This summer we set out on a mission to create a pizza that was the complete antithesis of fast food; a ‘no-compromise pizza’.
We brought together our bakery team in Sweden and they spent two days baking, taking the time to create a pizza without any short cuts. When Jan finally decided “this is it” we had our ‘no-compromise pizza’.
The rumour spread around and in the first 8 weeks we sold 5,000 pizza (that’s really not bad given we are situated in the heart of the Swedish country-side, in the middle of no where . . . )
Okay, let´s be honest – we didn´t invent the concept of a ‘no-compromise pizza’.
We´ve been very much inspired by The Cheeseboard in Berkeley, Ca. A great place!
Ever since summer faded we´ve been thinking about bringing our no-compromise pizza to Quartermile, Edinburgh. Being busy already, we just couldn´t make up our minds, if it was a good idea to add more work-load.
But we just can´t resist.
From Friday January 20 , we will be making our pizza everyday from 4 pm and extend our opening hours to 10 pm . We will take the same care and patience as we do in Sweden, using sourdough, Shipton Mill flour and our own special tomato sauce recipe.
Just as in Sweden you will only have a choice of 3 types of Pizza:
- Vegetarian
- Salami Ventricina or Parma ham.
- Anchovies
They will be £10 each .
We will also serve 3 red wines and a white at a fair price. No more.
There will be one or two desserts .
That´s all.
No table service and no reservations.
We want to keep things simple so that we can do it well.
Christmas is fast approaching and it’s time to get together to share good food and conversation with friends and family. We thought we would share with you some of our favourite seasonal toppings for our crispbreads. Along with our original medium and large sharing size we now have a mini crispbread that’s perfect for parties and get togethers. They are available from our online shop and stockists across the country.
We’ve new recipes for Anchovy and Butter Bean dip, really easy to make from store cupboard ingredients. A Cheese Terrine that’s very simple and a great way to use up some of your cheese board leftovers or as a special treat for cheese lovers. A wonderfully festive coloured Red Roe topping and a twist on the traditional open sandwich topping Skagen.
Our crispbreads remain crisp for sometime but if you want to make them well in advance, you can place a piece of lettuce under the toppings to keep them crisp and crunchy for even longer.
We also like to serve the crispbreads with a platter of smoked salmon or a good cheese board, simple but delicious. You can find some of our other favourite recipes here.
If you are placing orders through our website then the last order date for Christmas and New Year is Wednesday 21 December.
If you are visiting our Edinburgh coffee house or To Go shop please note that we will be closed from 24 December to 2 January so our staff can enjoy time with family and friends. We will re-open on 3 January at 9am.
We hope you have a wonderful Christmas.
On a wet October evening we hosted an evening with Signe Johansen, author of Scandilicious: Secrets of Scandinavian Cooking, at our Edinburgh coffee house.
About 35 regular customers and loyal friends came along to hear Sig talk about how her love of food started while growing up in Norway, particularly spending time at her grandparents’ fruit farm by the fjords. She learnt many recipes from her grandmother (farmor) and a love of learning about food that has stayed with her as she has travelled to different parts of the world. Currently based in London, Sig is keen to highlight how simple and delicious Scandinavian food can be and how it is often similar to some traditional British dishes. With an even shorter growing season than in the UK, Scandinavians make use of super fresh ingredients while they are plentiful and preserving methods to create delicious stores for winter.
Sig explained how to make two of the dishes we served that evening, Gravlaks with dill sauce and Goats cheese with radish and raspberry vinegar. Both are very simple to make and if you’ve never tried home cured gravlaks it is a revelation of flavour, so much better than you can find in the shops. You can find the recipes for both here along with a recipe shared by one of our guests that evening, Caroline von Schmalensee.
We served our guests the following to go with our crispbreads:
Gravlaks with dill sauce
Goats cheese with radish and raspberry vinegar
Chicken liver pate with pickled beetroot
Lightly smoked cods roe (we used Mills Kaviar, available in the UK at Scandinavian Kitchen)
A selection of cheeses
with traditional Swedish Kladdkaka (gooey chocolate cake) to follow.
…..and everyone had a gift of crispbreads and cardamom buns to take home.
You can read a review by one of or guests, Edinburgh Eats here, and review of Sig’s book by another guest, Edinbugh Fooby, here.
Join us….
for an evening of Scandinavian food, drink and conversation with author Signe Johansen
When: 20th October 2011, 7-9pm
Where: Peter’s Yard Edinburgh
Spaces are limited please see the end of this post for details.
Signe Johansen grew up in Norway spending time learning to cook with her farmor (grandmother). She enjoyed learning about everything from cured fish dishes to the many traditional cakes and biscuits. In her first book Scandilicious: Secrets of Scandinavian Cooking she shares her passion for Scandinavian food showing us how simple and delicious it is.
Booking:
Tickets are only available online from We Got Tickets. They are priced at £20 which includes a goodie bag. In addition there is a 10% (£2) booking fee charged by the ticket agent wegottickets.com
We hope you will be able to come along and join us.
(Images from Scandilicious: by Signe Johansen. Hodder & Stoughton. Copyright Debi Trelor)
Peter’s Yard has been selected to appear in Cool Places Edinburgh, part of a new travel-guide series created for the iPhone and iPad. The App is available from the iTunes store using the link below.
The guides have been created by the founders of Rough Guides and Cool Camping with a team of independent travel writers deciding on which places to recommend.
This time of year is quite magical in Sweden. As Christmas approaches, the celebrations start on 13 December with the festival of Saint Lucia. In the Georgian calendar the date coincided with the shortest day of the year and traditional stories suggest that Lucia was the bringer of light into the midwinter darkness. The celebration is a mixing of pre Christian Scandinavian folklore and Germanic Lutheran religious traditions. The day is observed widely across Sweden and in communities with a large Swedish population such as London, New York and other parts of the USA. The festival is also celebrated in other Scandinavian countries but its origins are truly Swedish.
Traditionally the day commences with a breakfast of golden coloured saffron buns (Lussekatter), often made in the shape of a cat with raisins for eyes. Later in the day, there is a candle lit procession of girls depicting Lucia, dressed in white robes, carrying candles, singing the haunting hymn of Sainta Lucia. The procession is lead by a girl wearing a red sash over her white robe, along with a crown of burning candles. This is a special day and an important part of the winter celebrations leading up to Christmas.
At this time of year, Swedes enjoy the chance to get together, share food and warm ourselves with a glass of hot glögg. Many people have their own family recipes for glögg and there are always plenty of invitations to join friends to try their spiced, warm wine. Here’s a favourite recipe that Peter recommends. It’s sure to warm you up and put you in the festive spirit.
Glögg
- 5 green cardamom pods, slightly crushed
- 2 cloves
- 3cm piece of cinnamon stick
- 1 teaspoon dried orange peel
- 2 tablespoons brown sugar
- 75ml Madeira or port
- 1 bottle good-quality red wine such as burgundy
Put all the ingredients in a pan (not aluminum) and slowly heat. Do not allow to boil. Strain and drink while still warm. For a more intense flavour leave the spices to infuse for several hours or overnight then strain and gently reheat when ready to drink. Serve in a heatproof bowl, with mugs or glasses and a large ladle.
The main Christmas celebration happens in Sweden on Christmas Eve. Many Swedes visit church in the afternoon and then families and friends come together in the early evening to feast on a traditional Christmas Smörgåsbord. This is similar in some ways to the food served in Britain on Boxing Day with a buffet of gravadlax, smoked salmon, baked hams and salads. Other traditional foods which are less familiar here in Britain over Christmas include a wide range of pickled and cured herring, smoked eel, meatballs, smoked sausages or roasted pork ribs. Hot and cold potato dishes are an important part of the feast as are a wide variety of breads from dense rye to lighter crispbreads. After dinner we exchange presents and children are allowed to stay up late to enjoy the celebrations. Christmas Day is a much quieter day with simpler food and a chance to spend time outdoors enjoying the few hours of daylight, perhaps with a walk followed by another glass of warming glögg.
At Peter’s Yard, we look forward to welcoming you in the run up to Christmas. We will be serving our own hand-baked Lussekatter to celebrate Saint Lucia at our Edinburgh coffee house and if you’d like to try your hand at making Lussekatter yourself then email wendy@petersyard.com for Jan Hedh’s recipe from his forthcoming book Swedish Breads and Pastries.
We are delighted to have been awarded 2 Gold stars for our sourdough crispbreads in the Savoury Bread Category. Having won in 2008/9 it’s great that we have achieved an even higher award this time, with the judges commenting on their attractive appearance, crispness and delicious taste.
There were a record number of entrants with over 6000 submitting products and tougher selection criteria this year, making the award feel even more special. Over 350 experts including key buyers, retailers, chefs and food writers blind tasted entries to ensure they were fairly and independently assessed. Before two or three stars were awarded, up to 20 judges had to unanimously agree that the entry had achieved absolute perfection!
It just goes to show that making a product properly, really does make a difference. Well done and thank you to our lovely bakery team and to the suppliers of our ingredients, especially Shipton Mill for their wonderful organic flour!
Find out more about our crispbreads, buy them on line or be inspired by our recipe suggestions.
As ever the weather this summer is delivering its usual mixed bag of wet cool days and warm blue sky days. We’d all like there to be more of the latter but whatever the weather we always make sure we spend a little time enjoying good food and coffee.
For those who like our coffee you can now buy our espresso beans in our Savour To Go shop and you grind them on site to your own specification. Choose between our in-house blend Janszoon and the wonderful new Suomi blend, named because Finland consumes more coffee per capita than anyone else in the world, mind you Sweden comes second!
Because we like to make sure that good ingredients are kept as fresh as possible we spent lots of time thinking about the best way to store coffee at home. We searched books and the web trying to understand the pros and cons of all the possibilities. Fridge or not? Finally we found a new product from Planetary Design, who make the best thermo mugs in the world.
Airscape.
A clever canister that creates a vacuum like seal and keeps the coffee really fresh for much longer.
Our only problem was there were no distributors in Europe. But a few emails later and Brooke Billadeau at Planetary Design back in Missoula, USA solved our problem by sending us a few boxes. Now available in our Savour To Go shop in 5 great colours.
If, for any reason, the weather turns into one long balmy blue sky filled August then we’ve eight different flavours of artisan ice-cream for you to try, all equally delicious and made with real fruit, real cream and real care.
From 30 July to 29 August Savour To Go will have extended opening hours from midday to 8pm daily.
At Peter’s Yard, we aim to create a relaxed place where like-minded people can meet to enjoy lively conversation and exchange views over great coffee and a bite to eat. In Sweden we call it fika and our loyal customers know how much we love good conversation. For those of you who can’t pop into our coffee house and bakery for a chat, we wanted to have a place to share with you everything we’re up to and so at last, we have a blog as part of our new website. Here we’ll talk about our food journey as it progresses, whether its new openings, upcoming tastings, recipes, events or the stories behind the food we make and the people who work with us. And of course, as in all good fika, we’d love to hear what you think too.
Our new website, is about sharing with you our passion for fresh food made with pure ingredients, like our ice cream and our sandwiches. We’ll tell you about the origins of our food and their connections to Sweden, we’ll share recipe suggestions and our food stories. We hope to create an online fika.
For those who don’t know our story well, so far it runs like this…
Back in 2001, a late night dinner conversation with friends about making good bread combined with a healthy appetite for challenges, led Peter, our founder, to join with his friend Christer, to open Olof Viktors, their first bakery café in the countryside in Southern Sweden. With its traditional wood-fired oven and handmade breads, Olof Viktors has become a much-loved part of Osterlen, but Peter was ready for a new challenge: bringing great bread and Swedish food ideas to the UK. Intrigued by the Edinburgh portrayed in Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels Peter chose it as his base. Working closely with Swedish Master Baker Jan Hedh to create a wonderful range of artisan breads, Swedish cakes and crispbreads and with his friend, architect and furniture designer Nirvan Richter to design the modern Swedish décor, Peter opened our first Peter’s Yard coffee house and bakery in late 2007 in Edinburgh’s Quartermile. There, fika has found a natural home, and the coffee house has quickly built up a loyal clientele of fascinating people.
In 2008, Peter joined forces with Wendy and Ian to bring some of our favourite bakery products to a wider audience across the country, starting with crispbreads, a somewhat misunderstood traditional Scandinavian speciality. Our crispbreads are handmade to a traditional Swedish recipe using Shipton Mill organic flour and our own sourdough starter, making them crisp, light and the perfect base for cheese, smoked salmon, butter, in fact anything you would usually serve with good bread. The response from everyone who tries them has been wonderful and now we are starting to develop new sizes and alternative recipes. Your ideas are always welcome.
We’ve plans afoot for our coffee house and for our other bakery favourites. We’ll share them with you here as they progress. We hope that way, we can keep in touch with friends old and new.
|
 |  |  |
