Irish restaurants lives

At the beginning of my stay in Ireland I met Dublin restaurants, but not as a customer. I was looking for a job. I needed a job immediately. So I decided not to wait for the reply to my emails or notification from the job centre. I started to walk from one restaurant to another and ask about a job. During two weeks I visited almost all the restaurants in the city centre. At that time I came across many types of cuisine and culinary tastes of the Irish people.

What surprised me most? There was a large number of Italian restaurants and big influences of Italian cuisine on the modern Irish cuisine.

When I read about Ireland, every guide talked about Irish or English cuisine as the most popular in Ireland, but it isn’t true. In every Irish Pub, in the menu, you can always find at least one Italian dish. Sometimes in the Pub menu there are just two or three Irish meals, the rest of the dishes are Italian. This regularity is not only in Dublin but also in provincial Pubs. If you want to eat a typical Irish meal in the Pub, you will order this dish which doesn’t seem too much Italian or you will order classic fish and chips.

 

There are many Italian restaurants in Dublin. Three years ago there was about one hundred. There are good places to try good cuisine and you can also find good Italian wine and coffee there. I have one close to my home. In addition, there is amazing espresso in Dublin. 

  

The second European cuisine very popular in Ireland is the Spanish one. The Irish love Spain and everything what is from Spain. They spend holidays in Spain, learn the Spanish language, like to enjoy with the Spaniards. Spanish restaurants are always full in the evening. I'm not surprised at this because Spanish restaurants employ the greatest Spanish chefs. 

 

 

Asian restaurants are the third most popular type of restaurants in Dublin. There are typical national restaurants. Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese and Indian restaurants are very popular but you can also find very exotic restaurants. Asian restaurants are often at a very high level and are open even in small towns.

The best Vietnamese restaurant I have ever been to is in a small village Ashford, outside Dublin.

The Irish love the spicy taste of Asian cuisine. Now during the crisis many restaurants are liquidated but they are still opening new Asian buffets and have lots of customers.

 

If you want to find a Polish restaurant in Dublin, you can visit just two bars in the city centre but very simple and very expensive dishes are served there.

Irish Ham

Irish ham has been the best culinary discovery in Ireland. I have always thought that Polish smoked meat is the best in the world but Irish ham is also very good. Ham sold in supermarkets is made by several big companies. I was surprised by the taste of Irish ham. Irish ham is pickled in brine, then smoked over peat or over juniper. This gives it a spicy, evergreen taste that is difficult to find in other types of ham. It is simply delicious. Ham is made in several types and each has a various taste by adding some spice but all are smoked and all taste very well. Irish ham is served cold with sandwiches or hot as the main dish for dinner.

During my trips around Ireland I often eat ham with cabbage for dinner. In all traditional Irish pubs there is always smoked ham and bacon on the dinner menu.
The Irish are avid smokers. In many country cottages ham was smoked on two beams over the fireplace. Smokehouses exist all over Ireland. The Irish seem to smoke anything that runs, swims or flies, from beef and pork to pheasant and chicken, and from salmon, haddock and eel to trout, cod and herring. Currently there are more than a dozen smokehouses in Ireland which smoke ham in a traditional way.

Baked and smoked ham is served during Christmas dinner in all Irish homes and that type of ham is the one that I like the most and I serve it not only at Christmas.

Christmas Ham

Irish Smoked Whole Ham on the Bone

10g Whole cloves
1 cup brown sugar -
1 tbsp Balsamic or cider vinegar
½ tsp mustard

Orange slices

Maraschino cherries

Heat the oven to 160° C. Place the ham, fat side up, on the rack in a shallow roasting pan. Insert a meat thermometer so the tip is in the thickest part of the ham and does not touch the bone or rest in fat. Bake 1¼ to 2¼ hours or until thermometer reads 60°C (13 to 17 minutes per half a kilo).

About 20 minutes before the ham is done, remove it from the oven. Pour drippings from the pan and remove any skin from the ham. Cut it into uniform diamond shapes on the fat surface of the ham. Insert a clove into each diamond. Stir brown sugar, vinegar and mustard together; then pat or brush onto the ham.

Bake uncovered for another 20 minutes. Cover the ham and let it stand for about 10 minutes or until the thermometer reads 70°C. Garnish with orange slices and cherries to serve hot with potatoes and salads.

Any leftovers can be used in sandwiches or salads and you can save the bone for making soup!.

Enjoy!!!

Irish butter

Irish butter is the best one in the world. It tastes like my grandma’s home-made butter. I have been in love with it since the first bite of bread with this butter. The best butter brand is the Kerrygold butter. I was surprised that such a big company offers such tasty and natural products. I have tried other types of butter made by other companies but I have always come back to the Kerrygold butter. It tastes fantastic when it is spread on a piece of bread. It adds a lot of complexity to each bite. It is available in salted and unsalted varieties. That extra flavour is the result of cows in Ireland having a rich grass diet .
Irish cows are very happy animals because grass is fresh the whole year and they spend their entire lives on the pasture.

Butter is made from cream. Cream from around 15 litres of milk goes into making just half a kilo of butter. Around a third of the world’s milk is changed into butter. Ireland is the fourteenth largest producer of butter in the world.

Butter contains vitamins A, D and calcium and, of course, is high calorie.
In the past in Ireland butter was packed into wooden churns and stored in peat bogs, where it would keep well for some length of time. Sometimes forgotten butter turned into creamy cheese, which was often discovered by archaeologists.

Buttermilk is used extensively in traditional Irish cooking. I have found many recipes for traditional Irish food where butter or buttermilk is used . My favourite are apple tart and buttermilk pudding.

Buttermilk Pudding

100 gram of sugar

250 ml of cream

500 ml buttermilk

1 teaspoon of powdered gelatine

1 vanilla pod

Dissolve 1 cup of gelatine in 2 tablespoons of boiling water. Cut the vanilla pod in half. Place it in a pan with sugar and half of the cream. Heat but do not boil. Remove a pan from heat and stir in the gelatine blending well. Remove the vanilla pod, then whisk buttermilk into hot cream. Whip the remaining cream until stiff, then fold it into the hot mixture. Pour into a bowl and chill well.
Serve with a teaspoon of your favourite jam.

Irish Soda Bread

When I moved to Ireland, shopping for groceries was the first thing I did. I needed the basic ingredients for my kitchen. I bought tradition Irish bread and flour in a bakery. I wanted to make a home-made cake. After shopping, I baked an apple cake and I was very surprised when I saw the cake after baknig. The cake was huge and tasted a little too much of soda. I didn’t know what had happened because that recipe is without soda. As it turned out, I had bought flour with the addition of soda. I was wondering why the Irish added soda to flour.
The answer was on a wrapping of traditional Irish bread. It was soda bread.

In the book of the history of Irish cuisine I read that Ireland didn’t have a strong tradition of yeast bread making. The use of baking soda as a leavening agent is quick, effective and it produced a much more consistent result than yeast did.

The original soda bread contained nothing more than flour, buttermilk, baking soda and salt. The dough should not be kneaded too much.
I have never liked soda bread because it tastes to me like salt cake.  However, Irish bread is different. It doesn’t taste as normal bread and is heavy and dense. Soda bread is made using either wholemeal or white flour but you can often find bread with the mixture of both types of flour. In some recipes, buttermilk is replaced by yoghurt or even stout.

I am not enthusiastic about soda bread and I don’t eat it every day but in a restaurant I always order soup and soda bread as a starter. Some restaurants bake their own bread and every one tastes different.
I ate the best bread in the north of Ireland.

Below there is a recipe for a traditional version of this bread.

Traditional Irish Soda Bread

1 ½ cups wholemeal flour

1 cup white flour

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking soda

1 – 1 ¼ cups buttermilk

Preheat oven to 280 C and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

In a large bowl, combine all dry ingredients and stir together. Add buttermilk and mix with a large spoon (or with your hands, shaping your fingers into a “claw”) until the dough comes together. You might need two tablespoons more or less buttermilk depending on the weather. The dough should be moist, but not so sticky it is very hard to handle.

Shape into a round and place on baking sheet. Cut an X into the top with a sharp knife and bake for about 45 minutes, until dark golden. A toothpick will come out clean.

Cool on a wire rack for about 10 minutes before slicing.

This bread is best served soon after baking with Irish butter.

Guinness -Black Irish Gold

Guinness is called the Black Irish Gold. People sometimes don’t know where Ireland is but they know that Guinness comes form Ireland and means – enjoy.
Guinness is Irish dry stout that originated in the brewery of Arthur Guinness. Arthur Guinness started brewing ales in 1759. On 31 December he signed up to a 9,000-year lease at £45 per annum for the unused brewery at the St. James’s Gate Brewery. When I saw the lease in the Guinness Museum, I began to wonder how beer would taste in the year10759.
Arthur Guinness started selling dark beer porter in 1778. The first Guinness beer to use the term was Single Stout and Double Stout in the 1840s. Guinness produced ‘only three variations of a single beer type: porter or single stout, double or extra, and foreign stout for export’.

Guinness is made from water, barley, hops and brewer’s yeast, and is treated with isinglass finings made from fish air bladders, although Guinness claimed that this material was unlikely to remain in the finished product. This means it is generally deemed unsuitable for a vegetarian or vegan diet. A portion of barley is roasted to give Guinness its dark color and characteristic taste. It is pasteurized and filtered. Despite its reputation as a “meal in a glass”, Guinness only contains 198 kcal per pint (1460 kJ/l), fewer than skimmed milk or other non-light beer.

The reputation as a “meal in a glass” has come from the the fact that in the past one part of the salary paid to workers was in pints of beer. Until these days there are many pubs around the Guinness factory .

Studies claim that Guinness can be beneficial to the heart. Researchers have found that “antioxidant compounds in Guinness, similar to those found in certain fruit and vegetables, are responsible for health benefits because they slow down the deposit of harmful cholesterol on the artery walls.”

Guinness ran an advertising campaign under the slogan “Guinness is Good for You” since the 1920s. This slogan stemmed from market research – when people told the company that they felt good after their pint. Now this type of advertising of alcoholic drinks is prohibited in Ireland. 

I have also heard that at the beginning of the 20^th century in hospitals pregnant women were given one pint of Guinness per day as protection against anaemia.

Now Guinness is treated as a normal alcoholic drink with all its consequences.

The very good Guinness marketers still make a special atmosphere around this beer.

In Ireland and abroad Guinness is treated as the king of beers. A pint of Guinness should be served in a slightly tulip shaped pint glass, as opposed to the taller European tulip glass or ‘Nonic’ glass, which contains a ridge approx ¾ of the way up the glass. Every bartender needs to be able to pour the “perfect pint” of Guinness.

The “perfect pint” of Guinness is the product of a “double pour”. The waiting time between the first and second pour should take 119.53 seconds. Guinness has promoted this wait with advertising campaigns such as “good things come to those who wait”. Guinness should be served at 6°C while Extra Cold Guinness should be served at 3.5°C.

In the Guinness factory there is a museum where you can see how beer is made. There is exhibition devoted to the history of company. You can watch old advertisements of Guinness. Ain addition, in the Guinness bar you can learn how to pour “the perfect pint” and drink a pint of Black Irish Gold.

Irish chefs have invented many meals with Guinness which are a good lure of tourists. I have discovered the following dishes in Dublin restaurants: Irish stew with Guinness, chicken with Guinness sauce, Guinness soup, Guinness cake and ice cream with Guinness. My favorite is Beef In Guinness.
You will see the recipe is on karott.com

Beef In Guinness

for 4 servings:

1/2 kg Beef, cubed
1/2 cup Flour, seasoned
Oil; for frying
2 Onion; sliced
4 Garlic clove; minced
3 Carrot; sliced
1 tsp Parsley; minced
1/2 tsp Thyme
Salt; to taste
Pepper; to taste
Beef broth
 200 mlGuinness

Dip beef in flour and coat on all sides. Brown in oil, in batches and remove to heat proof pot or casserole. Sauté onions and garlic in same oil and add to beef. Add carrots, parsley and thyme. Season with salt and pepper. Pour enough beef broth to cover and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer 30 minutes. Lift meat, onions and carrots from pot to serving plate with slotted spoon. Over high heat, reduce sauce to half the original volume. Pour sauce over meat and serve.

Enjoy!!

Irish breakfast

My first meeting with truly Irish cuisine was when I started working as a breakfast chef.  I was very surprised when I saw the menu. There were ten meals to choose but only two were healthy and light. I was scared.  The head chef showed me Full Irish Breakfast. There was a plate with fat and fried food, even tomatoes were baked. I was really surprised. I know, in Poland we serve heavy breakfast but with a wide selection of vegetables and fruit. Irish breakfast is not only heavy but also unhealthy.  After the first day in that restaurant, I understood why so many Irish people are so obese.

Irish breakfast is the result of famine in Ireland. Farmers normally ate only one warm meal a day in the morning before work. Breakfast rich in fat and calories was a source of energy until the evening, when they returned home to eat an evening meal.

The traditional Irish breakfast consists of  some components which are fried in  deep fat  or baked in the oven. Traditionally the most common ingredients are

fried or grilled bacon, also referred to as "rashers" or "slices", baked beans,

black or white pudding, fried mushrooms, sausages, fried or grilled  tomatoes and hash browns. Eggs, fried, poached, or scrambled are very important ingredients of this breakfast.  Full Irish breakfast may be accompanied by  strong Irish Breakfast tea such as Barry's Tea, Lyons Tea, or Bewley's, and it is always served with milk. Fried potato bread, or toast, is often served as an alternative to brown soda bread or French toast.

This meal is very fat and high-calorie - not least because in recent times, there has been a variety of mutations, such as the vegetarian version. Juice and porridge are also not traditional for this type of breakfast. They have been served since the 1950s of the twentieth century. Due to the relatively time-consuming procedure for preparing breakfast, in recent years the fast food version has become  very popular: a roll (which looks like a small French stick) filled with the selected components of the traditional Full Irish Breakfast. This sandwich can be purchased at many bars, grocery shops and petrol stations.

In restaurants, pubs, cafés, bars or even petrol stations you can find Full Irish Breakfast. However, in travel guidebooks or on postcards from Ireland you can see pictures with other Irish Breakfast – a plate full of oysters served with a glass of Guinness. So, I have looked for this type of breakfast in restaurants and pubs but I have never found it. The Irish have a great sense of humor and a good knowledge of marketing strategy.