Daz Switalla Flavour Secrets No.1 The Strand Chef www.no1thestrand.co.nz

A long while ago, before the advent of convenient prepared meals and sauces in jars and packets, there was something called cooking from scratch. Bakers use this term a lot when preparing dough from base ingredients without additives and pre-prepared mixes.

The convenience of having a sauce in a jar, just open and use, comes at the price of flavour and the art of cooking itself. If you learn a recipe – for example sweet and sour – you can adjust and add to it according to your tastes. The other disadvantage of a lot of convenience products is they often have labels that contain lots of numbers E 113, E 330 etcetera.

Fresh is always best; the sauce for this week's recipe is so simple to make I often find it hard to understand how you could ever buy sweet and sour sauce in a jar.

Now that we have that out of the way and while on the subject of sweet and sour, I recently met some very sweet and sour people lately – mainly on reception duty. They are either sweet and talkative while answering the phone and then sour when offered free samples or business cards. In one case, throwing their arms in the air as if fending off some demonic evil denying free salads as if they were harbingers of doom.

The sweet ones accept our free samples, tap away at the keyboard and email their colleagues and provide positive feed back – which somehow brings me to this week's recipe; the well-balanced sweet and sour pork in noodle batter.

Sweet and Sour pork in noodle batter
Serves 4

Sweet and sour sauce

1 cup of each:

Water

Sugar

Pineapple juice

Vinegar, white or cider

Tomato sauce

1 tbsp corn flour to thicken

Bring all five ingredients to a boil, then thicken with corn flour and a little water. Garnish with thinly cut celery, onion and carrot if desired.

Noodle batter

150g cooked fine wheat noodles

200g flour

150-200mls chilled water

Small pinch of baking soda

Tsp of salt

In a large bowl, add the flour, baking soda and salt, pour in the chilled water whisk to a batter adding more water as required. Allow to stand, add cooled cooked noodles.

Pork Fillets

Two pork fillets, sliced on an angle into 4cm chunks

2 tbsp honey

2 tbsp soya sauce

1 tbsp hoisen sauce

Marinate cut pork for an hour then bake in moderate oven 250 degrees for 10 minutes – do not overcook the pork. Rest in fridge to cool and set completely. Toss cooled pork in corn flour then into batter mix, drape noodles over pork chunks and scoop up with batter place in deep fryer or shallow fry in pan until batter is crisp – about six minutes. Drain on paper towels then serve with sweet and sour sauce, serve with rice or salad and a nice floral Gewurztraminer.