Beyond the bacon sandwich: the many uses of brown sauce
I like my bacon sandwich with brown sauce, but that means keeping a bottle for a long time.What else can I do with it? Will, via emailIn the early 1980s, Tom Harris, co-owner and chef at the Marksman in east London, made a beer mat from penny coins for his dad (and in the quest to secure a Blue Peter badge): “The instructions said to put the dirty coins in brown sauce overnight,” he recalls.“The next morning, they were all shiny and looked brand new, so there’s another use for it right there!”Brown sauce is “an absolute marvel”, agrees Sabrina Ghayour, author of the recently published Persiana Easy, and not just for its cleaning prowess: “If you break it down, the sauce is packed with some pretty interesting ingredients, including my beloved tamarind.” It’s worth exploring your bottle options beyond HP, too, not least because there was much controversy back in 2011 when the brand gave its recipe, which had remained unchanged for more than a century, a tweak.“They reduced the salt [from 2.
1g per 100g to 1,3g] and it completely upset the balance,” Harris says, “and that’s a great sadness,” That’s why Ghayour’s go-to these days is Tiptree: “It has a slightly less vinegary punch and a more rounded sweetness,” which comes with the added bonus of making it “even more versatile”,If you were to ask Harris’ dad, one such use would be a piece of fried fish in a buttered roll with lots of brown sauce: “That’s a lovely, lovely thing,” Otherwise, use it in place of tonkatsu sauce “with anything crumbed or fried, such as a pork chop”, he adds.
The “tangy, savoury nature” of the stuff also works a dream with a hash, says Anna Tobias, chef-owner of Cafe Deco in London, which bottles its own brown sauce.“I often do a hash after a Sunday roast, when you have a bit of leftover meat, cabbage and potatoes,” she says.“Fry them up, top with a fried egg, put some brown sauce on the side and that’s delicious.” Or pair it with roast pork: “Instead of apple sauce, why not try brown?” Tobias says.“It has the same sweet-sour tang and will cut through.
”Brown sauce is, after all, a porky condiment, although it was traditionally partnered with sausages rather than bacon.“When I was the tea boy at Dad’s warehouse, I’d do the 11am sandwich run and it was always sausages with brown sauce and bacon with red,” Harris says.“That was the dividing line.”Ghayour says our reader Will, however, could also harness the acidity in his excess sauce to “give wonderful life to soups, stews, sauces, gravies, marinades [think sticky barbecue-style] and beyond”.Meanwhile, as the weather cools, Tobias would be tempted to segue to homemade baked beans: “I know not many people bother making their own beans, but adding a bit of brown sauce to the tomatoes and cooking that with the beans would be very good.
”That all said, sometimes you don’t need to look beyond the obvious: “Brown sauce is really good for breakfast, and maybe that’s its purpose in life,” Tobias says very sensibly.A good dollop on the side of a full English, or on a bacon sandwich, is always going to be more than OK.Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com
AstraZeneca pauses £200m investment in Cambridge research site
The drugmaker AstraZeneca has paused a planned £200m expansion of its Cambridge research site, completing a depressing week for the UK pharmaceutical industry.The decision by the UK’s largest company means none of its much-trumpeted £650m investment package in the UK – which was originally announced in March 2024 – is proceeding.The now stalled £200m Cambridge project had been expected to create 1,000 jobs. In January, AstraZeneca scrapped plans to invest £450m in its vaccine manufacturing facility in Speke, Merseyside, citing a cut in government support, after months of negotiations.An AstraZeneca spokesperson said on Friday: “We constantly reassess the investment needs of our company and can confirm our expansion in Cambridge is paused
Pound dips after UK economy doesn’t grow in July; Ocado shares slide 20% amid robotic warehouses demand fears – as it happened
The pound has weakened since today’s GDP report showed the UK economy failed to grow in July.Sterling is down 0.2% at $1.355 against the US dollar this morning.Kathleen Brooks, research director at XTB, points out there is “not much to like” from the July monthly GDP update, with zero growth in the economy at the start of the third quarter
AI content needs to be labelled to protect us | Letters
Marcus Beard’s article on artificial intelligence slopaganda (No, that wasn’t Angela Rayner dancing and rapping: you’ll need to understand AI slopaganda, 9 September) highlights a growing problem – what happens when we no longer know what is true? What will the erosion of trust do to our society?The rise of deepfakes is increasing at an ever faster rate due to the ease at which anyone can create realistic images, audio and even video. Generative AI models have now become so sophisticated that a recent survey showed that less than 1% of respondents could correctly identify the best deepfake images and videos.This content is being used to manipulate, defraud, abuse and mislead people. Fraud using AI cost the US $12.3bn in 2023 and Deloitte predicts that could reach $40bn by 2027
ChatGPT may start alerting authorities about youngsters considering suicide, says CEO
The company behind ChatGPT could start calling the authorities when young users talk seriously about suicide, its co-founder has said.Sam Altman raised fears that as many as 1,500 people a week could be discussing taking their own lives with the chatbot before doing so.The chief executive of San Francisco-based OpenAI, which operates the chatbot with an estimated 700 million global users, said the decision to train the system so the authorities were alerted in such emergencies was not yet final. But he said it was “very reasonable for us to say in cases of, young people talking about suicide, seriously, where we cannot get in touch with the parents, we do call authorities”.Altman highlighted the possible change in an interview with the podcaster Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, which came after OpenAI and Altman were sued by the family of Adam Raine, a 16-year-old from California who killed himself after what his family’s lawyer called “months of encouragement from ChatGPT”
Records tumble as England thrash South Africa by 146 runs: second men’s T20 international – as it happened
I’ll leave you with Simon Burnton’s report – night night.I’m pretty lost for words! The way [Salt and Buttler] started the night off was just phenomenal. Me and Jos were in the field and we both said that we never thought anybody would get 300. But with the batting line-up we’ve got, there aren’t many heights we can’t reach.[On Salt v Duckett v Smith at the top of the order] There are some tough decisions to be made
Records tumble as Phil Salt’s stunning ton leads England to T20 rout of South Africa
England made history, and for the first time more than 300 runs, on an extraordinary night in Manchester as they buried South Africa under a mountain of runs and shredded statistics. Their highest T20 total was turbocharged by a brilliant opening stand of 126 between Phil Salt and Jos Buttler and by their highest individual score, Salt knocking himself off the top of that chart with an unbeaten 141. Within a week and against the same opponents they have set new national records for winning margins in both one-day internationals and now T20s, the final difference here an almost comic 146 runs.Salt described his evening as “really good fun” but the experience for Shukri Conrad, South Africa’s head coach, was anything but. He described a bowling performance that – having invited England to bat first – “was way off, bereft of ideas” as England were allowed to plunder 30 fours and 18 sixes en route to a score of 304 for two, with nearly twice as many boundaries (48) across the innings as there were dot balls (25)
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