Food DIY: How to Make Your Own Everything: sausages to smoked salmon, sourdough to sloe gin, bacon to buns

Over recent years, across much of the world, people have started rejecting shop bought food and are getting into making it themselves. The DIY food movement is spreading.

But why DIY? Because it’s fun, an adventure, thrifty, a great way to get your hands gloriously dirty, and because at a time when skills like baking, preserving and curing are in danger of being lost forever, it’s more important than ever to learn how things work. Most importantly though, when you do it yourself you can make sure that all the food you eat is absolutely delicious.

In Food DIY, Tim Hayward, editor of influential food magazine Fire & Knives and enthusiastic DIYer, will show you:

– How to make your own butter and cheese, sloe gin, suet pudding and potted lobster.

– How to smoke, and cure fish and meats, air-dry bresaola and boerwoers, as well as
pickle fish, game and vegetables.

– He’ll explain the mysteries of terrines and faggots, bread and buns, as well how to spit-roast a whole lamb, make a clam bake in a wheelbarrow, smoke a salmon in a gym locker and deep fry a turkey outdoors.

– He’ll teach you how to make your own takeaway: from delicious Peking duck and fried chicken to doner kebab and your morning cappuccino.

Food DIY is the essential modern urban cook’s manual.

‘The perfect guide to everything from salt beef to gravadlax, through jerkey, pickles and sloe gin’  Shortlist

‘If you fantasise over the perfect pork pie with a proper jelly layer and cut into each deli-bought version only to be disappointed, here is the answer’ Independent

‘If you like Cooked, and even if you didn’t, check out Tim Hayward’s new book, which promises to be a DIY classic’  Michael Pollan

‘As ‘Urban Food DIY-er’ Tim Hayward proves with his new book, making your own everything is much easier than you might think and a whole lot of fun . . . excellent inspiration for anyone who cherishes the art of producing good food’  Psychologies

Tim Hayward is a food writer and broadcaster. He is a contributing writer at the Financial Times and a regular contributor to the Guardian ‘Word of Mouth’ Food Blog and Radio 4 Food Programme, among others. Tim is the publisher and editor of Fire & Knives, a quarterly magazine of new food writing, and winner of the ‘Best Food Magazine’at the 2012 Guild of Food Writers Awards, and the publisher of Gin & It, a quarterly journal of new writing for drinkers and thinkers. He is the proprietor of the Fitzbillies bakery and restaurant in Cambridge. Food DIY is his first book.