the juices are often used, but the lack of seasoning and the fear of fat make many British versions sadly stodgy.
Rawduck’s first premises, a café on Amhurst Road, closed rather dramatically in November 2013 after structural damage to the building led to an emergency evacuation and its eventual demolition. It reopened in April on Richmond Road in a larger and airier space with a full kitchen, suggesting that the relocation, despite being harrowing, has wrought some benefits to the restaurant’s scale and ambitions.
Like its sister restaurant Ducksoup, Rawduck puts an emphasis on healthful, seasonal eating and house cured, smoked, and fermented food. Its quirky menu has unusual ingredients that, while enticing, are sometimes needlessly obscure. Thankfully our waiter welcomed questions and recommended dishes. Following her suggestion, we started with a raspberry drinking vinegar: slightly carbonated, tart but not sour, it was a worthy non-alcoholic alternative to wine.
Our dinner consisted of various sharing plates. Fermented sweet white miso carrots were the star of the meal – and cost £2. The miso’s salty richness balanced out the sweetness of the blanched carrots. The “impatient” cucumber pickles that followed were bland by comparison and lacked the punch of a longer brine. A courgette and pomegranate salad with tahini yogurt was beautifully presented and an exemplar of the restaurant’s mission to source the best ingredients.
Buttermilk fried chicken, while expertly done, didn’t stand out, but the restaurant’s signature dish, chopped raw duck, was excellent: marinated in citrus juice with red onion and chilli, it was an elegant take on a ceviche. For pudding we shared a lemon pie. Zesty slices of lemon offset buttery pastry and a healthy dose of clotted cream.
Our bill came in at £20 a head (albeit with no wine), and for the price we felt we’d received a generous selection of inventive dishes that piqued our curiosity in a cosy space that invited us to linger. A welcome addition to the increasingly foodie Hackney Central.
Fish you were here? Ole Hansen prepares fresh smoked salmon in his studio. Photograph: Hansen & Lydersen
When prehistoric Hackney citizens roamed the plashy marshes and meandering water meadows of the Lea Valley they brought home wild fowl and fish, fruits and seeds, and enjoyed a varied but by no means balanced diet.
A good catch meant a glut and much feasting, and a poor one left empty bellies. We soon learned to preserve the fish and meat left after a binge by wind drying, salting and smoking.
Of all foodstuffs that started to go off almost as soon as it was caught, fish was the most vulnerable, so barrels of herrings in salt or brine, cod dried to the consistency of a block of wood, sardines, fried then put in a vinegary pickle, all became commercial staples and much loved fare. Our national dish of fish and chips has its origins here, but that’s another story…
When Lance Forman’s ancestors came to Hackney from Odessa in 1905 and set up a smokery in Ridley Road, Londoners were astonished at the delicacy and melting tenderness of their smoked salmon, made not with heavily salted fish from the Baltic, but fresh wild salmon sourced by the Forman family from Scotland.
From subsistence food to a luxury treat, today their state-of-the-art, high tech smokery, having survived fire, flood, and planning blight (the murky shenanigans of the Olympic committee…), borders on the dubious terrain that once housed the games, and here Scottish salmon are still prepared following traditional methods.
The glitzy décor is new, but the age-old methods survive. It is Lance Forman’s genial combination of entrepreneurial skills and unshakeable idealism that saved his firm when other East End smokeries collapsed in the face of unscrupulous competition.
Of the various cures for which they are renowned Forman’s ‘London Cure’ is perhaps the most characteristic: the fish are salted for a short time, rinsed, drained, and ‘cold’ smoked over oak shavings at a low temperature. The resultant delicate, light flesh is thinly sliced diagonally the length of the fish, and best eaten at once.
Sensitive slicing by hand gives variations in the texture of the flesh, with a better flavour and a less slithery feel than the mechanically cut versions done by mass-producers of inferior products. It is paradoxical that a technique evolved for long-life preservation has today brought us an ephemeral product, with a relatively short shelf life.
‘Farmed salmon’ does not have to be a derogatory term; it all depends on how they are reared and what they feed on. Forget battery hens and calves in crates, and imagine the deep pens through which the cold northern waters surge. And remember that fish have been farmed by the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and reared in ponds by medieval monastic communities.
In another corner of Hackney, where its ancient inhabitants once roamed amongst fields and hedgerows, swallowed up only recently in brickfields and then by those rows of no-longer-cheap terraced houses, there lies a hidden network of converted industrial premises and modern mews developments.
Behind the stretch of Church Street facing Clissold Park, there lurks a different kind of smokery; Hansen & Lydersen was founded in 1923 in Norway where traditions of catching and preserving fish go back to prehistoric times.
A small family firm, they were producing high quality smoked salmon using ancient methods. The arrival five years ago in Stoke Newington of the smokery of Ole Hansen, great grandson of the founder, brought a whole new dimension to Hackney’s gastronomic life.
Here, in an obscure studio, Ole, with an inspired combination of imagination, childhood memories and down-to-earth hands-on skills, together with his equally enthusiastic team, are offering us a luxury product.
His fish is farmed in the cold bracing waters of northern Norway. It is prepared and salted within 48 hours at the most of being caught, and lightly smoked for not more than 12 hours using beech and juniper shavings, which impart a distinctive aroma; the beech gives a mild background smokiness and the juniper has a pungent perfume – think the best kind of gin, almost spicy, that lingers on the palate.
The fish, suspended in the drying chamber, swaying voluptuously in the wafting aromas, mellow in the smoke, sometimes soothed, we are told, by riffs and arpeggios from the battered upright piano close by. Ole’s manic business plans are both visionary and practical, so I feel sure that the piano is indeed a source of good vibrations, not just a gimmick.
We can buy the salmon on various of the Hackney street markets, or with advance warning from the smokery. It is awesome to watch the perfectionist preparation, as the fish is trimmed then cut in thick vertical slices towards the skin, giving a variation of flavour and texture through each slice.
This account of two smokeries in Hackney is not a David and Goliath story. Both are on the same side, perfectionists, casting stones and rocks not at each other but by implication at the purveyors of cheap and nasty versions of what should only ever be a luxury product. Best not to think of the ways in which unhealthy farmed fish, none too fresh, can be tarted up with synthetic colouring, salt and sugar to boost water content and hence volume, sprayed with a smoky flavour, and squashed to death in a vacuum pack. Instead save up for a lavish meal.
Forget messing around with canapés, pile it up on the plate. As Oscar Wilde recommended: ‘Enough is as good as a feast; more than enough is even better than a feast’.
Fine smoked salmon needs no recipes, but there are things to do with the trimmings and off-cuts. I weep to see the strip of lush fat from the underbelly get tossed into the waste bin. Sacrilege. If you can cadge some, cut this amazing stuff into little cubes and melt gently in a frying pan, then when the fat is oozing out stir in some beaten eggs and cook lightly, no butter, no milk, just a grating of black pepper. A few trimmings enhance a fish soup. The things to avoid are lemon and cream cheese, both of which add nothing to an already perfect luxury.
Eggs Lincolnshire at Blighty Coffee. Photograph: Anna Niman
Blighty Coffee on Blackstock Road is an artisan coffeehouse that opened in 2013 and is seeking to establish itself as a community hub and event space in the style of early 20th century coffeehouses.
Punters as well as the creatives who rent hot desk space on the floor above are invited to make themselves at home in the large but cosy space, that spans two floors and a garden and has a piano and board games all are welcome to use.
The dominant theme in the décor is postwar England, with pictures of Winston Churchill on the walls and other paraphernalia – if a little at odds with the neighbouring Algerian cafés, it is nevertheless a welcome departure from the minimalist industrial décor that seems to be required of trendy new ventures.
The coffee was excellent: prepared in a third wave style with beans from the always excellent Monmouth roastery, although Blighty also roasts its own beans. Don’t miss the orange zest flavoured cappuccino that tastes like a Terry’s Chocolate Orange, or if that’s not to your taste, you can order another one laced with Baileys to sweeten up brunch.
The food menu also takes inspiration from the 1940s and serves up traditional English breakfast fare. We had the Winston (£9), a full English that came with unlimited toast, but was so amply sized that we couldn’t avail ourselves of this feature and preferred to focus on finishing the excellent quality meats.
The Eggs Scotland (£7.50) were essentially a very straightforward salmon benedict, and while decently prepared, the salmon was a little on the cold side and the dish could have used some garnish. On the whole we left full and pleased with our relaxing meal and will definitely stop there next time we’re in the area.
If, like me, the promise of ‘bottomless soda refills’, frozen margaritas on tap and burritos the size of your face has you reaching for your Oyster card and checking the elastic of your waistband, DF Mexico might be the place for you.
Launched by the team behind Wahaca, this is nothing like Wahaca. Instead of trying to synthesise street food in a restaurant, which can inevitably miss the mark, this place is a very happy marriage of American diner fare and traditional Mexican food.
Named after Districto Federal, or Mexico City as it’s known to outsiders, the idea was born on a road trip that Thomasina Miers and Mark Selby, founders of the Wahaca empire, took around Mexico and the US. And it really works.
There are tortas – gorgeous great burger-style stacks filled with pork pibil, chile beef or ancho mushrooms and jammed with cucumber pickle, pumpkin seed mayonnaise and avocado.
There’s soft-whip ice cream in flavours like dulce de leche with peanut butter brittle smashed on top that may or not make you salivate even as you type the words 24 hours later. There’s even passionfruit flavour with popping candy on top.
Highlights include the fish tacos – a nightmare to negotiate from plate to face, but a dream to eat: fat ingots of crumbed cod (sustainably sourced) with a zippy red slaw and sweet chipotle mayonnaise zigzagged on top. If I’m not still wearing that dish somewhere on my person I’d be surprised.
Another surprise might be that one of the best things we ate was the ‘cup of corn’ – labelled with a modesty that belies its utter perfection: a little pot of delicately-seasoned chowder with translucent little cubes of sweetcorn and a scoop of something that tastes like quesa fresco, but is actually a mixture of Lancashire cheese and mayonnaise.
I loved the huge glass coolers of icy margarita and hibiscus-flavoured agua fresca swirling mesmerisingly above the tables. I loved the textures and flavours of food that tasted like it had been left to luxuriate on a stove for hours. I loved the super-sized, money’s-worth feeling of the diner experience.
Tucked into the Old Truman Brewery, there’s a nod to its surroundings too, with the bar stocking local brew and ales from Brixton and Gipsy Hill, as well as Mexican brands like Pacifico.
Another place looking to buck the dizzying merry-go-round of week-only pop-ups, DF Mexico has an 18-month residency here. It’s fun, the people are lovely and the food is great, but not pricey. Definitely worth a visit.
DF Mexico, Old Truman Brewery, Hanbury Street, E1 6QR www.dfmexico.co.uk
No need to consider taking the Eurostar any longer to go to a bistro-type restaurant in Paris. There is one right up your street, though it took me a year to find it!
Located at the crossroads of bohemian Stokey and hipster Dalston, Oui Madame is owned by Jérôme Pigeon and Rosane Mazzer, the once married Franco-Brazilian couple who founded the Favela Chic restaurants in Paris and London.
On arrival, we found our bearings with a couple of Oui Madame Cocktails, made from gin, elderflower, lemon, grenadine and raspberries. To complement the creamy texture and frothy top (the result of the egg white) Pigeon sprayed them with absinthe using a vintage bulb spray bottle. They smelt a treat and had a really nice kick to them.
The steak tartare we had for starters was a cute-looking dish, displayed as four raw canapés on a plate. We indulged ourselves with the four corresponding eggs yolk, but were disappointed by the foie gras which looked and tasted more like a terrine.
Being meat lovers, we both had the steak cooked medium rare to perfection. It came with a gratin dauphinois, which for me was lack-lustre (I am a fierce critic of the dauphinois since no one could possibly beat my mum’s recipe!) though my dining partner had no qualms with it.
Other than food, art is what brought Pigeon and Mazzer to Hackney. The restaurant hosts live performances in basement space ‘La Culotte’ (‘The Knickers’) on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
It’s a chilled atmosphere in the restaurant before 9pm and fairly revelrous afterwards. With artists and performers invited to test their shows in front of an audience, I for one can’t wait to enjoy some of the fun and unique nights to come… oh que oui!
