Food news antipasto

GBBO finalist Crystelle Pereira just released her first cookbook, Flavour Kitchen, to rave reviews. She recently sat down with The Independent to discuss life after Bake Off, the decision to quit her day job and focus on cooking and baking, her Goan-Portuguese roots, and her upcoming food plans. Despite loving French pastries, Pereira admitted that she doesn’t love French food. “I’m just more into pan-Asian and Mediterranean food – I just think the flavours are a bit more vibrant,” she explained. For more information about this title and to enter to win a copy, see our promotion.

Fish and chips is an iconic dish in the UK and it’s difficult to imagine the country without it. However, due to a range of factors including the rising cost of potatoes and natural gas, chippies across England and Scotland have been forced to close. One trade association, the National Federation of Fish Friers, believes that as many as a third of the UK’s fish and chip shops could fold, calling the situation a potential “extinction event”.

Judging by early box office numbers, this weekend officially belongs to Barbie. The movie has the biggest opening numbers of any release this year, pulling in $155 million (USD). The movie’s success has spawned numerous tie-ins with food and drink, such as cocktails based on Barbie’s iconic outfits and a retrospective on the Barbie cake.

One thing I look forward to every summer is buying a bag of fragrant, juicy Georgia peaches. With a brief harvest period and an even shorter shelf life, the best peaches are not available very long and this year, to my dismay, they might not even be coming to a store near me. Severe weather has devastated the peach crop, with estimates that 80 to 90 percent of the crop was destroyed early this spring.

For some less depressing news we turn to Eater, where Jaya Saxena is making the case for more silly pasta shapes. Noting that new pasta shapes like cascatelli and vesuvio emerged to a warm welcome, Saxena believes it would be fun (and totally Instagram-able) to have more novelty shapes. “It feels like there’s a whole untapped world of pasta shapes dying to be explored. Imagine a Via Carota-quality cacio e pepe around tennis racket pasta, or slow-simmered ragu served over miniature New Jerseys,” she says.