Why I'll Never Order From Dominos Again

I'd have said "...or Pizza Hut" as well, but they've just shut the Winchester branch so that's that obviated then.

I love pizza and since coming to the UK from Melbourne I have been constantly irked by the fact that pizzas in the UK are either quite decent and not delivered like the astonishing Zizzi Rustica Piccante or US delivery style and mostly unappetising.

However pizza is a very convenient thing at times and so we occasionally ordered a pizza from Dominos. Trouble was it was getting worse over time as we kept getting pizzas that were undercooked - even after specifically asking for it to be "well done" - and with an unpleasant sea of soggy sauce all around the outside of the pizza.

Also Lee and I don't 100% agree on toppings even though we can always agree on a shared pizza if needed.

About the time that we were given a pizza oven by my MiL and so we decided to give it a go. It was a revelation. We now get the "perfect" pizza every single time by making the pizzas fresh each time. Hard work? Not really.

We have a breadmaker which has a "pizza" programme which in 45 minutes creates a really nice stretchy dough which I divide and roll into two pizza bases. They're left to rise for 30 minutes.

Whilst the dough is on the go I skin, seed and chop a few tomatoes, mix with garlic and dried basil, parsley and oregano and cook down into a nice fresh tomato sauce. Or if I'm not that keen on tomatoes I just use some passata from a jar and cook it down with the herbs... :-)

Finally top one of the bases and get it into the pizza oven and top the other whilst cooking. When the first one is finished just put it in the (normal) oven until the other is cooked.

Result: two really nice pizzas topped with exactly the toppings we want and in the proportions we want. They're as close to the "perfect" pizza as you can get.

Start to finish is about 90 minutes with about 25 minutes of actual effort, and about 15 if you use passata for the sauce and less again if I got organised and made a lot of pizza sauce in one go and froze it.

So, we're not going to be buying delivery pizza ever again!

I'm Sick to Death of Real Ale

I drink quite a lot of beer. I like it, and in a lot of forms. Coming from Australia 10 years ago I unsurprisingly mostly drunk mass produced "IndustroLager". Little by little I started onto "real ales" in my local pub and over the next year I was exclusively drinking ales and exploring what at the time appeared to be a dizzying range of beers. In my local though were the seeds of my eventual dissatisfaction with a lot of "real ale" and why I am now a lot more choosy about both the beers I drink and the pubs I frequent.

Those seeds were Greene King IPA and Ruddles County. I first started drinking Abbot Ale and really liked it, but thought I'd better give the others a try, especially as a lot of the locals appeared to like the IPA particularly, not to mention Greene King's advertising of it. I was immediately struck by how uninteresting both were, but especially the IPA which was bland, thin and lacking in any distinctive flavour. Since then I have become aware that actually the bulk of the UK "real ale" market is made up of a very narrow group of beer styles and they're largely pretty hard to differentiate. A large percentage of them are of the Greene King IPA mould.

I'm now officially sick to death of (a lot of) real ale. My non exhaustive list of issues include...

Lack of differentiation. There are too many breweries in the UK brewing bland, taste-alike, look-alike "session beers" of limited strength and they're all competing for the same market space. Line up ten random 3.7% "best bitters" and see if you can pick them. See if any of them challenge your mind or your palette. Every beer should have to justify its existence. I'm not going to drink you just because you exist no matter what "tradition" you represent. Modern production, transportation and storage mean we don't need a brewery turning out identical beers every 20-30 miles any more. I'm now attracted to unusual and innovative beers in addition to a stable of reliable regulars but won't do more than sample another "me too" session bitter.

A rush toward lower alcohol beers. This appears to be happening both in smaller beer festivals and a lot of pubs. The Southampton Beer Festival last year had an incredibly limited range and mainly on the weaker side apparently due to "complaints of too many strong beers" the previous year (don't drink them then...). My favourite local pub has also started down this route and I have not seen a beer over 4.1% for several months and I now find myself drinking more often at a different pub where at least I can get a decent HSB! I will though commend the 2011 GBBF for having a really excellent variety on show, but easy when you're that size I suppose. My other paranoid thought on this is simply that low alcohol beers are a lot cheaper to make.

Survival of the feeblest. CAMRA appears to embrace virtually every real ale in much the same way that only a mother can love an uncomely child. I'm perfectly happy that they might discuss and critique behind closed doors but apparently unequivocal support for all beers and brewers as long as they brew, package and serve according to the strict CAMRA guidelines means that there is a lot of very poor beer out there but which CAMRA argues should be embraced and even protected. It has to be damaging their stated aim of promoting consumption of "real ale". Does CAMRA really think that long term lager drinkers are going to drink a pint of Greene King IPA and immediately become a convert? It is probably a good thing it is not where I started years ago as I'd probably still be drinking lager and eying real ale somewhat distastefully.

Lager is not a bad beer style and nor (necessarily) are the companies that produce them. In fact even CAMRA agrees on this one - as long as it is not UK based - and as long as it is not made by one of the brewcos that they disapprove of. Their enthusiasm for Budvar Budweiser is almost embarrassingly hypocritical because the, admittedly quality, beer is mass produced by a very large brewco. It is not a Stella, Grolsch or Carling but still a mass produced lager. Even the big guys can make great beers alongside their mass market IndustroLagers. Fosters and Tooheys make some fantastic premium beers in Australia in addition to the mass stuff.

The packaging is part of the problem. I love a fresh cask. Wonderful. The next day, not so good. The day after, well... I love Fuller's London Porter and it used to be on tap at a pub my workmates used to drink in. Eventually I started buying it in bottles though, to the annoyance of the landlord, because the quality from the pump was so utterly variable and always downward away from "perfect" whereas the bottled version was borderline perfect and consistent. There has to be a realisation that a lot of casks are not going to sell in a short amount of time and techniques for prolonging beer life should be embraced instead of "forbidden" under CAMRA's rules on real ale, for example.

Meantime IPA. The final straw some time back. I randomly bought a bottle of Meantime IPA from my local supermarket, put it in the fridge, got it "far too cold" and then was staggered at the explosion of flavour and texture I got when I drank it. I then proceeded to drink Meantime beers almost exclusively for a couple of months. You mean people are making beer this good in the UK? Why can't I buy it in my local pubs? Suddenly beers and breweries like this are popping up everywhere producing some outstanding beers and causing my consumption of "real ale" to diminish.

The Elephant in the Room: CAMRA. I used to be a member because I thought they protected traditional, quality and non industrial style brewing. I grew quickly disenchanted when I realised CAMRA actually didn't care about quality at all, it cares about a set of rules that it has invented. These rules are so specific that they essentially demonise all beer apart from "real ale" but are lax enough to allow some truly awful beers to proliferate. I'll keep going to their beer festivals - why not - but I'll not support an organisation that can't seem to differentiate quality from mediocrity and promotes that self same mediocrity.

So whilst I still like a lot of real ales, I am sick to death of the sameness, the lack of distinctiveness and a blandness especially when put up against some of the more modern brewers, techniques and packaging. Over time I will inevitably shift to more distinctive, daring and flavoursome beers keeping a small number of real ales that exhibit those characteristics as favourites. The rest of them... I'm done!

That's it, I'm buying an induction stove

Having faffed around for a long while considering the relative merits of induction cooking vs. non-induction vs. doing nothing at all about replacing my ever deteriorating cooktop I finally took the plunge and bought myself a (surprisingly) cheap standalone induction hob to test the waters:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0069KUR6C

The good news is that most of what is promised by induction cooking appears to be true.

A test boiling 2 litres of water on induction vs. ceramic was about half the time and 7 minutes quicker.

Heating a pan to "fried" egg temperature is achieved in "several" seconds.

Powering off the hob stopped the cooking pretty much instantly apart from residual heat in the pan.

There is a surprisingly fine level of temperature control and the "keep warm" appears to work on a feedback loop from the pot.

So overall I am really very impressed... apart of course from the small problem that only two of my current pots are ferrous and so will need to replace others. I sense a new cooker and a kitchen renovation on the way!