Greetings Gastronauts, this is Keef Cooks, I'm Keef, and today we're going to do
something a bit Irish - Coddle or Dublin Coddle.
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So I'm doing this for Luke Fay who's requested it three times - I think he's desperate and
basically what it is
it's a very simple stew of potatoes, bacon, sausages and onions and
it's delicious. It's variously known as coddle, Irish coddle, Dublin Coddle and
it's one of those things where yer mam has the best recipe so whatever I do it
will be wrong somebody somewhere will say 'that's not how you make coddle' and
apparently there's different things go in it depending on which side of Dublin you
live - north or south - so I'm on a hiding to nothing really but anyway it's delicious
let's do it.
OK ingredients for the Coddle - I've got a kilo of potatoes, a litre of
chicken stock, about half a kilo of bacon, five or six sausages, a good handful of parsley
a teaspoon of ground black pepper and a large onion - except this comes in
five installments. And because this isn't actually really a fixed recipe - it's
something you can put leftover stuff in or stuff you want to use up
like maybe carrots and celery or cabbage or whatever, but this is the
absolute basic stuff that you need for it to be called a Coddle. And the bacon
it's best if you can get it in a slab and cut into big chunks but I couldn't, so
I've just got rashers and it's streaky bacon not back bacon 'cos there's lots of tasty fat
in there. So we need to do a bit of prep - I'm going to peel the spuds and chop them
into big chunks. So the chunks want to be about this kind of size, about bite-sized
OK there's all the spuds prepped and now we need to do the large onion, or
the five little ones - I don't know why I got little onions!
So we just need to top and tail the onions peel them and then just chop them into chunks.
And finally, finely chop the parsley
Now I'm going to do a bit of prep on the bacon and the sausages
so this is where people might start complaining that 'that's not how you make coddle'
because, well it may be, it may be not. Everybody makes it differently and
I've seen lots of recipes where they just throw in the sausages whole and
not pre-browned or anything, but I think that looks a bit rubbish
so what I'm doing so I'm going to saute these briefly just to brown them
off. So just heat up a bit of oil in a frying pan and keep things moving
until they've got a bit of browning on them I'm not going to fry the bacon, but I have
chopped it into sort of chunks because you don't want entire rashers of bacon in your coddle, do ya?
Now traditionally a coddle would be done in the oven like a casserole
So you would want to pre-heat your oven to 130 degrees Celsius if it's a fan oven
or 150 if it isn't and I'm not using the oven for this, I'm doing in my slow cooker. So
you need to put all the bits in your vessel, your casserole dish or your slow
cooker pot, the crockpot pot, whatever and they go in in a certain order - onions at
the bottom and a good sprinkling of parsley and the bacon and the sausages
more parsley and then the spuds and any other vegetables that you're using and
finally the remainder of the parsley and the stock. Now I've heated the stock up, because
it would take a while to heat up in the slow cooker and I haven't got enough stock so I'm going to
make up some more with a stock cube - cheat! And you want the stock to come up to
more or less the top of the potatoes so they'll cook properly. Now this goes in
the oven with a lid on or in the slow cooker for three to five hours until the
spuds are cooked. Now actually I'm going to throw the pepper in but it probably
won't need salt because of the bacon, but some I'll check that later.
And because you've been good here's a bonus recipe how to make soda bread. Soda
bread is a very well-known Irish type of bread. iI'ts unleavened, as in there's
no yeast in it but there is bicarbonate of soda and a bit of chemistry that
makes it rise. It's very quick, it's very tasty and this is how you make it. Before
you even think about making soda bread
you need to get your oven preheated to 210 degrees Celsius if it's a fan oven,
or 230 if it's not, because it's got to be really hot when the dough
goes in. So ingredients, we've got 450 grams of plain flour, 300 mils of
buttermilk, a teaspoon of salt and the magic ingredient, a teaspoon of
bicarbonate of soda. So I lied about that -
that's not buttermilk that's whey but it
will work the same because it's acidic if you haven't got buttermilk or whey you can
use soured milk, which you would make by adding a tablespoon of lemon juice or
white vinegar to 300 mils of ordinary milk and just stir it and leave it for
about 15 minutes. And the reason I'm labouring this point is because it's
risen by a chemical reaction between the bicarbonate of soda and the acidic
liquid. I'll show you - this glass contains two parts water, one part lemon juice
and I'm just going to add a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda...
and you see it makes a lot of bubbles and that's what causes your soda bread to rise, so it's very
important to work quickly once once you've started mixing everything. So you
want to mix together the flour and the salt and the bicarbonate of soda -
stir those very well. Now stir in the buttermilk or whey or whatever all ok until
it comes together it's still quite wet I probably put it too much liquid in. But
flour your hands, flour the worktop and you just want to knead this for like 30
seconds. It's not like kneading bread, you don't want to try to develop gluten,
you're just finishing off the mix really. I've got a baking sheet with some flour on
it and we'll pop our lump of very coarse dough on there.
I know this looks a mess but it's meant to - possibly. Maybe not that much of a
mess. And just slash a cross in the top and slap that in the oven for 45 minutes
OK, there's our soda bread looking a bit like an asteroid and the cross didn't
work. And I'll just turn it over,
give it a whack, sounds hollow, that's cooked. Stick it on a wire rack to
cool down and I'm going to cover it with a clean tea towel.
OK so the asteroid has cooled down somewhat, so let's - well it's still warm
actually but let's hack it open and see what we've got
Hey that looks kinda like bread. A dollop of good old butter on there
this is still warm - ooh!
Oh yeah. It looks rubbish, but it tastes great...
soda bread. So here we are, hours and hours later and here's our coddle.
And it smells fantastic
Let's try a bit of sausage.
I declare that a success a few simple ingredients and lots
and lots of cooking and it's turned into something magical. Irish Coddle, Dublin
Coddle, coddle, whatever. Wonderful!
And that's that - I hope you enjoyed it.
Now you can get the full recipe on my website keefcooks.com and there should
be a link kicking around on the screen over there or down there, and if you
haven't already done so please subscribe to my channel - link - link - and talk to me -
leave comments, make requests - keep it civil and friendly or I will BAN you
and thanks for watching and see you next time