English food is fantastic – everyone knows that! 🙂 In the video below, a chef explains how to make a famous English dessert/snack called flapjack. If you’ve never tried it, believe me, it’s incredible. Try to make it yourself and enjoy the wonder of flapjack and pretend you are sitting in an English garden in the summer sun having a conversation about the upcoming Olympics. The secret ingredient is the golden syrup – that might be difficult to find in your country. But, if you can get your hands on some, you won’t believe how delicious it is…it’s tastes like an angel crying on your tongue! 🙂 Enjoy the video and use the transcript (below) if it’s too difficult to understand. Use the images to try and understand what she is saying. Some of the recipe vocabulary is explained below the vid. What’s your favourite sweet-tooth recipe from your country? Let me know in the comments, please! I’ll try to make it 🙂
Recipe Vocabulary Transcript
Going to be making flapjacks, which have quite an unjust reputation for being a healthy snack, when in fact, as you can see, they contain butter, sugar and golden syrup. I think the mitigating factor might be the oats. So, we’ve got jumbo oats, which give a really nice interesting texture because they’re chunky… and Delia uses them. And I’ve also used some ‘Quick-Cook’ oats, which are cut more finely. Now this is a tip I picked up online. It actually helps to bind the mixture together, so it doesn’t fall apart when it’s cooked. You could also use flour – the National Trust Book of Baking uses flour, but I think it gives a sort of strange, fudgy, fine texture which I don’t really like, so I’m using two types of oats instead. First step, we’re going to turn the oven on. Now you to have to decide at this point whether you want quite soft, classic flapjacks, in which case we’re going to go for 150 degrees. Or whether you want those lovely, crispy, thinner ones, in which case you’re going to go for 190. So we’re going to start off by making the softer kind of flapjack. I’m going to use this tin here which is quite deep, as you can see. Just need to grease it with a little bit of butter. Measure it slightly larger than the tin. Now you’re ready to make your mixture. First of all you need 300 grams of butter. I would usually use unsalted butter because that way you control the amount of salt you put in yourself. Add that to a saucepan on a medium heat, just to melt the butter. Now you just tip in the sugar: 75 grams of demerara sugar. And then, add 6 tablespoons of golden syrup. It is quite difficult to measure completely accurately because it does cling to the spoon. But don’t worry too much about that. You just really want to dissolve the sugar at this point and mix it all together. So you need 300 grams of jumbo oats and 150 of the Quick-Cook oats which are the finer ones. Turn the heat off and just tip the oats in. Stirring until they’re all nicely coated. Add a pinch of salt at this point if you’re using unsalted butter. I think it just brings out the flavour of the other ingredients. So, once it’s all nicely coated, then we take the tin and just spoon it in. Push it into all the corners. This will give you a more solid, final texture. Put it in there for 40 minutes. And let it cook. The crispy flapjacks uses the same mixture. In fact, everything’s exactly the same. You just need to turn the oven up slightly higher and use preferably a slightly larger tin so you can spread the mixture out more thinly. There we are. Here are our nice crispy, golden flapjacks. Once you’ve left them to cool for a few minutes in the tin, you just cut them into squares. If you do this while they’re still hot, then it’ll be much easier than leaving them until they’ve set. They might feel a little bit squidgy. But don’t worry, they will firm up as they set and cool down. It’s very important with flapjacks to let them cool in the tin. If you take them out, they won’t set and you’ll end up with those crumbly things that are no good for taking on picnics.
Recipe vocabulary glossary
- texture
- the ‘feel’ of sth – like soft or hard
- chunky
- food that has big bits in it
- to cut finely
- to cut into thin bits
- to bind
- to stick little bits together into one big bit
- Stirring
- to stir – to move a spoon around in a liquid
- coated
- food that is covered in sth else…like chicken coated in breadcrumbs
- to cool
- to allow sth to become colder
- to set
- as sth becomes colder it becomes hard and solid
- squidgy
- soft, spongy and wet
- crumbly
- food that easily breaks into small pieces
