One Hungry Chef

Splashing Out

2012-01-04T08:59:00.000+11:00

One of the primary concerns of my job as head chef (and I have many in the kitchen) is keeping an eye on how much everything costs to produce. In fact, after ensuring that the food tastes good and that the quality is consistent, food-cost occupies the majority of my attention. As a result, all good chefs are experts in the fluctuating costs of fruits and vegetables. I watch the farm report on public-access television, because the price of livestock directly affects me. I even keep an eye on the national weather patterns, as a week of rain in Queensland or a few days of heat in Victoria could mean spinach prices will skyrocket, or half my herbs will be unavailable.

All this focus on price and availability, as is especially required in a bistro, is typically on what things are cheap and most available. I spend a great deal of time agonizing over the price of asparagus, lamenting the price of lamb, quarreling over the price of quail. I pinch and skimp and recycle and stretch so often that I sometimes forget that premium ingredients exist at all. What would it be like, I wonder, to order a couple dozen lamb racks? White asparagus? Truffles? I love cooking all of these things, but I cannot imagine cooking them in my restaurant: I just can't justify the price.

This frugality, wanted or not, spills over into my home life. I often find myself standing in the supermarket isles, frozen with indecision, incapable of deciding which cuts of meat represents real value. Are carrots really worth $4/k? Mangoes seem reasonable, given the time of year. What's the farm report say the harvest has been like this season?

As a result, I forget, from time to time, that it is ok to splash out and buy nice things, just for the hell of it. I have to tell myself that, yes, $20/kilo for honey dates is expensive, but my boys love them so. Broccoli is three times the price it was last week, but it would go so well with the roast dinner I've planned. Lobster has gone to how much? Ok... I guess it's a treat.

This sort of thinking doesn't do you much good in the professional kitchen; no matter how good a product is, the price determines if I can use it or not. For those of us trying to keep a lid on the spending at home, similar thinking is useful.

Don't let it, however, keep you from going a little crazy with the shopping from time to time; you deserve a treat.

This is exactly what you have to to if you want to make this pie. Splash out and buy a lot of raspberries, which are expensive as hell, even when they are in season.

Raspberry Cream Tart

This rich little tart speaks of summer luxury. The filling is made by mixing crème fraîche, sugar, and eggs, and then pouring the mixture over a tart shell filled with raspberries. When the tart has baked and formed a caramelized crust, fresh raspberries are dropped in before the crust has a chance to cool; embedding themselves in the tart like tiny ships locked in a frozen sea.

4 cups raspberries
200ml crème fraîche
200gm sugar
3 egg yolks
1 tart shell, blind-baked and trimmed (below)

Preheat your oven to 160ºC. Fill the tart shell will 3 cups of raspberries, reserving one cup of the best for the topping. Mix together in a bowl the crème fraîche, sugar, and egg yolks. Pour this mixture over the berries in the tart shell. Bake for 1 hour, or until the tart is bubbly, slightly browned, and set in the middle. A set tart will giggle as one when gently shaken, an under-cooked tart will giggle in separate parts. You'll know what I mean when you see it.

Remove the cooked tart from the oven and immediately drop the reserved berries in so that they are at least half submerged. Cool to room temperature before serving with a bit of cream or ice cream. Refrigerate any leftovers.

Tart Shell

For the tart you'll one piece of special equipment: a fine tart ring. It's a little ring of metal, about 24cm wide, and only 2cm tall, with no bottom and perfectly vertical sides. The idea is that you bake on a perfectly flat tray and when the tart is trimmed, filled, and cooked, the ring lifts off to reveal neat, straight little sides.

200g flour
135g cold butter
pinch salt
30ml cold water

In a food processor, combine the flour, salt, and butter. Pulse until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. With the processor running, add the water a bit at a time just until the pastry pulls together and forms a ball; you may not use all of the water. Stop the processor immediately to avoid over-mixing.

Remove the pastry dough from the processor and shape it into a ball. Flatten this into a disk about 2cm thick, wrap in cling film and refrigerate for at least half an hour.

Line a flat tray with baking paper and place the pastry ring on top.

Remove the pastry from the refrigerator and roll it out on a floured board until it is about ¼cm thick. Starting at one end, roll the pastry onto the rolling pin like a scroll, move it over the pastry ring, and unroll it. Using a small piece of pastry dough (torn from the overhang gently press the rolled pastry into the ring, lifting the edges up as you press down so that you stretch the rolled pastry as little as possible. Leave the over hanging pastry intact., reserving a golfball-sized piece for later. Refrigerate at least half an hour.

Heat your oven to 200ºC. Line the inside of your tart shell with baking paper or foil and fill with rice, beans, or pie weights. Bake for 20 minutes, remove from oven and remove the weights. If the tart shell has cracked anywhere, use the pastry you reserved earlier to make repairs. Bake an additional 5 minutes. Allow the shell to cool.

Using a serrated knife, trim the overhanging crust from the tart so that it is level with the height of the ring. This step is tricky, and you want to be sure not to break your tart crust. To do this, make sure that you keep the blade perpendicular to the tart ring and take care not to saw back and forth – rather pull the knife towards you with each stroke so that the tart shell is pulled up against the side of the ring, preventing breakage. Take your time and make small slow strokes with the blade. When you are finished, you should have a tart shell which is exactly the height of the ring with no pastry actually hanging over the edge of the ring, as you want to be able to lift the ring off after your tart is baked.

On Dumplings and Cousins

2011-12-20T10:00:00.000+11:00

I've mentioned before that professional cooking is about numbers. How many portions of fish did you get from that salmon? How many olives per chicken garnish? Have we enough beef cheeks to last the weekend? All this purposeful counting leads to unintentional counting. I find myself counting along as I peel potatoes, or shell prawns, or dice tomatoes. This habit is mostly annoying, especially when I do it aloud, because no one, myself included, cares how many carrots I've peeled. I would definitely rather not know how many gnocchi I've made in my cooking career. (In case you are wondering, it's a shitload.)

If I'm making them, someone is eating them. Lots of them, in fact. Gnocchi, in whatever form I've served it over the years, is always one of the most popular dishes on my menu. A quick bit of googling reveals a near-infinite list of gnocchi recipes on the internets. Browsing through a page or two I'm struck by one common element: every recipe calls for potato.

But that, I can hear you say, is what gnocchi are made of; you mix potato (usually roasted, sometimes boiled), with flour and cheese to make a dough, roll it into little balls and boil them until they are cooked. That's how you make gnocchi.

Well, it the most popular, modern method, anyway. Gnocchi is a generic term for a dumpling, and can be made from any type of dough. Some gnocchi are made from nothing more than flour and water. Italians have been making gnocchi since Roman times, when they adopted the Middle Eastern habit of blanching paste made from flour and water. In fact, pasta and gnocchi share a common history, and it is difficult to tell sometimes what should be classified as pasta and what gnocchi. Potato gnocchi, obviously, didn't exist on the peninsula until well after the introduction of spuds to the Old World in the 1500s.

For whatever reason, the potato variety is clearly the most popular, meaning that many of the other versions are rarely served.

One such is the French version: gnocchis à la parisienne. These dumplings are made not of potato but a savory choux pastry. They are airy and light, much less stodgy than even the best example of their potato cousins. And like their counterparts, they are infinitely versatile. You can brown them up in a bit of butter and they'll be delicious, or you can create with them an accompaniment to any meal.

If you like potato gnocchi at all, you've got to try these.

Gnocchis à la Parisienne

Not only are choux pastry gnocchi lighter than most other forms of the dumplings, they are much easier to make, and require lass of a cleanup; no roasting of potatoes, rolling of dough, flour everywhere. Joy.

I've flavored these with lemon thyme, but you can use most any herb.

180ml water
90g unsalted butter
½ Tbsp salt flakes
120g flour
1 Tbsp dijon mustard
1 Tbsp chopped lemon thyme
½ tsp cracked black pepper
25g parmesan, grated
3 eggs + 1 yolk

In a medium saucepan, bring the water, butter and salt to a simmer. Whisking, add the flour. Stir with a wooden spoon until a dough forms and pulls away from the sides and bottom of the pot. Reduce the heat to low and continue working the dough in the pot for about 3 minutes, allowing some of the moisture in the dough to evaporate. Remove from the heat and transfer to a large mixing bowl.

Stir in the mustard, thyme, and pepper. When these are well incorporated, add the cheese. Stirring constantly, add the three eggs one at a time, making sure each is completely mixed in before adding the next.

When the three eggs have been mixed in the dough should be sticky and soft, but not slack. If it seems too firm, add the additional yolk.

Transfer the dough to a piping bag fitted with a 1cm nozzle and rest. (The dough, not your arm).

While the dough is resting, bring a large pot of water to the boil. Reduce to a gentle simmer. Holding the nozzle over the edge of the pot squeeze the dough out and, using a knife, cut little dumplings into the boiling water. Cook about 30 gnocchi at a time.

When the dumplings float, give them a further 2 or 3 minutes to cook and then remove them with a slotted spoon and drain them on paper towels.

Once all the gnocchi are cooked, refrigerate for at least half an hour before finishing.

To finish the gnocchi, heat a pan on medium-high heat, add a touch of oil or butter and sauté until browned and puffy.

You can serve these dumplings as you would any gnocchi dish. Here I rendered some speck, sautéd some zucchini, and then browned the gnocchi in some of the reserved speck fat. Yum.

House Dressing

2011-12-13T10:00:00.000+11:00

I was recently reading an article in a trade mag which gave pointers on setting up the perfect, trendy bar. The focus was mostly on decor and good staff and what not, but one tip stood out: develop a house cocktail. That's brilliant. A simple, eponymous, concoction that people will remember you for. While I'm not exactly in the business of making drinks (consuming them is more my style), it got me thinking. What's the kitchen equivalent? Signature dishes aren't exactly it... that's a level above. I'm thinking of some sort of flavor shorthand; a little, punchy bite that says: “Damn, I'm good.” A great house dressing is the sort of thing I have in mind. This, in turn, has got me thinking about the house dressing at a little Italian dive in my college town, which was nothing short of legendary.

The dressing at this unnamed eatery (no names, they might be the suin' type) was a cheese and garlic affair that most people I know who've sampled can't quite dislodge from their culinary memory. It is the singular flavor the entire business is built around – appearing on salads and sandwiches and even pastas – and has been for the better part of the past couple of decades. Which is exactly what you want, I suppose, when it comes to the longevity of a business. Regardless of what features on the menu at this particular establishment, as long as the dressing remains, the customers will come.

My problem is I can't imagine sticking with one flavor for longer than a month or two. Beyond that and I become bored. Making the same dressing for 17 years is not an idea I can really fathom. I get bored with cooking the same food after a week or two. That's why my specials board is where I spend most of my attention. I'm not happy cooking the same food over and over for more than a few days at a time. Changing it up thus is the only way to keep interested in a job which is repetitive by nature. Many who do not understand this concept of variation of repetition do not last in th industry. And the phenomenon is not restricted only to professional cooks, but, by tangential association, to ingredients as well.

The ever-changing fashions in cooking, which I have mentioned before, are no different to any other trade or movement. They are broad, sweepingly dismissive, and are characterized by the momentary exultation of a singular concept, for no discernible reason, over all others. Professional cookery is, as I have often pointed out, no different to any other industry known to man; that is: subject to the whims of taste.

This means that when I try to balance my perpetually-evolving specials board with the shifting sands of culinary fashion, I often have to omit common foodstuffs which are no longer in popular favor.

Iceberg lettuce, is, arguably, the poster child for just such an occurrence. It has fallen so far from the prominence it once held in the cookery of my youth it is all but been abandoned as a food source. I remember a time when iceberg was the only lettuce, with the possible exception of romaine (called cos, here Down Under) which we all know is only a elongated version of the same.

Now, try and sell iceberg on your menu and see what happens. Nothing happens, is what. I know, my side salad of iceberg, soft boiled eggs, and herb dressing attracts few takers, even though it is my favorite item on the menu.

I don't really understand this. Iceberg is a great lettuce. Sweet and cool by nature it is light when shredded yet compact enough to hold it's shape when cut. You want to serve a cube of lettuce? Only iceberg makes this possible (when you cut iceberg into a shape, it stays that shape; try that with any other lettuce). Need to crisp up a sandwich? Consider iceberg. What should you serve with the dry-aged, rare-roast, Angus rib eye for two? Iceberg (with a blue cheese dressing).

Only no one will order any of those things. Iceberg is decidedly out of fashion.

So, it is via two separate paths by which I come to the topic of today's post. I give you my interpretation of the house dressing of my former, college haunt, skewed by memory and all (and without the dried herbs), on a salad made solely of the best lettuce grown by man. Get in quick; I'll be tired of this shortly.

Iceberg Salad with House Dressing

Ok. I can admit that, given as a menu choice, I would not go out of my way to order this at all, based on the description alone. However, it is exactly the sort of food I want to eat.

½ head iceberg, rinsed and torn into chunks by hand. Dressed with below.

House Dressing

300 ml vegetable oil
1 head garlic, roasted*
½ bunch chives
½ bunch tarragon, leaves only
100g grated parmesan cheese
60 ml white wine vinegar

In a blender or food processor, mix the oil, garlic squeezed from its skins, herbs and cheese. Add the vinegar, pulse, adjust seasoning to taste and serve on hand-torn iceberg.

*To roast the head of garlic: Heat the oven to 200ºC. Cut the top from the head of garlic, exposing the cloves. Sprinkle with salt and oil, wrap in foil, and roast until soft and golden. 45-60 min.

Perfect garlic is roasted until just sweet but not burnt (bitter). Color is a good indicator; deeply golden roasted garlic is often sweetest. Sublimely roasted garlic exhibits not only great color, aroma, and flavor, but hair-like filaments when freed from it's foil wrapper; indicating the inherent sugars have been caramelized in the optimal manner. The tiny fibres, if you produce them, are spun garlic sugar: natural sugars perfectly caramelized.

Because it is There

2011-12-06T10:00:00.000+11:00

There exists, in certain corners of the world, a culture of eating exotic and strange animals simply for the sake of eating them. Most of these foods started out as necessity driven by poverty and can now be lumped into two categories: those that have been elevated to “delicacy” status (shark-fin soup) and those eaten out of tradition (fried tarantulas). Anthony Bourdain, in A Cook's Tour encounters more than a bit of this in his travels, most notably swallowing a still-beating cobra heart. It is a Mallory-esque attitude towards food; eat it “because it is there.”

While I have been known to ascribe to this particular mode of thinking – that I'll eat just about anything – I don't find myself rushing out to try, say, balut (half-fertilized duck eggs). I'm all for trying new things (when the revolution comes, I will be the last to starve, I assure you), but, in general, I want to eat things which have a chance of tasting good. I do not hold any such hope for deep fried spiders. Though, when eating a tarantula, I guess no one has to fight over the drumsticks.

Speaking of eight legs...

Eating for the sake of doing so is not the case with baby octopus, though I was accused of just that when I served up a grilled octopus salad at the bistro recently. “NO one could possibly enjoy eating that,” said my new waitress. “Look at those little... tentacles.”

The tentacles, in fact, are the best part of eating baby octopus, especially when they are char-grilled. The tips of each tentacle becomes blackened and crisp. There are so many ways to cook octopus. You can braise it in wine slowly to soften it, flash fry it, pickle it. It is a wonderfully versatile menu item. I like to marinate it in a flaming-hot marinade, char-grill it, and then serve it with a refreshing salad.

I also like having octopus on the menu because of the smile it brings me during service. I love to call out: “Order in... OCTO-SALAD!” Sounds so crazy and futuristic somehow.

Char-Grilled Baby Octopus and Niçoise salad.

“Niçoise salad” is used loosely here. Traditionally it has a strict list of ingredients; we're going to toss a few of them together and call it good.

10 baby octopus, cleaned (ask your fishmonger)

Marinade

2 birdseye chilies
4 cloves garlic, peeled
roots of one bunch coriander
small knob ginger, peeled

Chop all the ingredients roughly. Combine in a mortar and pestal with a generous pinch of salt and a few tablespoons of oil. Pound until a paste forms. Alternately you could pulse in a food processor, but the results wont be quite as good.

Marinate the occy overnight in the paste.

The next day, heat your grill or BBQ and cook the octopus on high heat for 5-10 minutes (depending on the size of your occy), or until the tips of the tentacles char and the bodies are cooked. Remove from the heat and rest for about 5 minutes before serving.

Niçoise Salad

Toss together any amount of any of the items below with a handful of parsley or lettuce and you are away. Do you really need me to tell you how to make a salad?

boiled baby potatoes
green beans
tomatoes
olives
anchovies
soft-boiled eggs
croûtons

Dress your very personalized salad with a vinaigrette:

2 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 heaped tsp dijon mustard
100 ml vegetable oil

Mix and season to taste.

Bending Rules

2011-11-29T10:00:00.000+11:00

There are certain things which are just not done in the culinary world. For example, the Italians, as I have often been told, do not combine seafood and cheese. It is something of a foodie law on the peninsula. Any self-respecting diner, therefore, wouldn't dare to ask for a sprinkle of parmesan for their spaghetti con le vongole. The same attitude prevents any chef worth his whites from offering such a pasta on his menu. Every waiter I know scoffs a bit when a customers asks for a side of grated cheese to go with their sardine and fennel pasta. Trust me, it's a no-no.

And it is a no-no for good reasons. First, cheese and seafood don't, generally, mix. When was the last time you wanted to melt a bit of cheddar over your pan-fried salmon? Second, and I've mentioned this before in relation to pasta, most people who reach for cheese when eating pasta really want a bit of salt. Try it. Sprinkle a few flakes of sea salt on your next pasta wand watch your parmesan cravings evaporate.

There are many such rules governing the dos and don'ts of cooking. Taken together they make up a sort of cooking law code, full of contradictions and conflicts and anachronistic beliefs. A great deal of it is still useful, as the laws are based on observation of what things work and what things do not.

The cooking of dried beans, which can be done by simply boiling them, has a list of rules attached. First once must rinse the beans, then submerge them and discard any floating ones. Next a certain amount of oil is added to the post and the beans must be slowly brought up to a simmer and then cooked ever so slowly until they are just cooked through. At no time during this process is any salt to be added to the water, according to traditional wisdom, as this results in (depending on who you ask) mushy beans, or beans which never cook through properly. Not salting is the key rule here, as it is contrary to every other cooking method, where food is seasoned at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of cooking.

Another cooking process with a litany of requirements is that of braising meats. I get quite passionate about the whole procedure myself, and consider many of the steps indispensable. While the method varies a bit from cut to cut, one step remains in nearly every braise recipe I've ever read: sealing the meat. The idea is that the cut has to be seared on all surfaces in order to lock in the moisture. Any meat not treated thus risks the chance of drying out in the braise.

Many of these rules, actually, amount to little more than superstition. Beans, it turns out, don't really differ much in the cooking no matter when you add the salt. This is based both on my observations and on those of Mexican food expert Rick Bayless. He notes in Mexico: One Plate at a Time that there seems to be no difference between beans salted at the beginning of cooking and those salted at the end. Nevertheless, for no good reason at all, I still salt my beans at the end of cooking.

Likewise for the searing-step in braising meats. While conventional wisdom might state that browning a chunk of meat “seals” it, there is no evidence this is actually so. In fact, apart from the advantages of flavor, searing meat makes no difference to a braise at all.

Even knowing the fallibility of such culinary laws I still believed that seafood and cheese absolutely do not mix in Italy until I arrived mid afternoon on the island of Capri. After a wander through the comically steep streets and a sunset trip down to a tiny grotto with matching beach (comprised mostly of sea-worn glass and rounded bits of ancient, glazed roof tiles), we stopped to eat. The restaurant, filled half with tourists and half with locals (with a separate price structure for each, no doubt) offered a small selection of mostly pasta dishes.

My attention was drawn to one in particular: “Farfalle con gamberetti, zucca, pancetta e parmigiano.” Right, my Italian is neigh-on nonexistent, but I know that “gamberetti” is prawns or shrimp, and “parmigiano” is cheese. Seafood and cheese. What? In Italy? But... I... thought....

Oh, what the hell. I ordered it. It was delicious. Besides, who's surprised that the Italians don't follow rules, even self-imposed ones?

Farfalle con Gamberetti, Zucca, Pancetta e Parmigiano

or, rather

Farfalle with Prawns, Pumpkin, Pancetta, and Parmesan

It's not often that the translation into English comes up sounding better, but I like the alliteration going on here. And it's tasty. This will make 2 generous serves.

250g farfalle (that's bowtie pasta), cooked and drained and kept warm
½ butternut pumpkin, peeled and diced into small cubes
100g pancetta, cut into small cubes
1 bunch sage, leaves only
3 Tbsp butter
200g peeled prawns, uncooked
100g parmesan, shredded

Heat your oven to 200ºC. Toss the pumpkin in a touch of oil and a sprinkle of salt and pepper and roast on a baking paper-lined tray for 15-20 minutes, or until soft and beginning to color. Remove from oven. Meanwhile, in a large pan on low heat, combine the diced pancetta with a tiny bit of oil and slowly render out some of the fat, cooking until the meat colors and becomes crisp in places (but not dried out). Remove from the pan with a slotted spoon, leaving the rendered fat behind.

In the same pan, gently cook the prawns in the reserved pancetta fat until they are just cooked through. Remove from the heat. At the same time, in a separate pan, melt 2 Tbsp of the butter on medium heat until it starts to foam. Add the sage leaves and, by adjusting the heat and adding he remaining butter a bit at a time, keep the butter foaming – remember, too cool and the butter will stop foaming, too hot and it will stop foaming. Keep a happy medium and the sage leaves will crisp and the butter will brown. Remove from the heat, but do not drain.

In a large bowl combine all th ingredients, excluding the cheese. Toss them all gently (including the butter in the pan with the sage), season, and serve with a generous sprinkling of cheese on top.

The Library

2011-11-22T10:00:00.000+11:00

There are so many, many known flavor combinations out there. Thousands of years of paring ingredients, experimenting, rejecting, refining, repeating, has yielded a vast library of possible culinary alliances. A great deal of becoming a chef is familiarizing yourself with this library and learning the cross-referencing system, that is, how to determine what foods will taste good together. The knowledge-base is not limited to just flavors, but includes aromas, temperatures, and textures as well. The best chefs can navigate this reference so well that they don't even need to taste a combination to know that it will work. In The Soul of a Chef Michael Ruhlman tells of a conversation he had with the chef Thomas Keller about a dish on his menu – oysters and pearls (tapioca pearls). When queried on what Keller himself though of the dish he replied: “I've never tasted it.... I know it tastes good. You don't have to stick your hands in a fire to know it's hot.”

I, and I am quick to admit, am not one of these chefs. Neither, in fact, are any of the chefs I know. This sort of ability to know, with great certainty, that two or three flavors will come together in a pleasing manner without actually trying them is the realm of true masters.

That's not to say the rest of us professional cooks don't possess some of this ability. We often have an inkling, a hunch that some weird combination of flavors might just taste good. The difference is we have to try them out, test and tweak and taste again, before we're ready to try them out on you, the customer.

The skill works in reverse, too. One chef describing to another a new dish will list the ingredients and preparation methods. Any decent chef will be able to construct in his mind an idea of what the dish will taste like. This ability is particularly handy when dining out. Upon reading a menu description wherein the ingredients don't seem to add up, I ask myself: “Do I trust this chef?” If the answer is “yes,” if I really believe that this particular person has the skill to make an odd combo taste amazing, I'll risk it. If the answer is negative, well... look for the safe option.

All of these things are fallible. I, at times, opt out of a dish which turns out to be amazing; I order one which is as odd as it reads on the menu. I occasionally envisage combinations which are, in fact, unpalatable. And, sometimes, I fail to appreciate a grouping of ingredients which go incredibly well together.

This failure, that of lack of imagination is, at times, the case with all chefs I've met, especially when it comes to the subject of this week's post. It is a summery salad, Greek in origin, combining a small number of ingredients which one might not otherwise consider eating together. Nearly every chef I know who has encountered this salad in concept before tasting has turned up his nose, including myself, until the first bite.

Feta, Watermelon, Mint, and Pomegranate Salad

This is the sort of salad you pull out at a summer pot luck. Sit back and watch the looks of quiet amazement as everyone realizes how bloody good this actually tastes. You can serve this on its own, as we are here, but it makes a delicious accompaniment to some honey-glazed, bbq-chicken wings or some such.

1k watermelon, cut into 1cm cubes
100g feta, cut into 1cm cubes
seeds from ¼ pomegranate
¼ cheek spanish onion, finely sliced
6 lg mint leaves, chiffonade

Toss all the ingredients together, taking care not to break any of them up. Season lightly, dress (below), and serve.

If you are particularly good with a knife and you can make perfect cubes of both the the melon and the feta, you could serve this salad as a sort of rubick's cube of red and white with the other ingredients (green, purple and ruby) stuck in between. Sounds like a lot of work, but it sure would look good.

juice 1 lime
50 ml olive oil

Combine the juice and oil, season liberally, and dress the above salad.

Catastrophuffle

2011-11-15T10:00:00.000+11:00

About three seconds before I unleashed the twenty-litre tidal wave of foam and beer and broken glass, I remember thinking: “This is not going to go well.” Things, in truth, had not been going well for about an hour. My already saturated pants and sodden shoes attested to that. If you want to get technical, things started to go sour a month or two previously, when I put together a new batch of home brew. Perhaps I should back up and explain. This is a story about my deep love for beer.

I adore beer. I'm enamored with the its history, the rituals surrounding consumption, its color(s), the magical manner in which a head forms, the perfect columns of tiny bubbles which cling desperately to the side of each condensation-streaked glass. And I love how beer tastes. There are few moments I look forward to in a work-day more than my end-of-shift beer. I can conjure, at any given moment, that delicious malty-sweet and bitter-bubble dance, that rush of sub-arctic, floral-hop-and-yeast, liquid breeze which is the penultimate antidote to fourteen hours of sweating over a stove. I really like beer.

Enough, in fact, to brew my own, and have been doing so for years now. It's not bad, my home brew; most of what I've made has been drinkable, more or less. There have been a couple total failures: one batch of beer tasted like chemicals; a cider had strong notes of wet dog; my attempt at reproducing a 200 year old home brew recipe resulted in fizzy, acidic, sugar water. However, only one batch of beer was an absolute catastrophe.

Or, to use a word my four-year-old and I invented: it was a “catastrophuffle,” that is, a calamity which causes a great deal of commotion and mess. This sort of thing is a common occurrence when you have two toddlers who both like to “help” in the kitchen.

My most recent catastrophuffle began when I brewed up a batch of beer not long ago. Beer ferments in bulk for a week or two and then is bottled for a second ferment which carbonates the drink. After about two weeks in the bottle, you should be able to crack one open to see what it tastes like, though it will improve with a bit of age. Upon opening the first of this particular batch, I was greeted by a small geyser of beer. It foamed and rushed out in a fountain about half a metre high and continued until about ¾ of the beer had been ejected from the 750ml bottle. I'd seen this sort of thing before. This usually means one of a few things: perhaps the beer is still too green, that is, it hasn't finished the second ferment, or it is possible that the bottle was not clean and residual yeasts have infected the beer. Finally, and least likely in my mind, was the possibility that the entire batch has been infected in the bulk-brewing stage and is a total write-off.

I gave the batch another week or two in the bottles before I tried again. Old Faithful once more. This was starting to look bad. The beer should be well finished fermenting by now, and two out of two beers foaming like mad is not a good average. I opened one more in the hopes that I'd had a bit of bad luck. Beer everywhere. The whole batch was bad.

Unwilling to face the fact that I now possessed nearly twenty-five litres of bad beer, I stored the bottles away, lying to myself that they might get better with a bit more age.

When I brewed and bottled the next batch of beer I decided to get rid of the bad lot. I opened one of them again, to be sure, and the sheer force sent the cap to the ceiling and beer in all directions. They'd gotten worse. The bottles were super-carbonated and I was beginning to worry that they might explode. In something of a panic, I loaded the lot of them into a large laundry basket (the biggest vessel I could find) and set off to carry them down the three flights of stairs to the basement level and the rubbish bins.

As soon as I hit the first flight, the jarring began to knock the lids loose and about half the bottles began to fizz violently from around the edges of their marginally intact caps. This sour-smelling, warm beer-foam made its way, through the many holes in the laundry basket, down my legs and into my shoes.

Picking up the pace, in an attempt to limit the mess in the stairwell, only increased the jostling and the beers fizzed even more. By the time I reached the basement and started to make my way to the opposite side where the bins are located, my clothes were soaked and my shoes were filled.

I got as close as twenty metres from the rubbish area when I started to loose my grip. I tried so hard to guide the basket down gently, but my beer-soaked hands were nigh on useless.

It was at that moment I knew things were not looking good.

When the basket full of bottles hit the ground it did so at an angle pointing away from me, thankfully. Every single bottle exploded simultaneously. A wave of yeasty, warm beer washed through the basement, carrying shards of glass well over thirty metres away. In my shocked haste to clean up the mess I jabbed my finger deeply on a bit of bottle and began to bleed at what might be described as an alarming rate.

By the time I'd gathered up the majority of the glass, I'd spread enough blood on the concrete floor to give the general impression of, if not murder, grave physical violence. I returned a short time later, bandaged, changed, and armed with a broom, only to find a few residents in the building marveling at the scene. “Dropped a few beers,” I said, playing things down a bit. “And nicked my finger.”

God I hope no one looks at the security footage.

By way of an epilogue, I found four of the bad batch of beers in the back of a storage cupboard not long ago. I now know how bomb squad members feel when they pick up a suspicious parcel. I filled a sink with water and tapped the top off of each submerged beer grenade. They sounded not unlike depth charges.

Wholegrain Seeded Beer Bread

All of my above problems arose from yeast gone wrong. I thought I'd use some brewing yeast and malted barley to make a hearty loaf of bread. Yeast makes good.

This makes a single, heavy loaf of grainy, seeded bread. Why use brewing yeast? It works a bit slower than commercial baking yeast, allowing for more flavors to develop. Brewers yeast also tastes different; I don't really like the flavor commercial yeast lends.

50g flour
60ml warm water
1 Tbsp malted barley extract
1 tsp brewing yeast

Mix all ingredients and stand for half an hour. This is called the sponge. It allows the yeast to get going and gluten to form without much extra effort.

175ml warm water
1 tsp brewers yeast
125g flour
125g wholemeal flour
½ c mixed rolled grains
½ c mixed seeds
½ tsp sea salt

In a large bowl, mix all of the ingredients, except the salt, together with the sponge. Work into a ball and knead on a lightly floured surface for about 10 minutes. The dough will be a bit sticky – use a dough scraper to un-stick it rather than adding more flour. Rest the dough, covered with a towel, for 20 minutes.

After resting, sprinkle the salt over the dough and knead for a further 5 minutes to mix the salt in thoroughly. Transfer the dough to a lightly oiled bowl and allow to rise, covered, until doubled (about 2 hours).

Knock the risen dough down and turn onto a board. Cover with a towel and rest 20 minutes. Shape the dough into a tight round. Transfer, upside down to a proofing basket or into a bowl lined with a linen cloth saturated with flour. Cover with a towel and allow to rise until doubled (1-2 hours).

Meanwhile, preheat your oven to it's highest setting with a baking stone on the bottom rack. When the bread has risen, turn the loaf onto a bakers peel or a flat tray and slash an X in the top with a sharp knife. Slide the loaf onto the hot bakers stone and reduce the oven temperature to 200ºC. Don't open the oven for 20 minutes.

When 20 minutes have passed open the oven, rotate the loaf, and bake for another 20-25 minutes. Test the loaf by turning it over and tapping the bottom with your knuckle; when it is done it will sound quite hollow. Cool on a wire rack completely before cutting.

Keeping 'em Happy

2011-11-08T10:00:00.000+11:00

I've spoken before about the intricacies of preparing staff meal in restaurants. Mostly I've focused on the challenge it presents a chef; how transforming offcuts and trimmings and discarded bits into a delicious meal for twenty or more people is a deeply satisfying experience, when you pull it off. What I have not, in the past, focused on is the reason restaurants bother with staff meal at all. Why make the effort to give away free food to people you are already paying? The reason is simple: you have to keep your staff happy.

This is not always easy.

There are several laws dictating the way the workforce is treated here in Australia. These laws outline pay rates and shift lengths and break times and several other odds and ends. I can assure you that not a single restaurant I've ever worked in has paid the least bit of attention to any of these laws.

Rather, restaurant staff are asked to work down right illegal conditions. These people – your team – are going to work for eight hours, no, run for eight hours, if not more (much more for the kitchen staff) without a single break. The good ones won't bother drinking water so that they won't have to waste time in the toilet later. They are going to sweat, get burned by hot pans or hot plates, endure abuse from the customers or you or the angry dish hand who wants the plates stacked just so. They are going to resolve most problems before you know about them, and except blame, regardless, for the one you do hear about. If adversity brings a group of people closer, these people are your fucking family; until the end of service, at least.

The least you can do is feed them a meal.

It's a challenge keeping the staff satiated. The truth is, when cooking staff meal, you are limited in time and budget and ingredients. Every member of a restaurant's staff is expected to work as much as is physically possible in the time given. Work is to be completed at a frenetic pace, leaving no time for uselessness such as socializing or coking for the staff. Preparing staff meal is supposed to be squeezed in between all the other jobs that need to be done. Add to this that most restaurants allow little or no expenditure on food for the staff, expecting them to eat only leftovers and other random kitchen detritus. This leads directly to a dearth in the variety of ingredients; the same menu yields the same off-cuts, and the same off-cuts inspire the same staff meals. It's a (welcome) challenge to, somehow, take the same few scraps, zero budget, and no time, and come up with something copious, novel, filling, and delicious.

Like I said, it is not always easy keeping your staff happy. Which is why I bribe mine with treats.

Notably, I have been known to crank out pancakes on the rare Sunday morning I agree to work. The rationale is something like: I don't want to work Sunday morning; none of these people probably want to work Sunday morning; we deserve a treat.

In the same vein... Tradition dictates I work every News Year Day (the most hungover day of the year) and I turn it into an event of sorts; putting on a staff brunch of epic proportions: scrambled eggs with truffle oil, eggs Benedict, homemade bacon, ham and cheese croissants and so on.

And sometimes, when I really want the staff onside, I bake cookies. Chocolate chip, usually, or some variation thereof. Surprising my workforce with a batch of warm cookies has something of a magical effect. Most of them (especially the men) turn into excited little children. Glasses of milk are produced and the lot of them giggle away, like toddlers, hoarding cookies and generating milk mustaches and chocolate lips. And they'll do anything I ask.

White chocolate and Macadamia nut cookies

Remind me sometime to tell you about how macadamia nuts are native to OZ, but Hawaii treats them like their own. I'm telling you now that the hard-to-crack nuts are best of friends with white chocolate. Trust me.

This flavor combination is completely the idea of my wife's; it was her flippant comment that macadamia would make a mean contribution to my cookies which led to these.

250g butter, room temperature
125g sugar
300g brown sugar
1 egg
300g flour
1tsp bicarb soda
150g macadamia nuts, very roughly chopped
300g white chocolate cut into large chunks

Cream together the butter and sugars. Add the egg and mix well. In a separate bowl mix the flour and bicarb. Fold this dry mix into the butter and sugar mix. Stir just enough to combine. Add the chopped nuts and white chocolate. Mix well. Chill in the fridge for at least half an hour.

Meanwhile, heat your oven to 180ºC. Spoon rounded tablespoons of cookie dough onto baking paper-lined trays, leaving plenty of space for the cookies to spread. Bake 12-15 min. Cool on wire racks.

Little Racks

2011-11-01T10:00:00.000+11:00

Years ago, when working in the kitchen of an insanely busy restaurant, where the workload was exactly what every chef could only barely handle, one, tiny extra job broke me and sent me, just at the start of service, crashing, screams and all, face first, into the ground. The screams, for the record, were not mine; my teeth were quite clenched throughout. Rather, the yelling came directly from the head chef/owner and his sous chef, and generally alluded to my complete lack of skills as a cook, and my parentage. The tiny job responsible? The front-ends of a few rabbits.

It was more than “a few” rabbits, actually. Earlier in the week, Matt, the chef/owner, caught wind of a bargain from his meat supplier: rabbit on the cheap. It seems, in the typical fashion of fine dining restaurants, that one of our competitors was buying only the hind legs of several rabbits for a popular dish on their menu, paying a higher price to buy only the bits they wanted. Matt, rightfully, wanted to know what was happening with the other bits.

I say “typical fashion” because the nature of a fine dining establishment is to lavish a bit of excess on the customer. This sort of thing is, after all, included in the price. Diners expect a bit of pampering from the wait staff, a bit of flourish from the kitchen, a roll-call of premium ingredients (think prime cuts and foie gras and truffles and the like). A menu might include dishes like “Celery Heart Soup” (where does the rest of the head of celery go?) or “Rare Roasted Quail Brest Salad” (with no mention of the rest of the bird). It is wastefulness which is both warranted and paid for by the consumer.

Somewhere near the other end of the scale lies the classic bistro. Step into a bistro and you can expect none of the above, neither pampering nor flourish nor extravagance. What you can anticipate is a certain level of food: satisfying meals which can be produced at a reasonable price and still turn a profit for the restaurateur. That's why we patron these sorts of establishments; when it is done right the food is cheep and delicious.

A good bistro chef runs a tight kitchen, financially. All dishes are carefully monitored so that the cost of plating them does not exceed a certain percentage of the selling price. In general, a bistro will try not to spend more than 25% of the selling cost of given dish. A successful special, for example, will cost, in total, $4 to make, and sell for $19. Bistro chefs live by these mathematics.

It is no surprise at all that such a chef might want know what is happening to the 2/3 of several rabbits not being used by another kitchen. This sort of insider knowledge alone, if it leads to a bargain, can keep a little bistro afloat for weeks.

The thing is, the restaurant I was working in was not a little bistro looking to churn out a cheap meal whilst eking out a profit. It was another of Sydney's fine dining mainstays. Only Matt didn't want to play by the rules.

Matt served the same ingredients which you might find on a bistro menu – secondary cuts and what not – but demanded a mammoth effort from his kitchen staff so that those less-than-fine products could be hammered into fine-dining fare. The goal, which was achieved more often than not, was to operate at more or less the same costs as a bistro whilst serving (and charging for) fine-dining meals. Matt, in order to ensure that this transmogrification was indeed possible, hired more staff; enough to make his wage cost nearly swallow up the savings he made on food cost. However, he only hired just (and I mean by the narrowest of margins) enough kitchen staff.

Those of us in the kitchen were under constant, angry pressure to get every possible amount of work completed. Any difference in the work required and actual work being done was covered by ample, angry screaming until one managed to stretch and juggle and sweat enough to accomplish everything that was expected. As with any difficult experience or ordeal, especially those self-inflicted, I hated it when I was amongst, and love it, looking back. I wouldn't trade the time I worked there for anything.

I didn't feel that way at all when I arrived at work one morning to greet the forequarters (the butcher had sold the saddles to another restaurant again, making the bits we purchased even cheaper) of something like sixty rabbits. Feeling, as we all did, that my prep list was already longer than the day ahead, I was more than a little annoyed at the prospect of any extra work, much less a job that was, quite literally, a mountain of meat.

Luckily, my only task was to salt the legs for half a day and then confit them, with the view of storing them under fat until we were ready to use them. I had the meat salted and put away in minutes. It was upon rinsing the forequarters that I hit a snag. Matt came over to have a look at how things were going and picked up a specimen, turning it over and over in his hands. “They've left a bit of the loin on here,” he said pointing to a strip of meat along the backbone. “If you carve like this,” and here he picked up my knife and started butchering the tiny rabbit bits, “you can get a 3- or 4-point 'rack of rabbit'.”

This, I knew, was bad. I looked at the tiny rack of ribs, bones frenched (that is, devoid of meat). Very bad. Terrible, in fact. I could just imagine Matt asking me to carve 120 (that's two per rabbit) 3-point racks. To be served as an amuse-bouche to every customer that evening. “How many serves of rabbit and quail terrine have we got total?” Mat asked, referring to a dish we were running on my section. “Forty-ish,” I replied. “Ok, carve fifty of these racks. We'll pan-roast 'em to order as part of the garnish. I'll change the menu description now.”

I know that fifty isn't as bad as over one hundred, but it is still quite difficult. This was all extra work, mind you, and that thought alone sent me into a panic. Creating rabbit racks is tedious, to say the least. It is tiny work which is impossible to do quickly. (The racks in the photo above are on a tiny side plate, the kind you'd use for a bread roll, to give you an idea of scale.) Frenching rabbit ribs? The very idea is evil genius. Asking someone who is already in a hurry to produce two such racks is asking too much. Fifty? It was insanity. Pure, crystal, crazy.

Skip ahead to service time and I am ready for service, with the exception of an avalanche of rabbit ribs which are threatening to crush me. It's the ludicrously finicky nature of the task which broke me, but I was neither physically nor mentally ready for service and I went down. Hard. I couldn't string together more than a dish or two at a time, all the while trying to sneak out another rack or two.

It was disaster. Commence screaming, missing dishes, botched tables, horrible timing, and finally a (merciful) rescue from one of the pastry chefs. All for one, little job: tiny racks of rabbit.

Was the end result worth it? I don't know. It sure looked good.

And, just in case you are partially insane, I give you rabbit racks:

Roasted Rack of Rabbit with Caramelized Carrot Purée
Spring Salad, Mustard, and Vinaigrette

I usually tell you to leave these finicky meat jobs to your butcher. I dare you to ask a butcher to do this one for you. Most butchers I know have a great sense of humor, but when you have this conversation, remember which one of you is holding the knife.

Rabbit Racks

1 forequarters of rabbit

Place the rabbit legs down on a board. Using a boning knife, cut down either side of the spine to loosen any meat. Flip th rabbit over and peel away the belly flap with your fingers, it should pull off the ribcage with little resistance. With the rabbit still ribs-up, use a heavy knife to separate the legs from the body at the shoulder. The belly flap should be attached to the legs. Reserve this meat for some other purpose.

You will be left with a spine and the ribs. Using a sharp knife cut the ribs from the spine at the point where they meet. Press against the spine with the flat side of the knife, ensuring that you keep the meat you've earlier loosened above the blade and attached to the ribs. Repeat for the other side. Discard the spine (or save it for stock).

What is left is a set of ribs, usually about 6 or 7 per side, with a tiny bit of meat at the end. Trim off the upper (starting from the head of the animal) 2 or 3 ribs (there won't be much meat associated with these) and discard (again, stock). Carefully remove the bottom most rib without removing any of the meat. You should now have a 3- or 4-point rack of rabbit.

To french the ribs, remove as much of the meat as possible from between the ribs above the loin (the bit of meat attached at the bottom). Scrape them clean with a small knife, taking care not to break them as they are fragile.

When you are ready to serve, season the racks generously, roast them in a small pan on medium heat in a touch of oil and butter. Cook on each side for a few moments only – just enough to color, and serve medium.

Serve the racks on a bit of carrot purée with a spring salad (both below).

If you are extra crazy, carve the racks just before you serve them.

Caramelized Carrot Purée

I love this purée. No one ever believes me when I tell them that the only ingredients are carrots, a bit of butter and salt. It's the long, slow cooking that draws out and then concentrates all the natural sweetness in the carrots. It takes time to do it right, but the result is amazing. This is a tiny batch, but the recipe can be scaled up for larger quantities.

1 carrot, peeled
1 tsp butter
salt

Slice the carrot into rings, as thinly as possible. I suggest using a mandolin or the slicing blade on a food processor. Heat a small, heavy based pan on medium heat. Add the butter and, when it starts to foam, add the carrots and a pinch of salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, scraping the bottom to prevent sticking, for 1-2 hours. The carrots will break up, dry out considerably, and deepen in color. When the mixture is deep orange and richly caramely sweet, transfer to a mouli (ricer) or food processor and purée. It is possible to make this absolutely smooth, but not necessary; I leave a bit of texture in mine. Adjust seasoning.

Spring Salad, Mustard, and Vinaigrette

I'm going to leave this section up to you mostly. The “mustard” I just dab a bit on the plate (rabbit and mustard are the fastest friends). As for the “spring salad,” get some fresh peas, some sprouts (here I use snow pea sprouts), maybe some mint, a few edible flowers wouldn't go astray. Toss them all together and dress them with a bit of oil and a bit of your favorite vinegar.

It's the only part of this dish that is simple. You should be grateful.

Fraiiiiiiid Chickin

2011-10-25T10:00:00.000+11:00

Every day I work, I begin and end my day with the same little ritual. It's more a custom; a tradition really. I spend the first and last few moments of every shift looking over the specials board. I take the time, habitually, in no small part to satisfy my narcissism. Sure, I read it over at night to make sure I've ordered the foods I need and written all the jobs to be done down on my prep list. I scan it again to make sure I haven't missed anything and to note any changes that need to be made. Mostly, I peruse the board twice daily solely to admire my handiwork, to fluff my pride. I love looking over all the dishes, visualizing how they look when plated, thinking, as I often do when I serve food, how pleased I would be if I were served any one of those meals. It is pure vainglory. I'm OK with that. As I've said more than once, a disproportionate sense of self-worth is a prerequisite for being a chef. Nothing new there. What might be news is that, if I read my specials board to satisfy my ego, I write my specials board to satiate my appetite.

When I put dishes on the specials board I consider several factors. First is cost. I have to figure out exactly how much I am going to spend plating each serve of a dish. How much do I spend on the protein? The veg components? The sauce? The butter used in the cooking? The salt? (Confession: I don't actually factor in the salt. “O, that way madness lies.”) This cost breakdown is, of course, tied to the variable market cost of fresh foods, and must be reevaluated on a daily basis. A great part of this evaluation, and my second overall consideration when putting a dish on the menu, revolves around produce as it comes in and goes out of season.

The cost of fresh fruit and veggies follows a reverse bell curve. As a particular item – say peaches – comes into season, the price starts out prohibitively high, drops slowly initially, and then plummets in price as the market is flooded with in-season peaches, only to climb again sharply at the end of the season when availability drops off. Part of my job is to keep an eye on these prices and change the specials board accordingly.

Less obvious factors are that of weather and climate. I'll lump these two together because they are obviously connected, but they are not really the same concern. The weather, and its day to day variations greatly affect what people eat. Had a week or two of cold, spring rain but the forecast tomorrow is for a mild, sunny afternoon? Don't bother stocking up on pasta or your slow-cooked dishes. Everyone will be ordering the salads. Think it's difficult enough having to follow the weather forecast in order to forecast your sales? Now factor in the fact that sweeping movements in climate, both local and abroad which affect the price of meats, fruits and vegetables. Floods in Queensland mean a spike in the price of lamb. A mild spring in Chile means a bumper asparagus crop and spears will be obscenely cheap.

Even more obscure factors influence my specials board. I have to, believe it or not, consider international politics. Southeast Asia no longer accepting our rice imports? The US ceasing cattle exports? Japan refusing to buy Australian blueberries? All of these have an effect on the prices of my goods, and therefore on the items which make the specials board cut. I suspect running a kitchen is good training for being an international stock broker – you have to understand how decisions on one continent will affect prices on another tomorrow.

The single most influential factor which determines the contents of my special board is, diametrically, as local as possible: my stomach. I cook the foods I want to eat. And not in a general sense, but on a day-to-day basis. In other words, the special board is a sounding board for my cravings. Do I feel like French onion soup on a cold morning, check my specials board in the afternoon. Pasta with sauce putanesca sound good for dinner? I'm betting my customers will feel the same.

A quick check of my specials board recently would indicate I'm craving a Southern-style picnic. Recently I've been selling BBQ pork ribs, corn and bacon fritters, and peach cobbler. Cobbler, is not a known desert here in OZ, and my customers find it quite exotic. If all of that were not enough, this week, thanks to a a flare-up of something of an annual craving I have, I added fried chicken and coleslaw.

Fried Chicken and Coleslaw

I love fried chicken, but only about once a year. I usually have my fill of grease and then can't stand the thought of doing it again for quite some time. Which is why this time I decided to fry chicken wings. They are tasty, juicy, and small. As long as you don't fry too many, it's difficult to overeat.

The wings need to be soaked in a brine overnight to ensure that the meat is flavorful all the way through. The next day it is drained, dipped in buttermilk, dredged in a seasoned flour, and fried at a relatively low temperature so that it cooks through without becoming too dark.

Fried chicken is just as good hot as it is cold. If you think you can eat this meal two days in a row, make extra and treat yourself to a lovely cold lunch.

1 k chicken wings, tips removed, cut in half at the joint

For the Brine

1 litre water
40g salt
60g sugar
5 cloves garlic, cracked
1 sprig thyme
2 stalks of parsley
6 bay leaves
12 black peppercorns
1 lemon, quartered

Combine all the ingredients and bring to a boil. Simmer for two minutes. Remove from the heat and cool to room temperature. Strain, discarding solids, and transfer to the fridge. When the brine is cold, submerge the wings and refrigerate overnight.

The next day drain well, discarding the brine.

Seasoned Flour

100g flour
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp salt
½ tsp cayenne pepper
½ tsp white pepper
2 Tbsp smoked paprika
pinch chipotle powder (optional)

Combine all the ingredients.

Frying the Chicken

1 cup buttermilk

Heat your fryer (or pot of oil) to 140ºC. Working in batches, dip the wings in the buttermilk and then toss them in the flour. Lower into the oil and fry for 8-10 minutes. Drain well and serve with coleslaw (below).

Pickled Coleslaw

Calling this pickled cabbage coleslaw is a bit of poetic license. I like vinegary bite as a contrast to the rich chicken. I also like that the red cabbage becomes an unnatural shade of fuchsia – not many natural foods we eat are quite this bright. This improves with age, make this a few days in advance.

½ red cabbage, cored and sliced as thinly as possible
½ spanish onion, peeled and sliced as thinly as possible
1 carrot, peeled and shredded
white vinegar
water
sugar
salt

Mix the cabbage, onion, and carrot. Pack this mix tightly into a sterilized jar just large enough to hold the lot. Bring a 50/50 mixture of vinegar and water to a simmer – enough to fill the remaining space in the jar. Season to taste with salt and sugar (roughly equal amounts of each. Pour the boiling liquid into the jar with the cabbage mix, tapping the jar gently to remove any air bubbles. Fill the jar to the top and seal. Cool to room temperature and refrigerate until ready to use.

To serve, drain the liquid away, dress with a bit of olive oil and toss in some parsley, if you like.

Tools of the Trade

2011-10-18T10:00:00.000+11:00

I have no lack of self-confidence in the kitchen. Anyone who knows me will attest. When I don my “whites,” there is no culinary feat I'll balk at, regardless of actual skill. My chef's jacket is like a coat of pure, cotton hubris. Amongst the many boasts that “You'll never see anyone cook quite as fast as this.” or “At least you'll never see anyone look quite as good doing it.” I have been known to assert that I could cook a restaurant quality meal in any kitchen. I mean any kitchen, with any tools. Give me a tiny, single-burner camp stove, a tin can, and enough time, and I will give you coq au vin. Such is the faith I have in my own abilities.

If I were more humble, this would be the part where I admit that my assumptions are wrong; that I am not master of all when I wield a wooden spoon. But I am not humble. I have eked out five-course meals for ten people from a kitchen a single metre square. I've battled my way through impossibly busy services with half the staff I needed. I've decimated gargantuan prep lists in great sweeping gestures, King Kong-like. How am I not to be a bit cocky; I am, inarguably, good at what I do.

Well, not all of it is inarguable. In fact, a great deal of my self-aggrandizing is quite arguable indeed. While a good dose of self-confidence is required to make it as a professional cook, when I doff the uniform and take an objective look, some of my boasts come under suspicion. Not the least of which is my claim that I can cook any dish under any circumstance (see my tin can/braised chicken assertion above).This is not, strictly, true.

For, just as when I write I am a child of spell-check (and therefore cannot spell), I am also, in cookery, the progeny of an arsenal of culinary machines, which I cannot live without. I'm not talking about the plethora of useless little tools available at the local cooking store: the strawberry hullers, the corn cob-holders, and the like. I speak of the blenders and food processors and ice cream machines which make all the difference in the culinary world.

One machine I can't live without, for example, is a meat mincer. The owners of the bistro I run recently bought a electrical-powered meat mincer to replace our manual one. I've spent the last year putting kilo after kilo of meat for sausages thorough the hand-cranked mincer at a great physical cost. The new machine saves me so many hours of repetitive grinding it is worth at least twice it's cost, whatever that might be.

While I am on the subject of “cranking,” another piece of kitchen equipment I cannot live without comes to mind. Pasta makers. A pasta machine may not seem like a common kitchen item, but the majority of fine dining restaurants have one. Try making pasta without. You'll work your arms off trying to roll out the pasta dough with a rolling pin and still not get it thin enough.

In fact, in my flurry of ego-fluffing I failed to acknowledge just how dependent on tools chefs are. In the course of any given day I might reach for pliers, scissors, a ruler, tweezers, and an array of spatulas and tongs and ladles and spoons. I utilize such a variety of implements I have an entire shelf in the kitchen dedicated to them.

The tools I use most often, however, are the most primitive: knives and fire. It amazes me that, when I look around at all the various machines and toys I have at hand – the slicers and blenders and what not – I still do most of my work with a piece of sharpened metal and a flame. It is primitive to the point of being primal.

Speaking of primitive tools, one of the more ancient cooking implements is right up there amongst my favorites: the mortar and pestle. The first mortar and pestle would have been two rocks, banged together, used to grind grain. The technology really hasn't changed. I own, believe it or not, something like 5 mortars and pestles, in various sizes, made of a variety of materials. Some are small and porcelain, for grinding spices. Others are large and course, for making rough pastes like perfect guacamole. Still others are deep and smooth, for pounding herbs into curry pastes. I use all of them regularly and can't imagine cooking without them. It's become a bit of a joke in our household, the number that we own. Whenever we see a mortar and pestle in a shop, one of us will ask “Do you reckon we could use one of these?”

Pesto

Pesto, like it's French cousin Pistou, is named after the pestle – that is, named after the method in which it has traditionally prepared. Modern cooks eschew the mortar and pestle (and the labor involved) for blenders and food processors. However, while the manual method may take longer and yield a less uniform result, the blended version often lacks the intensity of flavor that comes from crushing the basil leaves by hand. Trust me, it's worth the effort.

1 bunch basil, leaves only
75g pine nuts
50g parmesan cheese
30ml olive oil

Combine all the ingredients in a large mortar and pestle. Add a pinch of salt and pound away until you have a paste. Season to taste, add a bit more olive oil if necessary, and toss a spoonful or two through some cooked pasta.

Purple Pavement

2011-10-11T13:50:00.001+11:00

It is easy to forget, living in some cities, about the life of plants. L.A., for example, is nearly unbroken concrete from the sea to the spot where the vast, inland suburbs finally break up and dissolve back into the great desert the whole thing is built on. There is, to be fair, an occasional palm tree, and the odd patch of lawn, but in general, green space is hard to come by. Apart from the odd rosemary hedge, a few bulbs of wild fennel in a vacant lot, and one avocado tree, I can't remember seeing much in the way of edible plants growing in Los Angeles. Even here in Sydney, a city not without it's own urban sprawl, it is easy to forget about the things which grow. To be completely honest, Sydney is a beautiful city, full of parks, roads lined with giant trees, carefully landscaped and gardened median strips. There is plenty of green. It's just easy to overlook when you are navigating traffic, looking for your turn, or trying to flag down a bus. It's easy, in other words, to become distracted.

That is, until someone points out purple pavement.

There are tricks you learn when you are an urban forager like myself; methods for discovering where you might find edible plants in your neighborhood. I have become obsessed with flowering plants, as flowers mean fruit. One simply has to either recognize leaves or keep coming back to see if anything delicious is going to grow. Conversely, and perhaps counterintuitively, a great deal of my searching for free food finds me staring at the ground. I'm not necessarily looking for herbs and mushrooms, but for evidence of things I might eat in the plants above. I'm seeking prune pits which tell me the nearby tree will fruit next year. I'm looking for any evidence: rotten acorns, dessicated berries, fermenting fruit cores. All of these are instant indicators that edibles grow in the immediate vicinity.

One other indicator, which I often fail to notice, is the color of the pavement. Fallen fruit, you see, is often removed – by animals or obsessively tidy residents – leaving little physical evidence. It takes someone with an eye for color to catch the obvious signs I sometimes miss.

Which, more or less, is what happened to me just the other day. When my wife pointed out that the mulberry trees in my neighborhood were fruiting.

Mulberries are a member of a family of tropical and subtropical flowering plants that includes the breadfruit, figs, and mulberries. There are three varieties of mulberry: red, black, and white. Red mulberries are native to the southern parts of North America and both the black and white Mulberry varieties are native to Southeastern Asia. Famously the silk worm, from who's cocoon silk thread is produced, eats only mulberry leaves, preferring those of the white mulberry. Silk worms are considered domesticated, they cannot breed in the wild. This domestication began at least 5000 years ago in China, implying that the cultivation of mulberry trees far predates this. The tree is ideal for cultivation, it grows quickly and produces an abundance of berries. The fruits resemble elongated blackberries, are deeply sweet and slightly tangy, and drop readily from the tree when ripe.

And the delicious, black, little berries stain both the pavement and your hands a special shade of crushed purple. It's a fruit thief's tattoo.

Mulberry Cobbler

Why cobbler? Because I've been craving cobbler of just about any sort, and picking free mulberries seemed like just as good a reason as any.

2-3 c mulberries, stems removed
60g brown sugar
1/8 tsp cinnamon
pinch nutmeg
½ lemon, juice
1 tsp corn starch
1 Tbsp berry liqueur (optional)

Mix all the above ingredients and allow to stand for half an hour at room temperature. Transfer to a baking dish large enough to hold double the volume of the berry mix. Spread into an even layer.

125g flour
60g white sugar
60g brown sugar
1tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
100g unsalted butter, cold
60ml boiling water

Preheat you oven to 200ºC. Mix the dry ingredients together. Using you fingers or a pastry cutter, cut in the butter until the mix resembles bread crumbs. Add the boiling water and mix until just combined. Pour or spoon the batter over the berries. Sprinkle the top with a tablespoon of extra sugar and bake (use a baking sheet underneath, as this is likely to bubble over) until the top is deeply golden and the berries are bubbling through – about 30 min. Remove from the oven and serve either warm or at room temperature with cream or ice cream.

On Bad Chefs

2011-10-04T10:00:00.000+11:00

“You can learn a lot from a bad chef.” A head chef of mine once told me that. He was not, I assumed, referring to himself, as he was quite a good chef. Beyond that, I wasn't quite sure what he was talking about, but I was still new enough about the game to be afraid of admitting I didn't understand, and therefore look like an idiot. For the record, I'm no longer afraid of looking like an idiot from time to time (some might suggest I excel at it). At any rate, it took me a few years to figure out what he meant, or what I think he meant. Honestly, there are at least two ways of interpreting his statement, and I'd find it difficult to choose which was his true intent. I'll explain.

The statement – “You can learn a lot from a bad chef.” – can be read as: “Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.” It is only from the most absolutely abysmal chefs that we have no skills, knowledge, or techniques to pick up. You don't know, when you meet a fellow cook, what you'll learn. It's easy to dismiss a burger cook as the grill-monkey we all know he is, but if you take the time to ask him, he'll probably show you exactly how thick a burger patty should be and just how long to cook it to yield the perfect burger. Sure, he doesn't know which end of a knife to grab, but you'll learn something.

The other interpretation, the more cynical one, is that you can learn how not to cook by watching someone else do it poorly. This is possibly more true than the first reading. Spend a bit of time with a mess chef and you'll quickly get your fill of chaos, and you'll work clean for the rest of your career. Taste the aftermath of a cook trying to cover burnt, bitter pasta sauce with a sprinkling of sugar (yes, I've seen it happen) and you'll never try to cover your mistakes again. Bad cooks have quite a bit to offer.

I know this as fact because I learned more about the best way to cook a steak by watching an endless parade of no-hopers ruin perfectly good cuts of meat.

I was working, at the time, in a cosy, country pub where customers ordered starters and sides, but chose and purchased from a display case raw steaks which they then cooked on a giant grill within sight of the kitchen. I watched hundreds of steaks silently endure torture at the tongs and spatulae of so many clueless cooks. I noted, in horror, such a number of meat cooking no-no's I couldn't possibly recount them all here. Observing the procession of mistakes, however made me a better steak cook.

Here, in a nutshell, is the worst way to cook a steak: Begin by choosing the largest-looking steak, one with the greatest surface area, though this will most likely be the thinest. Look for a lean one; fat, they say, is bad. Now, don't bother seasoning the meat at all, and oil is optional. If the meat sticks to the grill, you can tear and scrape it off later. Put the steak on a warm, not hot, part of the grill. It would be a shame to overcook the meat quickly, “stewing” is the aim here. As your steak stews and steams in its own juices, be sure to turn it several times, and if, god forbid, it ever ceases to produce a pitiful plume of smoke or the death knell also known as “sizzling” press it as hard as you can with the flat side of the spatula, attempting to squeeze the last bits of moisture out. This should cause a spectacular flair-up and will dry your steak nicely. Continue cooking until all traces of life have been wrung from your cut of beef and then transfer directly to a plate and eat immediately.

Cooking a steak properly, obviously, includes none of the above. (“Properly” also means no more cooked than medium, preferably medium-rare.) A good steak requires special handling, high heat, lashings of seasoning, one or two turns (at most), and a good, long rest between cooking and eating. Learning to do all of this well is, unfortunately, only done through practice. I can, however, offer a few tips.

First, choose thick cuts. You want to cook your meat on high-heat long enough to form a caramelized meat crust. This doesn't happen with steaks a mere one centimetre thick.

Second, season the bejesus out of the meat, just before you cook it. Tons of salt and pepper mean tons of flavor.

Third, cook the meat on the highest heat possible. You want to sear and seal, not stew and steam.

Fourth, leave the fucking steak alone. That's right. Leave it alone. Let me introduce a term into your cooking vocabulary: “passive cooking.” Let the meat cook half way before you think about flipping it. Once you flip it, don't touch it until you pull it off the grill. This also means no mashing the steak down with your tongs. Sure, this makes pretty fire, but ask yourself what exactly is going up in flames. The flavor and the juices, that's what.

Finally, rest your steak. Rest it in a place which is warm but not hot enough to cook it more. Rest it for as long as you cooked it. This relaxes the meat and allows it to finish cooking (pull your steak off the grill a bit before it is done – a take it off at medium-rare and with a proper rest it will become medium). If you can't stand the thought of meat at just-above-room-temperature, slap the sucker on the grill for thirty seconds each side just before serving.

Getting the difference between rare and medium-rare is a matter of repetition. Cook a few thousand of the same cut and sooner or later you get it right. While you are learning, I suggest you do what every chef who has ever learned does: poke the meat every few seconds. Get to know how it feels as it cooks. Periodically, cut a slit and have a look at the inside, to see how cooked it is. Before long you'll be a pro. Trust me.

Steak Frites

Since, as I have outlined above, cooking a steak is a matter of practice, I suggest pairing the many steaks you will cook on your way to perfection with some homemade french fries (and some mustard). The golden, crispy, “frites” as they are called in French bistros, will encourage you to practice again and again.

2 large starchy potatoes
2 litres frying oil

Cut the potatoes into long, thin sticks. Try to keep them as uniform and as even as possible. Soak the cut potato in several changes of cold water until the water remains clear. This removes as much starch as possible. Drain well.

Heat the frying oil to 140ºC. Working in batches, fry the potatoes for 5 minutes, and then drain thoroughly on paper towels. There should be little or no color change in this cooking step. The potato is cooked now, and can either be left at room temperature for a few hours or stored in the fridge or freezer.

Just before you are ready to eat (that is, when your steak has rested) heat the oil to 180ºC and cook the fries until golden and crisp – about 2 minutes. Drain, season well with sea salt flakes, and serve.

Green Season

2011-09-27T10:00:00.000+10:00

I've been teaching my oldest boy, nearly four, to appreciate fruits and veggies in season. When we visit our local fruit market, we talk a lot about why we can't buy peaches all year 'round, and why raspberries are expensive more often than not. He gets it; he asks me all the time when, say, mandarins are in season and when is the best time to buy watermelon. I'm happy to answer these sorts of inquiries; we get to chat about climate and farmers and the seasons. Then he asks me about tomatoes. Or bananas. Or carrots. Or about the innumerable other fruits and veggies which, through a combination of cold storage, hot-houses, and inter-hemisphere transport, are never “out of season.” It's tricky, trying to explain these things. Not the concepts, as my boy is quite bright, but I've put so much emphasis on in-season being “good,” I don't know how foods which are the opposite can be anything but “bad.” It's not that simple.

The issue isn't simple at all, actually. Eating local produce, in season, is generally considered better; for you, for your taste buds, and for the universe. I, more or less, buy into this way of thinking. Mostly, I'd rather eat asparagus that was picked sometime in the last week or so from a farm in my part of the world rather than the same product sent across the pacific in refrigerated shipping containers. I'll always pick field tomatoes over their hot-house cousins. I know, however, that it isn't possible to always eat locally and in season. I can't cook without onions, whether or not they are in season. Does that mean I eat old onions, or onions from the northern hemisphere (or both)? Yes it does. Potatoes? Green beans? Pumpkin? Bring on the cold-storage, other-side-of-the-world stuff.

It is entirely possible to eat only locally-grown and produced foods (depending on what distance you define as local) but it is not terribly practical. A healthy diet is a varied one, and choosing not to supplement one's diet with a few out-of-season veggies, severely limits dinner options. Which is my point; while in-season might be unequivocally good, the opposite is not necessarily bad.

The key, I think, is committing to a imbalanced balance. That is, a balance of local and in-season foods, which far outweighs your consumption of produce obviously from the other side of the planet. It's a fairly simple bargain to strike with yourself: I'll eat mostly delicious, fresh, local, inexpensive fruit and veggies and fill the rest of my diet with the occasional out-of-season interloper.

The polar opposite to all of these foods which seem to have no season are those rare bits of produce which have a achingly brief appearance on fruit shop shelves. These are your white peaches, your mulberries, your fresh borlotti beans. These are the sort of items which represent the nexus of rarity, difficulty of storage or transport, and relatively low demand. On a practical level, it means that, for the greatest part of the year, these foods are simply not available. On a more personal level, it means that the anticipation of any of these foods returning to the shops makes eating them all that much better.

It is just such a foodstuff that has me thinking about all of this, one I have glimpsed, in years past, for brief seconds in little bins at the local market: fresh, green almonds. These soft, green, fuzzy, immature nuts can be eaten whole and have a jelly-like kernel which is clear and tastes slightly milky and vaguely nutty and sweet. The green husk tastes, well, green; it is reminiscent of cucumber, only more bitter. The overall impression is intriguing rather than outright delicious, but the combination of flavors and textures is undeniably moreish.

The facetious side of me would like to point out that a quick Google search for “green almonds” yields a great deal of vegan and vegetarian recipes. Read a bit further and you'll find that these under ripe nuts are the darling of the raw-food movement and a staple in vegan diets. DON'T THESE PEOPLE REALIZE GREEN ALMONDS ARE THE VEAL OF THE VEGAN WORLD. These little nuts never had a chance to make it to maturity. So, so cruel. And tasty.

Fried Green Almonds with Serrano and Melon

Green almonds come in two types: (1) the very young, where the shells haven't formed at all and the nut is gelatinous and (2) the slightly more mature with a formed shell around a milky nut. This recipe is for the very young almonds. There is, actually, very little here in the way of a recipe at all. I'll tell you how to cook the almonds, though they can be eaten raw, and it is up to you so serve them with some thinly-sliced Spanish ham – Jamón Ibérico is the goods – and some fresh, sweet, musky melon. Think you can handle that?

200g young green almonds
3 Tbsp olive oil
pinch sea salt
½ lemon

Heat the oil in a fry pan over medium heat. Add the almonds and sauté, shaking the pan frequently, until the almonds brown slightly. Remove from the pan, drain on paper towels, and season with lemon juice and sea salt.

Eye to Eye

2011-09-21T15:25:00.000+10:00

This week's topic is something of a perennial issue here at OHC. It's one of those culinary hangups I have, and I can't seem, no matter how often I air my grievances, to completely get over it. The truth is I have a problem with a certain, fundamental attitude most people have towards food, and since neither attitude nor outrage are likely to change, I'm predisposed to angry outbursts. This time around it was a serve of school prawns that set me off. School prawns, for those unfamiliar, are tiny little prawns (shrimp, in the most literal sense) are typically fried and served whole; you are meant to eat the shells and heads and all. They are crunchy and taste intensely of shellfish. Delicious. I do understand, however, that eating whole baby shrimp might be challenging for some people. I get that. In fact, I understand this so well I make sure that every customer who orders the school prawn starter is told exactly what they are getting. Most recently, it was one such conversation that set me off.

“I don't like to eat things that look like the things they are.”

This, you see, was the response I received after describing the prawn stater to a patron. She cited the recognition of the animal she was consuming as reason to stop eating it. Which is when my rage kicks in. You don't like meat that looks like an animal? You don't want to think about what your food is, what you are eating? Why not? Facetiously, I inquired “What if I were to fashion a bit of chicken into the shape of a fish, so that it looked exactly like a fish, would you eat that?” No answer. This is why Chefs are not generally encouraged to talk to the customers.

Recently, one of my wife's coworkers pointed to her quail lunch and proclaimed: “those poor little baby birds never had a chance!” No, they didn't (and they are not babies). Neither, however, did the doe-eyed cow you ate for supper last night. I really don't understand the disconnect. I do understand that it is slightly harder to imagine that the pork in your sausage was once an animal, but only slightly. People will gladly tuck into a burger, but balk at quail? Insanity.

On another occasion I was serving whole sole, a delicious flat fish, at a bistro I worked in. The preparation was so simple, panfried whole fish with brown butter, capers, and lemon. In the middle of a busy Saturday lunch a customer brought back a her sole seconds after I had sent it. “I can't eat this. It has a face.” I mustered all my customer service skills and replied: “Lady, all the meat you eat had a face.” “Well, I shouldn't have to see it.” Of course not. Meat comes in packets, not from animals.

These are obviously hyperbolic examples, but the truth is people are disconnected from the source of their food, and tend to look at meat at a product not as a creature. I think the most responsible thing you could do is to look your next meal in the eye, so to speak, and imagine what it was, and what it means that you are eating it. And then enjoy, for the love of god.

Whole Flounder with Capers, Brown Butter, and Lemon

I know I mentioned sole above, but sole wasn't available at the fish market this morning. Flounder, a perfectly suitable substitute, was. This fish needs little attention or fuss in the cooking; it is naturally sweet and delicious. A good part of the fun is in the eating – delicately removing all the flesh from the bones.

2 flounder, fins all trimmed close to the body with scissors
2 Tbsp butter
2 Tbsp salted capers
lemon wedges

Soak the capers in a bit of water to remove excess salt. Drain. Heat a large, non-stick fry pan over high heat. When the pan is quite hot, pour in a couple of tablespoons of oil. Wait until this is smoking and then season the fish liberally with salt and pepper. Slide the fish into the pan, giving a little juggle to keep the skin from sticking. Cook for about 4 minutes and then flip the fish, taking care not to break it up. Continue cooking for another 3-4 minutes and then add the butter and capers to the pan. The butter will foam up, crisp the capers, and eventually subside and begin to brown. Remove the pan fro the heat at this point and serve the fish topped with the capers and butter with a lemon wedge on the side.

For the Love of...

2011-09-13T10:00:00.000+10:00

I have always loved cooking. For as long as I can remember, actually. The basis for the love has evolved over time, but my earliest, happiest memories are of standing on a stool at the kitchen bench, waiting impatiently for any opportunity to help: stirring, measuring, pouring, wooden spoon-licking. What started as an intimate food relationship in my Grandmother's kitchen changed as I grew up. Later, the love was based on the joy of creativity, then on the challenge of learning to cook professionally, next on the joy of mastery, later still on the comfort of deep familiarity. Most recently my love of cooking has again become about an intimate, loving relationship with someone in the kitchen: my two little boys. I know how special my time in the kitchen with my Grandmother was, I hope it is the same for my two children.

I digress, a bit. My point is that I love the act of cooking and all that is involved; I get up every work day and genuinely look forward to going into the kitchen. Given the long hours, the physical demands of standing for 14-or-more hours a day in a hot, smoky environment, the emotional stress, the required constant, unwavering focus on the job (jobs, rather, several jobs at once) at hand, and the pressure to get every, single, detail, right, – given all this – you'd expect every chef to feel as passionate as I do about cooking. But they don't. Some chef's don't even like food.

This discovery came as something of a shock to me, because I do love food, and I sort of assumed such affection was a prerequisite of working in the industry. It turns out that is it not only possible to be a chef who likes nothing about food, but to be a damn fine chef whilst doing so.

There are, I have since learned, quite a few reasons people chose to cook. The first chef I met with an indifference to food was a Canadian who, incidentally, was equally indifferent to humor. We shared a section in the kitchen of a fine-dining restaurant and my first sense that something was wrong was when I realized he was more concerned with how many spoons we had ready for use during service than he was with the food we were serving. We'd often prep, side-by-side, all day, me chattering away about the amazingly fresh scallops or the perfectly ripe tomatoes, while this guy was thinking predominantly about silverware.

Evidently, though I did not know at the time, there is a whole genre of professional cooks who are more or less the same. They are chefs not for the love of food but rather for the love of structured monotony. Cooks like my Canadian friend thrive on the structure of a day, on the hierarchy of a kitchen, on the discipline. These people would have done equally well in the military. The well-defined structure and general organization which define commercial cookery – daily routine, prep-lists, expectations, duties, workflow, and the like – provide a solid framework around which the rest of their working universe is structured, and order, rows-and-columns order, is their single driving factor. That the food is good is secondary, but only slightly so. A side effect of this chef type is that reproducing perfect copies of a given dish is a natural extension of this obsession with order. Such obsessives make great chefs.

Other chefs are in it not for the order, but for the chaos. Not total chaos, mind you, but the marginally contained confusion of fire and stress and sweat and shouting that is a busy dinner service. Working chaos, let's call it. These cooks are more or less adrenaline junkies. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but the food takes something of a back seat to to the trill of an insanely busy service. Prep is a necessary evil required to get to the fun at the later half of the day. I didn't know such a creature existed until one of them pointed himself out to me. “You really love cooking. I can see that. I don't love it at all. I just can't wait for the dockets to start flying in.”

Finally, there are cooks who do it solely as a job – those who come to work only to finish the shift. These cooks don't seem to enjoy any aspect of the career. Cookery is no different to any profession in this respect, I suppose. I've worked with plenty of such “chefs,” though I've understood none. It is so easy to make the same money working half as hard outside of hospitality, I don't understand at all why anyone would persist.

Anyway, this week's post is about quail. Why quail, you ask? Because it is exactly the kind of food you have to care enough about to prepare. Quail are fiddly little creatures with little meat on their minuscule bones. You have to love to cook (and to eat) in general to bother preparing quail.

Actually, that is not remotely true in the US of A. Quail in the states are widely available semi-boned. That is: with all the bones from the chest cavity removed. Leaving only the leg and wing bones intact. This makes nearly any preparation of quail overly simple. The rest of us, well, we have to work for it.

BBQ Quail with Honey-Lime Marinade and a Grilled Pear and Rocket Salad.

The trick to tasty quail is to be delicate at all times. First, when trimming up the birds, be careful not to break their tiny bones, it's no fun to chomp into a bone fragment. Second, marinade the quail only long enough to add flavor, but not so long tat the lime juice starts to cure the meat; about half an hour. Finally, use gentle heat – hot but not blinding and cook the birds until just done; the meat should still be quite pink on the bone.

This is a great spring meal – pears are still in season, and it's just warm enough to fire up the BBQ.

4 quail, backbones removed (I use kitchen shears)
1 lime
2Tbsp honey
2Tbsp olive oil
5 sprigs thyme
3 garlic cloves, cracked
12 black peppercorns

Mix the juice of the lime with the honey and olive oil. Roughly chop the leftover lime skin. Place the quail in a small container, just wide enough to hold them all in one layer and pour the lime juice mixture over. Sprinkle the remaining ingredients over and refrigerate for half an hour, turning the quail over once.

Remove from the fridge. Take the quail out of the marinade, brushing off any solids. Generously salt the birds just before cooking. BBQ them on a medium heat, breast-side down, for 2-3 minutes. Turn them over and continue cooking for 3-4 minutes more. Keep in mind that we've added sugar the the bird, which will cause it to burn quickly; keep a close eye on the quail when cooking. Give the breast a little squeeze. If it still feels a bit raw, flip the quail again and give it a minute or two more. Remove from the grill and rest a few minutes before serving with a grilled pear and rocket salad (below).

Grilled Pear and Rocket Salad

I love this simple salad. It only needs to be dressed with oil and a splash of balsamic. Yum.

1 pear, peeled, quartered and sliced ½cm thick
shaved parmesan
handful of rocket
oil
balsamic vinegar

Clean your grill. On high heat, grill the pears just until they color a bit, flip, do the same, and then remove from the grill. Overcooking will give you mushy pears.

Toss the pears together with some shaved parmesan and rocket and dress lightly with oil and vinegar.

Pioneering

2011-09-06T10:00:00.000+10:00

There is more than one way to be a food pioneer. Most obviously, you can invent new flavor combinations; paring ingredients and cooking methods in ways never before tried. Much culinary credence is given to such innovators: one need only to look at the accolades associated with names like Ferran Adrià or Heston Blumenthal for evidence. The custom is not a new one either. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously wrote in 1825 that: “The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity, than the discovery of a new star." Hyperbolic and factual at the same time. Clever.

There is also room in the business of food pioneering for those who embrace a national or regional cuisine and elevate it to fine-dining fare. While the French and Italians have been doing this for a couple hundred years, the phenomenon is relatively newly applied to, say, North Indian food, or the various cuisines from regional Mexico. The chefs and gastronomes refining these traditions into fine-dining fare are at least as worthy as those creating new dishes altogether.

On a much simpler level, it is possible to be something of a food pioneer by introducing unfamiliar foods and flavors to a population. Think of the quiet, but ground-shaking food revolution which must have heralded the introduction of dairy products to Japan. It was a culture unfamiliar with cheese, for the love of god.

On an even smaller scale, one can be a local pioneer by introducing ways of combining known flavors in a manner unknown in the collective culinary knowledge base. For example: the idea of pumpkin as a sweet flavor is unheard of in OZ, but pumpkin pie is the first thing I think of when someone mentions the fruit. I've tried it out on a few of my friends Down Under, and I think I am making converts.

Likewise with the subject of this week's post; I think with a bit of time I might convince a few that the combination of mango, lime, and chili is a winner.

Mango and lime, or mango, lime, and coconut, actually, are not a novelty in this country. It's the North American (probably Central American, if we are giving due credit) contribution of a pinch of chili powder that I am hoping to introduce to the people of my adopted country. This tiny addition moves the sweet combo from “tasty” to “memorable.” The heat gives such an unexpected, savory, bite to this otherwise cloying dessert, that it commands a careful consideration of the beautiful balance of sweet/tangy/hot/creamy flavors and textures within.

There is a something of a precedent of chili in sweets in OZ: I've eaten dark chocolates with chili and had a hot coco or two served with the same. Still, the idea that chili might have a place in dessert, much less a fresh fruit-based dessert, is still quite foreign. Consider this my tiny attempt at pioneering.

Mango, Coconut, Lime, and Chili Tapioca Puddings

Mangoes are just in season here in Australia, and I plan on eating about a billion this summer.

Often tapioca, or sago, a nearly indistinguishable substitute, is over-sweetened to compensate for it's bland, almost rice-like flavor and texture. Here, I've gone light on the sugar with the coconut milk, as I not only want you to notice the natural sweetness of the mango and lime, but also the contrast between sweet and hot, which, on my tongue at least, are polar opposites (eating something terribly hot makes everything else taste terribly sweet).

½ c tapioca pearls
60ml coconut cream
1 Tbsp brown sugar
1 mango
1 lime
pinch chili powder

Bring a large pot of water to the boil. Whisking constantly, pour the tapioca pearls into the pot in a slow, constant stream, to prevent clumping. Simmer, stirring often, until the pearls just go translucent. Strain and rinse under cold water until cool.

Meanwhile mix the brown sugar with the coconut cream. Add this mix to the cooled tapioca and combine well. Divide between 4 glasses and set in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours.

Just before serving, quarter, cut the cheeks from the mango, skin them, and dice the flesh. Squeeze with lime juice from half a lime divide between the 4 glasses. Sprinkle sparingly with the chili powder and garnish with a slice of fresh lime.

Gypsy Curses

2011-08-30T10:00:00.002+10:00

I don't eat nearly as much as one might expect. At work, I spend 14 hours a day preparing and serving food. I am surrounded by it, immersed in it. By the end of each day I reek of roasted garlic and fish and oil and herbs and smoke. I could do no worse if I were rolling in the stuff. On any given work day I prepare ten-to-twenty serves of each dish on the menu and specials board, totaling a couple hundred possible meals, with the expectation that I'll serve at least half of them. Amidst all this cooking, all this preparation and serving, I often fail to eat much at all. It's an affliction that affects many of the chefs I know. It's silly, I know, to be surrounded with food for more than half of the hours in a day and not eat enough, but it is quite common. Ask a chef, at the end of the day, what he's eaten during work; I guarantee he'll have trouble recalling a single meal.

It's not that I don't like to eat. Don't, for the love of god, get that impression. I love food. And I love to cook it just as much as I eat it. I spend a great deal of my spare time either cooking, or reading (or writing) about the history, science, and theory of food. I can think of little I enjoy more than eating out. I love to sit down to a meal someone else has prepared for me; I appreciate the effort and look forward to eating something I haven't personally followed from providore to plate. The greater the quantity and variety in a meal, the better. Twelve-course degustation menu? Hell yes. I love food.

It's just that at the end of a day in the kitchen, after innumerable tastes of this and that (add more salt, taste again), dozens of carrot nubs and celery stick tips and tomato cores which find their way into my mouth rather than the rubbish, the stomach-tightening stress of service, I simply don't feel like eating. I suppose I should understand when other's feel the same.

Usually, people come to me and ask me to cook for them. That's how a restaurant works. I ask that you, the diner trust my cooking abilities; you, in turn, tell me what you'd like and how you'd like it cooked. Outside of work I don't take orders, per se, but when I ask people over for dinner, I generally feel that their anticipation is genuine. Having people want to eat my food becomes the natural state, and I begin to mistrust anyone without an appetite. In short: I expect people to eat.

There are two people, however, who are not always excited to eat when I cook for them. In fact, more often than not I find myself asking, aloud, what is so wrong with the food I've prepared. I'm loath to admit to reducing myself to begging, but begging I do. I've been known to desperately plead my two little boys to eat.

Perhaps this is a gypsy's curse for a chef – that I dedicate my life to cooking and then have to beg my own children to eat anything at all. I should stop angering gypsies.

The one thing I know my two little ones will eat is rice. Both of my boys lap it up, in nearly any incarnation. Why they'll concurrently decide that they don't want to eat roast pork with applesauce, or that they no longer like salmon, I'll never understand, but I do get why they'll eat their collective body weight in my pilaf. It's really tasty.

Orzo and Rice Pilaf with Lemon Thyme and Leek

This is a side dish. A garnish. And one of my favorites. This is a versatile and delicious dish which acts as support personnel for the main event. While you could quite easily sit and make a meal of this rice-based dish, it is a great accompaniment to just about any protein. With this version in particular, I like to pan-roast a baby chicken, backbone removed and flattened, and then rest it on the just-finished pilaf. The juices from the bird soak into the rice and impart a flavor which is a perfect match for the leeks and thyme.

Pilaf is essentially just steamed rice. I add orzo, or risoni, as it is sometimes called, a rice-shaped pasta. Combining this tiny pasta with rice, treating it like rice, lends a contrast in texture and a bit of creaminess to the finished pilaf. This is the sort of recipe you should know by heart: ½ cup rice, ½ cup pilaf, 1 ½ c stock, 1 onion, diced, and something to add flavor: some garlic, a handful of herbs, whatever.

This pilaf is infinitely adaptable: add a half lemon to the pot when you pour in the stock (try substituting fish stock) and serve with pan-fried trout; add some diced carrots when you are toasting the rice and pasta, use beef stock, and serve with a braised veal shank. You can even change up the ratio of rice to pasta. All you need to know is that the the volume of stock should be one-and-a-half times the volume of the rice and pasta together. Other than that, go crazy.

½ c aborrio rice
½ c orzo
1 leek, split, cleaned
1 clove garlic, peeled and cracked
1 ½ c chicken stock
4 sprigs lemon thyme, leaves only

Bring the stock to a simmer in a small pot and keep warm.

In a medium pot with a tablespoon of vegetable oil, sweat the leek with a generous pinch of salt until it is soft and sweet. Add the garlic, the rice, and the pasta. Toast until the rice becomes translucent around the edges. Add the thyme and stock, bring to a simmer and cover.

Reduce to the lowest heat for 15 minutes covered. Remove from the heat and leave undisturbed for another five minutes. Fluff with a fork, season to taste, and serve.

Fancy Baked Beans

2011-08-23T10:00:00.001+10:00

NOTE: THIS POST CONCLUDES OUR THREE WEEK SERIES, WE'LL BE USING THE ELEMENTS FROM LAST TWO WEEK'S POSTS TO COMPLETE THIS WEEK'S RECIPE.

Some dishes are about far more than a paltry meal. These are the foods so very saturated with tradition and history and ceremony that eating them is as much about ritual as it is sustenance. One need look no further than American Thanksgiving dinner for an example; where tradition supersedes practicality, and each individual feast is marked by a bird far too large, flanked by sides far too numerous, and manned by relatives eating far too much. It's tradition. The French, in particular, excel at this sort of elevating food beyond a meal to a rite (sans gluttony). France, and it's culinary history, are filled with such stereotypes. Take, for instance, the ceremony surrounding the release of each new vintage of Beaujolais, or the pomp during the first winter truffle harvest. There are several such specimens, but my favourite, if I might cut to the quick, is cassoulet.

Cassoulet is, essentially, baked beans. There are several regional variations in southwestern France, where this meal originated, but most of them contain white beans, pork, sausage, and smoked/salted/confit meats. Namely, a spicy pork sausage, hamhock, and confit duck or goose, with the occasional addition of lamb or mutton, but variations abound. These items are all slow cooked together in a wide, earthenware dish called a cassole until the beans are rich and creamy, and a caramelized crust has formed on the top. Fancy baked beans.

Not content with the fact that fancy baked beans taste good, the French (particularly those of the self-proclaimed capitol of cassoulet: Castelnaudary) have cassoulet festivals and special events celebrating the tradition. Locals have even formed the Grande Confrérie du Cassoulet de Castelnaudary. “The Great Brotherhood”, according to their website, “is to ... disseminate and defend the reputation of the cassoulet of Castelnaudary , ensuring respect for tradition and quality.”

Really. It's just beans.

So, cassoulet is beans, made bigger than life, in France, through tradition. Outside of it's country of origin talking cassoulet with fellow chefs is not unlike talking politics: it shouldn't be done. It only takes someone to mention that they favor one ingredient over another, or that they add tomato, for moisture, and the argument is on. Soon it's all “That's not how it's done.” and “You can't leave out the ham.” or “Your method is stupid.” Feelings get hurt. Many of the chefs I know are abnormally attached to their cassoulet. Obsessively. Relationship-ending stuff.

If this weren't reason enough to leave cassoulet alone, making the dish requires a great deal of work. You've got to cook beans, sausages, hamhock, possibly a stock, and confit duck, all separately, some of which can take days, and then combine them and cook them for a further day or so. Some methods call for the cooked cassoulet to be rested overnight and then cooked again for a further few hours before serving. It almost sounds like too much effort.

Luckily, too much effort is something of my M.O. here at OHC.

Borlotti Bean and Rabbit Cassoulet

Those in the class who payed attention will notice that neither “borlotti” nor “rabbit” were ever mentioned as ingredients in traditional cassoulet. We're not going to talk about it, in the interest of preventing a fight. Trust me. It's desperately delicious.

For this you'll need the sausages from a couple weeks ago and the beans, rabbit legs, and stock from last week.

500g rabbit and pork sausages
1 tbsp rendered duck or pork fat
2 small white onions, peeled, rough chop
3 cloves garlic, peeled
500ml rabbit and ham stock
4 cups cooked borlotti beans
2 confit rabbit legs, removed from fat, meat removed from bones
bean cooking liquid

Heat the fat in a large fry pan on low heat. When melted and warm (not hot) and add the sausages. Cook the sausages gently until they color on one side, flip and continue cooking. Meanwhile, in a blender or food processor, blitz the onion and garlic with 100ml of the rabbit stock. Add this paste to the pan with the nearly cooked sausages and bring the lot to a simmer. Cook gently, stirring occasionally, until the onion no longer smells raw. Remove from heat.

Preheat your oven to 150ºC. In a wide, deep (earthenware if possible), baking dish, layer the cassoulet. First, a layer of cooked beans, then the sausages and onion paste. Follow this with another layer of beans. Top this with the picked confit rabbit meat. Finish this with a final layer of beans. This should, hopefully, fill your dish and leave with you no additional beans (although you're probably hungry by now, so a few handful's of perfectly cooked beans wouldn't kill you).

Ladle in enough of the rabbit and ham stock so that the level of the liquid is equal with that of the top of the beans. Bake, uncovered, for 4 hours. After the first hour, open the oven and push down the crust of that forms on the surface of the cassoulet, and top up the liquid using the rabbit stock. Repeat this process every half hour until the four hour's cooking is complete led. At any time the stock runs out, switch to using the reserved bean liquid to keep the beans moist.

For the last half hour, do not disturb the crust, but add a bit of stock if the cassoulet looks dry.

At the end of four hours, remove the cassoulet from the oven. Your beans should be individually intact, not mushy (a product of slow cooking), and the crust on top formed of a mattress of crisp beans and caramelized bits of goodness. Cool slightly, and serve a warm cross-section of beans, meat and sausages.

I usually suggest accompaniments, but not here. Perhaps you'd like some bread, I don't know. I just eat my fill off cassoulet and shut up. Oh. Wine. You'll need red wine. Tons.

How to Cook Beans (The Prep Shift)

2011-08-16T10:00:00.000+10:00

NOTE: THIS POST CONTINUES OUR THREE WEEK SERIES, WE'LL BE USING THE ELEMENTS FROM LAST AND THIS WEEK'S POST TO COMPLETE NEXT WEEK'S RECIPE.

It's not all glory. Not remotely. You need to know this; someone should tell you. It's not at all like TV. Professional cooking is, at best, only about 10% glory. The rest is, well, the rest. Actually, “the rest” makes up the majority of what a professional cook does on any given day. That 10% of the goods – service, finishing meals and sending them out, getting the odd bit of positive feedback from the customers – is completely eclipsed by the amount of work required to get ready for dinner service on any given day. Typically, I work a fifteen-hour day and only during a tiny bit near the end do I actually cook meals for customers. The rest of it fills up will roasting this, peeling that, blanching and rolling and confit and boning, chopping and sauteing and salting butchering, cleaning and simmering and a whole host of other generally menial activities. Not glamorous at all.

The prep portion of any shift is, as I mentioned, full of little jobs. It involves endless buckets of vegetables, giant pots of stocks and soups, and countless hours of fine brunoise and julienne and chiffonade. It's how every chef earns his knife skills.

To many professional cooks, the prep shift is a shitty one. The dull repetition, the crushing weight of impossibly long prep lists, the requisite constant concentration so that none of the seven or so jobs you have on the go turn sour, all breed resentment in some chefs. I, on the other hand, quite look forward to all of it. I love ticking jobs off my list as I go, juggling dozens of tasks at a time, stocking up my cool room with food ready for service; it's like preparing for a siege.

More than any of these things, I find pleasure in perfecting the simplest of jobs. This, in fact, is one of the things which differentiates a good chef from a great one. Are you able to maintain high standard when prepping? Sure, it's easy when sending out a steak, to imagine the customer eating it, and how they'll not enjoy their meal if the meat is overcooked. It is not so easy to imagine that 40 customers will be eating your parsnip puree, three bites at a time, and each one needs to be perfect.

This week is a prep shift. Today we'll be making a couple of seemingly unrelated foods, all to be used next week in part three of this triptych we started last week (anyone out there guess yet what we'll be making next week?) None of these things are meant to be eaten on their own, though both the rabbit legs and beans are tasty enough to be eaten thus.

In fact, this is the best way to cook beans, either fresh or dried, and is well worth keeping this method tucked away in that pretty little head of yours.

Borlotti Beans

These appaloosa-like beans (also called pinto beans) are my favorite beans. I wish only that cooking did not erase their pink and white patterns; alas, the beans turn an earthy brownish-gray. Upon tasting, however, any color-related concerns evaporate. These are the King of beans – meaty, firm, and creamy.

This cooking method works well with all beans, fresh or dry. The key is to cook them as slowly as possible until they are just cooked. No matter how long that takes.

1.5k borlotti beans, in their pods, or 2 cups dried beans
2 sprigs thyme
olive oil
4 cloves garlic, peeled and cracked

Pod the fresh beans (or soak the dried beans briefly in cold water and remove any which float). In a pot, cover the beans with water, so that they are submerged under 2cm of water (double this depth for dried beans). Add enough olive oil so that there is a 1cm layer floating on the top. Add one sprig of thyme. Do not season the beans.

Bring to a simmer over medium head, taking care not to let the beans boil, and reduce the heat to low. You want the beans to just tick over. Cook thus until the beans are soft through, about an hour for fresh beans, at least double that for dried. The key is to remove the beans from the heat when they are cooked, but before they start to burst.

Add the cracked garlic, the second sprig of thyme, and season liberally with lashings of salt and pepper. Cool in the liquid, then drain. Remove the garlic cloves and thyme sprigs.

Well need both the beans and the liquid they were cooked in for next week's post.

Rabbit and Ham Stock

All white stocks, that is stocks with raw (as opposed to roasted) bones, are made in more or less the same manner. The bones are covered in plenty of cold water, brought to a simmer, skimmed, and then the vegetables are added. The lot simmers for a few hours and then strained. Stocks sould remain un-seasoned. This allows you to luse thm in your cooking with worrying about adding to much salt to your final dish. The bacon or ham bones add a hint of smoky flavor to the stock, as well as adding a bit of body (rabbit bones don't have much gelatin in them).

500g bacon or ham bones
bones from 1 rabbit (from last week's post)
1 carrot, peeled, rough chop
1 onion, peeled, rough chop
1 stick celery, rough chop
1 head garlic, cut in half
1 sprig thyme
1 bay leaf
12 black peppercorns

Combine the bacon or ham bones and the rabbit bones in a large pot and cover with water, submerging them completely with about 5cm water above the level of the bones. . Bring to a simmer over high heat, reduce to a low simmer, and skim any fat and scum which rises to the surface. Add the remainder of the ingredients and simmer for four hours. Remove from heat and strain, discarding the solids.

Confit Rabbit

2 rabbit legs
2 cups duck fat
confit salt (see below)

Weigh the legs. For every 500g of meat, you will need 5g of confit salt. Place the rabbit into a nonreactive container just large enough to hold the legs. Sprinkle the salt evenly over both sides of the meat. Cover, and refrigerate for 8 hours.

Heat your oven to 150º C. Rinse the salt from the meat and pat dry. Gently melt the duck fat. Lay the legs flat in a baking dish or small pot and pour the fat over the top. Make sure the legs are completely submerged.

Cover with a lid or foil, and cook in th oven for at least 3 hours, and up to 6, until the meat is tender but not falling apart. Cool the legs to room temperature in the fat. Gently remove them from the warm fat, strain the fat into a tall container, allow any liquid to settle to the bottom, and pour the fat back over the meat, making sure to leave the liquid behind and that the legs are completely covered.

Confit Salt

100g rock salt
12 bay leaves
5 sprigs thyme
1 head garlic, skin on, rough chop
2 Tbsp black peppercorns

Combine all the ingredients.

Snags

2011-08-09T10:00:00.001+10:00

NOTE: THIS POST BEGINS A THREE WEEK SERIES, WE'LL BE USING THE ELEMENTS FROM THIS AND NEXT WEEK'S POST TO COMPLETE THE THIRD WEEK'S RECIPE.

“Perhaps,” Brian, a friend and fellow chef said to me, shaking his head, “we should have listened to hundreds of years of tradition.” The tradition he was referring to was that of sausage making, a long and fine tradition indeed. Making sausages is one of the rare instances in savory cooking (as opposed to pastry work) where science meets creativity. Crafting a sausage requires strict adherence to certain, long-established ratios of fat-to-meat-to-salt. There are other rules as well, regarding the number of times you pass the meat through a mincer, the temperature of the meat, and more. Obviously, there is plenty of room for improvisation and tweaking, leading to a near-infinite different types of sausages. Know this: all of them, if they taste good at all, fall within the guidelines set forth by countless generations of sausage makers.

Foolishly, the sausages Brian and I had just produced, did not.

Making a sausage from scratch is a lot of work. No. A ridiculous amount of work. As with most things I consume, I don't think I'd eat them nearly as often if I had to make my own. Snags, as they are called in OZ, are possibly the cheapest thing you can buy at your local butcher, but I don't understand why. Sure, they are the final resting place for all the little bits and offcuts which can't be sold otherwise, but taking those bits and offcuts and turning them into something delicious is time-consuming, physical (especially if you use a hand-cranked mincer, as I do), dirty, and tedious.

First you must determine the ratios of your various ingredients. Generally, a sausage is around 25-35% fat. You can easily figure this out if you are using lean meat and pork fat, as is often the case, but if you are using a fatty meat, well, the ratios get a little more complex. Doubly so if start to mix animals. Then there is the amount of salt, not to mention any of the other flavorings you might want to put in.

Once you've gathered your ingredients in the right proportions you've got to dice the meat, mix it with the flavorings, and then mince it. This process, when done through a hand-cranked mincer can take 5-10 minutes per kilo of meat. Imagine sweating, manually mincing 17 kilos of meat, all the while striving to keep the meat as cold as possible. And then some recipes call for you to mince the meat a second time. Ouch.

After the meat is mixed it needs to be worked in a bowl until it becomes a sticky mass. Large-scale butchery operations use a machine that looks like a concrete mixer to do this. I use a spoon. At this point the sausages can be piped into the casings (skins, or if you'd rather, intestines), which have been salted, rinsed thoroughly, and slid, endless-condom-style, onto a sausage nozzle. This nozzle is attached to the front of the mincer and the meat is passed again through the machine, this time sans blade.

Stuffing casings is a two-man job and in my kitchen we refer to the two jobs as “pitcher” and “catcher” (“bowler” and “keeper” as well). You see, in this step, not only does one person (pitcher) have to re-crank the meat through, but the other guy (catcher) has to control the speed at which the casing feeds, so that the snags are plump but not too taught. Any air bubbles must be removed with a pin, and a uniform thickness maintained throughout. You end up with a really long sausage snake.

Next the sausages must be tied. There are so many fancy methods one can use to tie sausages, but I don't really know any of them. Not well enough to teach anyone else at least. The simple, non-fancy, method involves pinching off a link, turning it towards you, then pinching off a second link roughly the same size and turning it away from you. You repeat this alternating towards and away for the length of the sausage snake.

The snags, if you have followed procedure more or less exactly, are now ready to cook. (Whether that be poaching, frying, cold or hot smoking.)

The sausages which Brian and I made, the ones which prompted his musings about our general disregard for a knowledge base several hundreds of years old, were not made in exactly this way. We might have ignored suggestions to re-mince some of the meat, and our ratios of meat to fat, would have been better measured, rather than eyeballed. We could have paid a bit more attention to the temperature of the mix as a whole as well. I'm speaking in the hypothetical because any one of these mistakes (we probably made all three) would have lead to the roughly 15 kilos of grainy, fatty-yet-dry sausages we produced.

The next batch, with more care, were great. Lesson learned.

Andouille-Style Rabbit Sausages

(I mentioned above that sausages are a two-man job. That's true. Today, my wing-man was my 3 ½-year-old. It's hard work, not complicated work. He pipped the meat and I shaped the sausages. My guy's a little champion. I couldn't have done it without him.)

These highly spiced sausages are traditionally smoked – either hot smoked to cook them through, or cold smoked to add an additional layer of flavor. I've elected not to smoke them at all, as I don't want to completely overpower the flavor of the rabbit. We'll also be using a blend of fatty pork with the lean rabbit.

As I mentioned above, this post is the first in a three-part series. These are intense sausages; you can eat them on their own, as they are delicious, but make sure to save about 500g for the master project.

1 farmed white rabbit

Breakdown the rabbit by first removing the back legs. Pop the hip joints out of socket and cut any connective tissue holding the joint together. Cut the leg muscle away from the body, keeping the knife as close to the backbone as possible so that the leg stays completely intact. Reserve the two hind legs for next week's post.

Using a sharp, flexible knife remove the rest of the meat from the rabbit. Start by cutting two parallel lines in the channels which run down either spine of the animal, the backbones will form two channels for your blade. Working the knife around the ribcage you should be able to remove all the meat from the chest of the animal and cut through the two shoulder joints. Using the point of the knife pierce through the flesh where the spine meets the ribcage of the rabbit and collect the loin which lies inside the chest cavity. Cut, with the knife running along either side of the spine, towards the tail end, until the two sides of meat are free. Cut and scrape the meat from the two front legs. Check all the meat for bone fragments and then dice into 1-2cm chunks. Reserve the bones and keep everything refrigerated.

Alternately, ask your butcher to prep the rabbit for you.

Sausages

Start by preparing about three metres of sheep casings. Soak them in warm water for about an hour and then rinse them. Find one of the ends and squeeze a few drops of oil into the casing. Using pinched fingers, work the oil down the length of the casing, squeezing any excess out the other end. This light oiling will make loading the casing onto the nozzle and feeding it off much easier. Load up the nozzle according to the instructions included with your mincer.

You'll need about 1 kilo of meat to match the spice measurements below. My rabbit yielded about 500g of meat, and I made the rest up with pork neck, a flavorful and fatty (and cheap) cut.

rabbit meat
fatty pork, diced into 1-2cm chunks
(the meat weight total should be 1 kilo)
15g sea salt flakes
1g cayenne pepper
¼ whole nutmeg, grated
1 clove, crushed in a mortal and pestal
1 allspice (pimento) berry, crushed in a mortar and pestal
pinch dried oregano
2 g mustard powder
1g fresh black pepper
2g fresh thyme, leaves only
35g milk powder
1 large brown onion, fine dice
5 cloves garlic, fine dice

Mix all of the ingredients together in a bowl by hand. Mince through your mincer with the smallest die, keeping as cold as possible. Work the mince in a large bowl with a wooden spoon until it is sticky and looks more-or-less homogeneous. Stuff the prepared casings with the mince. Tie into sausages using the towards/away/towards method I described in the post above. Cut the snags apart just before gently pan frying. Yum.

These are great with sauerkraut and mash, but remember, you need to keep about 500g-worth for the final dish we'll make in a couple post's time.

The Rip-Off

2011-08-02T10:00:00.001+10:00

I get a little worked up about culinary plagiarism, as I might have mentioned once or twice before. There is a restaurant here in Sydney which is consistently rated in the very top echelon of the City's dining scene. The meal I had there was technically flawless, worthy of Michelin Stars, but for one thing: three of the six courses we ate that evening were direct copies of dishes I've seen elsewhere. I'd seen them in my cookbooks at home, to be more precise, and what was presented to me at the table could have been the photographic twin of the dishes in my books at home. I can, on some level, appreciate the technical ability required to re-create these meals, but I didn't then, and don't now, understand why the wholesale duplication of another, sometimes well-known, dish qualifies one for “best-of-the-best” status in Sydney. If I copied the same dishes and sold them in the bistro I now run I'd be called a copy-cat. However, when one fine-dining chef rips another fine dining chef off, it's rewarded, and called artistry. I don't get it. What happened to originality?

My wife, with whom I shared both the meal and the trepidations, took the opportunity, not long after our meal, to confront Sydney's preeminent food critic on talk back radio, when he happened to be a guest. Why, she (and I) wanted to know, did this blatant plagiarism go either unnoticed or ignored? Why are we eating food conceived and designed by chefs in another hemisphere and paying dearly for the privilege. The Critic failed to explain, really, saying something along the lines that the execution was good enough to merit a nearly perfect rating.

Really? Perfect copying is just as good as innovation? I can't buy that. Imagine if that same principle applied to all consumer goods: Sure your iphone is a fake, but it is a pretty good replica, so what's the problem?

I suspect that distance has a fair bit to to with this attitude. iphones are shipped all over the world, signature dishes from European restaurants are not. An Ozzy chef wants to try his hand at some of the in-vogue dishes made by his European peers and the local food circles turn something of a blind eye to the fact, as it might just be the most simple way of tasting what's going on on the other culinary side of the world.

Still, I expect more from the leaders of the Australian culinary movement. I'm just sayin'.

This week, I am doing absolutely nothing to advance the cause, for I am ripping off a North American recipe. Well, not exactly. To be more precise, I am trying to reproduce one. Here in Oz, you see, we have these cookies called Tim-Tams. They are, and this is science, more addictive than heroin. Australia should use these little chocolate, cookie, and salty caramel numbers in lieu of international currency. I've learned, since moving here, to be cautious as to which of my friends and family in the States I expose to Tim-Tams, as I can only afford to meet the export needs of so many relatives.

Now, there is a cookie that exists in America which I crave in much the same way. The Girls Scouts Of America go door to door selling cookies every year, and one variety is the absolutely irresistible: Samoas. These chocolate, caramel, and coconut cookies, also called Caramel deLites, are possibly the greatest example of cookietry known to man. I love them, and as they are not easy to come by in OZ, am going to make a batch.

Well, no. Because the version you buy for the Girl Scouts are hexagon doughnut-shaped. Not only is replecating this step terribly time consuming, it means that there is a little hole missing out of each cookie you get. No thank you, Ma'am. Instead, I am making one giant cookie, and then cutting it into bars, giant ones sure to encourage over-consumption.

Samoas Rip Off Bars

(Let there be no confusion as to the origin.)

Cookie Base

125g sugar
175g butter, room temp
1 egg
1/2 vanilla pod scraped
250g flour
pinch salt

Preheat your oven to 180ºC. Cream together the butter and sugar. Add the egg and vanilla seeds and mix well. Add in the flour and salt and mix until just combined. Turn into a baking paper-lined tray and press out until it fills the pan in an even, smooth layer. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until just browning on the edges. Remove from the oven and cool in the pan.

Chocolate

Right. This step is simple. You melt some chocolate, then spread it on. What's that you say? I don't temper the chocolate? That's right, both because I'm a pastry cowboy, and because I plan on eating all of these before anyone will have time to notice un-tempered chocolate.

250g dark chocolate

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler. Flip your cooled cookie base upside down and, using a pastry spatula, spread the chocolate in a thin, even layer on to the flat surface. Allow to cool completely and then set in the fridge.

Coconut

Choose unsweetened dried coconut for this, as these cookies are already sweet enough.

3 cups dried coconut

Preheat your oven to 160ºC. Spread the coconut out on a tray and toast in the oven, stirring occasionally15-25 minutes, until golden.

Caramel

This recipe makes about 500g of chewy caramel, but you'll only need 400g of it to make to cookies. Just pour the rest into a container lined with baking paper, and then cut them into caramels and wrap in waxed paper when cooled.
250ml cream
60ml sweetened condensed milk
250ml glucose syrup
250g sugar
60ml water
60g butter

Combine the cream and condensed milk in a small pot on low heat, stirring to dissolve the condensed milk. Heat until hot but not boiling.

Meanwhile, stir together the glucose, sugar, and water in a large pot with steep sides. Bring to a boil and reduce the heat to medium, boiling until the mixture reaches a temperature of 121ºC. Add the butter and warm cream mix and return to a boil. Reduce the heat to low and cook slowly, stirring often, until the temperature reaches 118ºC. This step should take at least an hour, as the slow cooking allows the caramel flavors to develop deep roasted sugar characteristics, rater than scalded milk and burnt sugar.

Mix 400g of the caramel together with the toasted coconut (above) and spread onto the non-chocolate side of the cookie base (also above). Cool, cut into squares, and drizzle with a bit more melted chocolate if you wish.

Risks

2011-07-26T10:00:00.000+10:00

Someone needs to fill one of those glossy, image-driven cookbooks which live, barnacle-like, around cash registers in book shops, with a collection of all the meal-in-hand street foods of the world. It would be all croque monsieurs and falafel rolls and tacos and crepes and pupusas and meat pies and pastizzies and hot dogs doughnuts and tamales and the like. I say “someone” because I'm not going to do it. Whoever does make the book should call it “Hand-held” and make the spine look like the layers of a hamburger, and the two covers like a bun. There, I've done most of the work for you. I'll buy the book when you've finished. I do so love me hand-held street food.

I spend a good deal of time, in fact, seeking out and eating hand-held street food. I am a bit obsessed, really. I'll more or less try anything that is sold from a cart, roadside stand, or suspect take-away-only hole. I do usually sit back and watch for a moment or two, just to see if any of the locals are buying, but that's about the extent of my risk-analysis. I suppose, given the foods I'm willing to consume, from the vendors whom I'm willing to purchase, it's only a matter of time until I poison myself. These are the sorts of chances I'm willing to take.

Poisoning, actually, is quite at the fore of my thoughts, as I spent the day yesterday in a government-mandated food safety course (one employee from each kitchen in the state is now required to complete the course). I am now, (check yourself) a certified Food Safety Officer. Well, I made the “officer” bit up. And I don't yet actually have a certificate, per se, but it is, I've been assured, as good as “in the mail.” I'm considering having a engraved badge, sheriff-style, made up in the meantime.

I've been refreshed on cooking temperatures and cooling times and stock rotation and hand washing. It was, as you can imagine, a captivating eight hours. I did learn a bit about the exact behaviors of the most common bacteria which cause problems for the food industry. The one thing that stuck foremost in my mind is that beef is just as dangerous chicken.

The message, actually, was: “Don't eat rare meat.” It turns out, you see, that when it comes to food poisoning risk, chicken and beef are more or less equal. Australian chicken flocks, on the one hand, display about a 50% infection rate for salmonella. Beef, on the other, in OZ, have about a 30% infection rate for e. coli. Both salmonella and e. coli represent a group of pathogens of which only a small handful make us sick. It turns out that you have more or less the same chance of becoming ill eating undercooked chicken as you do eating undercooked beef. However, none of us ask for rare chicken. Several of us ask for rare beef.

The same rules which apply to chicken are applicable to all fowl. I eat duck medium-rare, quail rare, and squab nearly raw. While, from a cooking perspective, this has much to do with the flavor and toughness of the meat, as far as risk goes, I might as well be having diner at a chicken sashimi restaurant. Rare bird is as dangerous as raw beef.

That said, I'm still probably not going to start cooking my chicken thighs medium rare, on the bone, though I know it amounts to little more than superstition. In fact, everything I've just learned about the likelihood of microbial contamination mostly just piques my curiosity; I'm not going to change my eating habits. I'm not about to stop ordering my steaks bleu.

Nor do I suggest you cook the meat in the recipe below any more than a sear on the surface. The combination of crisp char paired with impossibly moist, rare – nearly raw – meat is a culinary treat in itself. The flavor is an absolute delight when combined with the fresh herb salad and the sharp, aggressive flavors of the dressing.

This is not actually, to my knowledge, a street food in any part of the world. It is rather, my ideal summer street food: an adaptation of Thai beef salad with strong Vietnamese influences. I've packed this for innumerable picnics, as it is light and clean and tidy and tasty.

Thai Beef Salad Rolls

This is perfect summer picnic food. It's not remotely summer here, in fact we've just had a week of endless, cold drizzle, punctuated by occasional downpours. However, the combination of the footage of the U.S. heatwave and my general desire to imagine warmer times has me in the mood for this meal.

1 300g steak, room temperature

Ok. I'll really teach you all how to cook a steak sometime in the near future, as it is a simple, but delicate craft. Here it is not so much so. You'll need a 300gm cut of beef – something with a bit of fat in it, not too much – like a sirloin, or a scotch fillet, that will end up being about 3 cm (just over an inch) thick, and a really, really, hot pan.

Heat a heavy-bottomed skillet on the highest of heat. Add a touch of oil to the hot pan. Quickly season the meant all over liberally with lashings of salt and pepper. Sear the steak on one side until a dark brown, crisp crust has formed. Flip the steak and cook until the same dark, caramelized crust has formed. Remove from pan and rest until the steak is at room temperature.

Cut the rested, rare meat into thin slices. It will be quite rare.

Rolls

Steak slices (see above)
1 bunch mint, leaves only
1 bunch Thai basil, leaves only
1 bunch coriander, leaves only
1 small bunch vermicelli rice noodles, cooked according to the packet
1 spanish onion, fine slice
1 red bird's eye chili, fine slice
100g mung bean sprouts
100g cashew nuts, toasted, lightly cracked and salted
12 rice paper wrappers

Mix the herbs leaves together. Soften the wrappers one at a time in warm water, according the the packet instructions. Lay out one softened rice paper roll and add lay two or three slices of beef down vertically in the centre. Top this with some of the mixed greens, a few noodles, a few slices of onion, a couple chili rings, a few bean sprouts and a sprinkling of cashews. Fold in the top and bottom and then roll from right to left, pulling the filling in tight as you go.

Repeat until all the ingredients are used up. Serve with a dipping sauce (below).

Dipping Sauce

Here is where I am going to call upon your ninja cooking skills. This is the sort of recipe that a Grandmother gives out. Not so much a list of quantities, but a relationship of ingredients. I'll give you a list of what goes in, and it it up to you to combine the items in a way that you can taste all of them in a balanced manner.

bird's eye chili, fine slice
fish sauce
lime juice
lime zest
palm sugar grated (or dark brown sugar)

What you want here is a flaming hot balance of sweet and salty and sour and heat. Play with a combination of the ingredients until you achieve this. I suggest starting with two tablespoons of fish sauce, two tablespoons of lime juice, one whole chili (finely sliced), and two tablespoons grated palm sugar. Work them all together until you find a flavor balance.

Over-sharing

2011-07-19T10:00:00.001+10:00

Menus are excessively verbose. That, in a uncharacteristic burst of straightforwardness, is the thesis of this week's post. Reading a modern menu is an absolute onslaught of adjectives and ingredients and verbs and animals and adverbs. The whole experience of sitting down and choosing a meal is wrought with a veritable avalanche of information about origin and method and accompaniments. It all serves only to confuse, and I say this both as a chef and a diner. No one is really to blame, these things often have a life and momentum of their own. I have to list most of the ingredients in a dish, when I write a menu, because the customers expect it; customers expect as much because every other menu they read has the same. Every menu is crammed with information because it is the new convention. Some of my patrons, after reading a dish description which might include only (only!) half a dozen items, ask the waitress: “What else comes with the Snapper?”

The down-side of all this verbosity is threefold. First, it is confusing. No one really wants to know about every single herb used to marinate the quail. Too many ingredients are too difficult to combine mentally, and the patron can't, generally, imagine what their meal might taste like. The highlight reel is better.

Second, it encourages overconfidence. If I give you a list of foods and sprinkle over the top a handful of culinary verbs, customers build expectations. Now, it is well known that the major job of the wait staff is to let people know what they are in for. “Just so you know, there is a half-hour wait on food.” “The squid is more of an starter size...” Building expectations. If customers are left to form their own expectations, well, they are almost bound to be disappointed in one way or another. Knowing every bit of what you are about to eat only serves to form a too-precise image of what is to come, and any disparity spells heartbreak, no matter how great the meal might be.

Third, the practice of listing every ingredient of every dish is So. Fucking. Boring. What happened to mystery? Why should I have to tell every single patron how I execute every single step? Actually, I don't. When I tell you it is a roast ½ chicken, for example, I mean it is a confit leg and pan-roasted breast. There is no reason you, as the diner, needs to know that. Be pleasantly surprised by how good your meal is. When does oversimplification become dishonesty? I don't know. However, I do know that I'd rather a bit of mystery in lieu of over-sharing.

Mystery and surprises are, actually, precisely what I love when writing a menu. And I am not the only one. Some fine dining restaurants are going to the opposite extreme, providing one or two words to describe a dish. I'd like to live somewhere in between, writing a menu that offers enough information to sell the meal, whilst leaving plenty or room for interpretation. It's inside this wiggle room where chef's get to have a bit of fun. For example, I often list ratatouille as a side for various proteins, and customers expect to see stewed Mediterranean-style vegetables; instead they get a pretty little parcel of those same veggies, wrapped in char-grilled eggplant, zucchini, and red capsicum. It is, I hope, something that makes people smile.

I've never served the dish in today's post in the restaurant, but if I were to, I'd call this collection of five different tortellini, each with a different vegetable filling, and brown butter, simply “Roast Vegetable Tortellini” and let the customer discover what's inside each one. Fun!

Roast Vegetable Tortellini

You'll need some fresh pasta for this one, which we covered a few weeks back. Roll the pasta out to the second thinest setting on your machine.

To make tortellini, cut the pasta into 6cm disks. Place a teaspoon of filling into the center of the disk, wet the edges with a bit of water, and fold them over into half circles, pinching gently to seal. Gently grab the two corners and bring them together, giving a half twist so that the edge of the pasta turns up like a little collar. Pinch the two corners together where they meet.

Bring a large pot of water to the boil and blanch each type of tortellini separately. Not because they have different cooking times, but because this will help you tell them apart. Cook each batch for about 3-4 minutes, until the torts float and stay on the surface for a minute or two. Drop the tortellini into an ice bath to stop them from cooking. Drain and set aside until ready to serve.

You'll need to make one of each tort for each serve, and you should be able to make about 4-6 serves with the quantities below.

Caramelized Carrot Purée

Right. Purée is a bit of a misnomer here, as it is not nearly smooth enough. The goal with all five of these so-called purées is not so much smoothness as thickness. They need to be firm enough to stand up in a spoon. Caramelized carrots are a favorite of mine, and I have featured them on this blog in the past. Carrots require nothing but a bit of salt and patience to become richly sweet.

1 large carrots, peeled
1 tsp butter

Slice the carrot as thinly as possible (using a mandolin or the slicing blade on a food processor). Heat a small, heavy based pan on medium heat. Add the butter and, when it starts to foam, add the carrots and a pinch of salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, scraping the bottom to prevent sticking, for 140 min – 1 hour. The carrots will break up, dry out considerably, and deepen in color. When the mixture is deep orange and richly caramely sweet, Remove from the heat. Mash with the back of a spoon, or pass through a ricer if you like. Texture is just fine here. Taste and season liberally. Cool and refrigerate.

Parsnip Purée

I love parsnips. They have a vague spice flavor that I can't quite place. They are great roasted, mashed, and boiled. I simply blanch a parsnip here until it is just cooked, and then pass it through a ricer or mouli.

1 parsnip, peeled, roughly chopped

Bring a small pot of water to a boil. Drop in the chopped parsnip and simmer until the pieces can be easily pierced with a knife. Drain. Pass the cooked parsnip through a ricer or mouli. Season the resulting rough purée well. Cool and refrigerate.

Roast Tomato Purée

This is actually tomato fondue – a concentrated tomato paste of which I have written a few times before. This is a recipe, as I keep saying, which you should know and love.

3 large ripe tomatoes, (about 500g total)
½ brown onion, peeled and chopped
1 heaped tsp tomato paste
½ clove garlic, cracked

Remove the core from the tomatoes and slash an x at the bottom of each one. Plunge them into a boiling pot of water for 30 seconds to loosen the skins. Remove and shock in an ice bath to cool. Peel away the skins. Cut the tomatoes in half along the horizontal and roughly squeeze out most of the seeds. Roughly chop the remaining flesh.

In a heavy-bottomed, stainless steel (aluminum is a reactive no-no for tomatoes) pot on medium heat sweat the onion in a bit of oil with a pinch of salt until soft and translucent but not colored. Add the tomato paste and cook until it splits, that is until the oil and tomato separate. Add the ½ garlic clove and then add the tomatoes. Cook over low heat for 1-2 hours, stirring frequently to prevent it catching, until the fondue is very thick and smells of deeply roasted tomatoes. Remove the garlic and season the fondue.

Roast Beetroot Purée

Beets, or as they are called here in OZ, beetroot, are not one of my favorite vegetables. I might have mentioned that before. Something about sweet dirt. That said, beets do have a distinctive flavor and amazing color.

1 beetroot

Preheat your oven to 180ºC. Wrap the beetroot in foil with a pinch of salt and a dash of oil and roast, on a tray, until cooked through – about an hour. You'll be able to easily pierce the beet with a skewer through the middle when it is cooked. Remove from the oven and the foil and cool completely. When cool, peel away the skin with your hands (I suggest gloves) or a pairing knife. Cut the beetroot into cubes and then pulse in a food processor until it is a fine kibble. Without the addition of liquids or oil, the beetroot will never become a perfectly smooth purée. Remember, a bit of texture is a good thing.

Pea Purée

Ok. Confession time. I use frozen peas. In fact, I often use frozen peas. Fresh peas, unless you grow them yourself, are wildly variable. The problem is that peas don't fare well once picked (they become less sweet and more starchy over time). Frozen, sadly, for those of us without a garden, are the best alternative.

½c peas, blanched

Drain the blanched peas. Pulse them in a food processor until they form a very rough paste. Season liberally.

Finishing the Tortellini (With a Brown Butter Sauce)

Bring a large pot of water to the boil. Drop one serve (that's one of each type of tortellini into the water. Boil 2-3 minutes and remove with a slotted spoon.

Meanwhile, in a small pan on medium heat, melt a tablespoon or two of butter. Allow it to foam up and then subside. Remove the butter from the heat at the moment the milk solids (that is, the yellow flecks which separate out when the butter foams) begin to brown. Add a squeeze of lemon juice to the pan to arrest the cooking and keep warm.

Toss the cooked and drained tortellini in the butter and arrange in a bowl. Sauce with the remaining brown butter and add a herb or two, possibly a bit of ricotta, maybe a few shavings of parmesan, as garnish.

On Recall

2011-07-12T10:00:00.001+10:00

It seems as if every food writer who wishes to address the subject of culinary nostalgia is somehow obligated to to mention Proust, his Remembrance of Things Past, and madeleines. I intend to do almost no such thing. You, if you find yourself at all interested, can look up what the hell I am talking about. There is such a broad literary tradition of igniting childhood memories through the medium of food you might nearly call it a genre. The convention even exists in kids films: the penultimate scene in Ratatouille involves the antagonist, upon taking a bite, jolting loose a memory of his own childhood and subsequently being completely won over. My childhood, in contrast, holds nearly no like examples of formative food experiences, of nibble-triggered, emotional food bombs. I remember, rather, only an endless stream of processed foodstuffs, just-add-water dinners, and 70's hold-overs. Not much to grow teary-eyed about. Still, I find myself occasionally nostalgic.

This week is one of those occasions, and, specifically, I am nostalgic for a childhood, American desert: Strawberry Shortcake. Not to be confused with the greeting card character of the same name, strawberry shortcake was a staple of my childhood. Originally, the dessert, as the name implies, would have been made with shortbread (which was once commonly called shortcake). Over time in the States this evolved into a couple variations: layers of sablée pastry, or a type of sweet, American-style biscuit with berries and cream between and on top. Either sound great to me.

What I remember is much more dire. I recall, for sale, packets of preservative-rammed, dimpled, sponge cakes, conveniently placed between the punnets of fresh strawberries and little tubs of gloopy “strawberry glaze” which I can only now imagine must have been some sort of evil combination of red dye, corn syrup, and corn starch. All of this was cross-promoted with aerosol tins of whipped cream, completing the package. What I knew as strawberry shortcake was a pile of glossy, artificially, glazed berries atop a vanilla-flavored, dry sponge cake, garnished with lashings of instant whipped cream. Nothing much to long for.

I don't necessarily want to reproduce the exact flavors of the strawberry shortcake of my childhood. Actually, I don't remotely want to reproduce those exact flavors. I would, however, like to encapsulate the idea of my childhood strawberry shortcake. In fact, I want to break it down a little. I want all the great flavors that I remember, only better - not so saccharine and fluffy and processed. Strawberry shortcake, in my memory, is the flavor of the freedom of summer in youth and of desert sunsets and the smell of everyone in the neighborhood manning a BBQ. What I remember most about eating strawberry shortcake is how perfectly cool and sweet it was, always at the end of a dry, Wyoming, August day. To have again the ability to enjoy so completely such immediate and visceral pleasures...

Strawberry Shortcake

Right. I'm going to mess with every single element here, and layer the dessert in a shot glass. Something about dessert in a cup reminds me about my childhood as well. Also, a few bites of any one thing is better than either none at all (obvious) or far too many. I suggest, therefore, making this in shot glasses or small tumblers, so that everyone gets a tiny, manageable serve. This should make about 6 serves, depending on the size of the glass you use. You might have a bit of extra jelly and custard left over, and quite a bit of shortbread, but it is difficult to work in smaller quantities. Besides, it's better than not having enough.

Shortbread Purée

That's right. Purée. Ok? Well, not exactly. More like a shortbread crumb mixed with just enough cream to make it moist. Think cookies and cream at its best.

Shortbread

225g unsalted butter, softened
110g sugar
450g flour

Preheat your oven to 180ºC. Cream together the butter and sugar. Mix in the flour just enough to combine. The mix will be crumbly. Press into a buttered 20 cm round tin and transfer to the oven. Reduce the heat immediately to 160ºC. Bake 25 minutes, taking care not to let it color. Remove from the oven and cool in the tin.

Purée

The word “purée” is a bit of creative license, as this is too thick to be really qualify. It is more of a cakey cookie. Delicious, whatever you call it.

50g shortbread
100ml cream

Process the shortbread in a food processor until it becomes fine crumbs. Mix with the cream just enough to combine.

Divide the paste between 6 shot glassed, taping it down flat.

Strawberry Jelly

250g berries, hulled, and roughly chopped
100g sugar
2 tbsp water
gelatin (sheets or powder)
6 strawberries, fine dice

Bring a medium pot of water to a boil. Combine all the ingredients in a bowl, toss, and cover tightly with cling film. Place the bowl over the pot (like a lid) and remove from the heat. Sit, bowl on the pot, until the lot reach room temperature. Remove the cling film from the bowl and strain, reserving the liquid and discarding the solids.

Measure the liquid. For every 100ml of liquid, you'll need 1 sheet of gelatin, or one tsp or gelatin powder. If using sheet gelatin, soften it first by soaking it in cold water, removing it, and then dissolving it in a bit of the warmed, reserved berry liquid, and then add the lot to the total reserved liquid. If using the powdered form, simply sprinkle the gelatin over the reserved liquid. Either way, apply the gelatin and cool the liquid in the fridge until it starts to thicken, but not set. Divide the diced strawberries between the glasses. Pour the jelly into the glasses, over the shortbread purée and berries, and set in the fridge at least 4 hours.

Burnt Honey and Vanilla Custard

This is, by far, the greatest stretch: I'm replacing whipped cream with a flavored custard. I wanted to introduce both an adult flavor in the caramelized honey and a dense richness to replace the airy whipped cream. The combination makes the whole experience a bit grown-up, smoky, and mysterious.

150ml cream
150ml milk
½ vanilla pod, split and scraped
4 yolks
80g honey

In a large pot on medium heat, bring the honey to a boil. Reduce the heat to low and simmer until the temperature reaches 130ºC. Pour in the milk, cream, vanilla pod, and scraped seeds, and bring just back to a simmer. Remove from the heat.

Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, whisk the yolks until they are light and fluffy. Ladle a few scoops of the hot honey cream into the yolks, whisking as you go, to “temper” the eggs; that is, bring them up to temperature without scrambling them. Pour this mix of eggs and honey cream back into the pot with the remainder of the honey cream and stir, on low heat, until the mixture thickens and reaches 82ºC, or thickly coast the back of a spoon. Pass the custard through a strainer and cool.

When cold, layer on top of the set strawberry jelly.

Dried Strawberries and Strawberry Dust

200g strawberries, hulled and sliced ¼ cm thick
50g sugar

Preheat your oven to 50ºC. Lay the berry slices in rows on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Sprinkle the berries with the sugar. Dry in the slow oven overnight. Remove and cool.

Remove the berries from the baking paper and reserve a dozen of the prettiest ones. Transfer the remainder to a mortar and pestal and pound until a fine powder forms.

Bringing It All Together

At this point, if you have followed instructions, the dessert is nearly finished. You've got the shortbread on the bottom, followed by strawberry jelly, and a topping of honey custard, in lieu of cream. All you need to finish is to stick a slice or two of the dried strawberries into the top, sprinkle some berry dust, and provide a spoon.

Green Goo

2011-07-05T10:00:00.001+10:00

Learning to cook, whether it be at home or professionally, is really a process of collecting a set of skills and methods and recipe which can be called upon again and again. I'm sure the cooking industry isn't alone in this, but we refer to this collective knowledge as a “toolkit.” It's an apt metaphor, as each skill, or method, or recipe is something which might be applied to a novel ingredient or situation or meal – much like testing wrenches against an unknown bolt. The greater the tools in your arsenal, the better the cook you are. The obvious tools are the ability to sear and roast and bake and sauté, to understand the basics of braising, of why cakes fail, of how to truss a bird. Less obvious are the little memorized recipes for basic foods – a perfect salad dressing, a simple custard, a succulent roast pork belly. More than any of the other tools, these are the little bits of knowledge which differentiate a good cook from a great one.

One such little recipe, for example, is tomato fondue, a concentrated tomato paste. Though a bit time consuming, tomato fondue is easy to make, has a minimum of ingredients (tomatoes, onion, garlic, thyme, and oil) and is infinitely versatile in the kitchen. It is great with fish, or under some salt cod fritters, makes a perfect tomato risotto, enriches stocks, glazes roasts, and cleans the kitchen for you. It is a little burst of intense flavor that can be called upon time and time again, as long as you know how to make it in the first place.

Another of these versatile tools is a herb sauce: salsa verde. I've made this Italian herb, caper, vinegar, anchovy, garlic, and mustard sauce in so many of the kitchens where I've worked, and so often, that I've taken to calling it simply “green goo.” This diminutive but loving nickname has been taken up everywhere I've worked, no matter the variation of green sauce being made. And variations abound: all manner of herbs, inclusion of chili, exclusion of any of the aforementioned ingredients. The French version is a herb mayo, the Mexican is made with tomatillos, the Germans use sour cream or buttermilk. My favorite is the Italian version.

Green goo is amazingly useful. It is piquant, salty, aromatic, and refreshing. It pairs amazingly with lamb, or any other roast meat, really. Try it with some poached chicken. I like to spread a bit on a piece of white-fleshed fish before I bake it. Smear a slice of toasted sourdough with salsa verde and then float it in a bowl of soup. This sauce has so many uses, you simply need to have the recipe in your toolkit and you're ready to go.

As an example of how versatile and flavorful it is, I'm just going to toss a bit of it with some warm kipfler potatoes. This is one delicious potato salad.

Warm Potato and Salsa Verde Salad

This is pretty simple stuff. You only need to make the salsa verde, and then toss it with some warm boiled potatoes. I like kipflers for their firm waxy texture, but just about any spud will do.

Green Goo

1 bunch of parsley, leaves only
1 bunch of mint, leaves only
1 bunch of basil, leaves only
1 clove garlic, peeled
4 anchovies
2 Tbsp capers
2 Tbsp tarragon vinegar
1 Tbsp dijon mustard
100 ml olive oil
lemon juice

Chop all the herbs as fine as you can. Transfer to a bowl. Chop the garlic, anchovies, and capers until very fine. Mix these with the vinegar and mustard. Now mix this into the chopped herbs. Add the olive oil, stir to combine, and season with salt, pepper, and a squeeze of lemon.

On Legwork

2011-06-28T10:00:00.001+10:00

Regular readers will know I will go to great lengths to procure the foods I love. Many times this involves disproportionate effort, often due to my belief that I should be able to produce anything I eat, even if I don't always do so. I once, for example, made bonito flakes; it's a month-long curing, smoking, and drying process, just because I love a bowl of udon. I've also processed coffee, from berry to cup, in part to understand how it is done. Other times the effort I'm willing to expend is simply a great deal of old-fashioned leg work. In general, I am willing to walk, cycle, or drive any distance for a meal or an ingredient. Once, when in Naples, my wife and I walked the streets for hours, starving, unable, somehow, to find a single restaurant. We talked up the giant, steaming bowl of mixed clams we'd seen served in several establishments the night before until it became all we could think about. When, finally, we spotted a restaurant, a quick check of the menu revealed no clams. Silently, with empty stomachs still, we slipped back into the restaurant-less night. It's the sort of pursuit I often find myself on. Let me tell you a story.

This particular quest began, as do most of my adventures, with a craving. I woke one morning with a desperate desire to have Korean BBQ for dinner. In Sydney this is no challenge at all; there are several dozen Korean BBQ places within a few kilometers of my apartment. This time, however, I decided to cook at home. I mentally prepared a shopping list – rice, beef, chicken, soy, garlic, lettuce, spices, and whatnot – and headed into Chinatown.

The sheer size of the Asian population in Sydney makes purchasing any Asian foodstuffs a very simple task; one need only to go into the CBD and choose from the vast variety of shopping options. Which is what I did. I was home, beef marinading, before midday.

When dinner time rolled around and I started cooking, I began to assemble the finished meal in my mind. Beef and chicken cooked at the table, lettuce leaves to wrap them in, bowl of sticky rice on the side, and a big bowl of OH MY GOD I FORGOT THE KIMCHI.

Kimchi, for those of you who don't know, is a Korean pickle. The most popular version is made from cabbage, which is mixed with flavorings and allowed to ferment. The name, kimchi can refer to a host of varieties and dishes, but for the most part, outside of Korea, when you order kimchi, you'll get some brined and fermented cabbage that has been flavored with chili, garlic, onion, shallots, and ginger. Famously, the traditional method of home production was to bury large earthenware jars filled with kimchi so that it could slowly ferment over great periods of time. It is squeaky when bitten, spicy, sour, salty, and delicious. When eating at Korean restaurants I order serve after serve, sometimes consuming more pickled cabbage than I do everything else combined.

Only, for my home meal. I had no kimchi. Begin insanity. With rice already on the stove I dashed out of my apartment and ran up to the local supermarket, telling myself on the way that kimchi was common enough in this city that I should be able to pick it up anywhere. Wrong. No luck at the supermarket. Quickstep it down to the next-closest supermarket, one city suburb over, for the same result. Wait! What about my local Korean restaurant; they'd sell me enough to get by. Backtrack a bit into my own neighborhood only to discover a “CLOSED MONDAYS” sign. Aaaaa! Why does it have to be Monday? Now, technically, I've got someone at home making sure the rice doesn't burn, but by now I've exhausted the majority of my shopping options and the time I have before dinner is rapidly running out.

In desperation I do something of a mini-canvass of all the local shops. I must have ducked in and out of two dozen establishments: little corner shops, convenience stores, any place that stocked as much as a bag of potato chips. I had no luck at all. Long after I had given up and headed for home, I walked past a dingy little shop not a block from my house which I had never patronized before. The sign read “Mixed Business” and what I could see through the open front door was a collection of tinned foods, household necessities, postcards, and cheap tourist merchandise. I stepped in, took a half second look and turned to go, when the woman behind the register, whom I picked as Chinese, asked “What you rook for?”

“Uh, kimchi?”

She looked at me, then at the door, and then squinted at me in silence. After a moment of this study she asked, slowly and deliberately, with more than a little disbelief in her voice: “You rike-a the kimchi?”

When I answered in the affirmative, the shop keeper, who was, it turns out, Korean, slowly reached under her bench, always with an eye on me, and produced a gigantic jar of kimchi. This she opened and from it filled a small container for me. I thanked her, embarrassed without knowing why, paid, and took my kimchi.

I left, feeling strangely like I'd just participated in a drug deal. I still really don't understand what was going on.

Luckily, I now know how to make my own kimchi. It's no last-minute thing; it needs at least a week to ferment. However, it keeps in the fridge forever and with a little planning I'll never find myself without again.

Kimchi

The method for kimchi is not unlike making sauerkraut. Salted cabbage is mixed with flavorings and allowed to ferment. The result is some of the tastiest kimchi I've ever eaten. I rike-a indeed.

½ head nappa cabbage (about 1k)
2 tbsp salt
water to dissolve

Cut cabbage into 3-4 cm chunks Dissolve the salt in a bit of water and toss this with the cabbage. Sit overnight in the brine. Rinse well.

2 heaped tbsp chili powder
2 tbsp water
1 large nob ginger, fine mince
2 spring onions, sliced
5 cloves garlic, peeled
1 white onion, peeled
1 nashi pear, cored

Mix together the chili powder and water. Into this mix the ginger and spring onion slices. In a blender, puree the garlic, onion, and nashi until smooth. You may need to add a touch of water to get everything moving in the blender, but add as little as possible.

Mix this onion blend into the chili mix and then toss this through the rinsed cabbage. Transfer to jars and stand in a dark, cool place with the lits slightly loosened (to allow the escape of fermentation gases) for a week. After one week, seal and transfer to the refrigerator. Your kimchi is ready and will keep for several weeks in the fridge.

Saucier

2011-06-21T10:00:00.005+10:00

In the film Apocalypse Now one of the main characters, a soldier in a team sent to find and kill the renegade soldier Kurtz is called Chef. The character is, in his civilian job, a chef from New Orleans. A saucier, to be precise. The incongruity of a chef who specializes in something as intricate and delicate as making sauces being sent on a killing mission is, at the very least, amusing. Our saucier, sadly, does not survive the film. (Why, by the way, does the chef always get killed in movies? Are we so expendable?) I actually don't find the idea of a cook hacking his way through the jungle that much of a stretch, quite a few of the guys I've worked with would be quite at home in a similar situation. Besides, a machete and a chef's knife seem pretty interchangeable to me. What I do find interesting is the idea that someone can specialize so much in my field that they only make sauces.

Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration. A saucier is responsible for not only the sauces in a kitchen, but for the majority of the cooking during service. How hard can making a few sauces be, you ask? Well in many fine dining establishments, every dish has it's own sauce, each of which is usually based on a stock of some sort. Each of those stocks has to be made by gently simmering bones (roasted or not) overnight in a giant pot, straining, skimming, and reducing the liquid slowly over the course of the next day. To this can be added wines or vegetables or meats or other condiments to create a great number of sauces. If the menu has fifteen savory items, it's no stretch that the saucier might have eight or ten different stocks to make (chicken, roast chicken, veal, white veal, lamb, pork, quail, venison, mushroom...). It's a lot of work. To put it another way: Escoffier, in his comprehensive Le Guide Culinaire, lists nearly 300 different sauces.

Here in Australia, the word sauce refers mainly to ketchup. Its been something of a source of confusion for me since moving here, with plenty of “Who's on first?” style conversations: “You want sauce with that?” “What kind of sauce?” “Sauce. You know, like tomato sauce.” “You mean pasta sauce?” “No. Sauce.” “What kind of sauce?”

Keeping with my stream-of-consciousness form of the past couple weeks, I've been thinking about a sauce, great with fish, which is made with ketchup. It's called bois boudran and is excellent with a piece of salmon.

I was mulling over what I might serve with my salmon and bois boudran when I remembered how I've always wanted to use spaghetti omelet, a Maltese comfort food, as a garnish. I posted about the dish in one of my first blog posts, when I was a but a blogling. It seems like a perfect fit with bois boudran, as my family generally pairs spaghetti omelet, or spaghetti frittata as it is called in Italy, with ketchup. Let's see if all three work together.

Crisp-Skin Salmon with Spaghetti Frittata,
Herb Salad, and Sauce Bois Boudran

Crisp-Skin Salmon
Ask your fish monger to sell you salmon with the scales removed. The skin, when cooked in the manner described below, is like fish crackling. This is one of the only times you will ever hear me tell you to cook anything in a cold pan; we're going to crisp up the skin by rendering some of the fat out, much like duck.

2 x 200g portions of salmon, skin on

Preheat your oven to 200ºC. Put a couple of tablespoons of oil into a cold, nonstick pan large enough to hold both pieces of fish. Season the fish liberally. Place the fish, skin side down in the oiled pan and then put the pan on medium heat. Cook, taking care not to disturb the fish, until the skin begins to crisp (about 3-4 minutes). Gently turn up a corner now and again to check the skin. Transfer the pan to the oven without flipping the fish. Bake for anywhere from 5-8 minutes. Salmon should be medium rare, and will feel firm with a slight give in the middle when ready. Remove from the oven, flip, gently prying the skin from the pan with a spatula if it has stuck, and remove from pan.

Serve immediately on spaghetti frittata with a herb salad and sauce bois boudran (all below).

Spaghetti Frittata

Traditionally, this dish includes cheese, but I've omitted it, as cheese and fish aren't really the best of friends. The result is essentially just fried noodles, really tasty fried noodles.

100g angelhair pasta, boiled and cooled
1 egg

Mix the cold pasta and egg together and season liberally. Heat a small fry pan on medium heat. When the pan is hot, add a touch of oil. Transfer half of the pasta mix to the pan, forming a nest, cook until browned, flip and cook again until browned and crisp and cooked through. Remove from the pan and drain on paper towels. Repeat with the other half of the pasta mix. Keep warm until ready to serve.

Herb Salad

tarragon leaves
chervil sprigs
parsley leaves

Mix a handful of the herbs together and dress with a touch of the bouis boudran (below).

Sauce Bois Boudrain

50ml safflower oil
25ml olive oil
1 Tbsp tarragon vinegar
2 Tbsp ketchup
½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 drop of tabasco
1 small shallot, fine dice
1 tsp chopped chervil
1 Tbsp chopped parsley
1 Tbsp chopped tarragon

Mix all ingredients. Taste and season.

Coming 'Round

2011-06-14T10:00:00.000+10:00

I reserve the right to change my mind. It is something, admittedly, that I do not do often; I am quite strong-willed. One might even say obstinate. The exception to this rule is, not surprisingly, food. In culinary matters, I try to keep a very open mind. So open, in fact, that I am willing to eat nearly anything, at least once, and there are not many foods which I don't like. To list a few in the "not" column: beetroot (which taste of sweet dirt), calves liver (pasty metal), and kidneys (hot urine). It bothers me greatly that, as a chef, I don't enjoy eating these things. I feel somewhat obligated to like all foods, and I make a continual effort to get my palate to come 'round by trying and retrying. I hope in this way to make the flavors familiar to the point where I might enjoy them. This is especially true for kidneys.

When working at an insanely busy French restaurant years ago, one of the dishes on my section was a rabbit and quail terrine. Amongst the many accoutrement were sautéed rabbit liver and kidneys. I cooked each serve to order, in a tiny fry pan meant for making individual blini, basting the offal in foaming butter with a cracked clove of garlic and a sprig of thyme. The aroma was maddening: rich, roasted, meaty. I carved each liver and kidney in half, reserving always a secret slice from the middle of each for myself - cook's treat. The livers I loved. I must have eaten 200 slices of kidney, each warm and dripping nut-brown garlic butter, and every one tasted like piss.

I haven't yet given up on kidneys, but it seems unlikely I'll be changing my mind any time soon. Luckily, this is not always the case. Take, for example, nimbekai uppinkai, a Southern Indian lemon and chili pickle. I first tasted this when eating at my favorite local Indian dive and did not at all like the intense, soapy flavor of the cooked lemons. Over time, however, I have reversed my opinion and now quite enjoy the bite of the pickle's tangy-hot-salty-sour combination. I make sure to ask for extra whenever I order.

I was inspired to try to make the pickle recently when a couple a friends (Thanks Ant and Nic) dropped off a bagful of home-grown lemons, about half of which looked to be meyer lemons perfect for this pickle.

Southern Indian Lemon and Chili Pickle

When I bought some Indian chili powder from a small spice shop near my house, the shopkeeper pointed at my box and said “That's expired.” When I turned to look for one with a more recent date, he called over my shoulder “They're all expired.” “What? All the chili powder?” “No,” broad, sweeping gesture, “the whole shelf.”

I bought it anyway.

6 small meyer lemons (500-600g)
50g granulated salt
75g sugar
2 Tbsp red chili powder
2 tsp turmeric powder
1/2 tsp fenugreek seeds
1 tsp black mustard seeds
1/4 tsp garam masala
½ tsp cumin seeds
Juice of 1 lemon

Wash and dry the lemons. Remove the stem and flower ends. Cut each lemon into 8 wedges and then each wedge into quarters, leaving bite-sized pieces of skin and flesh. Mix the salt, sugar, chili powder, and turmeric together and toss with the cut lemons. Set aside.

In a dry pan on low heat, gently toast the fenugreek seeds, mustard seeds, garam masala, and cumin seeds, until they are aromatic and color slightly but do not burn. Remove from heat and pulverize in a mortar and pestal or in a spice grinder. Add to the lemon mix. Transfer the lot to a small, non-reactive pot. Add the lemon juice and bring just to a simmer on low heat. Cook very gently, partially covered, stirring often, until nearly all the moisture is gone – about 4 hours. Transfer to a jar and cool.

Homonyms and Random Association

2011-06-07T10:00:00.002+10:00

I am, as I might have mentioned before, quite fascinated with the process in which ideas evolve. I've written in the past about the manner in which slow-burn thoughts combined with a lifetime's gathering of knowledge, can suddenly explode, (Eureka!), into the consciousness. In contrast, most of my my ideas are not the result of amassed knowledge and long mulling. Neither are the majority sudden bursts of inspiration. Rather, my ideas often come to me when my mind is free and wandering, leaving a random association trail of breadcrumbs which I can only sometimes retrace. For example, once when slow-roasting a batch of quince, I was thinking about the medieval nature of the fruit, which has fallen, for the most part, out of favor. This, in turn got me thinking about other foods no longer in popular use, and I was reminded of bay leaves. We still use bay, obviously, but it was once a common flavoring in desserts, only dropping out of use when vanilla became widely available. So I wondered, looking at my quince, what bay would taste like alongside. Quince tatin with bay leaf ice cream is sensational.

This week's post, (not about quince, by the way) came to me in something of an oblique, random association manner: via a joke I've been perpetuating. I've been flogging, ridiculously, at work the declaration that the next time I travel to the States, I want to do so in hunting season. Not that I am much of a hunter, really, but I hope, as my story goes, to happen across an old friend with a Moose-hunting license, something of a sought-after and limited commodity in my home state of Wyoming. My co-workers have started referring to me as “The Moose Hunter.” Now, I have nothing in particular either against living moose nor in favor of moose meat, which, incidentally, I have eaten. It's just that I'd really like, just once in my life, to whiz up some raw moose meat with some eggs and cream, crafting (forgive me) a moose mousse.

This potential menu item and, shall we call it, gastro-pun, reminds me of a similar such example I read once in an Australian cookbook. The chef (and I can't remember who, sorry) paired marron, a freshwater crayfish native to Western Australia, with chestnuts. Sure, the two might have tasted great together, but I can't shake the feeling that the chef was simply playing on the fact that the French word for chestnuts is “marron.” Marron et marron. Cute.

It's this sort of random association that brought me 'round to the idea of combining the two and making a marron mousse. It has none of the pun-factor, but manages to maintain a bit of the alliteration. I'm serving it up tucked inside some ravioli with a champagne and lemon beurre blanc, and chervil. Yum.

While we're free associating... a story: I was working at a fine dining restaurant owned and run by a volatile English chef; we'll call him David. David was the sort of angry, insult-flinging, eyes bulging, screaming psychopath who would probably make great T.V. viewing (think Gordon Ramsay on a bad day), but isn't so great to work under. Not to say that David was a bad boss. Quite the opposite, actually. We all had immense respect for him as a chef – he'd done his time in Europe, and in Australia, working under some of the best chefs in the world. On top of this, he was a genuinely nice guy, outside of service times, who cared for all of his employees, beyond what might be reasonably expected (when I gave my notice, for example, he gave me in return a list of phone numbers of friends with restaurants who might be looking for kitchen staff). It's jut that once service started, so to did the screaming.

David has the highest of standards in the kitchen. This means that when you made a mistake, even a tiny, minuscule misstep – burn a single carrot fondant in a batch of 40 – falling on your chef's knife, samurai-style often seemed like a more attractive option than the absolute bollocking you were sure to face at the hands of David.

One Friday afternoon during staff meal at David's restaurant, I was flipping through a copy of a national Australian food magazine and happened across a tiny column called “Chef's Confessions” or something akin. Usually, the “confession” is that the chef in question eats bowls of cereal for dinner in lieu of cooking, or other boring non-revelations. This month, however, the confession was by a Sydney chef admitting to a kitchen crime at least five years old. “Darren,” admitted that while working under David at a now defunct restaurant, that he'd spilled a jug of blue sports drink over a tray of several serves of marron ravioli in the cool room, ruining the lot. He'd told David that the ravs had oxidized, changing color, and had to be thrown out. David, angry but not incensed, believed, and Darren more or less got away with it.

I had a good chuckle at the story and decided to point it out to my chef, David, who was mentioned by name. I watched his face, as he read, change from amusement to bemusement to anger to rage. He picked up his phone, punched in some numbers and, when Darren answered, launched a tirade, half a decade late, with the most withering barrage of expletives and accusations I have ever heard. There is no escape.

Marron Ravioli with a Champagne Beurre Blanc and Chervil

I know this is fresh pasta two weeks in a row, but once you've got the ol' machine out, you might as well use it a few times. Look to last week's post for a pasta method and recipe. If you can't get marron, prawns, yabbies (crayfish), or lobster will do just fine. Look to last week's post for a pasta recipe and method. A double batch should be ample for this recipe, which will feed 4 as a moderate main. Also, I know I called this a “marron mousse” earlier, but that is a lie. It is a fish mousse filled with chunks of marron. Marron is nearly as expensive as lobster, I can't afford to make a real marron mousse.

4 large live marron (about 600g total)
250g white fish (something cheap and boneless)
200ml cream
1 egg + 1 white
1 tbsp chopped chervil
grated zest of one lemon

1 double batch of pasta
25 small chervil sprigs, plus 15 for garnish

200 ml champagne
400 g butter, 1 cm dice, cold
juice of half a lemon

Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil. Stun the marron by placing them in the freezer for half an hour before cooking. Plunge them into the boiling water and cook for 2 minutes. This will not be enough time to cook them through, but it will allow you to extract the tail and claw meat more or less intact. Remove them from the water and transfer to a bowl of ice, covering them in the ice. Cool.

Pull the tail from the body of the marron. Using scissors, cut through the soft part of the shell on the underside of the tail and then peel off the shell. You should have a single piece of marron meat that will probably be a bit raw in the middle. Slice the tails into medallions about ½cm thick.

Remove the claws at the first joint. Crack and pick any meat you can from the joints below the claws. As carefully as you can, crack the shell around the claw (I use the back of a knife) forming a circle around the hemisphere, so that you can break away the bottom half of the shell, exposing the claw meat while leaving the claw tips in place. This take a bit of practice, and if it goes poorly, pick the meat and put it in with the tail meat. Otherwise, save the shelled claws for a garnish.

Meanwhile, make the mousse. Cut the fish flesh into chunks and place it in a food processor with the egg and the extra white. Blitz until smooth. With the processor running slowly add just enough of the cream to make the mix light and loose, without being runny. You might use all the cream, but it is unlikely. Stop the processor to avoid over-working the cream. Transfer to a bowl and, using a spatula, mix in the chopped chervil, lemon zest, a generous pinch of salt and grind of pepper. Place a dollop on a sheet of clingfilm tie into a little parcel and drop into a simmering pot of water for 3 or 4 minutes. Taste the cooked mousse and adjust seasoning as needed. Fold the prepared marron meat into the mousse and refrigerate.

Cut your rolled out pasta into disks using a 8cm ring cutter. You'll need more than 50 disks to make 4 serves of 5 ravs each while allowing for inevitable breakages. Keep the disks covered with an ever-so-slightly damp cloth wile you work.

Lay five of the disks out on a board or the bench and spoon a heaping teaspoon of mousse into the centre. Top this with one of the picked chervil sprigs. Brush the exposed edges of pasta with water and press a second disk onto the top of each, pinching together the two to form a tight seal. Lay the ravioli in a single layer on a sheet of baking paper.

Repeat this process, making 5 ravs at a time, until all the mix is used up and you've got about 28-30 ravioli.

Prepare and ice bath. Bring a large pot of heavily salted water to the boil. Drop in half of the ravioli and cook for 4 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer to the ice bath. Repeat with the second half of the ravs. Remove all the ravioli from the ice bath when cold. Drain, toss lightly with oil, and refrigerate until ready to serve.

Just prior to serving, make the beurre blanc. Bring the champagne, a pinch of salt, and a grind of pepper to a simmer in a small pot on medium heat and reduce to 1/3 of its original volume. Reduce the heat to low. Whisking constantly, add a few cubes of butter at a time, waiting until one lot is incorporated to add the next. When all of the butter has been added, remove the pot from the heat and add the lemon juice. Taste and adjust the seasoning. Drop the reserved claws into the hot beurre blanc to rewarm.

Meanwhile, boil a large pot of water and drop the ravioli in to rewarm, for about one minute. Remove from the pot. Arrange in 4 shallow bowls, drizzle the beurre blanc over the top, garnish with the remaining parsley sprigs and the reserved claw meat. Finish with a crack of pepper and serve.

Everything Old is New Again

2011-05-31T10:00:00.001+10:00

There is much focus, in the culinary world, on the creation of new flavor combinations. Much stock (pun intended) is put in the ability of a chef to show his prowess through novel combinations of common ingredients. It's the sort of drive that leads to the combination of oysters and licorice, coffee and pork. Originality is key. Jordi Butrón, research-cook at the experimental center of the Adrià brothers (of elBulli fame) said in a recent article:

The key thing now for a cook is to develop a library of flavors that you can recall. If I say to you, ‘Apple and cinnamon,’ you would click in immediately. ‘Yes, apple! Yes, cinnamon!’ The library of your mind contains that. But what if I say ‘Apple, asafetida’? Nothing! You have nothing stored there. Now, this is a benefit to the chef, because if I do apple and cinnamon and you don’t like it you think there’s something wrong with me, but if I do apple and asafetida and you don’t like it there’s something wrong with you.

It's tempting to write this off as a modern phenomenon, this idea that originality supersedes merit and experience, but as Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously wrote in 1825: "The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity, than the discovery of a new star." This is not Savarin trying on hyperbole; he really believed. The elevation of novel foods is not new.

I do not agree, however, with the general sentiment at all. There is, admittedly, a challenge in pairing together ingredients in combinations never before seen, all while, hopefully, making them taste good. I've suffered through many such attempts at some of the best restaurants in Sydney. A few stand outs in the “failure” column: avocado blancmange, sweet corn ice cream (served as a palate cleanser), and crab roe chawanmushi. Other combinations have been much more pleasant, a few were quite good. The fact remains, however, that the focus here is on novelty above all else, which is something I can't quite swallow.

The real challenge in cookery is re-evaluating well known flavor combinations. Making old friendships fresh again. As Butrón points out, when you botch a classical paring everyone knows it. It's a brave chef who is willing to trot out a collection of old favorites in a new way, but this, more than the invention of new flavors, is the viscera of culinary change.

By way of comparison, ages ago, a creative writing instructor told me that the success of any writing endeavor depends on the ability of the artist to use “fresh, usual words.” Not exotic, thesaurus words. Normal, everyday language. The kitchen should be no different: normal, everyday flavors in fresh ways.

I've been promising to post about making fresh pasta for some time here at OHC. This week I'm both making pasta and re-thinking the classic combination of rocket, feta and pumpkin. Its a trio of flavors I've eaten in countless salads. The salty feta contrasts with the sweet, roasted pumpkin, while the rocket adds a peppery counterpoint. I'm putting all three together in a lasagna.

Feta, Pumpkin, and Rocket Lasagna

As per usual, I'll break this down into parts. This will make a 20cm x 20cm lasagna, enough to serve 4 generously.

Pasta

Right, you'll need a pasta machine for this one. If you don't own one, ask around. You'll be surprised how many people have one lurking, unused in the recesses of their cupboards.

250g flour
2 eggs
1 yolk

Place the flour on a large board and make a well in the center. Crack the eggs into the well. Using a fork, gradually work in the flour until it forms a dough. Continue working in the flour with your hands until most of it is incorporated and a stiff, dry dough forms. (Alternately, you can use a food processor: start the processor with the flour in and add the eggs while it is running. Process until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs and just starts to come together. Turn on to a board and knead together.)

Knead your dough on a floured board for 5-10 minutes, until it is elastic and smooth. It should be quite stiff. Wrap it in cling film and rest it (and your arms) for 30 minutes.

To roll out your pasta, flatten the dough by hand as much as possible and run it through the largest setting on your pasta machine three times. Drop the settings down a notch, and run the dough through three times again. The overall goal is to work the dough and stretch it so that when you cook your pasta it is firm. Under-worked pasta is soft and soggy.

Continue tightening the settings on your pasta machine one notch at a time, running the dough through a few times on each setting, until you get to about the second or third finest setting (I find the finest setting to be too thin). Cover the pasta sheets with a slightly damp (not at all wet) cloth and refrigerate.

Feta Béchamel

This is a simply a classic white sauce with feta melted into it. The result is deliciously tangy and rich.

25g flour
25g butter
400ml milk, heated to near boiling
150g feta, crumbled

Melt the butter in a small pot on medium heat. Add the flour, stir to combine and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture just begins to color and becomes foamy. Add the hot milk, whisking constantly and cook until the mixture thickens and starts to bubble. Add the feta and stir until incorporated. Remove from the heat. Taste and adjust seasoning. Don't allow the béchamel to cool below room temperature, or it becomes difficult to work with.

Roast Pumpkin

I was tempted to call this a purée, but it is more of a mash, as the roasted pumpkin gets no more than a cursory mush with a spoon so that it is easy to spread.

600g peeled and seeded pumpkin, butternut or similar variety

Preheat your oven to 180ºC. Cut the pumpkin into 1cm thick wedges. Lightly season the pumpkin and arrange in a single layer on a baking paper-lined tray. Bake until soft and lightly colored – about 20 minutes. Remove from oven, cool, and mash slightly with the back of a spoon.

Rocket

Most pasta recipes which call for leafy greens suggest blanching as the preparation method. Blanching works just fine, but adds unneeded moisture and, as anyone out there who has blanched a handful of spinach and then squeezed it dry can attest, leaves you with something like 0.1% of your initial volume. I use a different method: sautéing. Wilting greens in a pan with a touch of oil cooks them without adding water, and retains a bit more of their volume, so you don't need to buy a market box or rocket to end up with enough for 4 serves.

500g rocket
lemon

Heat a pan on medium heat and add a tablespoon of oil. Working in batches, fill the pan with leaves and toss and stir until they have wilted. Add a squeeze of lemon, season, and remove from the pan. Drain on a towel. Chop roughly and squeeze out any excess moisture.

Feta, Pumpkin, and Rocket Lasagna

Preheat your oven to 180ºC. Line the bottom of a 20cm square baking dish with baking paper. Cut your pasta sheets to cover the bottom. Top this with a layer of pumpkin purée. Add a second layer of pasta and top this with first béchamel and then a sprinkling of rocket. Repeat this layering: pasta, pumpkin, pasta, béchamel and rocket, pasta. Top the last layer of pasta with a layer of béchamel, and sprinkle, if you like, with a bit of additional feta or some parmesan.

Bake, uncovered, for about half an hour. Remove from the oven, cool slightly, and serve immediately.

Special Treats

2011-05-24T10:00:00.001+10:00

Lamb is not a meat I grew up eating. It's not commonly consumed in the States, as least not as commonly as is beef. In fact, as far as I can remember the first time I ate lamb was when I met my Australian girlfriend. She's never said as much, but I'm certain feeding me lamb was a test, and if I'd failed, she'd not have married me. Australians, you see love lamb, in fact they love it on a scale second only to New Zealanders. Americans do not. By way of comparison, Australians eat about 13.5 kilos of lamb per capita each year, while Americans eat about 0.3 kilos per capita.

Lamb in America expensive. Part of the reason for this can be attributed to the powerful cattle lobby in the States. They successfully managed to limit subsides and land access to sheep ranchers, thus keeping the price of lamb and mutton hight. This high price eventually creates something of a negative feedback loop: hight price means low popularity, low popularity means low demand, low demand means lower supply, lower supply means higher prices, higher prices mean lower demand.

Lamb in Oz was once cheep. When I moved to Sydney the market price for a lamb was somewhere below $100 for a whole animal. Now, however, eight years later, the price is double that: a result of years of drought followed by catastrophic flooding that has seen sheep numbers in Oz greatly reduced. A look beyond the last decade shows sheep numbers have been declining more or less steadily for at least the past 30 years. In the early '90's there were nearly 140 million head. By 2010, according to the Australian Bureau of Statics, that number fell to only 68 million, the smallest number since 1905. In that same 20-year period, the human population in Oz increased by almost 5 million. Fewer sheep, more people, higher prices.

So, the price of lamb is up. Way up. So far up I can't really afford to serve it in the restaurant, not at a price that would make money. Lamb has become, in Australia, a luxury food of sorts. Where it was once served at home two or three times a week, roast lamb is likely now to be reserved for special occasions. Which is what lamb once was exclusively: a special occasion food. Nearly every country in Europe has a tradition of a spring lamb feast, often around Easter. There was a long expanse of time when this might have been the only lamb one could afford from the flock annually, the rest of the year was punctuated by the occasion feed of mutton.

The the history of sheep eating in Oz is as long as European settlement. A number of sheep – anywhere from 44-70, depending on the source – were brought to Australia on the First Fleet. The morning of February 7th , just one day after the crew and convicts disembarked, Governor Phillip and his officers dined on a lunch of cold, boiled mutton, which, incidentally, as Robert Hughes relates in his history of Australian settlement The Fatal Shore “was completely crawling with maggots, although the sheep had only been butchered the night before.” The flies, if you've never been to Australia, are like nowhere else on earth.

It is with all of this in mind (the bits about tradition and celebration and lamb being a treat, not the flyblown meat part), that brought be to the subject of this week's post. This is what I would consider the ultimate roast lamb meal. It's the perfect combination of comfort food and special treat. It is also the perfect celebration meal for OHC's third birthday, which passed a week or two ago. Just the sort of complicated cooking project I love.

Rare Roast Lamb Rack and Pot Roasted Leg
with Caramelized Carrot Puree, and Potatoes Two Ways

I'm going to break this down bit by bit, more or less in the order you should prepare things, with an aim to have everything ready before you roast the rack. We'll meet at the end and assemble the final dish. This should serve 4 people.

Pot Roasted Leg of Lamb

You do not need a whole leg of lamb for this, I just like the sound of “leg” in the dish description. Any braising cut, actually – shoulder, shank – would do fine. The method below would work for any of those cuts. I used a small cut from the lower portion of a lamb leg.

500g (800+g if the bone is in) braising lamb cut
1 carrot, peeled, cut into large chunks
1 stick celery, cut into large chunks
1 brown onion, peeled, quartered
1 clove garlic, whole
500 ml chicken stock, optional

Heat a medium, heavy-bottomed pot on medium-high heat. Add a tablespoon or two of cooking oil, liberally season the lamb on all sides, and brown in the pot, turning to brown all sides evenly. Remove from the pot. Reduce the heat to medium and add the vegetables. Cook, stirring frequently, until they begin to color and smell roasted and sweet. Add the stock to the pot with the veggies and return the lamb. Bring to a simmer and reduce the heat to low. Cover with a lid and cook, with the liquid just ticking, for 2-3 hours. Until the meat is tender and nearly, but not quite, falling off the bone. Remove from the heat and cool to room temperature in the cooking liquor.

When cool, strain the liquor, keeping the lamb, but discarding the cook veggies (they've given up their flavor). Bring the liquid to a simmer and reduce by half, until it becomes a bit sticky but not overly salty. Strain again and reserve.

Caramelized Carrot Purée

I love this purée. No one ever believes me when I tell them that the only ingredients are carrots, a bit of butter and salt. It's the long, slow cooking that draws out and then concentrates all the natural sweetness in the carrots. It takes time to do it right, but the result is amazing.

4 large carrots, peeled
2 tbsp butter
salt

Slice the carrots into rings, as thinly as possible. I suggest using a mandolin or the slicing blade on a food processor. Heat a heavy based pan on medium heat. Add the butter and, when it starts to foam, add the carrots and a pinch of salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, scraping the bottom to prevent sticking, for 1-2 hours. The carrots will break up, dry out considerably, and deepen in color. When the mixture is deep orange and richly caramely sweet, transfer to a mouli (ricer) or food processor and purée. It is possible to make this absolutely smooth, but not necessary; I leave a bit of texture in mine. Adjust seasoning.

Mashed Potatoes

I make mash, as I have said before, differently every time I make it. This is because I am usually looking for the mash to play a different role in each dish I make – silky and creamy, fluffy and light, firm and structural. And that's what I was going for here – structural, as I needed a mash that would help hold up the dish, match the carrot purée in texture, and soak up all the delicious lamb juices and sauce without becoming soupy. The problem with all of this theory is that it is difficult to give accurate measurements, as different potatoes will require varying amounts of cram ant butter to be both tasty and firm. Use this as a rough guide.

500 g potatoes, peeled and quartered
100ml cream
30g butter

Bring the cream and butter just to a simmer together. Remove from heat and keep warm. Boil the potatoes until just cooked through – you'll be able to pierce them with a knife or skewer with little resistance. Drain and process through a mouli (ricer). Add about half of the cream mixture to the potatoes and mix until combined. Season, and add enough more of the cream mixture to make the mash moist but not at all slack.

Crisp Potatoes

These are not an every day food. They are bits of potatoes which are first boiled and then crisped up in a pan in a bit of butter. They are creamy on the inside and crisp and butter on the out. I cut potatoes into 6ths and then turn them a bit (trimming off the angular edged with a paring knife). You can skip the trimming step and just use wedges.

3 potatoes peeled, cut into wedges, turned if you like
2-3 tbsp butter

Bring the potatoes to a boil and reduce to a gentle simmer. Cook until just soft through. Gently drain, taking care not to break the potatoes up. Heat a frying pan on medium heat. Add 2 tbsp of the butter. When it foams, add the potatoes (don't overcrowd the pan, work in batches if necessary). Brown the potatoes, turning as needed, in the foaming butter. Keep the butter foaming by adjusting the heat – reduce the heat if it stops foaming and begins to brown, increase the heat if it both stops foaming and sizzling. Butter, in fact, is the perfect cooking medium, it lets you know when it is too hot or too cold by ceasing to foam. You can also keep the temperature down by adding more cold butter as you go. Remove the finished potatoes from the pan with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels.

Roast Lamb Rack

For the love of god if you are going to fork out for a whole rack of lamb, insist that it has all of the fat on it. As the meat roasts, the fat melts and bastes the lamb, keeping it deliciously moist. Stop being so afraid of fat. It's delicious.

8-point rack of lamb

Preheat your oven to 230ºC. Score the fat on the lamb rack in a criss-cross pattern. Heat a heavy-bottomed, oven-safe pan on high heat. Season the lamb liberally on all sides. Add a touch of oil to the pan and, when that begins to smoke, add the lamb, fat side down. Sear until the fat begins to color, flip so that the fat side is up, and transfer directly to the oven. Cook for 5 minutes and then reduce the oven temperature to 180ºC. Roast for 20 minutes. Remove from the oven and rest in a warm place for at least 5 minutes. The meat will be perfectly rare to medium-rare.

Bringing it All Together

Rewarm the pot-roasted lamb in the reduced cooking stock on low heat. Make sure the carrot purée, the mash, and crisp potatoes are hot.

Arrange a large spoonful of the carrot purée and an equal-sized spoonful mash in the middle of the plate. Carve a few slices of roasted lamb and place on top. Place a few of the crisp potatoes around. Carve the rested rack into individual cutlets and cross two over the slices of roasted lamb. Drizzle with the warm reduced lamb stock. Celebrate.

On Forgetfulness

2011-05-17T11:31:00.000+10:00

There is something of a joke in my household that it's not possible to host a dinner party without forgetting to serve some small item of food or other at least once in the course of the night. Inevitably, after all your guests have gone home and the dishes are washed and the last of the wine is drunk and you are drunk as well, you open the fridge to find the carefully picked chervil sprigs which were meant to finish your grilled snapper course. I say it's a running joke at home because it happens every single time we have people over. Once, as our last guests walked out the door, my wife asked, eyebrow raised: “How did you enjoy the warm roast vegetable salad?” It was still in the oven, where I'd left it in a warmth holding pattern. This sort of forgetfulness isn't limited to home.

In fact, there are several recognized species of kitchen mental vagueness, one of which is the professional equivalent of my home malady. One of my head chefs broadly refused to include little finishing garnishes like crisp sage or fried eshallots, as he consistently failed to put them on the finished dish. At another establishment, we once had a fixed-menu, six-course dinner for 100 customers. Among many other responsibilities I had to take care of the onion rings for the beef course, two per serve. I had to cut 200 rings, plus a few extra in case of breakages, soak them in milk, flour them, batter them in a yeasted beer batter, and blanch them, six-at-a-time, in a tiny benchtop fryer, as the restaurant had no commercial fryer. During service someone else was to re-fry them at a higher temperature and serve them. Preparing the rings took hours. At the end of service, whilst packing down, I found tray after tray of blanched onion rings in the cool room. “Must have forgot those,” responded Matt when I presented him a tray or two in silent indignation. “Feed them to staff.”

Another such specimen of chef forgetfulness is related to our recipes. Overconfidence is endemic in professional cookery, and this flows over into the way we treat the recording of work methods. When a given dish is on the menu, all of it's components have to be prepared several times a week, and they have to be exactly the same every time. This sort of forced repetition, instead of encouraging careful recording, fosters a sense of deep knowing, as in: “I've made this pommes dauphinoise a million times, I don't need to write the method down.” Two years later, when it comes up as a possible menu item again, the recipe you find you eventually jotted down is more of a shopping list, full of cryptic abbreviation like “bppcns” and instructions such as “cook till done.” The worst example in my collection are lists of numbers followed each by a single letter; ingredient weights followed by the first letter of the item to be weighed. No method. No oven temperature or times. If I've had the foresight to include a title, a name of what the cypher represents, I have a chance, but I usually fail to include even this clue.

My favorite of the widely recognized kitchen forgetful moments is what I've always referred to as Cool Room Amnesia. It goes something like this: you stride confidently to the cool room, step inside, and then spend thirty seconds looking around at the shelves blankly, trying in vain to remember what in god's name brought you here in the first place. The only cure, really, is to admit temporary dementia and head back to you section for a good look at your workspace, which always reminds you of what send you walking in the first place. It happens to the most focused of chefs and is a result, I think, of knowing that you next task requires your body to be in one place or another and you feet automatically taking you there, and is not limited solely to the cool room. I often find myself standing in a corner of the kitchen, wondering silently what I am meant to be doing, or how I got there at all.

Which, incidentally, is exactly what I was thinking the other day when I found a lid-dented, dust-covered jar of brandied kumquats in the back of my pantry, buried beneath jars of chutney from summers past. “How,” I muttered aloud, did you get here?”

It turns out that I put them there, a couple years ago thinking I'd find a good use for them someday. I went flipping through my recipe folder, looking for some clue as to my intention or even when I produced them and found an equally dusty and dented, folded little scrap of a former docket upon which I'd scribbled the word “kumquat” along with some numbers, a few letters and dots, and an arrow or two. Great work there, Jerad.

I also forgot to mention last week that OHC is celebrating it's third birthday. I'll cook something celebratory for next week's post.

Brandied Kumquat and Grand Marnier Ganache Petit Fours

This is precisely the sort of tiny food item I would forget to serve at the end of a meal with coffees. Try not to do the same.

Brandied Kumquats

As I mentioned above, my recipe for these is a bit vague, but I'm sure this will produce a delicious result. There are nor real quantities here, just relative amounts.

salt
kumquats
sugar
cinnamon stick
bay leaves
brandy

Dissolve about 1 tbsp salt in a litre of water and add the kumquats. Soak overnight. Drain and rinse. This step removes some of the bitterness from the fruit.

Fill a jar just large enough to fit the kumquats ¼ of sugar. Add the rinsed fruit, a cinnamon stick or two, and a couple bay leaves. Close the jar and tip a few times to coat the fruit in sugar. Add enough brandy to fill the jar. Seal and store for at least a month. Or, alternatively, completely forget about the kumquats for years. (Remind me to tell you how long I've had cherries in brandy sitting around....)

Remove the kumquats from the brandy, cut in half horizontally and remove any seeds and pith inside, creating tiny little cups.

125 ml water
125g sugar

Combine the sugar and water together in a small pot and bring to a simmer. Add the kumquat halves and simmer gently for about 20 minutes. This softens the skins a bit and gives them a translucent appearance. Remove from the heat and allow to cool to room temperature in the sugar syrup.

Remove the kumquat halves from the syrup and drain. Press them gently onto a sheet of baking paper, flattening the end so that they sit open side up. Pipe full of grand marnier ganache. Refrigerate until serving.

Grand Marnier Ganache

Calling this “Grand Marnier Ganache” is a bit of what we in the profession call “menu poetry” which is to say “a lie.” I used a couple tablespoons of the brandy in which the kumquats were preserved to flavor my ganache. The liquor tastes surprisingly like Grand Marnier.

50 good quality dark chocolate
50 ml cream
2 tbsp kumquat brandy

Chop the chocolate into small pieces and place in a small bowl. Heat the cream on medium heat until almost, but not quite, boiling. Add the hot cream to the chocolate in the bowl and stir until the chocolate has melted and the mixture is well combined. Add the brandy and stir again. Refrigerate until cold – the mixture should be firm but soft enough to pipe.

If you find the mix too bitter (I quite like bitter chocolate) you can soften it a bit by adding a tablespoon of the sugar syrup that the kumquats were cooked in. Be careful, however not to add too much, as this will prevent your ganache from setting up enough.

On Autumn Leaves

2011-05-10T12:59:00.000+10:00

I've just returned from a morning excursion to the local park after completing a mission to gather autumn leaves and other such paraphernalia for a craft project of my eldest son's. We'll be using the bits and pieces we collected as stamps, to make leaf-prints and the like. Autumn here in Sydney has only just started to really announce itself visually; the trees which line most of the city streets of my city (plane trees, for those keeping track) have finally acquiesced to the tilt of the Earth on its axis and now present a confusion of green and flame and red and purple and olive and gold and orange and more. The effect is best at a distance, as each leaf is more or less monochrome and is only truly spectacular when viewed as part of the whole. It's chilly, nearly cold, at least by Sydney standards, and red noses and dead leaves have me thinking of my childhood in Wyoming, where autumn creeps in only about six weeks after summer starts.

It's a harsh existence, life in the high altitude deserts of southwestern Wyoming. The place is completely geographically and culturally isolated, the wind blows incessantly until it becomes a part of your very existence (No one in Wyoming packs a picnic without considering what they are going to use to keep everything from blowing away.), winter accounts for at least half the year, tumbleweed is the dominate wildlife species, dust is the major form of precipitation, and drinking and shooting are (is) the dominate recreational activities. Oh, and the whole state – and it's one of the big ones – is an absolute culinary wasteland.

There is nothing interesting or exotic about the foods on offer in my home town. I remember a high school classmate of mine thinking it was odd that I ate eggplant. In general the only foods available at local restaurants are American Diner fare, steaks, steaks, or steaks. The only “foreign” food is Mexican, though that's not even Mexican, but Tex-Mex – a particular brand of Americanized Mexican food which bears little resemblance to th real thing. It's the sort where rice and beans come with everything, completely smothered by a raft of molten cheese. Want Thai? Indian? French, for the love of god? Not a chance. You can get Chinese, if you don't mind eating something devoid of authenticity, flavor, and interest. Everything is soooo glossy.

This is not to say that I didn't enjoy my meals when I was growing up. I remember quite looking forward to dinner most nights and ate at least as well as the average American kid. There was nothing spectacular, really, but it was all tasty enough. One of my favorite meal memories from my childhood is of the simplest meals. It was another autumn morning, many years ago, spent trodding on leaves – aspen this time – with my father, preparing the back yard for the imminent winter. We took a break from the cold for lunch: soup and sandwiches. More precisely, tomato soup from a can and grilled cheese sandwiches. I was just short of a teenager and ate accordingly; I kept my poor Dad standing at the stove, spatula in hand, churning out sandwiches in an attempt to keep up with my appetite. While I can admit that the glow of memory tends to exaggerate, a conservative estimate would say I consumed half a dozen sandwiches between bowls of soup.

The memory is a happy one. Timely as well, as my two boys will be wanting lunch shortly. For them, it's a tomato soup and grilled cheese. For Daddy, the same, though an adult version:

Roast Tomato, Garlic, Chili, and Chive Soup
with a Toasted Sourdough and Gruyère Sandwich

I am not the first person to try and “fancy up” this classic lunch combo. One of my favorite versions is Thomas Keller's in the French Laundry Cookbook: a consommé and a dainty little sandwich. Mine is no where near as elaborate. In fact, it is one of the easiest soups you can make. Most of the cooking is done in the oven, with a short warm in the pan to finish the meal. The result is a creamy-textured soup with a smoky-chili bite. This should make two generous bowls.

1 k tomatoes
2 cloves garlic, not peeled
1 long red chili
1 eshallot, not peeled, cut in half
1 Tbsp tomato paste
2 Tbsp cream
2 tsp chopped chives

Preheat your oven to 180ºC. Place the tomatoes, garlic, chili, and eshallot (cut surface down) onto a tray lined with baking paper. Roast until the tomatoes are soft and have split, and the garlic is soft. Try not to let the skins of anything color up too much, as this will leave little black flecks in your soup (not the end of the world; a presentation issue really). Cool slightly.

Peel the garlic and the eshallot and then transfer all the coked ingredients to a blender and process until very smooth. Transfer to a small pot and place on medium heat. When the soup comes to a simmer, stir in the tomato paste, mixing well. Simmer for a moment or two more. Taste and season. Stir in the cream and serve, garnishing with the chopped chives (and a grilled cheese sandwich!).

One note: When adding he chili to the blender, start with the bottom half, keeping the top aside. Blend, taste for heat and add more if you like. Remember that the seeds (mostly in the top half) will be hotter than the rest of the chili, so either discard them or use them sparingly. You want a soup that has a bit of chili warmth, not a curry.

Toasted Sandwich

2 slices good quality sourdough, buttered
2 slices Gruyère or other similar swiss-style cheese

The secret to a good toasted sandwich is low, even heat. Stretching out the cooking time allows the cheese in the middle time to melt and the bread to go deeply golden without burning. Resist the urge to ramp up the heat, you have to gently coax this sandwich along. I have a café-style sandwich press which I swear by. It's my favorite kitchen appliance – not only is it great for sandwiches (always the perfect temperature), but it makes great croûtons and cheese crisps and quesadillas and more. I recommend one.

Assemble the sandwich with lots of cracked pepper in the middle and cook it gently in a frypan on low heat, turning only once, until the cheese is molten and the bread crisp and golden. Serve immediately.

A Million Free Eggs

2011-05-03T12:27:00.000+10:00

I've mentioned, from time to time, the enormous affect that fundamental necessity has on the foods people consume. People eat, obviously, the foods which are generally available. More precisely, we tend to eat the best of the foods available. In the meanest of times, people will manage to subsist on just about anything. Being human, however, means mere subsistence is rarely enough, and groups of people, given enough time, find ways to make these subsistence foods delicious. Have a thousand years or so to find a use for pigs' blood? The result will be, inevitably, tasty (and boudin noir is delicious). Famine, you might argue, is one of the key evolutionary pressures on flavor. People eventually grow to love these famine foods so much that during good times, they continue to consume them, often elevating them to “delicacy” status. Allow enough time, enough lean time, and you'll build a National cuisine.

There is an exception to this rule. All poverty foods, even the most delicious ones, don't always embed themselves in the cultural cooking repertoire. Every now and again there is a cultural backlash so violent it propels a given food or dish far out of fashion, until it is all but forbidden. For example, chestnuts were once widely used all over Europe as a flour substitute: in breads, soups, cakes, pastas, pancakes, as a porridge. The nuts replaced wheat, when even that became too expensive for the poor. Chestnuts were available free to anyone willing to harvest them. Now there is something of a stigma surrounding the sweet little nuts. You may be able to purchase them roasted by a street vendor, or to have mont blanc served to you in the Alps, but they have all but disappeared in modern European cooking – seen as a poverty food only eaten under extreme conditions.

An example closer to home (home being Sydney, Australia): Oz has a rabbit problem. They are an invasive species which have reached plague proportions and show little signs of going anywhere. Australians once made use of this overabundant resource. The suburb in which I live hosts a rugby team named after the men who walked the streets selling the same rabbits to the once impoverished inhabitants of my now gentrified neighborhood. Rabbitohs, as they vendors were called, used to shout, announcing their wares, passing through the high-density terrace housing of Redfern. More accurately, all over Australia, from before the turn of the 20th century until well past the end of the depression. Now, however, rabbit is not commonly consumed at all, despite their availability, and this is due, in no small part, to the attitude that rabbit is a foodstuff of the impoverished.

On the opposite end of all of this food-by-necessity is the odd culinary and cultural concept of necessity by means of plenty. Sometimes, there is such an abundance of a food that people have to come up with a way of using, often preserving. Romans in Gaul found the population of wild pigs so great they developed a way of preserving the meat, sometimes for years. We call it ham.

I recently found myself in an analogous situation when my fish delivery arrived packed with a few extras: several lobes of mullet roe. “What,” asked my fishmonger when I called to inquire, “will you do to wow the customers with the roe?” Well, what indeed? Mullet is viewed as a bait fish in OZ, the roe is hardly considered a food at all. The customers who dine in the bistro are not likely to choose a salad with sautéed roe as a starter. Unwilling to throw it out, I started thinking about ways I might preserve it, salting being the first to come to mind... wait, salted mullet roe? That's already been invented.

It's called bottarga in Italy, botarga in Spain, boutargue in France, avgotaraho in Greece, and batarekh in Arabic. There are Egyptian murals describing the process of salting and drying roe, and nearly every country on the Mediterranean has a version. It is now considered a delicacy and the premium examples fetch a premium price. The flavor is something like anchovies, though more buttery. Bottarga is strongly associated with Sicilian cuisine, where it is grated or sliced onto pasta.

Which is what I eventually did with my preserved roe. And it was delicious.

Spaghetti with Bottarga, Breadcrumbs and Leek

You can buy bottarga in Italian shops, if you don't want to make your own. Opt for the whole bottarga rather than the pre-grated stuff, which is not as good. Any unused bottarga will keep indefinitely wrapped tightly in your fridge.

This recipe calls for no salt or pepper, as the bottarga and chili flakes replace these. Add more bottarga or salt to adjust the seasoning to your taste.

250g spaghetti
½ leek, split, washed, and thinly sliced
4 Tbsp olive oil
1 clove garlic, crushed
pinch chili flakes
zest from half a lemon
small handful of parsley leaves
100ml pasta water (taken from the pasta pot just before the pasta is ready)
2 Tbsp breadcrumbs, toasted
2 Tbsp grated bottarga (see below)

Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil and cook the spaghetti until it is al dente. Drain, reserving 100ml of the cooking water.

Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a large frypan on medium heat and gently cook the sliced leek until it is soft and sweet, but not colored. Add the garlic and continue cooking for a couple minutes more. Add the chili flakes, lemon zest, parsley, and pasta water. Toss together with the cooked spaghetti, sprinkle with breadcrumbs and stir in the bottarga. Serve immediately.

Bottarga

This is a very simple method of preserving, you simply pack the roe in sea salt and wait a week or two. You can then rinse off the salt and air-dry the roe further if you want, but I like the bottarga to retain a bit of moisture, as it makes grating the roe into a fine texture of individual eggs quite easy.

mullet roe
sea salt

Pack the row in salt in a container just larger than the roe, making sure that the roe is completely surrounded with salt. Refrigerate and cure for at least a week.

When cured, the roe will be hard and about 2/3 its original size. Rinse away the salt and pat dry. To use, peel away the skin with a knife and grate the bottarga on a fine grater.

Holidays and Cinnamon Shells

2011-04-28T09:02:00.000+10:00

I've spent the last five days or so on a tropical beach holiday in Queensland. It's been all toes in the sand and wake boards and picnic lunches and castles and seashells and generally getting one last taste of summer before I settle into what is meant to be a rather wet Sydney winter. The trip was deliciously devoid of electronic connectivity, which is why this week's post is both a tad late and brief. All that relaxing, you see, didn't leave much time for writing. I did have plenty of time to lie about near the surf collecting miniature seashells with my two boys. As my regular readers will know, food is never far from my mind and the repeating patterns on our collection of shells got me thinking.

The majority of the shells we gathered once housed either tiny clams or snails and had imprinted upon their outer surfaces a perfect lattice which reminded me of the crusts of so many past cherry pies. Already primed to think of sweets, my son presented me with a brown and white spiral, the sight of which sent my stomach into fits. Cinnamon rolls. I must have cinnamon rolls.

I thought I'd wrap up my mini series on sourdough with an unusual recipe. I like to substitute sourdough for yeast in these otherwise straight-forward cinnamon rolls. It gives the fluffy rolls an extra dimension: a slightly savoury-sour tang beneath the multiple layers of sugar.

Sourdough Cinnamon Rolls

Since most people I know like to make these rolls for breakfast, it's best to start them the day before, and allow the final rise to take place in the fridge overnight, so that they can be cooked more or less first thing when you wake. This makes half a dozen rolls.

80g starter
80ml milk, warm
40g butter, melted
1 egg
60g sugar
200g flour
½ tsp salt

Mix all of the wet ingredients together. In a separate bowl mix all of the dry ingredients and make a well in the middle of the mix. Pour the wet ingredients into this well and mix until well combined. Turn the dough out onto a floured board and knead, adding as little flour as possible, until smooth and elastic; about 10 minutes. Transfer to a buttered bowl, cover, and allow the rise in a warm place until doubled. 3-4 hours.

When risen, punch down and rest 20 minutes. Using a rolling pin, roll the dough out on a floured board into a rectangle shape roughly 40cm x 25cm.

20g butter, room temperature
125g brown sugar
1 Tbsp ground cinnamon

Spread the butter over the rolled out dough. Mix together the cinnamon and the brown sugar and sprinkle this mix evenly over the surface of the dough. Starting at one of the long ends of your rectangle, roll the dough into a long log. Using a sharp knife, cut into 6 rolls. Place the rolls, exposed spirals facing up, in a buttered baking dish – ideally one which has twice the volume of the un-risen rolls and is approximately as deep as the just-cut rolls are high. Cover and allow to rise in a warm place until doubled.

Preheat your oven to 180ºC. Bake the rolls for 15-20 minutes, until browned on top and just baked through – cinnamon rolls are best when slightly under-done.

Cool slightly and top with cream-cheese icing (below).

Cream Cheese Icing

60g butter, room temperature
80g cream cheese, room temperature
125g powdered sugar, sifted

Using a whisk or electric mixer, whip the butter and cream cheese together until fluffy. Add the powdered sugar and mix until combined.

On Old Ovens and Picnic Lunches and Bears

2011-04-19T10:00:00.000+10:00

I feel as though, if I am to be completely honest, I've been a bit blasphemous. I've done an injustice to one of the great culinary institutions of the human race. Last week, instead of lifting up, idealizing, instead of crafting a pedestal upon which I might rest my tribute to the foundation of one of the fundamental principles of the Western diet – bread baking - I blathered on about the expectations, both assumed and otherwise, heaped upon professional chefs. I should have been, rather, talking about the amazing chain of human expertise, about common knowledge of complex chemistry, about everyday mastery, generation after generation, stretching back to nearly the beginnings of definable civilization. I should have told you, when I talked about sourdough bread, of how every one of your ancestors, if they originated in Europe, Northern Africa, the Near East, or Middle East, have been making bread in this exact manner for their families, for nearly 5000 years.

I should have, but I didn't, and I'm not going to do so this week, either.

Instead, I am going to tell you a story.

I spent some time in Italy years ago, long before I knew I wanted to be a professional cook. Long before I knew much, actually – as is the wont of twenty-year-olds. What I did know, the moment I landed on the Peninsula with my soon-to-be fiancée, was that I was hungry, and that I was in the motherland of pizza. A beautiful combination, I remember thinking.

A quick consultation of the obligatory guidebook sent us wandering in search of the local “best” pizza. We found it, eventually, a little cave of a place, reassuringly inhabited by a bear of a waiter who, hunched over his ordering pad, diminutive in his harry paws, frowned and furled and scribbled in furry our order. He passed the docket to the sole inhabitant of the kitchen with a grunt. I watched, as no seat in the establishment was more than a metre or two from the tiny cooking space, our pizza's being prepared.

I still, every time a see it, deeply wish I had the skill to pat and stretch and toss and hang and coax a tiny piece of dough into a giant, perfect, translucent base that makes a good pizza, just as our pizza chef did that night. None of that flamboyant flinging into the air, spinning on fingertips crap that passes for finesse elsewhere. No. It's the absolute display of a deep intimacy with the nature of the dough, expressed through knowing flips and turns and deft little flicks and pulls which stretch, yet never tear, the dough. I'll never tire of watching that kind of simple beauty in action. And our mustachioed chef was a master. However, the bulk of my fascination that evening, all my infatuation, belonged to the wood fired oven.

It was a cracked thing, an injured beast, in this particular establishment. The oven bore a dramatic zigzag of a crevice like a wound which traced, I imagined, the brickwork beneath the concrete rendering that covered the great dome and its cast-iron door. The damaged animal drew and roared and huffed and hissed like some primal thing, only barely contained. It's no wonder, really, that the brick dome failed in some part. The oven, as I later learned, is capable of reaching 500ºC. At that temperature any mason can be forgiven. Besides, your pizza is in and out, charred 'round the edges, in something like three minutes. Tempestuous beast or no, the customers are happy.

Three days later, shopping in a street market for the picnic lunch we planned for Pompeii, we stopped at a baker's stand to buy a loaf of bread. He had on offer only one style of loaf – ciabatta – with no sign indicating price. My grasp of the Italian language is limited to a few pleasantries and the word “birra,” so I really don't know what I expected to accomplish when I asked “Quanto costa?” (“How much?”) Whatever the man said, the plan was to give him a 20 euro note and hope for the best.

Walking away, bread in hand, I started to count my change, in curiosity mostly. I got up somewhere above 18 euro when I became intensely distracted by the most intoxicating smell. It was sweet and warm and deep and smoky, and it was coming from my armpit. Rather, to be precise, it was coming from the loaf tucked there. Not only did this chewy, woodfired, sourdough cost me something less than 1 euro, it was still warm. I clutched it to my chest and inhaled, like holding a newborn, until people started to stare. Into the backpack with our lunch of tomatoes and whatnot.

It tasted as good as it smelt, at lunch that day when we rested in the stands of Pompeii's coliseum: chewy and crusty and sour. Later, poking around in the alleys and buildings as one can only do in an Italian-run World Heritage Site, we came across the remains of a bakery. There were giant stone mills, still standing, the shattered remnants of storage vats and, in the back, the gaping mouth of a woodfired oven. The metal door had long been removed but it was the twin of the oven I watched our pizzas being cooked in days before, and the oven, I imagined, my lunch loaf had been created in as well.

I stared into its depths for ages, imagining innumerable fires and loaves and flatbread dinners. These people, I realized, have been doing this very thing for more time than I can really imagine.

It seems silly to spend an entire day in one of the most amazing archaeological sites in the world and walk away thinking about an old oven and the loaves of bread it once baked, picnic lunches in ghost towns, and pizzas served by bears.

Or maybe not.

The experience made me feel deeply connected. It's one of the reasons I bake.

Ciabatta

Sourdough bakers love to bang on about the fact that you need only three ingredients to make bread: flour, water, and salt. There are even breads sold both in the States and here in OZ which make claims about being “yeast free,” usually implying this is some kind of health benefit. Close inspection of the ingredients reveals no yeast at all. I guess these loaves are injected with air prior to baking. Or, perhaps, they are leavened with natural yeasts, as in those from a starter. My point? Unless you are making flat bread or soda bread, you need yeast.

That said, I absolutely do not suggest you add commercial yeast to your bread. Commercial yeast has a disgustingly overpowering taste, and once you learn to recognize it, you'll never be able to eat bread baked with it again without being aware of the flavor. The solution? Use non-commercial, wild yeast. It is as gentle in flavor as it is slow in action and well worth the effort.

Ciabatta is a flat loaf of sourdough with uneven holes and a chewy texture. It is a bit tricky to make because the dough is so wet. I describe a folding, almost no-knead, technique for working with sticky dough below. It is simple and very effective.

The only things you need, you see, to make this loaf of bread are: flour, water, salt, and starter. If you want to make really amazing bread, however, you need a woodfired oven or a very hot, steam-injected commercial one. I, sadly, don't have either. But it is still possible to make a great loaf of bread.

250g sourdough starter
250g flour
170ml water
5g sea salt flakes

Mix the starter with 50g of the flour and leave in a warm place overnight.

The next morning mix in the remaining flour and the water. Stir just to combine and rest 20 minutes. Add the salt. The dough will be very sticky and quite loose.

Pour the dough onto a floured surface. Using a dough scraper gently lift and pull the sides of the dough, folding each side into the middle, like an envelope. Repeat twice. Dust liberally and cover with cling film. Rest 45 minutes.

After resting, repeat the envelope folds as above. Dust, cover and rest 45 minutes.

After the second rest, repeat the envelope fold, dust cover, and allow to rise until doubled, about 2-3 hours.

When doubled, fold two of the sides up and into the center, pinching a pit so that they hold together and form a seam across the loaf. This should shape your dough into a rough square. Transfer to baking paper dusted with flour. Seam side up. Dust and cover. Proof until doubled, about 2 hours.

Meanwhile preheat your oven to the highest setting. If you have a baking stone, heat it on the bottom shelf.

When the ciabatta has doubled, use the dough scraper to gently stretch the loaf into a rectangle by pulling out the two ends perpendicular to the seam you created earlier. This will deflate the loaf a bit, which is necessary for creating those different size holes which lend so much to the texture of this bread.

Slide immediately onto the baking stones, still on the baking paper, or onto a flat tray on the bottom shelf of the oven. Spray the sides of the oven with water to create steam, close the oven, and reduce the heat to 200ºC.

Bake 10-15 minutes, until the crust is deep brown in color and the loaf sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom. Cool completely before slicing.

Start Me Up

2011-04-12T10:00:00.010+10:00

I am a Professional Chef. It is a job title which arouses, in the uninitiated, certain romanticized visions of artful cookery. People imagine, when they think of the chef's trade, a Jamie Oliver-esque montage of ultra-speedy chopping, half second sautéing, and little pots of bubbling sauces, all culminating in a close up of placing the final garnish on an immaculate, finished dish. This is not exactly accurate. All of those things happen, certainly, but with a lot of long, hot, hard work in between. Chef's, would you believe, fall victim to the romance as well. I once asked a group of my chef friends what they imagined professional cookery to be before they embarked on their careers. One friend envisioned “stepping out of the cool room with a tray of eggs, brushing the hair from my eyes, and gently patting the flour off my apron.” My own vision was much less clear. I sort of imagined whisking things in very large bowls.

Which, I suppose, I get to do from time to time; chefs work with some comically over-sized equipment.

Dig a bit deeper and a civilian will tell you that a chef is a person who knows how to cook most anything. While I know plenty of chefs who would be glad to tell you they are capable of cooking anything (the industry attracts a certain, overconfident type), the truth is that each of us specialize in some way or another. There are division of culture: an expert in Japanese food cannot reasonably be expected to prepare a tamale. There are differences in the level of cooking: it's as unfair to expect a burger cook to know how to work with truffles as it is to expect a chef with haute cuisine training to whip up a batch of buffalo wings.

Finally, and most surprisingly to some, there are distinctions between types of cooking withing each of these previously mentioned divisions. In French cooking, for example, there is a whole discipline devoted to the curing and preservation of meats. Charcuterie, as it is called, is an entire profession within itself, though only a small part of the professional kitchen. It is genuinely possible to spend an entire cooking career perfecting sauces alone. It gets that specific. Pastry, the industry's collective name for all things desert does not include baking, which refers only to breads.

Which brings me, more or less, to the topic of this week's post: bread. I am an avid hobbyist baker. Professional chef. Hobby baker. It is a distinction I am acutely aware of because I know real bakers, and I know I am not one. I wish, on a very selfish level, that more people understood that being a “professional chef” does not in any way mean I automatically know how to make a loaf of bread. You see, when I produce a beautiful, crusty, chewy, aromatic loaf of sourdough bread, of which I am immensely proud, most people say dismissively “of course, you're a chef.”

Yes. A chef. Not a baker. This is really good work for an amateur. Come on people.

I'm thinking about this mostly because I noticed that I often suggest the use of a sourdough starter in recipes here at OHC, but I've never told you how to make one.

Why should you use a sourdough starter? Flavor mostly. Bread made with a sourdough starter have a depth and breadth of flavor you just can't produce using bakers yeast. On top of this there is the pride in crafting a loaf of bread in the same manner it has been made for the past 5000 or so years. It's a tradition of simple, vital skill.

Purchasing yeast, rather than using your own starter, is a relatively new historical development. 18th and 19th century brewers would sell the barm (skimmings) or yeast dregs from cider and beer which were then used by home and professional bakers. Sometime around 1850 yeast was produced in cakes (called press yeast) for baking. During the Second World War dried yeast was developed as a shelf-stable, military-friendly product. Rapid rise yeast soon followed, after which came instant yeast, which is fast becoming the standard.

The problem with this steady march towards ever speedier yeast is that it comes at the expense of flavor. A loaf of sourdough can take several hours to rise just once, where a loaf made with modern yeasts will rise twice and be ready for baking in the same time. Some bakers using a sourdough starter even slow down the proving (rising) process by refrigerating the dough over night. This extra time, this slow proof, allows all those complex flavors we associate with great, chewy, European-style bread to develop. You'll need a starter if you want to make good bread.

Sourdough Starter

A sourdough starter is a living thing. It is a colony of wild yeast and lactic acid-producing bacteria. It is this combination that produces the characteristic sour flavors in these types of bread.

There are several ways to make a starter. The easiest is to find a friend with one and get them to give you a bit. Then you can keep it alive by feeding it, using it whenever you need.

Other methods involve capturing wild yeast one way or another, and then propagating it in a slurry of flour and water. I have made a couple starters, with varying levels of success. The starters which have been the most consistent and produced the tastiest bread, I've made using grapes.

Grapes naturally have yeast on their skins. We'll take advantage of that here by using organic (hopefully not sprayed) and unwashed grapes (look for ones with the white, powdery bloom still intact) and submerging them for a week or so in flour and water so that the yeasts have a chance to multiply.

Two more things... First: wash everything you plan on using to make your starter very thoroughly. You want to introduce the right kinds of yeasts and bacteria, not the weird shit that lives on the half-washed wooden spoons in your utensil drawer. Second: Whenever I call for water in the starter recipe (or any sourdough recipe for that matter), I mean water at just above room temperature – about 22-25ºC. This is warm enough to strongly encourage yeast and bacterial growth, and not hot enough to kill either.

1 large bunch of grapes, organic and unwashed if possible
500g flour
1 litre lukewarm water

Tie your bunch of grapes in a muslin or cheesecloth bag. Mix together the 500g flour and 1 litre water in a large container with a tight-fitting lid.

Hold the bag of grapes over the container and squeeze the juices from the grapes into the flour and water mix. Drop the bag into the container, stir and seal. Keep at room temperature for 4-5 days, opening the lid once a day to allow any built up gas to escape, all the while preventing excessive airflow to the young culture.

After 5 days feed the starter. Add 250 m of water and 125g of flour. Stir together, agitating the bag of grapes and replace the lid. Stand another 5 days.

When the second 5 days have elapsed, remove the bag of grapes and discard. You now have a juvenile sourdough starter. Over the next 3 days you'll feed it in order to strengthen it and encourage a healthy balance between the bacteria and the yeast (more about this some other time).

Remove 500ml of the starter and discard the rest. (If you don't periodically use or discard some of the starter, you'll end up with a gigantic bucket of the stuff.) In a container with a non-airtight lid (a tight-fitting lid may burst under fermentation pressure), mix the reserved 500ml starter with 200ml water and 200g flour. Stand 12 hours and then add 200ml water and 200g flour again.

12 hours later, pour off most the contents of the container and add 200ml water and 200g flour. After another 12 hours add the same again.

The third day feed the starter again at 12-hour intervals, discarding approximately half the volume at the first feeding.

After this point you have a full grown sourdough starter. Whenever you wish to use it, plan to start your recipe at the point just before you would feed the starter – when there are the greatest number of hungry little organisms in your culture. When baking, you'll be using the starter you would otherwise be discarding. Maintain the starter at room temperature, feeding every day as above.

I, sadly, abuse the living bejesus out of my starter, which I have maintained for a decade or so now. I often leave the poor culture to starve in the back of my fridge in not so much suspended animation, but rather a forced hibernation. When I want to use it, I pull it out, feed it for a few days based on the above schedule, and away it goes, producing me the most delicious of breads. I'm not suggesting that you be so cruel to your starter – most people who maintain one properly fed them once or twice daily – but it is possible to revive a starter after a bit of neglect. Just sayin'.

We'll spend the next few weeks using our new starters. And we'll start this week with a very simple one, pancakes.

Sourdough Pancakes

Obviously maintaining a starter requires wasting a fair amount of it - as the method has you dumping a bit off every day. In the past, this schedule of feeding twice daily and dumping once wold have meant, rather, feeding twice and removing an amount to make bread with every day. However, as you and I are not likely to bake a loaf of bread each day, you will have some excess starter. Every now and again, I use this excess to make some deliciously complex pancakes.

Sourdough pancakes are a bit less fluffy than regular pancakes. This is because the overnight fermentation necessary for the distinctive flavor encourages the development of gluten, which is what makes bread chewy. The extra bite gives this breakfast an air of a meal of substance. You don't need to eat many to fill up. This makes enough pancakes for two people.

150g starter
150g flour
150ml water
1 egg
20g butter, melted (1 heaped Tbsp)
30g sugar (2 Tbsp)
1/8 tsp salt
1/8 tsp baking soda

Place the sourdough starter in a glass or ceramic bowl (non-reactive is the key) with the flour and water. Mix just to combine and leave covered with a loose-fitting lid (to allow fermentation gases to escape). Leave overnight in a warm place.

The next morning, stir in the remaining ingredients, mixing only enough to combine.

Cook the pancakes in a lightly oiled or buttered pan on medium heat until they are set around the edges and the bubbles which burst near the center of the pancake remain open. Flip and cook a few minutes further, until lightly golden.

Serve with maple syrup or honey butter.

Ugly, But...

2011-04-05T10:00:00.007+10:00

I have to be careful here... I'm about to spend an entire post complaining about the Western World's unhealthy obsession with beautiful food, all the while maintaining a blog where I glorify the same. Let's see how fine a line I can walk.

There are several facets to this particular obsession with perfect foods which we all share. At it's most basic, the urge to eat only the most beautiful foods is completely primal. We want the brightest fruit and vegetables, the darkest roast meats, the most perfectly shaped eggs. These things indicate they are good for us and will taste the same. Anything sub-par, any imperfection, gives us pause. An attractive strawberry, for example, looks and smells so because it it at the height of ripeness, and more or less pest free. Still green? Mouldy? Wormy? No longer arousing. It's part of our survival instinct.

Chef's of course, take advantage of this instinct by making their dishes look as beautiful as possible. Aesthetic concerns even sometimes outweigh those of flavor. Ever wonder why so many professional cooking recipes call for blanching green vegetables in pots of salted water and then shocking them in an ice bath? It's because the higher temperature of salt water cooks the greens faster and the ice bath instantly stops the cooking. The result: the chlorophyll doesn't break down as much and you get to eat bright green veggies. The flavor isn't affected one way or another. Young chef's are told over and over: “It must taste good, and it must look good.”

Professional cooks are not the only ones to benefit from our propensity to be drawn to pretty produce. The local fruit shop depends on it. Next time you are buying a few apples, take a look around at the other shoppers. Everyone in the produce section will be carefully examining fruits and vegetables as they drop them into their carts, looking for the smallest bruise or blemish. Any offenders are rejected.

And why not? We pay a certain price for fresh food and expect the best. In fact, the price we pay includes the assumption that only the perfect specimens will be consumed. The remainder, damaged in transit, scarred by adverse weather, bruised by inattentive customers, will be discarded.

This is the natural state of the local produce section. Anything that is not at the height of perfection will not be purchased and is therefor removed. I'm just as guilty as anyone. I've seen a million or so tomatoes in my professional career and I know what an ideal one looks like. You better believe I spend the time looking for prime examples when I shop.

However this embrace of flawlessness has long since slipped over the edge into obsession. It's now a fixation on perfection to the point of perversion. It's a general affliction that sees the rejection of bunches of asparagus because one tip is damaged, a punnet of strawberries returned for the sake of one smashed one, a peach set back down at the discovery of a thumbprint.

All this rejection leads directly to wastage. Produce, as I'm sure most of my readers know, is a variable and imperfect lot. Ever grown your own? How many of your tomatoes came up perfect? 20%? Fewer? Where, in the commercial world, does the rest of it go?

Some of it, obviously, goes into tinned fruit, into chutneys, into jams, into livestock feed. A good deal goes into landfill.

I worked, for a short time, in an office on Wilshire Blvd in the center of Los Angeles where a coworker brought in a bulging bad of homegrown lemons. The were greenish, packed with seeds, pithy, misshapen, and quite sweet-tart and delicious, as a good lemon often is. I took a few home to make lemon curd out of, a couple more disappeared, but the majority sat in the staff room until some brave cleaner tossed the lot out. They'd sat long past the mouldy stage. No one, it seems, is willing to eat an ugly, home-grown lemon.

“Brutti ma buoni.” Ugly, but tasty. It's an Italian phrase which has been adopted, to some extent in the English-speaking culinary world. The phrase, in Italian is applied to a certain type of cookie which is purposely made roughly, to assure it is ugly. I'd like to extend the concept to fresh produce. Pick up that over-ripe, split tomato. Use that brown banana in a milkshake. I'm giving it a shot. This week I am applying the concept to apples.

A few weeks ago I mentioned a roadside apple tree I pick from year to year. I was in the country on the weekend and the apples are falling-from-the-tree ripe. They are ugly. They vary greatly in size, often have worm holes, are quite dirty and slightly misshapen, and they are the tastiest, most crisp, tart apples I think I've ever had. I brought home a basketful.

Apple Galette

This dessert ranks amongst the most simple in terms of preparation, presentation, and overall work involved. It is one of those simple desserts where the end product is magically complex given the limited number of ingredients.

2 lg cooking apples (Granny Smith will do)
2 Tbsp butter, melted
2 Tbsp coarse sugar
2 Tbsp honey, warmed
4 pastry disks (below)

Preheat your oven to 180ºC. Peel, core, and slice the apples thinly. Arrange the slices in spirals on the pastry disks. Brush with butter, then brush with the honey, and sprinkle liberally with sugar. Place on baking paper-lined trays, and bake for 25-30 minutes. Until the pastry is crisp and the apples begin to color around the edges. Remove from oven and cool completely. Serve at room temperature with a scoop of ice cream.

Pastry

250g flour
160g cold butter, diced
1 egg
1 yolk
1 Tbsp cold water

Combine the flour and butter in a food processor and process until the mixture resembles fine bread crumbs. With the processor running, add the eggs and water and work just until it pulls together in the machine. Turn onto a board and work once or twice to bring the dough into a ball. Flatten into a disk, wrap in cling film, and rest in the fridge at least half an hour.

Roll pastry base. Cut into 4 rounds approximately 14cm in diameter. Gather together and freeze any pastry scraps for a future batch (but only use the dough twice, ans over-working will make it quite chewy.)

Autumn Chill

2011-03-29T10:00:00.006+11:00

We've had a solid week of rain here in Sydney. Autumn technically starts in OZ on the 1st of March, not on the equinox, only a week past. This year, however, the 21st was marked by a discernible shift in the weather, with cooler mornings, damp days, and the emergence of yellow on the tips of a noticeable number of leaves. The timing of this phenomenon is partly coincidence, I know, but it is satisfying nonetheless that the local weather seems to keep exact pace with the movements of the Earth on it's axis. And all this cool weather has me itching to pull out the cold weather dishes. When flipping through my cookery books, I find myself pausing longingly at photos of braised veal shanks, roast pheasant, and slow cooked pork. I'm already obsessing about the rich, sticky foods I can cook once the ambient air temperature drops; thinking of bone marrow and sticky sauces and glazes and such. And then I remembered soup.

Soup, that summer-month-afterthought. It's the forgotten child of the winter months, the one who makes the surprise and often awkward appearance at a warm evening's meal served up as vichyssoise or gazpacho, like meeting a past lover whom you're now a bit embarrassed to know.

Now, however, as the rains hit day eight, soup comes storming back in, triumphantly, declaring victory with a petulant “I knew you'd be back.”

And I am back. The first hint of a crisp morning had me wondering when I might put French onion soup on my lunch menu. I've already been fretting about what kind of chowder will grace the winter specials board: Smoked mussel and corn? Vongole and house-cured bacon? Smoked haddock and peas? I wonder if the customers will go for the warm tomato consommé or if a lentil, leek, and ham hock affair is safer. Hell, when should I roll out that Australian favorite, pumpkin soup?

All this soup ruminating has me thinking about slow simmers and I'm reminded of an article I read once about the nature of ideas and inspiration. It was focused on discovering where all the good ideas come from. The crux of the article was that great ideas, don't simply pop into peoples' heads. Rather they evolve there over great amounts of time coupled with a lifetime of training in a related field. In other words, if you are an auto mechanic, your chances of suddenly, whilst changing an oil filter, answering the mathematical P vs NP Problem are not so great. Charles Darwin, for example, spent half his professional life wondering how species came into being before he developed his theory of natural selection.

This is, in a tenuous link, the very way the recipe for this week's post came about. I often recall, when thinking of soup, one of my favorite meals (and I don't say that lightly), a shrimp gumbo served to me by a street vendor on a pier somewhere in San Fransisco in dense, mid evening, late autumn fog. The spicy soup was ladled into a sourdough bread bowl, which I devoured at the end, and I've not since had quite such a confluence of flavor, atmosphere, and attitude.

Add to this memory a dash or two of chili addiction, a decade-long mental simmer surrounding the combination of pork and shellfish, and my love of bright, sharp soup flavors. Out came this soup – veggies and black beans, clams and hot chorizo. The result is a soup that finds itself somewhere between gumbo and minestrone.

Look, I'm not saying that my soup is some kind of genius invention, only that it has been slowly ticking over on my personal back burner years. A rainy day dislodged it and made it an actual meal, but it's been cooking for quite some time. No “eureka” moment here. Damn tasty nevertheless.

Clam, Chorizo, and Black Bean Soup

You can substitute any of the root veggies here. I suggest sweet ones; they complement the pork nicely.

500g clams (any variety will do)
2 hot Spanish chorizo
½ c dried black beans (or 1 tin cooked black beans, drained and rinsed)
300g tomatoes (about two large tomatoes)
1 dutch cream potato (or similar variety)
1 medium swede (that's what they call a rutabaga Down Under)
1 carrot
1 small leek
2 cloves garlic
1 stick celery
2c fish stock
2 sprigs thyme
1 Tbsp chopped coriander

First, cook the beans. Soak the dried beans overnight. Cover the beans with a generous amount of water in a pot and bring them to a simmer. Simmer gently until soft but still firm – about 2 hours. Transfer to a tray to cool, mixing in one sprig of thyme and seasoning liberally while they are still hot.

Next steam open the clams. Heat a medium sized pot on high heat until it is quite hot. Toss in the clams and then immediately add ½ cup of the fish stock and cover with a tight-fitting lid. Steam for 2-3 minutes, until the majority of the clams open. Strain over a bowl, reserving the liquid. Cool the clams and remove the meat from most of the shells, keeping a few aside in their shells for presentation. Discard any clams that do not open. Strain the reserved liquid through a cloth to remove any bits of shell or sand.

Dice the chorizo into 1cm cubes. Toss the chorizo with a bit of oil and place in a cold pan. Put the pan on low heat and gently render the chorizo, stirring frequently, until it browns and crisps and a good deal of fat comes out. Remove from the pan with a slotted spoon and cool. Keep the rendered fat in the pan.

Split the leek lengthwise and wash out any sand. Slice the white thinly, discarding the darkest green bits. Dice the celery stick into ½cm cubes. Finely chop the garlic. Combine the leek, celery, and garlic and gently cook it in the pan with the rendered chorizo fat until the leek is sweet and soft but does not color. The celery will still be a bit crunchy. Add the reserved clam liquid and the remainder of the fish stock and bring to a simmer. Cook until the celery is just soft.

Meanwhile, cook the remaining vegetables. Peel the swede and carrot. Dice the swede, carrot, and potato into 1cm cubes. Cook each separately in salted boiling water until they are just soft, but not at all mushy. Drain.

Add the cooked root veggies to the pot with the stock. Bring just to a simmer. Add the leaves from one sprig of thyme, taste, and adjust seasoning. Drop in the clams and the chorizo and simmer for one minute to warm through. Serve with a sprinkle of chopped coriander.

To Hell With...

2011-03-22T10:00:00.001+11:00

I spend a great deal of time here at OHC banging on about traditions. I am a great lover of traditional dishes and eye suspiciously any modern “twists” or “interpretations.” I get quite upset, for example, when someone serves a confit duck leg atop a few braised borlotti beans and calls it cassoulet. That's not cassoulet. Don't get me wrong; I am not one of those snobbish cooks who insists on by-the-book cooking. I am, in fact, nearly the polar opposite. I think of the kitchen as a creative space (though cooking is a trade, not an art) where a recipe is a vague guide and imagination coupled with a bit of skill often yields wonderful meals. Feel free, as far as I'm concerned, to invent, substitute, rearrange, and renew, but don't tell me, when you are finished, that you've you made gazpacho out of carrots, because no matter how good it tastes, it's not gazpacho. Which is my point, really. When I defend traditional dishes, I suppose I'm trying to make sure the name always signifies the same meal. In other words, I just want to know that when I order a pizza margherita I get tomato, mozzarella, and basil.

For this week's post I plan no such banner-waving. To hell with tradition. It turns out that one of my favorite street foods (to continue a theme I touched on a couple weeks ago) is a bastardization of a traditional Mexican dish with which it shares a name.

Chilaquiles traditionally is a breakfast dish, made up of leftover stale tortillas or chips which are cooked in a green chili sauce until soft, and then served with eggs and cheese. Variations include baking rather than frying, the addition of herbs, sour cream, chicken or pork, onions, white sauce, refried beans, red chili sauce, and a host of others. One friend of mine tells me, with the dreamy look of someone recalling the most comforting of foods, that his mother used to take leftover enchiladas from the night before, crack a few eggs on top, sprinkle with cheese, and bake the lot, casserole style. The result of nearly any of the above combinations is the same, more or less, at least texturally. Eating a mountain of chilaquiles it an adventure in crispy-soggy-spicy-creamy-rich-and-fresh. It's no wonder this is considered comfort food, it deeply satisfying, filling, speaks of mothers at the breakfast stove, and is as gentle as Mexican food can be.

The chilaquiles I am familiar with, however, were served to me at a farmer's market in L.A. and are quite different. They are made up of corn chips which are tossed for mere seconds on a hot flat-plate along with some fiery chargrilled tomato or tomatillo salsa, a handful of coriander, some cheese, and a few cooked, salted baby squash. They were served in a spectacular, gooey mound, with sour cream on top, all on a paper plate far too flimsy to hold them. I'd rush to a curb where I could sit and enjoy the delightful juxtaposition of crunch and sog that develops as the chips soak up the salsa and cheese.

And this is more or less how I make them at home. I know how they are traditionally prepaired, but I like these chilaquiles so much I'm not about to change. Does my version really qualify as chilaquiles? Probably not. I suppose, if I were going to be a strict traditionalist, my dish needs a name change, but I've been calling this, one of my favorite summer meals, chilaquiles for so long I don't know what else to call them.

It's Chilaquiles, OHC style, until I can think of something better.

Chilaquiles

The selection of basic ingredients for Mexican cooking in Australia is woeful. There are about 3 kinds of chillies, no great corn chips, a confusion of inauthentic salsas, and no one has ever heard of a tomatillo. This leaves me a bit limited in what I can do when a craving strikes. I get by, however, and still manage to make a pretty decent dinner.

This takes seconds to cook once you have all the ingredients ready. Be sure that you have everything ready to go before you start. Also, heat is key. If your flat plate or wok is not big enough to hold all the ingredients, work in batches rather than trying to cram everything in at once. This should serve two comfortably.

500g corn chips
200ml grilled tomato salsa (see below)
250g jack-style cheese, grated
handful of coriander, roughly chopped
4 baby yellow squash
4 baby green squash or zucchini
sour cream to garnish

Begin by cooking the squash. Bring a pot of heavily salted water to the boil. Cut the squash into 4cm pieces and blanch in the salted water until they just become soft. Remove from the water and drain thoroughly.

Heat a large flat plate or wok on high heat. When it is quite hot, toss in the chips, closely followed by the salsa and cheese. Toss a few times, coating the chips. Add the coriander and the cooked squash. Toss once or twice more and remove from the heat. Serve on plates with a dollop of sour cream on top.

Grilled Tomato Salsa

The tomatoes here are cooked two ways – half are flame grilled for a smoky flavor, and the other half are cooked under a grill (broiler) which blackens the skins and concentrates the natural sweetness in the fruit. Don't peel anything here; the blackened skins go into the blender as well. A minor touch of authenticity in a recipe somewhat otherwise devoid. Also, the heat in chillies varies widely between species and even individuals of the same crop. Taste as you go and use your judgment.

500g tomatoes, roma, heirloom, or other plump delicious variety
2 cloves garlic, not peeled
1 cayenne chili (or other hot red chili)
1 birds eye chili (or other flaming hot chili)
1 Tbsp chopped coriander
1 Tbsp red wine vinegar

Core all the tomatoes and divide in half. Blacken half of them on an open flame (bbq or gas burner) until the skin blisters everywhere and becomes quite smoky. Preheat your oven grill on the highest setting and place the remaining tomatoes, along with the garlic and chillies on a tray. Grill for 7-10 minutes, until the tomato skins blacken and peel back, turn all items, and grill 10 minutes more. Everything should be blackened and blistered. Cool slightly. Remove the stems from the chilies and peel the garlic.

Transfer all the tomatoes and the chillies to a blender, add the coriander and blend until smooth.

Transfer the mixture to a pot and simmer gently until slightly thickened. Add the vinegar, salt to taste, and cool. Store in the fridge for up to a week.

2011-03-15T10:00:00.011+11:00

I'll never understand fruit tree owners. See, I live in a small two-bedroom apartment in the city. My personal green space is limited to a tiny cube of a bricked balcony, upon which I have done my best to scratch out a garden. I've attempted, with varying success, basil (Fail), tomatoes (Success), thyme (F), coriander (S), rosemary (S developing into F), lettuce (very mild S), strawberries (F), lavender (S), various bulbs (some S), tomatillos (F), jasmine (S), and many others mostly (F). I am absolutely desperate to have a little plot of land wherein I might grow things (I'm also hoping that my success rate improves once I diversify from planting in pots). This desire leads me to jealously eye-off little bits of land which are both owned and, well, under-utilized. I see, as I wander about Sydney, dusty yards, bricked over, occupied by tired cacti in leaky clay pots. I can't help but think what I might do with a few square metres of green.

I suppose it's easy to be an armchair gardener. I can't really say that, given any of the same spaces, I'd do any better. Besides, my tiny balcony is a bit barren at the moment. What I am sure of, however, is that given a fruit tree or two, I'd fare much better than the average. I see so many fruit trees in the city, many of them hanging over fences or planted on median strips, that completely go to waste. I can tell, if you care to know, where you might watch, season after season, a multitude of fruits blossom, ripen, fall, and rot unused. Just across the street, for example, there is a gargantuan loquat tree; I manage to grab a few each year, but the majority end up in the gutter.

Walk around the corner, in two directions, and you'll find two mulberry trees. One is so old and tall I never knew it existed, until I noticed purple pavement one day. The fruit is so far out of reach it is only abstract. The other, with fruit once reachable, has been cut back so severely in favor of a terrace renovation it will be years before it's berries stain the footpath again.

Within the same radius are several front-garden lemon trees anyone might notice, as the over-ripe citrus litters the surrounding sidewalks. Not far away is an alleyway covered with a canopy of grape vines, which spend all summer hanging with ripening wine grapes, and all winter covering fermenting waste.

I know where one can collect several jars of olives, with no effort, if you've only a step-ladder and the will (and possibly the permission of my mate Jules, who planted the tree as a child). Apples? Pears? Peaches? Bananas? Yep. Now and again I even spot a stray tomato plant (sandwich filling gone astray?). Like the rest, they probably end up as mulch.

Again, I'm not positive I wouldn't waste a orange here or a nectarine there, but I'm sure I'd make a better fruit tree owner. I know it's not possible to eat the full amount of fruit a tree produces, but surely a combination of consumption, preservation, and gifting can take care of the majority.

I come about this particular line of thought not only because it is the beginning of autumn here in OZ, a time when I see an inordinate amount of locally grown fruit being wasted, but also because I recently received a gift of a rather large bag of unwanted figs. These came courtesy of my mother-in-law who, during a recent visit to the country, collected the abandoned little fruits from a tree owned by a family on holidays. They were not scheduled to return, my mother-in-law was assured, until long after the last fig dropped.

A basket of figs is quite a bounty, as the little fruits typically sell for about $1.50 each here in OZ. Given the state of the majority, I knew most of them were destined to be jam. This is not a sad thing, for a jar or two of fig jam is quite the thing to look forward to on the cool winter mornings ahead.

As for my own fruit tree ownership, well, I've got a small start. Quietly, my father-in-law is kindly looking after an apple tree for me, one which I planted in his garden. It's a twig of a thing, a clone of a roadside apple tree from which I sometimes manage to pinch a few apples. They are the most delicious, crisp, sweet, pink-blushed apples I've had. My little tree has yet to fruit, but when it does, I won't be wasting a bit.

Spiced Fig, Hazelnut, and Frangipane Tart

Right. Figs are expensive down under, as I might have mentioned above. Fig jam, then, seems like quite a luxury. And it is, unless you can get a bag full of free figs from someone. Next best thing? Make friends with your local produce manager. Figs are expensive, not because they are scarce, but because they spoil and bruise easily and must be thrown out. Take advantage of this fact and tell your local fruit guy you'll buy half a kilo of the ones he'll otherwise throw out if he'll sell you them at half price. Toss in a half kilo of the most under-ripe ones (more pectin in under-ripe fruit) at the same price as well, and you've got the makings of a perfect jam.

The figs themselves here are not actually spiced; in fact, these whole figs are so beautiful I only slice them in half and bake them into the tart. The spices, namely cinnamon, star anise, and bay leaf, are infused in the fig jam, which hides on the base of the tart.

4 large, perfect figs, halved
4 Tbsp spiced fig jam (below)
1 unbaked tart case (also below)
frangipane and hazelnut filling (also also below)

Preheat your oven to 180ºC. Gently melt the fig jam in a small pot on low heat. Spread the warm jam in a thin layer onto the prepared tart base. Spoon in the frangipane and hazelnut filling and spread it evenly, it should not quite fill the shell. Arrange the figs, cut side up, in a circular pattern around the tart, pressing them down into the frangipane.

Bake the tart for 30-35 minutes, until the tart appears cooked in the centre: the tart will no longer appear liquid and will move as one mass when gently shaken in the oven. Remove from heat, cool slightly, remove from tart tin, and cool completely. Serve room temperature with a bit of cream, whipped or not.

Spiced Fig Jam

So, it turns out that FIG JAM is an acronym for a phrase someone with an abundance of self confidence might utter. Someone like me. (I'll let you look it up.) I didn't know this before poking around on the intranets, but I'm a-gonna' tuck that one away for latter.

1 k figs, mix of over-ripe and under-ripe
600g sugar
1 cinnamon quill
1 star anise
1 bay leaf
1 lemon, zest and juice

Stem and roughly chop the figs. Mix these in a non-reactive sauce pan with the sugar and stand for at least an hour. This time allows the sugar to draw out some of the moisture from the figs and alleviates the need to add any extra water to the jam, which would then need to be cooked out again.

Add the rest of the ingredients and bring to a simmer over low heat. Simmer for one hour, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat, cool, cover and sit overnight. This step helps draw out as much pectin as possible (and is a common step in marmalade making).

The next day, return th lot to the boil and simmer until it reaches setting stage. Setting stage usually happens around 104ºC. When you jam reaches this temperature, begin testing it by dropping a bit onto a plate you have stored in your freezer; return it to the freezer for a moment. If, when you push the jam drop with your finger, a little skin wrinkles up, it has reached setting stage.

Remove the solid herbs, transfer the jam to sterilized jars, seal, and cool.

Pastry

I'm not using my usual pastry recipe for this one, I wanted something a little less “short.” Add a pinch of salt and this make a fine savory pastry as well.

250 flour
160 cold butter, diced
1 egg
1 yolk
1 Tbsp cold water

Combine the flour and butter in a food processor and process until the mixture resembles fine bread crumbs. With the processor running, add the eggs and water and work just until it pulls together in the machine. Turn onto a board and work once or twice to bring the dough into a ball. Flatten into a disk, wrap in cling film, and rest in the fridge at least half an hour.

Roll out the pastry on a floured board until it is a large disk about ½ cm thick. Transfer to a lined 20cm pastry tin with a removable bottom or (as I have) a 24cm pastry ring on a tray. Trim and rest again in the fridge for at least half an hour before use.

Frangipane

Frangipane is one of those magical kitchen substances that has an equal ratio of butter, sugar, and almond meal. I like that kind of thing. It's tidy.

100 butter, softened
100 icing sugar
1 egg
2 yolks
100 alomnd meal
1tsp almond essence
50g hazelnuts, toasted, kibbled in a mortar and pestal

Cream the butter and sugar together in a large bowl. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing until each is incorporated. Mix in the remaining ingredients. This can be made ahead and stored in the fridge for several days.

Food Fight

2011-03-08T12:37:00.000+11:00

I recently read an article in the The Atlantic wherein the author, B. R. Myers, complains (amongst a raft of grievances relating to foodies, food writing, and food writers) about the overtly graphic writing in the food community. He takes particular issue with the descriptions of the slaughter of animals. Myers rambles a bit (throughout), but it seems his problem with this particular issue is that such writing highlights the manifestation of excess as expressed through the celebration of animal death. As evidence, he offers a quote from the writings of Vogue food critic Jeffery Steingarten about the twenty-minute slaughter of a pig destined for the dinner table; relating that it took four people to hold the animal down while it bled to death. That, I admit, sounds horrific. This, Myers then suggests, is the normal attitude of the modern gourmet, and he then goes on to support this by relating a Michael Pollan anecdote of witnessing, with a friend, the slaughter of a goat. As for Pollan's friend, “the experience made him want to honor our goat by wasting as little of it as possible.” Meyer dismisses this as equating a trip to a abattoir with “fun,” before moving on to an altogether separate beef with what he calls the “foodie subculture.”

The author's point is not, as you might expect, that we should not eat meat, but rather that focusing on and drawing attention to the fact that meat comes from somewhere is automatically the the glorification of an animal's death, and therefore brutality manifest. In fact, according to Myers, reveling in animal torture has been a mainstay of the gourmand for centuries. He supports this assertion by quoting, as he calls it, “a British dining manual of the time,” providing the passage: “A true gastronome is as insensible to suffering as is a conqueror.” Myers cites neither author nor work, nor does he give time frame, other than a vague reference to the past few hundred years.

The quote is, in fact, originally from the works of nineteenth century English writer Abraham Hayward, something of a critic of all things, who penned it in an 1836 article which was later republished in 1852 in the compilation: The Art of Dining: or, Gastronomy and Gastronomers. Far from being a “dining manual” of the times, it was, like most of Hayward's writing, a critique, and should be thus considered. This isn't a historically accurate, unbiased, information manual. It is rather the outspoken view of a man who, by most accounts, angered nearly everyone he ever met.

This next bit is pure speculation, but I'm guessing that Myers lifted the quote not directly from The Art of Dining but rather secondhand from Mark Caro's The Foie Gras Wars (2009), wherein it is a predominate quote. Perhaps this failure to understand the source lead to Myers' “mistake” of referring to Hayward's work as a historical manual.

Obviously, This hyperbole (hyperbole being an argumentative method dismissed by Myers), supported by antiquated evidence, masks the true intention of the modern chefs and food writers whom he is attacking. Witnessing the slaughter of an animal you are going to eat is not a barbaric sacrifice ritual. Rather it is the deep acceptance of responsibility. This thing died for me; an animal, a living thing has died so that I can eat. I have a duty to respect that.

It really is that simple. The topic, when presented as Pollan, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (at whom Myers also takes a swipe), and so many others do, is a not-so-gentle reminder that the meat you are eating comes at a high price, ethically speaking, and you better treat it that way. Thomas Keller mentions this in The French Laundry Cookbook. After receiving, at his request, a delivery of live rabbits which he painfully slaughters – an experience he describes as “terrible,” – Keller states:

Because killing those rabbits had been such an awful experience, I would not squander them. I would use all my powers as a chef to ensure that those rabbits were beautiful. It’s very easy to go to a grocery store and buy meat, then accidentally overcook it and throw it away…Would that cook, I wonder, have let his attention stray from that loin had he killed the rabbit himself? No. Should a cook squander anything, ever?”

Writers like Pollan and chefs like Fearnley-Whittingstall and Keller are fighting against the general perception that meat comes from the supermarket, wrapped in cellophane. Myer, in twisting this argument so that it looks like a glorification of a macabre spectacle is, frankly, producing irresponsible journalism.

The simple truth is that the majority of people are disconnected from the source of their food. Sure, anyone will tell you that the steak they are having for dinner comes from a cow, but ask any of them how it came from cow to plate, or how the cow was reared, or what part of the cow they are eating, and most couldn't tell you a thing.

Don't believe me?

Once, when describing to a patron what a beef cheek was like, I used the phrase “ a muscle that's been worked a lot” and she visibly blanched, halting my description with an upheld hand. “It's a muscle?” “All meat is muscle,” I replied, to which she muttered: “I need a moment to come to terms with that.”

If it takes a bit of moral shock brought on by a bit of gory prose about the nature of animal rearing and slaughter (a la Pollan, etc) then so be it. This isn't a revelry in animal flesh as much as a general prod into awareness. Not enough people care where their food is coming from; perhaps such writing will shock a few.

Anyway, speaking of beef cheeks...

They are mussels which are worked constantly throughout the life of a cow. The beasts chew incessantly. All that work makes the cut very flavorful but quite tough – exercise encourages the growth of connective tissue, and connective tissue makes meat chewy. The solution? Long, slow, gentle cooking to break down those tissues and make the meat tender and delicious.

It's just officially past summer here in OZ, but it still feels like summer. Braised and slow cooked meats are not typical summer foods, being rich and heavy by nature. It is for this reason that they are seldom served outside of the winter months. However, years ago, when I worked at one in a row of restaurants on a wharf, the neighboring establishment put braised lamb shanks on their summer menu. We laughed at this apparent folly, until a waiter, upon returning from reconnaissance, informed us that fully half of the patrons at our competitor's had ordered shanks. Comfort food is comfort food, regardless of the season.

Braised Beef Cheeks

This secondary cut is not something your butcher will probably have on hand; order ahead. They are satisfyingly sticky and very filling. One per person is a very generous meal.

2 beef cheeks, trimmed
2 carrots, peeled, rough chop
2 brown onions, peeled, quartered
2 sticks celery, rough chop
1 head garlic, cult in half horizontally
1 sprig rosemary
1 sprig thyme
2 bay leaves
white chicken stock (optional)

Preheat your oven to 160ºC. Heat a large, heavy-bottomed pot on high heat. When very hot, add a couple tablespoons of oil, liberally season the beef cheeks, and brown them on all sides in the pan. Remove from pan. Reduces the heat to medium and add the carrot, onion, celery, and garlic. Cook, stirring frequently, until the veggies have colored and smell deeply roasted and rich. Add the herbs, stir for one minute more, and then add about 1 cup of chicken stock or water. Simmer this, scraping any stuck bits from the bottom of the pot. Remove from heat.

Return the browned cheeks to the pot and add enough stock or water to just cover. Place a lid on the pot (or cover with foil) and transfer to the oven. Cook at 160ºC for 3-4 hours (possibly more), until the meat is very tender. You should be able to pull it apart with a fork, but it should not be completely falling apart. Remove from the oven and cool slightly.

Using a slotted spoon, remove the cheeks from the braise and set aside. Refrigerated, these will hold well for up to a week. Strain the remainder of the braise, discarding the solids (these veggies have given up all of their flavor). Put the liquid in a small pot and let it settle for 10 minutes. Once it has settled, skim any oil off the top and then bring it to a simmer over medium heat. Reduce the temperature to low and simmer, skimming often, until it reduces to about ¼ of the original volume and becomes a rich and sticky jus.

To serve, heat your oven to the highest setting. Place the cheeks on a baking paper-lined tray, season, and roast 5-10 minutes, until hot through. This method creates a crisp crust around a melting, sticky meat interior.

Serve with some mashed potatoes, steamed vegetables, and a spoonful or two of hot jus spooned over the top.

Street Food

2011-03-01T10:00:00.010+11:00

I love street food. It's so filthy and visceral and I seek it out wherever I go. There's something special, communal, about the immediacy and anonymity of picking up a meal from a street stall, often after a long wait in a queue, and wandering off somewhere to eat it. Street food is often ugly, always fast food, typically served long after normal business hours, mostly hand-held, inherently low-brow, invariably cheap, and, with a few exceptions, very tasty.

Before we go further, I want to clarify something. I mention that these things are always “fast food”, but I use the term in a very literal way. All of the street foods I like so much are quick to serve, 'fast food' in the tradition sense. I even include in this list burgers, shorthand for Fast Food (capitol F), but I do not consider international burger chains candidates for either my list nor my late night snacks.

It's a particular obsession that shapes my life to some extent. I usually plan travel first by picking a destination, and then outlining the local things I must try. I fit sightseeing into the gaps between. I'm not necessarily talking about the strangest, or oldest, or biggest, I just want to eat what, say, you would eat if you were out in your home town looking for a cheap, take-away meal. I'm talking about burgers and tacos and reuben sandwiches and pupusa and Philly cheese steaks and tamale and roasted nuts and udon noodles and frozen treats and hotdogs and pad see ew and meat pies and shrimp gumbo in sourdough bread bowls. I am very aware, for the record, that eating food from greasy stands and tiny counters in the depths of major cities is courting gastroenteritis, but I'll take my chances. I'm not giving up street food.

My current street food obsession is a world-wide, late-night staple – a falafel roll. Falafel, for those of you unfamiliar, is a small, fried patty made primarily from ground chickpeas. The dish, originally from Egypt, is flavored with onion, garlic, and a variety of spices, and is deliciously crunchy, light, nutty, and filling. When served up at kebab shops in roll form, a few of the freshly cooked little guys are tucked into a flatbread with a bit of salad, some hummus, and chili sauce. I adore the combination of hot, crisp, fried with cool, crisp lettuce. Add to this that I am absolutely addicted to chili (I usually as for enough chili sauce to “melt my face off”) and this street meal is an absolute winner for me.

Remember me saying these foods begin to shape my life? I often choose a falafel roll over a proper night's rest; the kebab shop near my house is open until very late, so when I finish work, long past midnight, and should be heading home to bed, I find myself wandering about with a roll in my hand.

Falafel Roll

I am so tempted to forgo this week's recipe, thus saving time which I could be spending buying myself another falafel roll (and suggesting you go do the same). However, that's not the way we roll here at OHC. Here's how to make one for yourself:

Falafel

This recipe makes a lot of falafel. It's hard to work in smaller quantities. I shape but do not cook the remaining falafel, and freeze them for later. The rest of the quantities below are for about 4 rolls.

250g chickpeas, soaked in water overnight
½ brown onion, rough chop
4 cloves garlic, peeled
1 Tbsp chopped parsley
1 Tbsp chopped coriander
1 Tbsp cumin
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp ground coriander
½ c breadcrumbs
1 Tbsp sesame seeds
1 egg
1 ½ tsp baking soda

Oil for frying

Drain the soaked chickpeas. In a food processor, combine the chickpeas, the onion and the garlic and blitz until the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs. The mix should be damp when you squeeze it, but will not hold together. Turn into a large bowl and add the remaining ingredients, except for the baking soda. Season and set aside for at least half an hour.

After resting, the mix should have come together nicely and will now hold it's shape when formed into small balls. Shape the falafel mix into golfball-sized balls, and then squash them down into small disks. Heat about 2 cm of oil in a small pan on medium high heat. Just before the oil starts smoking, add a batch of falafel, enough to fill, but not crowd the pan, you want a cm or two between each falafel. Fry for 2-3 minutes, until deep brown, adjusting heat as you cook to maintain a hot oil temperature. Flip, and continue cooking 2-3 minutes more, until evenly colored. Remove and drain on paper towels. Cook enough to allow 3 per roll. Serve hot in flatbread (below) with some shredded lettuce, tomato, hummus (below) and lashings of chili sauce (also below).

Flatbread

Right, I'm actually a pretty handy baker, but I've not much experience with flatbreads, especially leavened flatbreads (I make a pretty decent tortilla). The short version: these were tasty, but could have been prettier.

100g wholemeal flour
200g plain flour
60ml water
1 tsp honey
7g dried yeast (1 pkt)
1 tsp sea salt flakes
2 Tbsp olive oil
180ml water

Begin by activating the yeast in the 60ml of water with the honey dissolved in. In a separate bowl, mix together the dry ingredients. When the yeast begins to foam a bit, about 10 minutes, add the mixture to the dry ingredients along with the remaining water and the olive oil. Bring together and knead for 10 minutes. The dough should be sticky but still workable. Rest the dough, covered, in an oiled bowl until doubled – about an hour.

While the dough is rising, preheat your oven to the highest setting, with a stone on the lowest rack. If you don't have a stone, invert a tray so that you have a hot, flat surface onto which you can slide your flatbreads.

When the dough has doubled, punch it down and divide into four. Cover with a damp cloth or cling film and rest 20 minutes. Roll out with a rolling pin or by stretching with your hands until the dough is a large round, about ¼ cm thick. Transfer to a bakers peel or the back of a lightly floured tray and slide onto the hot stone or tray in your oven. Bake about 3 minutes, flip, make a minute or 2 more, and remove from oven. Repeat with the rest. Cover the cooked breads with a towel.

Chili Sauce

There's something wrong with the chilies in OZ at the moment. I used a variety of what was available at market – long reds, birdseye, jalapeño – and my sauce still doesn't have enough kick. Good luck to you.

1 brown onion, rough chop
2 cloves garlic, peeled and cracked
2 birds eye chilies, rough chop
4 long red chilies, rough chop
1 jalapeño chilies, rough chop
3 tomatos, rough chop
2 Tbsp tom paste

Gently sauté the onions and the garlic in a bit of oil until they are soft and sweet, but do not color much. Transfer to a food processor with all the remaining ingredients and blitz until smooth. Return to the heat and simmer until reduced by at least half. Season and serve at room temp.

Hummus

100g dried chickpeas, soaked overnight
1 clove garlic, peeled and cracked
juice of one small lemon
60 ml olive oil
1 Tbsp tahini

Drain the chickpeas and cover with plenty of fresh water in a pot. Simmer the chickpeas for one hour, until quite soft and creamy. Transfer to a food processor and blitz, adding the lemon juice, garlic, olive oil, and tahini. Process until smooth. Season, taste, adding more of the oil, garlic, lemon, or tahini as needed. The hummus should be creamy, rich, nutty from the tahini, with a tangy, clean after taste, thanks to the lemon.

Celebrity What?

2011-02-22T10:00:00.016+11:00

Last week I talked a bit about the endless repetition which is involved in the culinary profession. In an act of blatant post-modernism, I'm about to repeat myself this week (though I'll probably spare you next week). The repetition to which I am referring, to refresh your collective memory, is the avalanche of omnipresent prep jobs which must be completed day after day after day. Peel the asparagus, blanch the asparagus, shock the asparagus, cut the asparagus, portion the asparagus, serve the asparagus, order more asparagus for tomorrow. It's the sort of work which makes me wonder how many onions I've caramelized, or fish scales I've removed from the backs of my hands (they are awfully sticky), or ox tails I've jointed. It's why every chef I know can perform the most delicate movements with a dangerously sharp knife whilst wandering eyes examine the reactions to whatever kitchen tale is being re-told. As I said last week, this toiling, this repetition, is the long, boring march towards mastery.

It is the very lack of this incessant repetition which makes me more than wary of the particular breed of celebrity chefs who launch their careers via various reality TV programs. Reality TV, and, through this medium, the public at large, has become quite enamored with my profession. There has been an veritable explosion of TV shows about cooking: My Restaurant Rules, My Kitchen Rules, Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, Iron Chef (I must admit, I love this one) Iron Chef America, and more I can't recall at the moment. The most popular example of such a program here in OZ is called “Master Chef.” Rather than enlist an army of properly trained chefs to battle out for the title, the series follows a groups of home cooks through a series of elimination challenges until a winner is named “Master Chef.”

Look, I'm not precious about the tile “chef.” I really don't care what I'm called in the kitchen; I get called, in fact, several unprintable names, none of which I'm terribly concerned about. I also don't care if someone who wins a cooking competition wants to call himself a chef. It's when that person goes on to seek celebrity status as a “chef” that I start to get annoyed.

Chef? Really? Where did you train? Show me your scars. You won the chocolate soufflé competition, great! But how many times have you made a soufflé? Three times? Four? Wow. Want to come run a service in my busy kitchen? What? Never have? Right.

I'm aware I might sound a bit bitchy right now, but you, the celebrity-chef consumer, should be asking yourself: What standard am I accepting?

If someone participated in a eight-week television program called “Master Electrician” and won, would you trust them to teach you how to wire your new home? Yet former reality TV contestants are now experts in my profession. And the public trust them as if they've done the time.

No, not just “trust” but rather embrace. These so-called chefs appear as guests on breakfast news television programs, on magazine covers, in newspaper weekend supplements, at live events. None of which is necessarily wrong. Hell, every reality TV winner is an instant celebrity. I just hate that the TV appearances involve a cooking demonstration, the print media invariably accompanied by a recipe, and live appearances marked by a cooking “masterclass.” These people are not experts.

I feel bad now for, in the past, deriding grill-house chefs as “steak monkeys,” because I can promise you that every one of them has invested a few thousand litres of sweat over a grill and each of them could teach all of us a few things about how to properly cook a few dozen sirloins at a time. I can't say the same for for “chefs” who shoot to fame.

I don't pretend to propose any solutions, really, with the possible exception the suggestion that you not consume such celeb chef pulp in the first place. If we ignore them, perhaps they will go away.

Admittedly, I usually have a plan when I start writing a post, a destination that is a dish where we might all arrive together. I've honestly got a bit carried away by my own rant this week and I'm not really sure where I intended to take us. Perhaps I just need to relax.

Perhaps I need a cocktail.

Honeydew Vodka, Lime and Mint cocktail

I don't usually go in for sweet or fruity cocktails at all. However this one, my own invention, is inspired by a childhood picnic, bbq, and celebration food my Grandfather was obsessively fond of. My family used to cut chunks of fresh honeydew, toss it with mint leaves, and serve it with a squeeze of fresh lime over the lot. All of us would dig in with toothpicks, between hamburgers. It's a flavor combination I've since played with often: ice creams and sorbets and granitas and powders and whatnot. It keeps resurfacing because it is, well, part of me.

Add to this, when I got older, that my grandmother informed me that the fruit salad on offer at the same gatherings was an adult-only affair. The reason: the mixed fruit was soaked in a great amount of vodka overnight before being served. No wonder I don't remember fruit salad at any childhood picnics; it was kept well out of my reach.

I've combined the two here – the flavors of one with the alcohol maceration of the other. The result is quite a bright little number (both flavor and color) which tastes of good times in general, and reminds me of my childhood. I hope it reminds you of my childhood too.

1 nip (30ml) honeydew vodka (below)
½ nip (15 ml) lime juice
4 mint leaves, torn
2 tbsp honeydew ice cubes (below)
1 tsp sugar
3 ice cubes
soda water

In a short tumbler muddle the mint, honeydew cubes, and sugar. Add the honeydew vodka, the lime juice, and ice cubes. Top up with soda water. Taste, adjust for seasoning, and garnish with lime.

Honeydew Vodka
200g honeydew melon flesh
400g vodka

Blend together until smooth.

Honeydew Ice Cubes

You could just as well do this with fresh cubes of melon, but I like my drinks to keep quite cold.

Dice honeydew melon flesh into a small fine dice. Spread on a tray lined with baking paper and freeze. When frozen, separate and store in an airtight container in the freezer.

Crumby Jobs

2011-02-15T10:00:00.001+11:00

Kitchen work, as I have said many times in the past, is mostly made up a seemingly endless series of repetitious tasks. I don't mind most of them, though I can see how some people might find the prep aspect of cookery quite boring. Menus, for the most part, don't change all that often, and so it is quite likely you'll have to perform today most of the tasks you completed yesterday. It's the nature of the work really: prep the food, serve the meals, order the ingredients, prep the food... As I said, I don't mind it, but I can see why the prospect of making another batch of gnocchi, or picking ten bunches of parsley, or peeling several kilos of parsnips every day for a month mightn't sound like a good time. There are, however, some kitchen jobs I can't stand.

In fact, I might be a bit guilty of romanticizing the profession, what with all my past musings on the meditative and sooting nature of repetitive work. The truth is, some of the repetitive jobs are down right shitty. Sweetbreads, for example, the thymus gland of a cow, require poaching in a prepared court bouillon (flavored poaching liquid), draining, pressing, and then separating and peeling. The peeling step is the real bitch. You've got to somehow remove the tough little membranes which hold the sweetbreads together without the sweetbreads completely disintegrating. The white membranes, a film really, are fused to the edible part of the sweetbreads through the cooking, and vary in strength from papery to sinewy. I love to eat sweetbreads; I do not love preparing them.

Some kitchen jobs are evil by nature. Broad beans must be removed from their pods, blanched, shocked, and them peeled again. From the perspective of a cook with more work to do than time in which to complete it in – a normal state for kitchen staff – broad beans are not worth the effort. I hate them and do not usually have them on my menu.

Other kitchen jobs are evil by design. Some head chefs absolutely delight in dishing out horrifyingly soul destroying jobs, menial tasks on monumental scales. One Valentine's day my head chef greeted me with “Hey oyster boy!” To which I responded with a puzzled look, as there were no oysters on the menu. “Special menu today, and you get to scrub and shuck the oysters.” The oysters arrived inside two giant hessian sacks, 360 in each. I spent the day scrubbing and then shucking nearly 650 of the bivalves; half a dozen each for a booked out restaurant.

On another occasion, again for a night with a special, fixed menu, I had a quail dish I needed to prepare 100 portions of. Half a quail each meant 50 of the little birds needed to have their legs cut off, wishbone removed, and cavities stuffed with a sprig of thyme and a cracked clove of garlic. These, the crown as they are called, are later to be roasted, to order, until medium rare, when the breasts will be carved from the bone. The legs had to be salted for an hour, then rinsed, browned gently in butter, and braised for a couple hours with chestnuts which earlier had to be roasted and peeled. The cooked meat was then picked from the bones, mixed with the now mashed chestnuts and used as the filling in 100 hand-made ravioli, which were made from hand-cranked pasta. These were blanched and cooled, ready to be steamed to order. The braising liquid was then mixed with a splash of maderia and reduced to a sticky jus. All of this was my job. I started work at eight a.m. and had until six p.m. to finish. It was, as you can imagine, a race.

During service, the plan was to roast the crown, rest it, carve off the breasts, steam a ravioli, sauté some cavalo nero which had previously been blanched and squeezed dry, heat some jus, and assemble thus: bed of cavalo, ravioli, medium rare breast on top, jus around.

At about five o'clock I said to the head chef “I'm set. 100 portions of the quail dish.”

“Ravioli done?”

“Yup.”

“Crowns stuffed?”

“Uh-hu.”

“Jus? Cavalo? Grapes?”

“Yesss... what grapes?”

“You need three grapes per portion; they are to be warmed in the jus. A few bunches came in today. Brown bag, cool room.”

Cool. I've got an hour to count out 300 grapes, I thought as I turned towards the cool room. Easy.

“Oh,” the chef added over his shoulder, “and peel them.”

Peel. 300. Grapes.

Pure evil.

Apart from skinning grapes, there is another, much more common, kitchen job I completely despise: crumbing. Also called pané (pronounced pa-nay), it is the simple process of coating a food in bread crumbs so that it can be fried. It is, however, a messy job, and no matter how carefully you try to use one hand for drys and one for wet, dipping a series of, say, twenty veal schnitzels in flour, then eggs, and then breadcrumbs will inevitably result in fingers coated with several layers of sticky mess. Cooking is a visceral trade, and I spend most of any given day elbow deep in some food or other, so I can't really tell you why I find this one job so distasteful, but I do. If you ever work in my kitchen, you'll have to get used to doing all the crumbing, because I won't touch it.

Crumbed Mackerel Fillets with a Witlof and Shaved Fennel Coleslaw, and Horseradish Dressing

Mackerel are terribly underrated fish. I love their rich, oily flesh. They deserve a bit more culinary attention than they get here in OZ. I'm allowing one fillet per serve from a 500g fish. If you are unfamiliar with filleting fish, ask your fishmonger to do it for you, or, better yet, ask him to teach you. I match it here with a fresh, crisp salad, do balance the fried, rich fish.

Witlof, also called endive or chicory, is a bitter lettuce, that should be yellow, not green, as greening is a sign of over-exposure to light, and indicates that the witlof will be excessively bitter.

1 500 mackerel, fillets removed from the bone, pinbones removed
100g flour
1 egg, lightly beaten
100g bread crumbs
100ml vegetable oil

Place the flour, egg, and breadcrumbs in three separate wide, shallow dishes. Lightly season the flour and breadcrumbs. Dredge each fillet in flour, dust off excess, and then coat with the egg. Transfer to the breadcrumbs and coat thoroughly. Repeat with second fillet. Refrigerate for at least half an hour (it gives the crumbs a chance to set) or up to 24 hours.

Heat a small frying pan on medium heat. Add oil (it should be about 1 cm deep) and heat until nearly smoking. Add the mackerel fillets and cook until brown and crisp on one side. Flip and cook the second side. Remove from tee pan with a slotted, metal spatula and drain on paper towels. Serve on witlof and shaved fennel coleslaw (below).

Witlof and Shaved Fennel Coleslaw

1 head witlof
1 head baby fennel
½ bunch parsley, leaves only
a very small bit of purple cabbage, shaved

Prepare the witlof by cutting about 3 cm from the base. This will allow you peel off the individual leaves. Reserve half a dozen of the nicest ones. Shred the remaining leaves lengthwise. Shave the fennel on a mandolin. Toss all the ingredients (except for the reserved witlof leaves) and dress lightly with horseradish dressing (below). Use three of the reserved leaves to make a cup of sorts and fill it with the coleslaw.

Horseradish Dressing

For this recipe you'll need to either make mayonnaise (whisk together 1 egg yolk, 1tsp dijon, and a pinch of salt and pepper. While whisking, slowly pour in about 250ml veg oil until it is all incorporated and you have a thick, glossy mayo.) or use a store bought one.

125ml mayo
1tsp sherry vinegar
1tsp horseradish cream

Mix all ingredients together.

Buried Treasure

2011-02-08T10:00:00.001+11:00

I've recently returned from a brief beach holiday on the south coast of New South Wales. I spent a great deal of time, when not languishing in the delicious heat in the confines of our beach cabin, with sand between my toes (not to mention elsewhere) and swimming in the surf. I took my oldest boy fishing for the first time (four fish!, though too small to keep), watched a late-night lightning storm build over the Pacific, ate far too many potato chips, and generally relaxed. While the relentless sun and fresh air were a welcome change from the hum of kitchen fluorescents and extraction fans, I must confess, cooking was (nor is it ever) far from my mind. Incidentally, it didn't help that the place was bloody crawling with wildlife, most of which I wanted to eat.

Perhaps this is the gypsy curse of the chef; that all living things are viewed as potential ingredients. Not a magpie flies past my window without me wondering how it might taste; a trip to the Sydney Aquarium serves only to make me hungry and is usually followed directly by a visit to the Fish Markets for lunch. My few days away on the beach were marked by a veritable parade of local animals, many of whom seemed to be in fine eating form. We had cabin visits from a small mob of 'roos (tasty when cooked rare) a flock of twenty young ducks, and a procession of what looked to be quite tender rabbits. Outside I'm all: “Look at the bunnies, boys!” while what I really want to say is: “I think the two of us could cut them off before they make it to that hole. I'll get a pot ready.”

And then there was the sea life. I saw bream and flathead and flounder and mussels and stingrays (skate, when you serve it) and prawns and crab and mullet and oysters and abalone. Together, land, sea, and air, there were so many delicious animals I couldn't stop thinking about eating. Even the plants looked good. I found myself wondering which varieties of seaweed washed up on the beach were edible. My hungry, roving eye managed to spot an accidental tomato plant near the beach boardwalk (discarded tomato slice from a sandwich?), surrounded by one of it's solanum genus relatives, blackberry nightshade, one of the few identified species of the holiday I didn't wish to eat.

Oh. And I found pipis.

For those of you not familiar, pipis are an Australian mollusk common throughout the majority of the Australian coast, and can be found from Queensland 'round to South Australia. More importantly, for myself at least, they are common in many of my favorite Chinese restaurants, steamed open, tossed in various sauces, and served on beds of rice or noodles. In fact, the tasty little clams feature in one of the signature dishes of my favorite after-hours Chinese restaurants here in Sydney's Chinatown. It's the sort of place which attracts chefs in general: late opening hours, good food, large tables. To arrive late on a Saturday night (read: very early Sunday morning) is to discover a room filled with tables of restaurant staff drunkenly consuming dumplings and whatnot. While the suckling pig is good, and the Peking duck pancakes are delicious, the one dish everyone I know orders is the Pipis in XO sauce.

XO , invented in Hong Kong in the 80's, is a spicy, salty, fishy, sauce which is used as a cooking ingredient, a condiment, and a dipping sauce. The chili level is often quasi-nuclear and so earns an instant thumbs up from me. It goes well with all manner of meats, rice, noodles, eggs, dumplings and more. However, when you suck it from the little cups that are clam shells, it seems as though the sauce was absolutely created to go with pipis.

Which, you might imagine, is lucky. For, as I mentioned, I found a beach full of pipis. Sadly, it is not legal to harvest pipis from the wild in New South Wales, as they have been deemed a possible health hazard (the little guys are pollution filters). It is legal to use them for bait, though, which we did. My family became quite good at spotting holes in the sand where the pipis reside. Digging them up is an addictive and satisfying venture, much like finding buried treasure.

Anyway, I'm home now and I can't shake the craving. I must have pipis in XO with fried noodles. Since I can't collect the shellfish, I'm just going to have to settle for homemade XO.

Pipis in XO with Fried Noodles

This recipe requires a lot of chopping and mincing and dicing. This is why god made apprentice chefs. Consider getting yourself one.

XO Sauce

Right. A few notes:

This recipe makes far more sauce than you will need for a meal of pipis. If you are remotely like myself however, you will find that addiction takes hold quickly and you'll soon be inventing reasons to use the stuff. Might I suggest scrambled XO eggs for breakfast. Great pick-me-up.

You might think that an Italian ham is out of place in a Chinese recipe, but the Jinhua ham traditionally used is not widely available in OZ, and any dry-cured ham (Prosciutto or Virginian, for example) makes a fine substitute.

Seeding dried chilies, as is called for below, is best done before soaking by breaking each in half and gently rolling them between your thumb and forefinger, open end down, allowing the seeds to fall out. Seeding fresh chilies, also called for, is best done by splitting each down the middle and removing the seeds (and white pith) with a spoon. Consider wearing rubber gloves.

Also, for the roasted shrimp paste, buy a bit of shrimp paste and wrap 5g (something like a teaspoon) in a loose foil parcel and roast it in a 200ºC oven for 5 minutes.

Finally, tradition dictates that this spicy sauce has no nuts in it. However, I once had a version with a fine kibble of cashew through it, and I really enjoyed both the rich crunch and oily undertones they added. Besides, “traditional” is quite the label for a sauce that is only about 25 years old. Mix it up, I say. Here I'm using macadamia nuts, as I like their creamy, oily texture, and, as you probably know, they are Aussie natives.

50g dried scallops
75g dried prawns
500ml vegetable oil
2 heads garlic, peeled, fine mince
8 medium shallots (that's an “eshallot” if you live in France or NSW), fine dice
50g prosciutto, fine dice
4 lg long red chilies, seeded, fine dice
20g dried long red chilies, seeded, soaked, fine dice
5g roasted shrimp paste
100g macadamia nuts, reduced to a fine kibble in a mortar and pestal

Soak the dried scallops and the dried prawns separately in 200ml of water each, overnight in the fridge. The next day, drain both, reserving the water. Using your fingers, shred the scallops into fine fibres. Chop the prawns as finely as possible.

In a small, heavy-bottomed pot on medium-high flame, heat 200ml of the oil until it is nearly smoking. Add the shredded scallops and cover with a loose-fitting lid, as they will fry quite violently and will spit oil. Cook for about 2 minutes, until the color deepens and the shreds become crisp. Remove from heat, strain, reserving oil and scallop shreds separately.

Wipe the pot clean and add the remaining 300 ml of oil and the reserved scallop oil. Heat on medium-high flame until nearly smoking and add the minced prawns, garlic, and shallots. Cook until deeply golden brown, stirring frequently. When done, the mixture should smell of roasted garlic and caramelized onion, with no “raw” aromas remaining.

Next, stir in both the dried and fresh chilies, and the diced ham. Cook for 1 minute. Then add the reserved scallop and prawn water, the roasted shrimp paste, and the fried scallop shreds.

Simmer, stirring occasionally, on low heat until all the water has evaporated and the mixture smells sweet, fishy, and richly hot. Add the macadamia kibble and cook for an additional 5-10 minutes, until the nut particles taste toasted. Remove from heat and cool. Transfer the XO to jars, top with more oil if needed, and store in the fridge for a month or two.

Pipis in XO

As with all bivalves, pipis have a high shell-to-meat ratio. If you are serving the mollusks on rice or fried noodles (as we are here), allow about 500g raw weight per person. You'll need about 150g of XO for each kilo of pipis. Purge your pipis (to remove any sand they might be harboring) by soaking them in a cold salt water solution (30g sea salt/1litre water) overnight in a cool, but not cold place. If you keep them in the fridge they will not open and disgorge sand. Drain thoroughly before using.

1k pipis
50ml shaoxing rice wine
150g XO sauce
2 spring onions, sliced

Heat a large pan on high heat. When the pan is blazingly hot, add the shellfish and rice wine at the same time. Cover with a lid, shake the pan constantly, until the majority of the pipis open: about 3 minutes. Using the lid, strain off all of the liquid. Add the XO to the pan, and return to the heat. Toss for 30 seconds. Add the spring onions, toss once or twice more, and serve on fried noodles (below).

Fried Noodles

Pipis are good served on rice or boiled noodles, as long as you have something to catch the sauce. Frying them adds a an extra crunchy dimension.

150g dried egg noodles
150ml vegetable oil

Bring a large pot of slated water to the boil. Drop the noodles in and cook, separating with tongs or chopsticks.Boil for 3-4 minutes, just until the noodles are tender but still firm. Drain and rinse under cold water immediately. Spread the noodles to dry on a tray for half an hour. Arrange into two portion-sized (10cm) nests.

Heat the oil in a small pan on medium-high heat until nearly smoking. Cook the noodle nests one at a time by sliding into the oil and frying for 1-2 minutes, flipping, and frying for 2 minutes more. The outside of the nests should be crisp while the insides remain soft. Drain on paper towels and keep warm until serving.

Strange Bedfellows

2011-02-01T10:00:00.016+11:00

Chefs train for years to learn all the skills of our trade. Every singe technique, and they are multitudinous, requires endless repetition to master, as with all things, really. Apprentices are given mountains of vegetables to peel and chop and turn and slice, not only because the most menial tasks inevitably fall to the bottom of the hierarchy, but also because when those mountains are finally scaled, one can be assured of a firm grasp of the method. The same is true for all aspects of the cheffing profession; it's near-endless, monotonous repetition which makes us so good at what we do. Would you like to know how to cook a piece of fish like a pro? You can pick up a few tips from the slick, toothy guy behind the pans on your television, sure. However, if you really want to be able to cook a perfect fillet, no matter the species of fish, the oven temperature, the pan, or regardless of a hundred other variables, all you need to do is cook about seven or eight thousand fillets. After that you start to get a feel for it.

By way of allegory, I'm reminded of a book (the name of which escapes me) I read when I was a distance runner in college. One of the main characters in the novel is a world-class runner, who comments on the fact that he has a constant flow of young runners appearing to train with him and dropping off within a week. They don't quit because the training regimen is too hard, though it is, but because every one of them realizes there is no “secret” to be gleaned, no trick to becoming a better athlete, only excruciating training which painstakingly inches towards mastery.

There is no “secret” in cookery either. Rather there is only a seemingly interminable procession of fourteen-hour days, brain-achingly repetitive prep lists, and a finite number of foods to be cooked an infinite number of times. All of this might seem, admittedly, quite soul-destroying. However, I enjoy my job; I'm prepared for the apparent monotony, as it is all in aide of, gently honing skills.

How many braises have I done? I couldn't count. Prime cuts butchered? Thousands. Fish gutted? Tonnes. I know how to prepare, deliciously, more vegetables than most people can even name. I can describe for you the internal structure of several mammals, a handful of fowl, several crustaceans, and nearly a hundred fish. It's nothing special; any decent chef could do the same.

I've also acquired, along the way, the ability, as all chefs do, of identifying what flavors go well together. It's not a skill so much as cross-referenced catalog of individual flavors and how they contrast, complement, overlap, and compare. It is so deeply embedded that much of it feels like instinct; I have a feeling, say, that cardamom will taste good in cinnamon dounghnuts, and it does. While it is always possible to add new flavors to the library, it isn't often that two very familiar flavors one wouldn't normally combine come together to create something surprisingly tasty.

However, this is precisely what happened when I was eating a bowl of cherries the other day. It's the tail end of the season here and the specimens in my possession were, perhaps a bit over-ripe. One cherry in particular was, as I discovered when I bit into it, on the very verge of going off completely. It was bitter, nutty, slightly acrid, and, I slowly realized, tasted very much like a cup of coffee. This, of course, got me thinking...

Cherry and Coffee Crème Brûlée

This makes about 6 crème brûlées. You'll need to get some shallow and wide brûlée dishes, as there should be a high ratio of crisp crust to creamy custard. Also, I'm sure I've mentioned before that the kitchen torches you can buy at cooking stores are only slightly better than a pocket lighter. Go to the hardware store and get a proper torch.

50g coffee beans
600ml cream
100g sugar
4 egg yolks

300g cherries, pitted and stems removed
80g sugar

extra sugar for dusting

Break the coffee beans up in a mortar and pestal; the goal is not to crush them all, rather to crack them. Alternatively you can do this by pulsing in a blender or spice grinder. Combine the cracked beans, the cream, and 50g of the sugar in a small pot on low heat. Heat gently until the cream almost reaches boiling point. Remove from the heat and let cool to room temperature.

Meanwhile, combine the pitted cherries, sugar, and 2 tablespoons of water in a small pot and bring to a simmer. Reduce the heat and cook, uncovered, until the liquid has reduced to a glaze. Remove from heat and cool.

Preheat the oven to 160ºC Whisk the egg yolks and the remaining 50g of sugar together until they begin to become light and fluffy. Whisking constantly, strain the cream (through a fine sieve) into the yolk mixture, pressing any liquid possible out of the beans. Discard the solids.

Place 7 or 8 cherries in the bottom of each brûlée dish spaced evenly. Pour the brûlée mix over the top and place the dishes in a deep-sided tray. Pour hot water into the tray until it reaches about 2/3 the height of the dishes. Bake for 40-50 min, or until the brûlée is set but still quite soft in the middle. Cool to room temp and refrigerate a few hours before serving.

Just before serving, sprinkle an even layer of sugar over the top of each one and caramelize with th torch, making broad sweeping motions to avoid burning.

"Roast Chicken"

2011-01-25T10:00:00.014+11:00

Rather than sneak up on this week's topic, as is my usual want, this time I thought we'd jump right in. I've be deconstructing chicken. Dissecting if you will. Picking (pecking?) apart certain flavors I love and wondering how I might reassemble them in a surprising fashion. Namely I've been thinking about my favorite dinner - roast chicken with lemon and thyme - and how I might mix things up. Admittedly, I'm oft quite quick to disparage over-thought, molecular mangling of food that is so in vogue right now; poking fun at the veritable avalanche of flavored smokes and gels and foams is, after all, something I quite enjoy. However, to be honest, I am quite a fan of the glossy, large format books filled with such examples of this modern gastronomy, and I own several. Flipping through them, as I do, fills one's thoughts with images of fine cylinders of savory sorbets, crisp arches of caramelized onion, and food as architecture in general. The whole concept is, to understate, a bit infectious.

As with so many of my cooking projects, the genesis of this particular idea was both accidental and planted long ago. When first learning to cook professionally, I became particularly enamored with the method of confit, wherein a joint of meat is slowly cooked, submerged in rendered fat, until it is moist, tender, and flavorful. When cooking a tray of chicken legs in this manner I discovered, by accident, that if you have your oven a bit too high, and the, say chicken legs, cook a bit too fast, two things happen: One, the meat is not as good as it could be: neither tender nor moist enough. And two, a thin raft of cooked chook juices form on top of the fat in which the meat is cooking, upon removal and cooling these form a chicken-flavored, artificial “skin” which is both tasty and crunchy while also being, I assume, terribly detrimental to the well-being of your heart. This, I thought, was something too precious to let go of, and I tucked it away mentally for years.

Some time later, upon pulling from the oven a roast chicken which I had stuffed with quartered lemons, I discovered the most delicious pan drippings known to man. Through some brilliant serendipity the bird juices, escaping lemon juice, and roasting fats all combined in the bottom of the pan to form a roast chicken and lemon toffee. It was addictive, crunchy, sticky, salty, and sweet, it tasted of lemon and roast chicken concentrated. My mouth is watering now as I recall. I tried several times to reproduce this toffee by combining varying amounts of lemon and roast chicken stock with butter or duck fat, but ultimately couldn't make it work. I eventually gave up but held onto the general idea.

Recently I began experiments with making savory jelly, namely a mint and vinegar jelly to be served with roast lamb at the restaurant. Unwilling to use gelatin (seems too easy) I opted for the pectin in apples. Only, just as I added a generous splash of vinegar to a bit of apple jelly as it cooked, I realized I'd forgotten to order a bunch a mint, which I hoped to chop and stir in just as my jelly was about to set. Figuring I could still test the concept, I tossed in some thyme leaves and a squeeze of lemon and let the jelly cool. Upon tasting I couldn't help but think of how good this would taste with a roast chicken. This brought back my fascination with the lemon chicken pan drippings, and crisp, salty confit. From there, it was a few short jumps to complete culinary disassembly.

And here's what I came up with:

Slow Roast Chicken with Crisp Skin,
Vegetables, Lemon and Thyme Jelly, and Chicken Toffee Wafers

Right. This is totally out of control, and so is the method. I'll keep the commentary to a minimum – something I am not, admittedly, all that good at. A few of these tasks are best done in advance, namely the “slow roast chicken,” the roast chicken jus, and the lemon and thyme jelly. The rest are best prepared withing 24 hours of serving.

Slow Roast Chicken

This is actually chicken rillettes, slow cooked until the meat falls apart, wherein it is removed from the bone, shredded, mixed with it's cooking fats and juices, and set in pots capped with fat until it is, traditionally, to be spread on bread and eaten cold. Here I shape it and give it a quick sear for color and a bit of extra roast meat flavor. Allow a week, at least, in the refrigerator between cooking and eating for the flavors to mature. This will make far more than you need

2 k chicken legs, bone in, skin on
1 garlic clove, peeled and cracked
1 shallot, peeled and sliced
1 bay leaf
1 sprig thyme
zest of ¼ lemon
2 Tbsp duck fat
150 ml chicken stock

Place the chicken into a large dish with a tight-fitting lid. Drop the garlic, shallot bay, thyme, zest, and duck fat around the sides. Pour the stock over. Season with generous amounts of salt and pepper. Cook, covered, in a slow oven for 2- 4 hours – until the meat is falling apart. The key is to not allow the liquid to come to a rapid boil; rather it should “tick” slowly.

Strain the contents of the pot, keeping the liquid and the solids in separate bowls. Allow the meat to cool until you can handle it. Carefully peel the skin from the legs, keeping it in as large of pieces as possible. Transfer the skin to a sheet of cling film, lightly season, top with more cling film, roll up, and freeze until ready to use for the crisp skin (see below).

Pick the meat from the bones and discard the bones, along with the hard herbs. Using your fingers or a couple of forks, shred the meat and cooked vegetables. You should end up with a fine-grained texture product, not a paste.

Using a ladle, transfer into the meat all of the fat that has risen to the top of the reserved cooking liquid. This will (hopefully) be quite a bit. Mix this into the meat, tasting and adjusting seasoning – adding more salt, pepper, as needed and a bit of the cooking liquid as well, until the mixture is moist and rich. .

Sterilize some small ceramic pots or jars or glasses. Divide the warm meat evenly, packing it down and attempting to prevent air bubbles; leave at least 1-2 cm of space at the top of each one. Smooth the top and cool in the refrigerator for a couple of hours. When they have cooled, melt the 200g of clarified butter (just melt, don't heat it beyond that). Pour the butter over the top of the meat until it is about ½ cm thick, taking care that no meat protrudes from the fat. Return to the refrigerator and store for at least one week before serving. Be sure to wrap them the morning after making them so tat they don't take on that “fridge smell.”

Brown Chicken Jus

The method for all brown jus is essentially the same: roast the bones, brown the veg, simmer, skim, skim, skim, strain, reduce, strain again, and cool. Nothing special here.

6 k chicken bones
100 ml red wine (or water)
1 carrot, peeled, roughly chopped
1 brown onion, peeled, roughly chopped
1 stick celery, roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic, peeled
1 bay leaf
1 sprig of thyme
4 whole black peppercorns

Heat your oven to 200º C. Arrange the bones in a single layer on roasting trays and roast in the oven, turning occasionally, until they are dark brown, but in no places black. Any burnt bits will add bitter flavor to your stock. Using tongs, transfer the bones to a large pot. Carefully pour off any accumulated fat and then splash a bit of the red wine (or water) into each hot roasting tray. Using a wooden spoon scrape off any bits of meat and cooked juices that have stuck to the pan. Pour all of this into the pot with the bones.

Roast the veggies in the oven until they are colored but not burnt. Don't worry if they are not cooked through; a bit of caramelization is what we are after here. Add these to the roasted bones in the pot as well as the thyme, bay, and peppercorns.

Fill the pot with cold water. Cold is important as it helps any fat to gel and rise to the surface. Skim all of this fat of. Bring the stock just to a simmer. It is of utmost importance that this does not come to a rolling boil, as this tends to produce a cloudy stock with cloudy flavors.

When the stock simmers, turn the heat down to the barest of simmers, skim again, and walk away.

Let the stock simmer thus for at least 4 hours. Occasionally skim any accumulated fat that rises to the surface and top up the water-level with cold water.

When the stock has finished simmering, remove it from the heat and allow it to stand for ten minutes to settle. Gently strain the stock through a fine sieve, discarding the solids as you go.

Simmer the strained stock, skimming any impurities, until it is thick and sticky, and, when spooned onto a plate, is very viscous and slightly cohesive; if it runs freely, reduce some more. Be careful, however, not to over-reduce; your stock will take on a deeply salty and slightly bitter flavor.

Strain the jus through a fine sieve and allow to cool, uncovered in the fridge until it is completely set. Remove any fat and impurities – they'll be a lighter color than the rest of the jus - that rise to the surface upon setting (just spoon or cut them off).

Lemon and Thyme Jelly

I really dislike the flavor of cooked citrus, so I add the lemon at the last possible moment here.

1k apples, quartered, skins and cores intact
1 litre water
sugar
200ml cider vinegar
5 thyme sprigs, leaves only
1 lemon, juice only

Gently simmer the apples in the water for 1 hour. Strain through muslin or cheese cloth overnight, reserving the liquid and discarding the solids. For every 1cup of apple liquid, weigh out 180g of sugar. Mix the liquid, sugar, and vinegar. Bring to a boil and simmer until the mixture reaches setting stage – about 105ºC. If you drop a bit on a cold plate, wait a moment, and then run your finger through it, the surface will wrinkle up.

When your jelly has reached setting stage, add the lemon juice and the thyme leaves, stir to mix and transfer to a sterilized jar to set.

--Try to do these things on the day you plan on serving.--

Crisp Chicken Skin

reserved chicken skin from chicken rillettes (above)
salt

Preheat your oven to 200ºC. Thaw (if you've frozen) the reserved skin from the rillettes (above). Line a tray with baking paper and lay out the skin, making sure that it does not overlap. Salt liberally. Top with another layer of baking paper and lightly press with another tray. Bake until the skin is golden and shatteringly crisp – about 10-15 minutes. Cool, break into shards, and store in an airtight container at room temperature.

Roast Vegetables

I use two veggies here to make purées: carrots and corn. The carrots, I leave alone, simply blanching them and then blending them with a touch of seasoning keeps both their color and flavor quite bright. The corn I prepare in my favorite way, removing the kernels from the cob and then pan-roasting them in foaming butter with a touch of garlic and thyme, after which I process them in a blender with a touch of cream until they become a velvety puree.

Carrot Puree

1 carrot, peeled and roughly chopped

Simmer the carrot pieces in just enough water until they are soft but still firm. Transfer the carrot to a blender and process until smooth, adding just enough of the cooking water to make a smooth puree. Finish with a few drops of lemon, and salt to taste.

Roast Corn Puree

1 ear of corn, shucked, kernels cut from cob
1 tsp veg oil
1 tbsp butter
1 clove garlic
1 sprig thyme
2 Tbsp cream

In a medium pan on high heat, bring the oil to nearly smoke point. Add the corn, and sauté until the kernels begin to color. Add the butter, garlic, and thyme. Cook, tossing often, in the foaming butter until many of the the kernels caramelize. Remove the garlic and the thyme and transfer to a blender. Process, adding the cream to loosen the mix, until very smooth. You can pass this puree through a fine sieve to remove any remaining corn skins, but I find the odd bit of texture here and there refreshing.

Chicken Toffee Wafers

These are the result of an attempt at reproducing the pan juices of myth I once accidentally made. These translucent crisps are not really wafers as much as paper-thin, sticky meat cellophane with a hint of lemon. It sticks to the recesses of your molars in a way only the most decadent of sweets are wont to do, but packs a savory, umami burst for a wonderful, trans-palate surprise. Very intense and quite good in very small amounts. This recipe shouldn't use all the jus you've made.

2 Tbsp brown chicken jus (see above)
½ tsp lemon juice

Heat your oven to 50ºC. Line a tray with baking paper. Just melt the jus in a small pot and then add the lemon juice. Drop small spoonfuls onto the the tray, allowing them to spread as they will. Transfer to the oven and dry 4-6 hours, until they are crunchy. Remove from oven and cool, remove from paper and store in airtight containers.

To Serve

Remove the cap of fat from the chicken rillettes and form a couple of quenelles using two large spoons. Gently brown these in a bit of oil in a pan on medium heat. Meanwhile, prepare two plates with a bit of both the corn and carrot purées, a dollop of the thyme jelly, shards of chicken skin, jus wafers, and dots of warmed, liquid brown chicken jus. Finish with the warm chicken and a sprig of thyme (mine's been crisped up in brown butter, yum!).

Finally, you can eat.

Pasta Problem

2011-01-18T10:00:00.001+11:00

It is not possible, in a Sydney restaurant of any reputation, to serve a dish made from dried pasta. Well, it's physically possible, but it's not something customers will accept. The standard is such that only fresh pasta will do, with the general expectation that most establishments will make the pasta in-house. And god knows we do. I can't count the hours I've spent hunched over a little stainless, manual pasta machine, cranking out sheets like some mad grinderman. “Pasta,” an old sous chef of mine used to tell me, “is a sweating job.” I've sweat over pappardelle and angle hair and linguine, raged at torn lasagna sheets, fretted over lopsided tortellini, cried for burst ravioli. Just thinking about the additional pressure that “roll pasta” puts on my morning's prep list makes my respiratory system lurch into hyperventilation overdrive. Still, it's all worth the effort; evidently, as the customers get the best, the freshest product available.

That, actually, is an oversimplification. You see, fresh pasta is best when it is spanking new, but it is not necessarily a superior product. In the case of pasta, fresh is not always best. In fact there a quite a few times I'd love to be able to dish up to my customers dried pasta in the place of the fresh variety.

Technically,I should be able to have a dried pasta dish on my menu, regardless the reputation of my establishment. This is not a manifestation of laziness. Rather, dried pasta it's a different creature altogether. Confusing the two, fresh and dried, is akin to equating, say, tortillas to corn chips. The difference isn't exactly the same in its nature, but you get the idea. Italians, inventors of the idea, would be, frankly, confused at our confusion. In Italy the two are distinct foods: pasta fresca (fresh pasta), and pasta secca (dried pasta). Fresh pasta is thin and light and delicate, with slightly spongy texture which is, in part, a result of the inclusion of eggs in the dough. Dried pasta, on the other hand, is thick and robust and firm. Only dried pasta, made from high protein, high gluten durum wheat, and without eggs can really be cooked until it is, famously, “al dente.”

In everyday Italian cookery, each type of pasta is used accordingly for it's flavor and texture. Sadly, somewhere along the lines, this distinction was not exported and the impression became, at least here in OZ, that the dried variety is an inferior version of the fresh stuff, and that serving it would not be unlike serving up instant mashed potatoes.

Try, however, to make proper carbonara with the delicate noodles you've just cranked through your machine. It's not possible. You really need a noodle that will stand up to a second, vigorous cooking in a pot with a bit of egg, bacon, and cheese. Dried spaghetti? No problem. Fresh linguine? Gluey mess. Want to replicate Froġa tal- għaġin (Maltese spaghetti omelet, well worth trying)? It's impossible with fresh pasta. Macaroni and cheese, for the love of god, is a gloppy mess without dried noodles.

Nevertheless, I can't serve my customers dried pasta; they think they are not getting their money's worth. Which means no rigatoni or fusilli or orecchiette. And it definitely means that I'll never get to put one of our family favorite pastas on the special board, as it calls for penne rigate which is tossed/sautéed with the other ingredients just before serving, giving it a bit of crispy bite here and there.

Kell's Red Pasta

We call this dish, my wife's invention, simply “red pasta” as the majority of the ingredients are some shade thereof. Though we don't usually mess with the ingredients much, some diced and cooked chorizo (also red) would go well here.

500g penne rigate, cooked and drained
2 red capsicum, seeds removed, cut into thin strips
2 spanish onions, peeled and finely sliced
300g sundried tomatoes in oil, drained and sliced, oil reserved
200g parmesan cheese, shaved
50g pine nuts, lightly toasted
olive oil

In a large pan or heavy-bottomed pot on medium heat gently cook the capsicum and spanish onion in the oil reserved from the tomatoes. Cook, stirring often, until they are soft and sweet and have just begun to color. Add the tomatoes and toss, then add the cooked pasta, stirring and tossing to coat. Increase heat to medium-high. At this point you may need to add a touch of olive oil so that there is enough to coat the all the pasta. Cook, stirring constantly to prevent sticking, allowing bits of the pasta to fry a little. Add 2/3 of the parmesan, stir until melted, add the pine nuts, toss and serve, sprinkling the remainder of the parmesan over the top.

You'll Have to Ask Chidren

2011-01-11T10:00:00.003+11:00

In my short (and, might I add, ineffective) stint in Sunday School, when I was quite young, I was told a fable about the dangers of dishonesty and corner-cutting. The story went something like this: three young siblings are sent out into the Black Forests of Germany (think: Big Bad Wolf territory) in search of blueberries. Each carries a pail and is told not to dare return until each respective bucket is brimming. The naughtiest of the trio, probably the youngest, quickly tires of his hunt and fills the bottom half of his pail with leaves, topping the bucket with berries, much to the horror of his two older siblings, leaving the afternoon free to do anything one might want in the spooky medieval forests of Europe (look for Smurfs? Hook up with Hansel and Gretel?). Upon returning home, the buckets are surrendered to Mother and, at the end of supper, each child is presented with (surprise!) a pie. Child number one cuts into a delicious blueberry pie; ditto number two. However, number three, bucket-half-full kid, gets a tartelette of foliage.

I have several problems with the above narrative. First, what mother would serve her child a pie of leaves? Harsh bitch. Second, I've never seen a wild blueberry. Alpine strawberries and wild raspberries sure, but blueberries? Never seen them, and I've spent a bit of time tromping about the wilds of North America, just looking for things I might eat. (What's that old boyscout adage about eating wild berries? Always blue, sometimes red, never white. Or is it: Sometimes blue, always red, never white? I can't remember.) I looked into it, just to be sure, and it turns out that blueberries, or their close relatives, are a circumpolar species, meaning that the family appears on every northern hemisphere landmass, at roughly the same latitude, presumably originating from a common ancestor when an arctic ocean did not yet exist. Evidently, though I've never seen such a thing, there exist “blueberry barrens:” Giant swathes of land dominated by wild blueberry bushes. So, while it may be a bad parenting decision to send your offspring foraging in your stead, it is quite practical indeed, as wild blueberries should be, in general, quite abundant.

I also take issue with the idea that picking blueberries is such a chore that no reasonably petulant child would be willing to participate.

I have this dim memory, at age three or four, of my Grandmother asking my Grandpa and I what kind of pie she should order from the local pie shop. “Blueberry!” was our united response. Though I don't recall, before or since, a particular love for the fruit, I recently watched my children eating blueberries directly from the bush, picking with joy, eating desperately, from the ground if necessary, worms and all. Recently, I took my family berry-picking at the same berry farm we've been to for the last few years, and blueberries were in season. My youngest might have had trouble (ate everything he picked), but my three-year-old easily filled a bucket; he was a more discerning picker than the rest of us, pointing out berries we'd picked which had yet to reach the pinnacle of ripeness.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (of “Faust” renown) said that: “One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.” To be fair, the line smacks of a proverb, and probably existed before Goethe put it to paper. At any rate, it's no wonder that children get to the majority of the berries firs, really, the fruits' tiny and delicate nature are perfectly matched to minuscule fingers. And the little bastards are swift. Damn quick.

Anyway, berry picking and pie memories and sunday school hauntings and other general baggage brings to you, my loyal readers (my army? Can we form the OneHungryArmy?) one tasty pie.

Blueberry and Apple Pie

I add a bit of Granny Smith apples here both for their sour flavor and their pectin, which helps the pie set up nicely. Also, I'm no pasty master, so the lattice top was something of a challenge for me, and describing how to do it here is, well, best saved for some other time.

4 c blueberries, rinsed and stemmed
3 granny smith apples, peeled, cored, and diced
½ lemon, zest and juice
30g flour
125g sugar
¼ tsp cinnamon
2 Tbsp butter, diced

for the Egg Wash
1 yolk
1tbsp milk

Prepare the pastry (below) and line a pie dish with one half of it. Mix all the pie ingredients, except the butter, and fill the lined dish. Dot with butter. Top with second half of the pastry, crimp the edges, cut some slits for steam to escape. Refrigerate for at least half an hour.

Preheat your oven to 220ºC. Brush the top of the pie with the egg wash, and bake for 20 minutes. Reduce the heat to 180ºC and continue baking for another 30 minutes, until the pastry is golden and the fruit is bubbling and thick. Cool before serving.

Pastry

400g flour
275g cold butter
pinch salt
60ml cold water

In a food processor, combine the flour, salt, and butter. Pulse until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. With the processor running, add the water a bit at a time just until the pastry pulls together and forms a ball; you may not use all of the water. Stop the processor immediately to avoid over-mixing.

Remove the pastry dough from the processor, divide into two, and shape into balls. Flatten these into disks about 2cm thick, wrap in cling film and refrigerate for at least half an hour.

I Could Do Better

2011-01-04T10:00:00.000+11:00

There exists the general belief that chefs, as a breed, are hypercritical about the food they are served. We, as the rumors go, are precious, nit-picky creatures, impossible to please. While, obviously, I can't speak for all chefs, I can tell you that this isn't entirely true. Nevertheless, I hear this assertion quite frequently, most often when I am invited to dinner at someone's house, usually phrased something like: “...but you are a chef, so I'm sure you're used to better.” Such thoughts never cross my mind. Worse than the implication that my standards are too high is the tendency for hosts, through the same insecurity, to pull me aside and ask for “a bit of help,” which usually ends with me manning the BBQ or pan-frying the fish course, when what I'd really like to be doing is drinking too much wine.* Regardless, I never pick apart a meal prepared by a friend or family member; I quite enjoy the novelty of someone else cooking for me and am thankful for the effort which I know, intimately, is involved. And I make sure to let them know.

I do not, however, extend this ethos to meals which I pay for. When I dine out, I expect a certain level (relative to the establishment) of overall quality and do not suffer unmet expectations lightly.

Sound harsh? Working in kitchens, several in fine dining restaurants, has taught me, at times brutally, what is expected of both the floor staff and cooks in terms of the experience presented to the customer. The rationale, when on the serving side, is that (to quote one of my former restaurant managers): “These people are paying us a lot of their money to do this properly. We better be bloody perfect.” When I take off my whites and go out to eat, I expect no less.

Given my high expectations it's probably no surprise that I am often a bit disappointed. While I could provide a litany of past poor performances, I can sum up my complaints in one sentence: “I could do better.”

And it's astonishing how often I do feel that I could do better. To be fair, when I pass this particular judgment I really mean: Given the same resources, I could do better. For example, not long ago, I went out for lunch with my family at an establishment which is marketed as “casual fine dining.” We had a disastrous experience. I'll spare you the blow-by-blow, but some of the highlights included a botched reservation, one very over-cooked steak, under-seasoned everything, shockingly lazy service, excruciating waits between courses, and a maître d' who told us to focus on the good points when we expressed our displeasure. Any one of these (with the possible exception of essentially being told to “get over it”) would be no big deal on its own, but when you sit down for a $50-a-head brunch, the little things start to add up to a considerable annoyance. It's about this point when I find myself looking around, counting wait staff, estimating seating capacity, peeking into the kitchen for a head count, that I usually come to the conclusion that if this were my team, I could do much, much, better.

I feel this way most often when eating breakfast out, and the feeling is particularly acute when, in moments of hangover-delusion, I allow hope to override experience and order Eggs Benedict.

An overview of everything which might be wrong with breakfast can usually be found in a single serve of Eggs Benedict. For starters, the egg must be perfectly poached, and they're almost never done properly. Too many establishments pre-poach eggs and keep them warm, or, worse, try to pass a fried egg as the real thing. Then, the ham or smoked salmon has to be of a decent quality, salty and smoky enough to assert itself from its position under lashings of rich yolk and butter sauce. Sadly instead, patrons are served cheap, flavorless varieties of the same. Then there is the English muffin, which needs to be chewy and crisp and strong enough to stand up as the supporting pillar of the dish that it is. The representative is more often a yeasty, bland puck of a thing. Finally there is the sauce. Hollandaise, a warm butter emulsion which, ideally, should be made in small batches, to order. The reason for this is that the sauce, once made, is only stable at slightly above room temperature and must be kept there (too hot and it splits, too cold and the butter sets, and, upon re-warming, it splits). Holding the sauce at the correct temperature is a problem because it also happens to be the preferred breeding temperature for many bacteria, which is why making large batches and attempting to hold them throughout service is a health gamble, at best. However, I can guarantee that your local café does not have the manpower to whisk up a batch of hollandaise every time a customer orders; someone is making a compromise somewhere.

So, you don't have the kitchen staff to make hollandaise properly? DONT PUT EGGS BENEDICT ON YOUR FUCKING BRUNCH MENU. It's that simple. How dare you ask me to pay $15 for a lukewarm, half-split, potentially deadly, simple sauce atop some flavorless, bulk-buy smoked salmon, over-cooked eggs and a stale English muffin from the corner shop? Honestly.

I'm aware that my title claim that “I can do it better” seems quite a bit like hubris at this point, so I want you to know that I do realize people make mistakes. Services in my kitchens aren't always perfect. However, I recognize the moments when I screw up, and I make great efforts to repair any problems I create (my floor staff are trained to use phrases like “Let me know how we can fix this.” and “We don't want you to go away unhappy.”) I differentiate myself as a chef by not putting hollandaise or similar items on my menu, because I know, with my resources, I can't do it impeccably. I often don't even bother with, for example, risotto, that bistro staple, because I know that on a busy night, with the size of my menu, I'm not going to be able to finish your roast mushroom risotto to perfection. It's my unwillingness to serve sloppy, over-cooked rice porridge that makes me a better chef. I know what my kitchen is capable of and I don't ask you, the customer, to pay for any more than that.

Eggs Benedict

Now, just before I show you how much better eggs Benedict can be when made at home, I want to point out that home-baked, multi-grain sourdough English muffins, self-cured salmon or ham, farm-fresh eggs, and blow-torch-singed hollandaise, are all completely over the top. I know that. I just wanted to show you how good breakfast really can be.

Multi-Grain Sourdough English Muffins

You'll need a bit of equipment for this one. Namely a mixer (this dough is nearly impossible to mix properly by hand) and 8-10 metal ring moulds about 10cm in diameter and 3 cm deep. You should be able to pick these up at a kitchen supply shop.

Also, you'll need a sourdough starter. If you don't have one, try to get some from a friend. Ask around, you'll be surprised at how many people are closet bakers and keep a starter lurking in the back of their fridge.

Sponge:
225 g sourdough starter
160 g whole meal flour
100 ml warm milk

Mix all ingredients in a large bowl. Cover and rest in a warm place 2 hours. Prepare the ring moulds by brushing them with melted butter and placing them on baking paper-lined trays, a few centimeters apart.

Dough:
140 ml warm water
2 Tbsp honey
1 tsp dry yeast
sponge (see above)
½ c mixed rolled grains
125 g whole meal flour
2 Tbsp oil
2 tsp sea salt flakes

(course semolina for dusting)

Combine the water, honey, and yeast. Stand 5-10 minutes until the yeast begins to foam. In an electric mixer with a dough hook or paddle attachment, combine the yeast mixture with all the ingredients (except the semolina) and mix on low until combined. Increase the speed to medium and mix for 8-10 minutes. The dough should become elastic and begin to pull away from the sides, but will still be very soft and sticky.

Generously flour a board with the semolina, scrape the dough onto the surface, dust the top with more semolina and rest for 15-20 minutes. The dough will be quite slack, so allow for inevitable spread.

Using a cutter roughly the same size as your moulds, cut pieces of dough and transfer them to the moulds. The dough should fill the diameter of the rings and nearly the height. Rest 1 hour.

Preheat your oven to 200ºC. Bake the English muffins in their moulds for 15 minutes. Remove them from the oven, flip them (still in their moulds) and bake for another r15 minutes, rotating trays as necessary to encourage even baking. Remove from the oven and cool in the moulds.

Eat within two days or freeze for a few months.

Sauce Hollandaise

3 egg yolks
pinch salt and pepper
125g melted unsalted butter (not hot)
1 Tbsp lemon juice

Bring a small saucepan of water to a simmer and reduce the heat to low so that it stops boiling but stays quite warm. Combine the yolks, seasoning, and 1 Tbsp water in a heatproof bowl that fits snugly over the saucepan. Place the bowl over the hot water and whisk the egg mixture until it becomes fluffy and thickens to the consistency of cream. Still whisking, add the melted butter in a thin stream until it is all incorporated. Remove the bowl from over the saucepan. Whisk in a few drops of cold water, followed by the lemon juice. Taste and adjust seasoning, adding more lemon juice if necessary. Serve immediately.

Bringing it all Together

Cut your delightful English muffins in half. Toast them, but for god's sake, don't burn them (so much work involved). Top each half with a few slices of ham or smoked salmon. Place a poaced egg (poaching instructions) on each half, pour a couple of tablespoons of hollandaise over the lot and burnish with a kitchen torch.

*To be completely honest, for those of you who might one day invite me over for a meal, I really don't mind helping out at a dinner party, and in most cases I could easily extradite myself if I really cared to. I love to cook, and can't stay away from it. Hand me that spatula.

Fail!

2010-12-28T10:00:00.010+11:00

I owe you an apology. I've completely botched the subject of this week's post. Total culinary failure. It was bound to happen, I suppose. Last year, at about this time I derided the onslaught of Christmas-themed recipes which appear in cooking rags, both in print and online. Particularly, I took aim at the endless eggnog recipes which crop up, weed-like, during the holiday season. I made some passing remark about posting about this, North American's favorite festive drink, only if I ran out of subject matter. While I have not yet run out of things to say, I did decide to post about eggnog this year, with a bit of a twist. In what hoped would be a continuation of the theme of last week's post, I wanted to show how cold weather Christmas traditions can be adapted to warm weather climates. Namely, I wanted to chuck eggnog into my ice cream churn and make a frozen treat out of my favorite holiday drink. It was a disaster.

It's not, actually, the first eggnog disaster I've had. Sadly, it was the third. The other two both happened years ago, while I was in in college in Idaho. The first occurred in my freshman year, when I lived in the dormitories and ate, primarily, in the dorm cafeteria. About a month before the Christmas holidays, one of the self-serve milk-dispensing machines was filled with eggnog. Fearing that such a bounty might be fleeting, I poured myself two large glasses; looking back I'd say they were about 500ml each. When both the eggnog and my meal were finished, I returned for another glass or two, then another, then another, and couple more whilst chatting with friends who come late to dinner, and then a few more, until I later found myself rolling in agony on the floor of my filthy little dorm room, hoping to god that the pain in my stomach would just hurry up and kill me so I could finally have some peace. Four litres of sweetened egg drink, it seems, is a bit too much.

And I'm not even talking about the alcoholic version. Traditionally eggnog, a cream and egg drink flavoured with nutmeg and cinnamon, is spiked with brandy or rum. The name of the drink is a contraction of “egg 'n' grog,” but there was no grog in the gallon or so I ingested. No, my personal shame is that I got sick from overconsumption of non-alcoholic eggnog.

My second unfortunate encounter with the drink also ended with me doubled over in agony, this time shortly before I was to board a flight. While I managed, this time, to keep my consumption to perfectly reasonable levels, I didn't remember to check the "use by" date, and was struck down instantaneously.

I should have, after two bad experiences, recognised eggnog as a nemesis of sorts. However, I've made the drink quite a few times with no incident. I've even made a few batches of eggnog ice cream, as I was hoping to do for this week's post. Besides, most of my history with eggnog has been with consuming, not producing, so I felt quite safe.

This time, instead of using my standard ice cream recipe and adjusting the flavourings, I used my favourite 'nog recipe and treated it like an ice cream base. In theory this should have been fine. All the required stuff is in there: eggs, sugar, cream. The anglaise I made tasted great. Then I added the grog. 150ml of brandy really gives my eggnog a bite, but, as I mixed it in, I began to wonder if it that quantity of alcohol mightn't prevent my ice cream from freezing. Which, as it happened, was precisely what occurred. No matter how long I churned my eggnog, it wouldn't firm up. I now had somewhere over a half litre of nutmeg-flavoured, boozy slush, more the consistency of soup than ice cream. In a last gasp of optimism, I transferred my slush to the freezer and left it overnight.

Author Isaac Asimov said that "[t]he most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I've found it!), but 'That's funny...'" So to in the world of cooking. Many foods have serendipitous origins. For example, tart tatin is famously an accident, created when an apple tart was baked upside down to save already over-cooked apples from burning. The result is magical. While I can't exactly say the same for my eggnog slush, I was quite surprised when I opened my freezer the next day.

I still didn't have ice cream, but what I did have was the most delectably smooth eggnog and brandy soft serve. It's set up just enough to be spooned into cups and sprinkled with a pinch of nutmeg. So, it's not remotely the ice cream I hoped to serve up the the adults on Christmas afternoon. However, it has an amazing texture, is deliciously refreshing, and packs quite a heady bite. I can't promise it will go well for you, but it's well worth attempting.

Eggnog Slush

6 egg yolks
150g sugar
600 ml cream
400 ml milk
1tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1tsp cinnamon

Prepare an ice bath. Combine the milk, cream, and spices in a small pot. Heat over low heat slowly until almost, but not quite boiling. Cool slightly. Meanwhile, whisk the yolks and sugar together until light and fluffy. Ladle some of the hot cream mix into the whisked yolks, whisking constantly (this step helps prevent the egg cooking too fast and scrambling). Pour the yolk mix back into the pot with the remaining hot cream, again whisking constantly. Using your trusty digital thermometer, cook over low heat, stirring constantly and scraping the bottom of the pot with a rubber spatula, until the mixture reaches 81.5C. Pour immediately through a sieve into a bowl floating in your prepaired ice bath and stir until cool. Pour in the brandy.

Churn in your ice cream maker until the mixture resembles a milk shake, this is about as far as you'll get it to freeze in your churn. Transfer to the freezer and freeze overnight. If all goes well, you should have something like soft-serve ice cream. serve in chilled cups with a sprinkle of nutmeg on top.
Ice Cream

Unstoppable Roast

2010-12-21T10:00:00.005+11:00

It's December and it's hot. No surprise really, as it is summer here in the southern hemisphere. Still, seven-and-a-bit-years post-migration, it's often a challenge to equate warmth with the months that I've always associated with the frigid depths of hell that were the Wyoming winters of my youth. While a sweltering January is something I can (just), after years of practice, comprehend, December, in my mind, is still all gloves and snow and fires and dinners in the dark after the sun sets at 4 p.m.. This inability to shake past associations, no doubt, has much to do with the celebration of Christmas. I can't yet disentwine the holiday from the memories and therefore find myself thinking of cozy nights and icicles when what really awaits me are heat waves and mosquitoes. It seems, however, that I am not alone, as decorations of snowmen and frosted trees appear on countless green suburban Australian lawns.

I've mentioned before this cultural holdover: the general tendency Down Under to spray fake snow in window corners and then venture out in shorts and thongs. The European immigrants who make up the majority of the Australian population have yet to shed the cold-weather symbols of their cultural heritage. No surprise, really, gum trees a bit weedy, and hold few ornaments.

I'm most fascinated, not unexpectedly, in how Australians have held on to the holiday food traditions of their cultural past. Christmas lunch often includes a beef roast, a roast bird, and ham. None of which most of us would choose to consume on a summer's day. Aussies have, to their credit, added copious amounts of seafood to the mix: oysters, cold cooked prawns, lobsters. However rather than transplant the roast, my adopted countrymen have simply, somehow, made room for the addition of seafood. Roast Christmas lunch, regardless of climatic inappropriateness, isn't going anywhere.

Paul Kelly, arguably Australia's greatest songwriter, captured just such a sentiment in one of my favorite modern Christmas songs: “How to Make Gravy.” The narrative voice in the song, when describing the upcoming Christmas day festivities, tells us “They say it's gonna be a hundred degrees, even more maybe, but that won't stop the roast.”

No, indeed. It seems there's no stopping the Holiday roast.

In the (Australian) holiday spirit, I give you my favorite roast dinner recipe – one which graces my table quite often, 40ºC be damned.

(Happy Holidays)

Slow Roasted Lamb Shoulder with Lemon, Rosemary, and Thyme

This is not so much a recipe as it is a general method. Hence the slightly vague quantities. Feel free to substitute whatever vegetables you like, add or leave out herbs (oregano or dried mint go well), and generally change things up.

1 lamb shoulder, boned out, rolled (ask your butcher to do this), about 1k
4 potatoes
4 carrots
2 whole heads garlic
1 bunch thyme
1 bunch rosemary
2 lemons
olive oil
white wine or chicken stock (both optional)

Preheat your oven to 160º. Season the lamb liberally. Heat a pan on medium-high heat until quite hot. Add a few tablespoons of oil and, when it begins to smoke, add the lamb. Turning, brown the shoulder on all sides, taking care not to burn the meat. Remove from pan.

While the lamb is browning, prepare the vegetables. Cut the potatoes into large pieces. Peel and cut the carrots into logs. Cut the top off the heads of garlic so that the cloves are exposed. Toss all the veggies in a bit of olive oil and season. Spread them out in a baking tray lined with baking paper. Sprinkle over some of the thyme and rosemary leaves.

Place the browned lamb on top of the vegetables, squeeze the lemon juice over the top of the lamb, drizzle the meat with a bit of olive oil, and sprinkle with a few more herb leaves. Pour a cup of wine, stock, or water into the tray. Cover the whole thing with foil and roast in the oven for about 3 hours, until the meat is fork-tender and sticky. Remove from the oven and serve hot with a bit of greek-style yoghurt or mint jelly.

It's What's On the Inside

2010-12-14T10:00:00.015+11:00

Chefs love to stuff things. We are forever looking for new cavities which we might fill. Birds, for example, beg to be stuffed. And stuff we do, with all manner of foods: bread and rice and nuts and meat and fats and herbs and veggies and fruit. Chicken with lemons, quail with veal sausage, turkey with bread and butter. The same goes for all meats, really. I love to roll up a bit of fennel in a pork belly and slow roast it, or to pack tapenade into a boned lamb leg. While the primary objective of stuffing meats is to add flavor, it also has the secondary outcome of increasing the cooking time (also increasing flavor) while keeping the meat moist.

Fruits and vegetables are subjected to similar treatment. I've filled capsicum with pork and rice, potatoes with truffle mash potato, tomatoes with crab risotto, zucchini with burghul, eggplant with vegetable stew, chilies with smoked gouda, and more. Rather than, as with meat, the focus being on enhancing the flavors of the foods which are stuffed,the objective here is creating a vessel into which some delicious thing can be cooked or served. While, obviously, you can still taste the capsicum which you've stuffed and roasted, the filling, whatever it is, is where it's at.

Pastries, with their endless fillings, also deserve a mention here. Where chefs run out of natural cavities to stuff, they create them. It requires little in the way of the powers of recall to collate a list of past-consumed stuffed pastries: cream puffs and cakes and chocolates and cookies and croissants and cannoli and, evidently host of others which begin with the letter “c.” While I'll enjoy the occasional éclair (not a “c,” I know), I am mad for savory stuffed pastries. My personal favorite of the savory pastry genre is the Maltese “pastizzi,” of which I am unnaturally fond. These flaky pockets are traditionally filled with any mixture of ricotta, peas, spinach, and other cheeses, while modern versions include “curry flavor” and “pizza.” I usually stick to the most simple variety: ricotta mixed with parmesan and a touch of course semolina flour, for a tiny bit of texture. The filling, in its simplicity, shares the stage with the delightful pastry (a crisp, flaky lard-layered affair), rather than over-power it. Delightful.

It was pastizzi I was thinking of the other day when I picked up a late-spring treat at the fruit market the other day, zucchini flowers. These bright yellow, paper-thin, flowers are abundantly available in spring and early summer. Each bud is four to eight centimeters long, concealing a small stamen within. When cooked, the flowers have the most tantalizingly sweet, “green,” zucchini flavor. Female flowers come with the added bonus of a tiny zucchini attached to the end (male flowers, obviously, don't fruit). With the stamen removed, the flower offers not only a visually arresting presentation, but the perfect space for any filling which needs, prior to cooking, to be contained, if only just. Zucchini flowers are often stuffed with delicate things such as crab meat, mozzarella and anchovies, meat mousses, and more. They are then either steamed or battered and fried to cook the filling within, and served up as the mere vessels.

Which brings me, in a way, back to pastizzi. When I purchased my flowers at the market, I immediately began wondering what I might fill them with. Running through several possibilities I realized what I really wanted to taste was the zucchini, and I thought instantly of the beautiful balance between filling and wrapping, ricotta and pastry, in my favorite pastizzi. Filling flowers with such a ricotta mix (as opposed to a chicken and bacon mousse, for example) would allow the delicate, sweet flavor of the young zucchini to move to the fore.

By way of counterpoint to the fried flowers, I served this one up with a achingly clean gazpacho consommé. The hot, crisp, cheese-filled zucchini flowers and cold, crisp, smoke-ghost soup make for strange and wonderful bedfellows.

Ricotta and Semolina-Stuffed Zucchini Flowers
with Smoked Gazpacho Consommé

Zucchini Flowers

6 zucchini flowers
150g ricotta
75g grated parmesan
2 Tbsp course semolina flower
salt and pepper

Prep the flowers by trimming away bottom bit of the baby zucchini (where it was attached to the plant) and removing the stamen from inside the flower. To do this gently open the flower, taking care not to tear it, insert one finger and, placing your thumb on the outside, gently pinch the stamen until it breaks off. Remove it from the cavity.

Combine the remaining ingredients and taste for seasoning. Using a piping bag, fill each flower until it is bulging, but not splitting. You want to be able to close it completely at the top and not have any exposed bits of ricotta along the sides. You can store the flowers at this stage for several days in the fridge.

Dredge the flowers in a bit of flour, dusting off any excess. Batter (recipe below) and deep fry at 175ºC, working in batches of a couple flowers at a time, until golden and crisp – about 3 minutes. Alternatively, you can shallow fry in hot oil for a few minutes on each side. Drain on paper towels and serve hot (2-3 flowers per person ) with minuscule cups of ice-cold smoked gazpacho consommé (below).

For the Batter

The best frying batters are fresh and cold. Make this just before you are ready to fry, using ice cold soda water and keep it as cold as possible as you use it.

¼c corn starch
¼c flour
pinch salt
soda water, cold

Combine the corn starch (called “corn flour” Down Under), flour, and salt. Add just enough soda water to make a batter. You are looking for something akin to the consistency of thin pancake batter. When you stick your finger in and pull it out, it should form a coating thick enough that it doesn't run off immediately, but thin enough that you can still see your flesh underneath.

Smoked Gazpacho Consommé

Gazpacho is a cold, tomato and raw vegetable soup. My recipe here is not, strictly speaking, really gazpacho, as the name refers to the stale bread which is used to thicken the traditional variety. Bread, however, would cloud our consommé, and we can't have that. The smoke here comes from char-grilling the capsicum – another no-no, as everything in a gazpacho is meant to be raw. Who's counting, really?

Keep this recipe handy, it's a great, tiny, refreshing, dinner party starter, with or without the fried flowers.

1 red capsicum
3 medium, over-ripe tomatoes
1 cucumber
1 eshallot, peeled
1Tbsp sherry or red wine vinegar

Prepare the capsicum by blackening its skin over a flame, cooling it, and removing the seeds and stem. Roughly chop the reminder of the vegetables. Blend the lot, including the vinegar, in a blender or food processor until smooth. Hang in cheese cloth or a muslin bag overnight in the refrigerator, catching the liquid (that's our soup, baby).

The next day, discard the solids. The liquid remaining will be clear, with a delicate red hue and the flavor of a smoky, liquid salad. Season the soup with sea salt (iodized table salt can cloud your consommé), and keep ice cold until just before serving.

Obsession Flavor

2010-12-07T10:00:00.010+11:00

Summer Down Under officially started on the first of December. It has yet to really feel like summer here in Sydney (we've had quite a bit of rain), but a trip to the local fruit market is enough to convince. Summer fruits are in season, and, as the weeks roll by and they become more abundant, the prices are falling. I've already eaten my body weight in mangoes (something I traditionally do several times over each summer). The peaches have only recently really come into their own, though white peaches, my favorite, are not yet very good. So far the cherries have been prohibitively expensive, as one would expect; it is, after all, only the beginning of the season. However, I couldn't pass up $6/k cherries, less than a third of the going rate, when I saw them the other day. Sure, they are on sale because of their tiny size. These little cherries have nothing on the plump blood-juice-filled monsters I'll be eating by Christmas, but they do taste good, and I've been dying to try out this cherry ice cream recipe I've been writing in my head for the past eight months or so.

This particular obsession of mine began, to be precise, near the end of last summer. My love, you see, of summer fruits is surpassed only be my love of ice cream. In summers past I've filled my belly in the mornings with a half dozen different pieces of fragrant fruit, and finished most of those days with scoops of ice creams flavored with the same. Bookends, if you will. Last summer was much the same with my sudden passion for a cherry ice cream which was produced at my local gelateria. I usually choose two or three flavors when I buy ice cream and for several months one of those was, consistently, cherry. Until, that is, cherry flavor was discontinued. Perhaps I was the only person who ordered it, for I know I did my part, but lack of popularity was cited as grounds for dismissal.

There is nothing quite like removing availability to spur desire. And desire I did. Regular readers will know that I am quite fond of recreating from scratch complicated foods which I might more easily buy, so making a bit of fruit-flavored ice cream should be no problem at all. Except that cherries were by that point well out of season; I have a moral objection to using those shipped from the Northern Hemisphere during our winter, and a flavor objection to using cherries from a tin or frozen bag.

I was therefore left to wait until local cherries once again graced the shelves of Australian fruit shops, giving me several months to concoct a recipe for a perfect cherry ice cream. I didn't want a saccharine, candy cherry affair. I wanted to capture that rich, metallic, cherry flavor one associates with cherries so perfectly ripe they are nearly black, when the flesh yields notes of nutty aromas. Nutty, in fact, I decided, is key.

Cherries, like all of the stone fruits, are closely related to almonds. In fact, next time you eat a peach, crack open the pit and you'll find something that looks and tastes quite a bit like an almond (disclaimer here: don't eat the pits of any of the stone fruits, as they contain cyanide compounds which are OK in small amounts, but harmful if you get too much). Crack a cherry pit open and crush the little white nut inside between your fingers; it smells intensely of almond. My ice cream, therefore, would cheat a little by using almonds to flavor the anglaise, into which I would swirl poached cherries once it was churned.

And, now, cherries have just started appear, but with quite the price attached. All of which is expected at the beginning of the season; fruits are cheapest at the peak of their season and become more expensive as you move either side. Which is why $6/k cherries, no matter their size, are so appealing. I can't wait any longer to get this ice cream into a cone.

Cherry Ice Cream

I'm going to keep telling people that a digital thermometer is an indispensable kitchen utensil until they become standard issue in all homes. You want perfect ice cream? Make perfect anglaise. Perfect anglaise? Get the temperatures right. It's that simple.

600 cream
400 milk
200 almonds “natural”
150 sugar
6 yolk

Preheat your oven to 200ºC. Spread the almonds on a tray and roast, tossing occasionally, until they color slightly and begin to smell roasted (My three-year-old said: “Daddy, I smell popcorns.” He's right, roasted nuts smell a bit popcorn-like when they are done.). Remove from oven, cool, and chop roughly.

Combine the milk, cream, and nuts in a small pot and heat over low heat until the mix comes nearly to a simmer. Remove from heat and cool to room temperature. Strain, reserving the liquid, pressing the nuts to extract as much moisture as possible, and discard the solids.

In a large bowl (or in your electric mixer) whisk together the sugar and yolks until they are pale and fluffy. This thick mixture is called, in French, a sabayon, close culinary relative of the Italian dessert “zabaione,” a whisked egg, sugar, and sweet wine sauce of sorts traditionally served with figs. (Making you smarter, one random fact at a time.)

Prepare an ice bath and float an empty metal bowl large enough to hold all the ingredients on it. Have a fine strainer nearby.

While your sabayon is being whisked, gently heat the cream mix until it reaches about 90ºC and reduce the heat to the lowest setting. Ladle about 300ml of the cream into the sabayon whilst still whisking. This step helps prevent the egg cooking too quickly (and curdling) when added to the hot cream. Pour the now-warmed sabayon into the pot with the remainder of the cream and cook, stirring constantly with a rubber spatula, scraping the bottom vigorously as your stir. Monitor the temperature of your cooking anglaise constantly, and, when it reaches 81.5ºC, remove it immediately from the heat and pour it through a fine strainer directly into the metal bowl floating in your ice bath. Do not, as you pour the anglaise from the pan, scrape the bottom of the pan clean with a spatula, as the bits stuck to the bottom are likely to be overcooked and taste overly “eggy.”

Stir the anglaise in the ice bath until it is cool and refrigerate overnight. It should taste intensely of roasted almonds (flavors subdue upon freezing, and therefore need to be very strong in general).

Churn in your ice cream maker until frozen. At the last moment, swirl in drained, poached cherries and a couple table spoons of their juice (below) and freeze until set.

Poached Cherries

You'll use all the cherries from this recipe in the ice cream. However, as they are pretty tasty on pancakes and the like, you might want to double the quantities.

500g cherries
100g sugar
1 Tbsp water

Pit the cherries. This is much easier if you invest in a olive/cherry pitter. If not, you can cut the cherries in half and remove the pits.

Combine the pitted cherries, sugar, and water in a small pot. Bring to a simmer, and cook, stirring often, until the syrup reaches between 108º and 110ºC. Remove from heat, cool, and drain well, reserving some of the juice.