Truffles, Clarines and frosty toes
As a precaution and litmus test of the temperature today, I’ve left the window wide open and my tootsies hanging out of the doona. It’s pre-dawn and judging by the colour of the toes, it’s cold. My eyes pop open. Yippee, a frost. I leap out of bed and check the weather station – minus 1.6C. Yep, it’s cold and will soon get even frostier as the cold air above is pulled down to ground level via inversion currents as the red sun rises over Rosehill.
I’m not normally this taken by morning temperatures. In fact, I live half the year in fear of frosts with acres of grapes, but today in early winter there’s nothing more important to the day’s activities than a season of deep, penetrating frosts. We’re off a-truffling down Braidwood way.
People that get into these subterranean orbs of joy don’t really know exactly why they produce this fruiting body. It’s linked to soil pH, friability, drainage and structure, and of course to the host plant whose root system these fungus cling to. But what is generally agreed upon is that you need a good series of deep frosts for the truffle to bloom and ripen at the right time to produce big, stinky black fruit.
This year, we’ve had a good amount of frosty mornings, and thus I am happy that today it’s a frosty brass-monkey morning that will evolve to a brilliant winter’s day for our hunt at the farm of Peter and Kate Marshall.
The trip out of Braidwood is a roundabout affair. This could be something to do with our hosts’ other business interests, which involve a couple of field cannons and factory full of military clothing. Being an avid reader of mystery novels, my senses are on high alert. Is there something else going on here? Will I finally get to have my Jason Bourne moment that I still believe my life is leading to?
Alas, no. Besides having to scratch our heads at why a group of tree fellers manages to get its truck so bogged in an area where a truck has no business being, the day unfolds without the need for me to revert to my alter ego and save the fair maiden from a devilish plot.
After a nice lunch and briefing, we head to the truffiere, a mixture of hazelnuts and oaks, all quite young, but already having proven themselves with a couple of neat orbs last year. The dog, Sal, doesn’t waste too much time and unearths a monster 365g black truffle in minutes. Being pretty well dumfounded that it was so easy, I reflect on my choice of dogs for my own much awaited truffle experiment. Will Pooka, a wide-eyed, can’t-focus bundle of hair, be able to so willingly and precisely find one of these in future years?
All Sal needs is a pat on the head and some attention, and in an hour she finds a crop with a potential street value of $2000! As opposed to the money sink our spoodle has become, requiring a weekly visit to the vet to remove half a cup of grass seeds from the ears and falling victim to the local animal coppers’ ongoing revenue raising round of Murrumbateman.
So at the end of a very nice day, a huge hunk of this first truffle sits before me back at home. What to do? The aroma has been tormenting me all the way back – even though it’s wrapped in a bag, the sweet, earthy, sulphidey aroma permeates the cruiser. The kids, when I pick them up, wonder what I’ve been up to.
While I’m thinking, I lightly toast some Silo bread, add lashings of butter and 30g of shaved truffle. This gives me a clue – keep it simple. This is really good toast and I wonder whether you can overdose on tuber melanosporum.
A while back, I was out at the refurbished Fyshwick markets. While I was snapping up a nice bit of cheese for the night at the Mart Deli, the owner, a Frenchman, gave me a nice bit of advice. The wooden box of Fromager des Clarines, a slightly ripe mountain cheese from Haute-Savoie, is perfect for heating up. So that night I warmed it on the barbecue with half a glass of white wine poured over it. The cheese expanded slightly as it warmed, and served with good bread it was a beautiful fondue of sorts with a slight mushroomy character already. At that point, I thought, if a truffle comes my way this year, and it has, I would re-create this fondue with thin shards of fresh truffle wedged into the cheese before heating.
So tonight, having no idea how much truffle to use, I aim at about 50g. On to the barbecue with a splash of marsanne, which I think is the perfect savoury cheese wine.
Simply served with a salad of super-fresh celery, crispy green apple and chopped hazelnuts, this is an early winter meal I can happily call brilliant. The aroma of truffle is intensified enough so as not to be intoxicating, the salad refreshes the palate, and all is well with the world.
Truffled Clarines fondue with apple and celery salad
1 box of fresh fromager des Clarines
50g shaved black truffle
2 stalks celery
half a granny smith apple
handful toasted hazelnuts
white wine
2010 Len Evan’s tutorial, reflection’s of
Len Evans, generally and correctly charged as being the father of the modern Australian wine industry, encouraged the production of quality Australian wine by educating the industry in what the greatest wines are all about.
In his beloved Hunter valley he basically challenged a group of like minded wine industry colleagues to start a scholarship which became the Len Evans Tutorial 10 years ago.
Now based around the Tower lodge near Pokolbin, a super premium resort of just 12 rooms, each individually decorated, luxurious. Totally full on, as we speak I’m sitting in this huge room with an aviation/travel theme. Being way more space than one person needs I do feel pretty well put of place, like a guppy swimming with sharks. Each scholar probably feeing the same in their private uniquely adorned piece of heaven, after a quick tour the Japanese room is the one to ask for. There’s a sense of timelessness here, the television and in-room bar are new additions since last I stayed here, Len believes that if a gentleman wants a beverage, it should be brought to him on a tray.
If you have plans to visit this area, no question you can’t go past this for luxury and relaxation plus they probably won’t accept kids so it’s peaceful at least until the scholars get revved up after the evening tasting.
So for a decade now, each year twelve wine industry professionals from winemakers and retailers to sommeliers and writers all have gathered, after a selection process, here in awe of what amazing wine we get to try under the tutorship of five industry icons. Len sadly died a few years ago but the there was a plan of succession, headed by James Halliday, Ian Riggs (Brokenwood), Tim James (Wirra Wirra) Ian McKensie (Seppelt legend) and Gary Steele (Domaine wine shippers).
It’s hard to convey the amazing heights of vineous joy we get to fly through in a week. Not just this we get access to the experiences the panel has enjoying in their auspicious long careers. It’s challenging, each morning the slightly dazed students gather for a 30 wine blind tasting. Not just any wines here, within these four sojourns we attempt to judge and discuss the world’s best shiraz, cabernet, chardonnay and pinot noir. Amongst each flight you will see some of the world best examples of the variety, not your normal show judging.
First day 30 shiraz tested my senses, in the back of your mind your going over what will be here, from France the great Guigal single vineyard Shiraz, the so called LaLa’s each worth a fortune and in such small supply that few get to buy let alone taste these beautiful wines. Along the way we see other great communes in the Rhone valley, Hermitage , St Joseph and Cote Rotie. Grange, Brokenwood & Giaconda from Australia along with the new cooler climate (3 from our own district) plus some contenters from New Zealand and South America. You span 2 decades, success is being consistent with the panel in both agreeing with their scores and awarding golds which there are many.
There’s no easy passage, you get challenged on flippant or vague responses, missing the greats comes with a nervous silence, the other scholars visibly leaning away from a weak response.
For the record yours truely did Ok for Shiraz having woken up on the first day with blocked sinuses, or is this some kind of excuse. Less so, in fact dismally, for Cabernet missing the great Chateau Lafite stating to the audience that it lacked poise and direction, one of those moments when you’re speaking but you’re not there, please stop speaking you here from a distant part of the brain. I was in retrospect commenting about my sensory performance. However, I did do particularly well in the flight of Chardonnay. Picking such super premium wines as Raveneau Valmur Chablis, Bouchard Batard Montrachet and Penfolds Yatana.
The afternoons sees the still dazed dozen at a masterclass headed by one of the panel, yesterday was burgundy with Gary Steele, a larger than life gentleman who has such a personal connection with the great sites in Burgundy which he imports, that one gets the impression he is describing his own backyard.
Whites first with a flight of premier crus to warm us up and then the big guns from the five grand crus that share the great name Montrachet: Bienvenue, Croits, Batard, Chevalier and of course the immensely impressive Bouchard Le Montrachet. The incredible thing there is that these vineyard are close and very small, a couple of acres at best yet show such varied personalities, balance between elegance and power, texture, persistence & concentration.
After a quick break were back in, again a flight of premier crus: Volnay, Pommard, Corton and into Nuit-St-Georges. The Grande crus have us working our way effortlessly up through the Cote de nuits, you know the names: Vosne Romanee, Flagey, Vougeot, Musigny, Bonnes Mares, Morey and the northern Gevrey-Chambertin, the final wine being a Rousseau Chambertin. You’ve never seen such perfection in wine, well this was my thoughts at the time, still to come on the last day is the legendary DRC masterclass, more about that soon.
The evenings, ahh, the evenings, here it got a whole lot more complex. Over dinner – where us gentlemen had to wear jackets and ties, of which I have neither so spent the day before gearing up, and lady’s evening dresses, likewise I’m a little short on – which was prepared each night at the lodge by the chef from Roberts up the avenue.
We are given multiple flights of wine; might be just one glass, like the very first which turned out to be an sneaky little Oenotheque bottled Dom Perignon from 1993, or indeed reds like the next bracket, seven vintages of Cos d”Estournel. You are given no clues here and the first job is to tell what links the wines, if at all, together: country, region, variety(ies), vintage and producer, the classic Len Evan’s options game. From there we go through a range of question that home in on the wine itself, one at a time. So the six reds we had one night, that I was certain were Tempranillo’s from Rioja, turned out to be Clare Shiraz from Wendouree, spanning consecutive vintages. If you know the wine you can forgive me.
These nightly sessions unearthed some amazing wines from all over the world, highlights: 1996 DRC le Montrachet, wow, OMG, like it still makes me giggle; comparing Gaja and Aldo Conterno Barolo’s from 2004; pre war vouvray; vintage ports back to 1927; a flight of 2007 burgundy from Dujac and Comte Georges de Vogue; some incredible old aussies, of note the 1959 Wynns Ovens valley shiraz and the stunning Lindemans Bin 3110 from 1965; 1991 D’Ychem, Oh yeh, and the flight of six la Chapelle’s, many many more, enough said.
Back the next day, Melbourne cup day, after lunch for another masterclass headed my Macca, this one on champagne. Not just any fizz, a flight of marcs starting with 1997 Salon Le Mesnil, a wine of such purity that I’m sure it’s like drinking angel’s tears, then the magnificent Krug Clos des Mesnil 1998, same region and variety, chardonnay, as the Salon but so different, complex, brooding, powerful. Along with the two giants we also had Cristal, Belle époque, Winston Churchill, Bolly Vieilles Vignes, la grande dame, Dom and others but none quite surpassed the first two. I missed the race and the sweep but feel that I’d won anyway, don’t think they’d be many line ups like this in play.
That was enough for this afternoon so we hit the local and possible spoiled the occasion by drinking KB’s straight out of the can but just about anything would be a come down, so why not.
Thursday’s masterclass starts with a session on Riesling by Tim James, firstly comparing some dry styles from around the world then homing in on the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer and a flight by Egon Muller and Joh. Jos. Prum from Wehlener Sonnenuhr, Graacher Himmelreich, Scharzhofberger amongst others. I know, I was out of my depth too, but enjoying the chance to compare these brilliant Ausleses.
Then, we had to do two sessions this day, a little look at Bordeaux and a challenge: Which is the better year 2000 or 2005? To help us solve this riddle (both are pretty good) we get five producers to compare: Latour, Mouton-Rothschild, Cheval Blanc, Cos d’Estournel (your right a second growth but up there) and finally Chateau Haut-Brion.
The 2005’s were so tightly wound that you couldn’t really get much more than immense power, the 2000 are a little more giving but still they should outlive me, Latour easily is the most impressive, concentrated, opulent yet brooding. I guess we’ll have to wait and see which turns out tops, one the day the 2000 were trumps, but I somehow doubt it.
Last day and after a pensive breakfast, none of us really wanting this to finish, six final wines await us, each poured by the group of stewards who have been working away each day to keep ahead of us. It’s a rite of passage to be asked to steward this event each year, mostly filled with local winemakers who have already done the tutorial.
Domaine de la Romanee-Conti is the absolute pinnacle of the wine world, no one would doubt this, unobtainable even if you can afford them. Unlike the Bordeaux premier crus, these six grand crus burgundies are made in tiny quantities, some as little as 400 dozen a year.
We all get these huge Burgundy bowls, each set up with about 80ml of each wine, in front a sealed envelope with the answers, we now have to unravel what wine is which: Echezeaux, Grands Echezeaux, Richebourg, Romanee St Vivant, Romanee Conti and La Tache.
In ten years no one has got it right but I was so certain that not only did I have the vintage but each Grande crus correct, I sat there smug in the knowledge that I had nailed it, the florals so distinct in the Flagey pair, the concentration of Richebourg and spiciness of St Vivant and then the obvious intensity, power and reserve of the top two.
Alas each was wrong, close but the pairs the wrong way around, my victory speech postponed but it doesn’t matter, in a week where we tried over 300 wines with a conservative value of $150,000 these wine are amazing, don’t think I’ll ever get to try such a flight again but feel that I am a better person for the experience.
The final thing to do before the long trip home and predicted restlessness, is to unveil our thank you sculpture that is sitting in the garden out front of the lodge like the previous nine groups ours is named Sir Rhosis, a metal warrior, perched on his sword, confident yet slightly shattered as we all feel.
Of mothers, bread & trebuchets
It seems crazy to complicate life yet again by bringing another mother into the family. They’re complicated, uncontrollable and can smell pretty weird, but I’ve done it, and I’m well on the way to achieving my new goal. It’s a yeast mother, obviously. The holy grail of cooking is to make your own bread from scratch each day. Just flour and water. It’s a primeval impulse. Every time I open a bag of Wonder White a little voice inside me screams “Noooooo! How could you?”
As I say, it does seem crazy to throw at this the very little spare time we have. I could, for instance, spend this time designing and building a trebuchet. Just type into your preferred search engine: trebuchet, piano, crazy Brit. Wouldn’t it be great to be the first one in the street who can catapult a flaming piano a few blocks away, or the reasonably priced small car over the fence. Love Twitter. How else would you find out about gems like this? But again I’m wasting time.
So bread making. I’m in the zone, having tried a couple of loaves on fresh yeast while my new brew gets ripe (they’re fine but they lack flavour). I’ve been working on timing and temperature. The main problem I’m finding is that you can’t just walk away and come back in 45 minutes or so as the recipe says. You have to watch the fermentation until it tells you that it’s ready for the next stage. You have to listen, watch and smell, otherwise you miss the tip of the parabolic curve that charts the rise from yeast activity, and if it goes to long you end up with a flat loaf.
My mother – after I tried a few methods that ended up either having no activity or smelling like old socks – comes from my well-worn copy of Beyond Nose to Tail, by London chef Fergus Henderson. His partner, Justin Piers Gellatly, a brilliant artisan baker, suggests an easy starter for the mother. You mix all the listed ingredients together and keep it somewhere warmish but not in sunlight. My first attempt failed due to UV rays sterilising the ferment. You just check it each day, stir a bit and dust with flour until you have activity. Then remove about half of it and add back everything except the rhubarb which is still working away, giving the young yeast some sugar. The next day, you should see some real movement, and if you listen – that’s right, put your ear into the jar – you can hear the faint sound of CO2 being produced. Remove 200g, add back a mixture of 100g water, 75g bread flour and 25g rye flour. Remember this, as this is what you do each day when you’re making bread – take out 200g, add back the same weight in fresh water and flour. Again, timing is the main issue.
It might take a few months to get to know your new mother. Temperature is critical, so if you can find a place where the temperature maintains constant, it becomes easier to predict. I’ve worked out that I get maximum activity about five hours after the addition, so now I can chill my mother to fit this, plus a warming period, into my baking time. It takes me about two weeks to get the starter sorted.
While I’m getting it built up, I buy a few loaves from Silo as a guide and use fresh yeast and the dough hook on the Kitchen Aid. This lot fails dismally. I think I might rename my mother Leanne after the Silo baker, and see whether that helps. This juvenile yeast strain and inexperience still produces bread that has flavour, not as beautiful as Silo’s, but the texture is good and the crust is getting there. The steam is important to create a crisp crust. Without an injection system, I’ve come up with crushed ice as a good way of increasing the moisture in the oven. When the loaf goes in, I toss half a cup of ice on to the base of the oven, close the door quickly, then sit on the floor to watch what happens. The result can be improved if you paint the top of the cooking bread with cold water every five minutes – so you’re stuck watching this all happen. This is more proof for the kids that I’m weird. All this smelling stuff all the time, sitting in front of the oven and crying when a loaf fails. My daughter has taken to bringing her friends over to watch this strange behaviour.
But I do think that to make great bread you have to believe in it, throw yourself at it and ignore the naysayers and “oh my god, what’s he doing now?” If you thought the coffee community was fanatical, it has nothing on the breadmakers. After much searching and reading, I came up with a simple formula for the balance of flour and water: Flo Makanai’s 1-2-3 method. Don’t go looking for this – there is way too much information. Suffice to say that when you are using a starter culture (mother or sponge) that is made up with 50/50 water-flour, as above, you use one part of this to two parts of water to three parts of flour. So I use 200g of mother, aka Leanne, 400g of cold water – don’t go speeding things up with warm water – and 600g of flour, plus fro this around 10g salt.
A word about these other two components, flour and water. The water should be pure. Since I have this apparatus to de-ionise and RO my water for coffee, it’s perfect for breadmaking. Rainwater is probably the best. You lot in Canberra have this ultra-safe water full of chlorine and fluoride, so don’t use that. The very chemicals that keep you in smiles and bacteria free will damage a young mother. For the flour, you want a good, organic if you like, breadmaking flour. High protein is the key. There’s plenty around at the markets. Find one you like and stick to it. Stay well away from those premixed, machine flours. The process is mostly drawn from my Henderson book and websites like www.sourdough.com.au.
Roll up your sleeves first and give yourself a lot of space. When your mother is at full bloom, take out 200g (by the way, you should invest in a good set of scales), dissolve this in 400g of cold water. Using your finger tips, break apart the gluten strands that have formed until you have a nice milky mix. Add the flour and salt, and with a pastry scraper working from the edge, mix all of this very quickly (30 seconds) to a messy mass. Walk away and let it sit for half an hour. Put a little oil on your bench top and hands, scrape up the dough and knead it six to eight times, oiling your hands again between each knead since the dough is super sticky.
Kneading is simply pushing half the dough away from you, then pulling that back over the rest, spin 90 degrees and repeat. You’ll feel the dough firm up and tell you to stop. This should only take a minute at the most. Leave for 10 minutes. Repeat this about five times. You’ll feel the dough get more stretchy, so after an hour it will look all shiny. Dust it in flour and put it back in the bowl. Cover with a towel.
Now the proving or first fermentation. This will take one to two hours if you used the starter properly, but here you have to know your brew. It will tell you when it’s ready. The risen dough will be about twice the size and have a certain tensile look it. Scrap it out again on to the bench and without too much fuss, press it into a long flat focaccia-like arrangement, using your fingertips to make pock marks. These capture air and help with the texture. Roll it up tightly into a batard-like shape and cover with a tea towel. Now the second and crucial fermentation. Let it rise again. This will be a shorter time depending on temperature. If it’s getting late, you can slow it down by refrigerating it for an hour or even overnight.
Once puffed up, roll on to a baking tray and into a hot oven – 230C I’ve found to work. OK, it takes 30 minutes, and as I’ve mentioned use water and steam as you can to make a good crust. That’s where I’m at. Each loaf is getting better. The crust and oven spring are the hardest parts of all this. You find yourself working odd hours, which ties in nicely with my other obsession, coffee, so I’m awake anyway.
Breadmaking isn’t for the uncommitted. Making something beautiful from just flour and water is possibly the hardest challenge in cooking. The rewards, a simple loaf of handmade bread each morning to share with the family, plus it keeps me busy so I don’t end up like the rich English guy and his trebuchet.
Bread
flour
water
salt
mother
Mother
1 stick rhubarb, chopped
210g water
2 tbsp live yogurt
50g Rye flour
50g whole meal flour
100g bread flour Recipe
From Beyond Nose to Tail, by Fergus Henderson.
Christmas food, 92.3 FM & a prediction
The looming question of the day is what’s happening at Christmas? Who will be where, and more importantly, what will we be eating? Coming from a big family means we could have as few as five people at dinner, or as many as 45, depending on all the complexities and dynamics that control us.
I could be imagining it, but since I’ve had my thinking cap on about what wil be in the centre of the table this year, our little flock of geese seem more nervous and thoughtful. They’re not hissing and chasing me anymore.
I wonder whether animals have a sixth sense about this. Maybe they’re wondering, why am I getting heaps of food all of a sudden? Why all this grain? Why is he boiling a big pot of water?
Before you start hitting the keys, don’t worry, I wouldn’t eat these geese. They’re way too old, plus they’re part of the family now. We need them to start breeding, then it’s open season.
I do have a plan, though, and it came to me just yesterday as I was strolling past Aldi at the Jamison shops. I’ve never been in an Aldi, but a sign grabbed my attention – “Gas-powered home smoker $199”. The unit stands about five foot high, has three tiers and a big heavy-based pot at the bottom, presumably where you put the wood chips. All you need to do is hook up the propane from the barbecue, soak your wood, then just smoke away.
When you choose your wood, don’t go grabbing anything of the Eucalyptus genus unless you want your pig tasting like a koala. I’ve been saving up the wood from fruit trees for this purpose – cherry wood, in fact, plus apple and pear. You can buy smoking woods like maple or spruce, but fruit wood is my favourite. Chip it and soak it in water until needed.
OK, done. Now, what to smoke? It doesn’t take much time for me to home in on a pig – their protein-to-fat ratio makes them perfect for smoking. A quick call around this morning and I’ve been hooked up with a young, spotted pig. About 18kg for $170 dressed, or there’s an opportunity to link it in with getting some hay cut – which I dearly need, as I was going to do something with lamb For Christmas, but can’t actually find my little flock in the six-foot high grass in the paddocks.
Generally, you’d cure and smoke the hams, the back pegs, but I’m a huge fan of the shoulder. There’s more action here, lots of differently arranged muscles, heaps of fat deposits, plus they will cure in a shorter time. So the plan of attack for this particular pig is: head to be braised for a terrine; ears, snout and tail roasted as a little salad accompaniment; shoulders cured for smoking, loin cut into chops; leaving the hind quarters to be roasted for Christmas parties.
It’s amazing how a fleeting moment, like seeing this smoker, has given me a whole hamper of ideas. Like the other idea I have brewing in the special section of my head set aside for such things – cherries. I was up at Young last week, lovely town, lots going on there and much discussion about the pantomime season – specifically, who will play the wolf this year.
An interesting fact, Young has not one but two community FM radio stations, which share the week. 92.3 FM 2YYY is on air from noon on Wednesday to noon on Sunday, then 92.3 FM Young district arts council broadcasts from noon on Sunday to whenever the other one finishes. What makes this all the more captivating is that you can’t tell the difference in the content.
When I was there, the cherries were looking splendid, but a week of rain might not help. Farmers, grape growers like myself included, are never entirely happy with the weather. After years of drought, we finally have rain and now on the front cover of regional newspapers, farmers are complaining about the rain. Tough job.
I’m not risking it, so I’ll make a preserve that will be a steadying condiment for my charcuterie planned for Christmas. If the cherries survive, we’ll have them fresh as usual as well. You make a vinegar out of the pips, then use this to preserve the flesh, keep for ages.
For the ham, you start a week ahead and set aside a big space in the fridge. Make the brine first. For this, work backwards from the size pork you have and the vessel in needs to fit in (fully submerged). The recipe below is for a litre of brine – I need five litres, so I’ll multiply everything by five.
Once the brining mixture is cold and strained, pour it over the pork. Make sure it’s fully submerged and place in the fridge. It need about a day per kilo to cure. Once it’s done, remove the pork from the brine, wash it and put it back in the fridge, uncovered, for a day to dry out.
Let the smoking begin. This is all theoretical as I obviously haven’t started yet. Use about half a kilogram of woodchips at a time. Place them in an envelope made of foil, with about four holes in it. Put the foil pouch in the bottom of the smoker, and once the smoke starts coming out the top, place the brined pork in and seal up. Have a few more of these wood-chip letters ready so you can add when required (when the previous one stops smoking). The meat will take about an hour per kilo to fully smoke.
Once it’s done and cool, wrap up in your wife’s finest pure cotton pillowcase and wait until the big day to serve with your yummy cherry preserve (adapted from a Charlie Trotter recipe). Stream 92.3FM for some country music and a open decent chardonnay – Mount Majura fits the bill. It’s local like me and the pig and having won some decent awards recently is sure to impress.
Brining mixture
1 litre water
1/3 cup good salt flakes
1/4 cup honey
1/2 bunch fresh thyme
4 bay leaves
10 peppercorns
5 juniperberries
10 cherry pips
2 tbsp banyuls vinegar
Bring everything to the boil except the vinegar. Once the salt is dissolved, cool the mix completely, adding the banyuls when cool. Steep overnight, then strain to use.
Cherry and banyuls preserve
500g cherries, pipped but stems still attached, washed and placed in a sterile jar with a tight-fitting lid
1/2 bunch tarragon
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup banyuls vinegar (see below)
1 1/2 cups water
handful peppercorns
To prepare the banyuls vinegar, bring it to the boil, add the cherry pips, cool and strain.
Bring the water to boil, add sugar and stir to dissolve, add peppercorns, tarragon and prepared vinegar. Cook and allow to steep as it cools. Strain and pour over cherries. Don’t open for two weeks.
Coffee obsessed, ducle & lift me up
I always find it fascinating where a passion will take people. We all have these interests, stuff we probably put far too much time and thought into. Others, looking into our little world, may not find as captivating. If we’re lucky this will overlap with our work as it certainly does with me, Food and wine. They’re easy hobbies to have, everyone has an opinion, certainly with food, and it’s always easy to open up a conversation “So, how’d that cooking a lamb roast in the engine compartment go?”
If, say, and I’m not necessarily stating I don’t, one had a huge passion for cave diving and pyrotechnics, although not at the same time, would everyone have an easy time discussing this? “So, what’s your thoughts on the use of twin re-breather gear when plumbing the depths?” No, it’s beyond our normal lives and sure people get into it but conversation generally dries up at “Why?”
Coffee is another obsession that is easy to fall into. Used to be just a sweetened brown liquid I eventually got a taste for whilst skipping school at Steve’s place where we just hung around sipping and strumming guitars. Now it’s a far more complicated beverage to embrace. It doesn’t take long to delve into home espresso machines, the simple soon gives way to the complex and you end up with a couple of grand tied up in getting a daily shot. Then the coffee itself has to be freshly roasted and ground so you now have half the kitchen bench cluttered with grinders, tampers, little rubber mats, de-ionised reverse-osmosis water filter and a vessel that probably set you back 100 bucks to put the used puck in.
Sure this sounds complicated but the progression is gradual. You end up a point where you can’t grab a coffee from a cafe due to the worry that it won’t be fresh roasted, the coffee isn’t ground to order or the barista won’t clean the basket well enough so all of a sudden you’re a coffee geek and passersby clear a path around you.
And this is the point I’m at, considering that this cup of coffee I have a day can be improved I can’t stop. I’m thinking of putting a PID kit through my Silva. Two months ago I had no idea what a Silva was let alone that you could improve it markedly by taking it totally apart to silver solder a temperature sensor on the outlet……you get the point it does seem a lot of capital and time spent on something that we used to just boil a jug for and spoon out 43 beans or whatever the ad said.
The problem is that someone in the room will be better than you, no doubt it will be a bloke and so when he states to no one in particular, Oscar Wilde fashion, “Well one can’t really call it a success unless the Taiwanese pea-berry has been passed through a musk rat’s spleen…”
I can’t stop though, nope, there’s no going back once on this meandering path, not until I can declare in any company that the brown water I drink each day is the absolute best it can be. And that’s why I’m putting on my Christmas list a home coffee roaster. It can sit next to my home bread maker, home ice cream churner and, if I can find it, my home exothermic chemical reactor that I use when recreating a Rammstein concert in the backyard at midnight because I’m so wired I can’t actually sleep anymore.
So..I’ve lost my thought line…. Coffee is also handy to use in cooking, those recipes that employ this beverage can be sublime when substituted with the best coffee around. The king of coffee desserts is undoubtedly Tiramisu, and I’ve possibly already given you a recipe for this before but now I have great coffee, although, I think I might lower the temperature by 1 degree and up the pressure a tad stick a toothpick in the steamer to whip the milk at a greater velocity saw off the bottom of the portafiller so the brew will be cleaner…….sorry, what was I saying, cripes I need some sleep.
Another product that has popped up with my mission to make the greatest cup of coffee around is a neat sugar, Dulce which goes by the a few names in Spain, Portugal and South America, Rapadura, Papelon. It’s a completely unrefined product made from sugarcane juice so is purported to have a higher trace vitamins and minerals than any other sugars. Tasting it, you get this rich, caramel treacle character with a very fine texture, so if you use sugar to sweeten your brew this is the bee’s knees. Substituting this into desserts adds a distinct richness to like of cakes and pastries so I thought let’s try this classic Italian dessert and use good coffee and this sugar see if it makes a difference.
I’ve included a recipe for making your own savoiardi fingers but you can use commercial, just crisp them up in the oven briefly first and I’ve added some caramel made from Dulce to rev up the dish a bit too, optional but do it. Obviously a lot of espresso is needed but I do find the added concentration of this is also worth the effort, though I might tighten up the grind a bit use that single estate coffee from Tanzania deepen the roast buy a straight sided filter maybe I need a commercial machine…..no, no, no this has got to stop, this obsession.
Tea, that’s an easy beverage right, just boil the water but I’ve heard that the southern Yunnan province makes terrific black tea around the winter solstice and if I keep the water at 87.25C….
Tiramisu
6 eggs, separated
24 savoiardi biscuits
2 cups espresso, cooled
6 tbsp Ducle sugar
450g mascarpone, warmed slightly and whipped
½ cup caramel sauce, warm
½ cup grated 70% chocolate
Arrange savoiardi on a tray and douse with coffee just enough for it to be absorbed. Whip the egg yolks with dulce over a pot of boiling water until thick, pale and frothy. Fold in marscapone. Whip egg whites to a stiff meringue (add a little more dulce) fold this into the yolk mixture. In a suitable sized bowl, make alternate layers of custard, biscuit, custard, sprinkle with chocolate and drizzled with caramel, repeat. Place in fridge to set.
Dulce caramel
1 cup cream, hot just off the boil
1 cup dulce Water
Dissolve sugar in a little water, bring to boil and cook until caramel forms, off heat pour in hot cream, be careful it splutters and is extremely hot, use protection.
Savoiardi (from Guiliano Bugiali’s Classic techniques in Italian Cooking, Simon and Schuste)
6 eggs, separated
1 cup dulce sugar
1 cup plain flour, cake
½ cup potato flour
Finely grated orange rind
Simplar process to above, whip egg yolks with sugar, sieve together flours, fold into yolks, whip egg whites, not quite a set, firm but still slightly runny, fold together with rind. In a piping bag, pipe 100mm fingers onto prepared baking tray, not too close together, sprinkle with more sugar and bake in 200C oven until risen and firm, cool but don’t refrigerate.
Canberra Times, December1, 2010
Fat bastards, naked harvest & bood orange
Its asparagus season once again, after last year’s disappointments I have to say there been some tasty tips already this year. Trying to grow them at home is a laborious process of growing the fern first and then waiting another year for the shoots to appear, got heaps on the go but that’s for later.
I have heard that they grow wild up in the hills around Tumut, a remnant of a flood in days gone by no doubt. I’ve tried to find out where exactly they exist but the harborer of this information is remaining tight lipped as he prefers to pick them in the moon light naked or something like that. I keep a straight face as he tells me this, thinking, amongst other things, that would possibly put you off the spear coming across a loping skinny dude with a bundle.
It’s the fat bastards that I like, not necessarily in nuded up men, more in type of asparagus I’d prefer, you know those stumpy, fat almost conical spears, you just snap them in two, toss out the hard end and peel the courser skin of the rest. I found a good supply of them in an unlikely place, well more unlikely than up in the snowy mountains. Down at the local supermarket in Yass, being a country town where the choices in everything tend to be simple, they had a big pile of these really fat buggers at $3.95 a kilo, organic to boot.
So I filled the basket with a couple of kilo given that, as you now know, I like them so much. Prepared as above I’m happy with them just stir fried in an omelette, or added as a side, they’ve just got to be cooked lightly generally with lots of butter present, maybe just a small, tiny, little sprinkle of pork. Bugger I wasn’t going to mention that this week but now that I have, some diced pancetta cheers up just about anything, anyone, anytime.
So there’s a few flavourings that you can mix and match with asparagus: eggs, pork, butter and citrus. Hell I use them all and try to create the perfect asparagus dish. Firstly have some very thin slices of pancetta stessa arranged on a tray, pop them into a very low oven 60C to dry over some hours, there should be enough salt here to carry the dish so any further seasoning needs to be reminded of this garnish.
Make a citrusy sauce that includes butter and eggs, so a hollandaise works, I’ve still got some blood orange which will give the dish a spectacular colour but you could use grapefruit or indeed just lemon as long as you adjust the quantities to allow for the higher acidity of these two citrus.
Have one blood orange juiced and strained, the other peeled, segmented (removing the pith) and dicing this as small as you can get, add any released juice to what you already have. Put the juice in a pan and reduce down to a light syrup, about 15ml. Have a pot of water on the simmer as your doing this for the next stage is to whip up the egg yolk with the still hot/warm reduction and place bowl on top of pot (ie double boiler which you can use if you have on) while you stir the sabayon vigorously so that it fluffs up start adding the clarified butter, very, very slowly at first, drip by drip so as to not split the emulsion, keep adding and stirring until you have a nice think hollandaise, add a grind of pepper, diced flesh and prepared herbs, keep warm but not over boiling water which is easy to do.
Now the poached duck egg, have another pot of water on the simmer, around 65C if you can manage it, add a splash of vinegar to acidify the water, crack the egg, one per person, into a cup and very gently, having stirred the water to create a little vortex, add the egg so that it wraps the white around the yolk. A hint here is for the egg to be pretty fresh and for it to be at above 40C already, so sitting in hot tap water before you use it. Cooking will vary, depending on how constant you keep the water, don’t let it boil.
Once cooked, scoop out, trim and place on warm plate.
Now the asparagus, I came across this idea in the Rene Redzepi book that I’m holding until the owner realises that I still have it. In a bowl and with a hand held blender, blitz the water and butter until it comes together in a mayo looking form. Have the asparagus prepared as above, cut off all the tips, say the first 2cm and then the rest slice into 2mm thick sliced on the bias. Heat the water/oil emulsion until its boiling, add a little salt and the tips, cook for 45 seconds and add the sliced spear, cook for the rest of 1 minute, remove from heat and scoop out. Arrange in an artful pattern around the poached egg, lean two or three crispy pancetta slices against the egg, pile up a little salad and drizzle with hollandaise.
This will do just fine any time of day, breakfast, lunch or dinner. It’s an elegant dish, a perfect start to a dinner party or something intimate, served with a glass of good white Burgundy or cold climate Aussie chardonnay.
Asparagus with blood orange hollandaise, poached duck egg and crispy pork.
Thin pancetta stessa
1 duck egg per person
2 blood oranges
Herbs: chives, chervil, parsley – all cut very fine
1 egg yolk
200ml clarified butter (you can do this yourself, just heat very gently a block of butter until it melts, leave and skim off milk solids, strain clear juice off muck on bottom)
4-5 thick fresh organic asparagus per person
40ml butter
100ml water
Baby lettuce mix
Salt, pepper, vinegar as needed.
Canberra Times, November 22, 2010
Manliness, a cold gold & Bin 3110
Ahh, November again. A month when a man can be a true man – a man sporting a mustache.
The ‘tache represents more than having the testosterone, gumption and just sheer manliness to produce a concentration of hair on the top lip at will – and within a month, or preferably in the first few days on November. It also harks back to a simpler era, when most males had that slight porn-star look about them, when Kingswoods were the motoring choice and KB the brew.
None of these micro-nancy-fancy beers. I reckon I’m a renaissance kinda guy but I fail to see the difference between a bright ale, golden ale and pale ale. No idea what KB is made of, but none of that. It’s just pure beer flavour. A combination of that taste you get when you burp some hours after enjoying a cold gold and a drain that needs cleaning if only you knew how to do it.
I know this because we had a few up at the Hunter Valley last week at the Fish bowl at Tempus Two winery, main culprit Mike Bennie, pictured. I didn’t realise KB was still being made, and sure, one was more than enough, but it did take me back to simpler times (and I’m using my imagination here since I was just warming up to the joys of alcohol at the start of the 1980s), a time when a bloke could, without being a pariah, refer to female acquaintances and co-workers as sweetheart, darl, or collectively, sheilas, and not take their life in their hands as one of my partner’s coworkers did recently.
All I could do was stand up for this guy, this dinosaur. November has this effect on us. Otherwise we’re all modern guys who can’t rewire an electrical plug, retap that leaking washer or fix that drain.
All this got me thinking of retro-food. Thankfully not all of it was enduring. Ham-wrapped bananas with hollandaise sauce didn’t make Junior Masterchef last night. As an aside after watching this for the first time I’m fairly happy that I don’t cook commercially anymore. What chance have you got as a chef when kids – what, four years old? - can whip up a roast pheasant dish. If I ran a restaurant, I’d be filling it with kids like this. They’d be cheap and all you’d need is one carer for five of them to match preschool ratios.
In the 1970s, the slowcooker was in its prime – set and forget. This is relevant in the ‘10s, now we’ve slowed the food down even more as we learn more about exactly what happens when you heat proteins, carbohydrates, fats and water.
Provencal beef daube is a dish from the 1970s, coming via cooks like Michel Guerard and Richard Olnay. You can pretty well have all the work done the night before and whack it into the oven first thing and when you get home the house will smell like the south of France 40 years ago.
It’s prefect with an old-fashioned Aussie burgundy. On this trip to the Hunter I was spoilt with great wines but none more so than the Lindeman’s 1965 Bin 3110 Hunter River burgundy – I’d say one of the two or three best wines ever made in Australia?
Provencal daube
2kg stewing steak, such as beef shank, cut into large cubes (3cm x 3cm)
300g pork – in order of preference, salt pork, pancetta, or bacon, cut into 2cm-long, thin rods
dried herbes de Provence
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 pigs trotters, shaved
300g pork skin, cut into little squares (salted overnight and rinsed)
6 golden shallots, diced
1 leek, diced
3 celery sticks, diced
3-4 carrots, peeled and roughly chopped
1 head garlic, separated
thyme, parsley, bay leaves
zest of one orange, shredded
1 cup soft red wine
1 tin Italian tomatoes
beef stock as required
salt and pepper
Mix minced garlic with dried herbs. Add the pork rods and mix to coat. Grab one piece of diced beef and insert one of these prepared pieces of pork into it. Repeat until all the beef is impregnated.
Heat some olive oil in pan, add salted pig skin, sauté until it all pops up a bit, remove with a slotted spoon. Now sauté the prepared beef until it’s caramelised and remove from the pan.
Refresh the oil and cook the leeks, shallots, celery, carrot and garlic until softened.
Place trotters on the bottom of the pan with the vegetables. Add the beef and pork skin. Deglaze with red wine. Add herbs and orange zest, tomatoes and enough stock to submerge everything, and season well. Cover with two layers of baking paper then the lid so everything is sealed. Into an oven at 70C for eight to 10 hours depending on traffic – it won’t overcook.
Serve with pasta, rice or spuds. If you assemble all this the night before, make sure you return it to simmer before it goes into the oven.
Parity, Kobes & Meatloaf
If one was smart and savvy, and I am at least one of these, half the time, one should be taking advantage of this situation of the Aussie dollar been equal to the US. I have this feeling that in about 2 years when things presumably turn back to normal, I’ll be beating myself up saying why did I not take advantage of this time.
Maybe I should just collect US dollars, say you were an economist, does this make sense? The US seems to be making plenty of them, surely they wouldn’t miss some if we all stashed them under the mattress.
I dare say I’m just oversimplifying a complex situation as usual.
However one thing that does make sense is buying up stuff that is made/sold in the US but as far as I can see there aren’t many things they produce there, maybe that’s the problem. Basketball and running shoes maybe, shoes are one thing that is on my mind with a son who loves the sport and whose feet are growing an inch a month. I’m looking back at our linage to see where the water bird look comes from because that’s what he looks like at 11 years of age with almost size 11 shoes, a duck.
Hastened on by some advise by a nephew we looked off shore for this month’s shoes, locally, its going to cost us $250 for the latest must have basketball shoes. Which is fine, he may end up in the NBA and this will all be paid back, but I know they will only last half a season based on his current growth curve.
So we went shopping, it’s was easy just need the faith that the aussie dollars we’re throwing at this web based company (www.eastbay.com) isn’t some scam by one the these US banks with $3.00 in collateral. The shoes did turn up, amazing, in 7 days to our farm, incredible, got the latest Nike Kobes, plus a neat pair of up to the minute cross trainers that are not even available in Australia, all here for $190, brilliant.
I guess this won’t last but after this I do find myself drawn to anything US, like maybe even going there it’s so cheap. Last time the family headed to North America, late September 2001, yep that time, it took 2 Australian dollars to buy one US plus any change you had in the pocket. Granted they had some fairly serious issues back then and we were pretty well the only people traveling. The jumbo was only 1/3 full at best, had an aisle each and when we arrived, after the body cavity search, into LAX, it was empty, as was Disneyland, as was everywhere.
There would be something quite satisfying being in the US and your money means something so all this got me thinking about American food, they must have some, so did some serious hardnosed journalistic investigating, which for me means hitting Wikipeadia. I dial up Meatloaf on the ipod to put me in the right frame of mind.
Apparently, if you believe this site as I do religiously, folk from the US have enjoyed eating many foods through their rich history like raccoon, opossum, wood rat, skunk (at this point doubt set in, surely not), porcupine, ospray, bullfrogs, both painted and wood turtles. I think they mean these early settlers ate anything, you wouldn’t gnaw on a wood rat by choice. The bliss of Maccas, KFC and Ben and Jerry’s being a few centuries away.
Most celebrity chefs that write prodigiously about food, have now brought out their ‘At home’ book, you see them all through Borders, where the usual temper tantrum in white is warmly smiley at his (they’re always blokes) home probably over a BBQ holding up a prawn, sorry shrimp. As if, I say, with that little huff you get being a self proclaimed expert, to myself. Firstly they have no home life and the last things they’d do is cook there but you get a sneak peak at some of the simpler foods they may or may not cook at home.
Thomas Keller is one such author, using this moniker loosely, who has invited us into his private life of late. We know who he is, pinnacle of American cuisine for years but still I open his glossy, coffee table ready book with the usual warm cloak of cynicism along with some back up scepticism.
Strangely, and flying in the face of my oft used logic, the book is pretty good. There’s not much in the original sense but he does have throughout the book lots of commercial secrets that he shares which put a certain unique spin on an otherwise done to death dish. I mean how many recipes do we need for salt and pepper squid?
It’s his method for frying up a chook in that great North American tradition that is my eventual topic this week, thanks for staying with me. Seems simple enough, dunk in flour and then into the deep fryer. Not so, getting that prefect crispy skin and juicy uniformly cooked flesh is anything but easy.
Keller turns to salt to aid the process, seems like any food can be improved by immersion into a salt bath prior to cooking, I already am a fan. In fact I have at home this day 7 lambs tongues a-brining, along with their respective brains, chilling. And yes I will be eating home alone tonight, not being able to garner any enthusiasm from the departing family this breakfast beside “yep, sure, knock yourself out dad, we’re grabbing pizza”
One problem with ordering from across the Pacific is that it’s mighty hard to return the goods if they are nor exactly what you want, like the pair of Levis that just turned up, looks like they’re built for a cowboy heading for the rodeo, oh well as the big man says, two out of three ain’t bad.
Thomas Keller’s buttermilk fried chicken
1 large chook cut into 10 pieces
Brining solution (se below)
600 ml buttermilk
Coating mixture (see below)
Oil for deep frying
Early on the morning you are cooking this, like at 5 am, soak the chicken in the cold brine for 12 hours leaving enough time to soak it in fresh water for at least 1 hour and dry thoroughly before turning on the gas.
To cook hear oil to 160c, dredge chicken in mixture and then into buttermilk and back into the mixture, this departs from the recipe slightly but in my haste I did it in the reverse and re coated the chook, seemed to work, deep fry until golden, start with larger pieces first, should take about 10 minutes, don’t crowd the pot. If you had two lots of oil going and cook dark meat in one and white meat in the other you’d be onto a winning formula, otherwise just be careful, they take about 8 minutes each. Its like super KFC, crispy and juicy, the kids love it
Brining solution
2l water
1/2 cup salt flakes
1 tbsp black pepper corns
4 cloves garlic, smashed
2 tbsp honey
1/3 bunch thyme
1/3 bunch parsley
6 bay leaves
1 big lemon, halved
Combine all in s pot, boil for 1 minute cool before use
Coating mixture
3 cups plain flour
2 tbsp garlic salt
2 tbsp onion salt
Big pinch each if paprika, cayenne pepper, salt plus a grind of pepper
Combine all
Temperature, time and pressure, is all related
Gotta keep shopping, must shop. It seems like everything is on sale and if you’re not out in the malls on the weekend your going to miss that ultimate bargain. The mall is one of the few places on earth that I truly hate, a shopping centre with no windows, but I’m feeling an involuntary compulsion to be here.
The weather is shocking outside and I’ve got loads of time as the kids are otherwise engaged (funny, when you get to this point in life when the children are self sufficient you’d think there would be more celebration involved). So there’s no pressure, and it seems like the perfect equation for aimlessly buying stuff we most likely don’t need.
I blame the movie we watched last night. Having spent most of the past 10 years trying to avoid watching Sex in the City, the TV show, I was pinned watching the second movie with Swedish subtitles, which continues my current fetish with the region.
It seems like this movie is just one long two-hour advertisement for various products and services. As well as this unusual urge to buy branded stuff, I’m wanting to travel to the Middle East and remove body hair.
Today, I’m looking for anything from the Cuisinart brand. I won’t settle until I find at least one cooking utensil to satiate this subliminal impulse implanted by the previous night’s product placement.
My wife looks at me strangely – well, just a bit more oddly than the norm – when we meet back at the car after two hours immersion, me with these big DJs bags full of hand blenders, cookers, bottle openers and the like.
`So you did watch that movie?” she asks. “Ja, och jag tror att jag älskade det. Jag hade bara en kropp vax,” I reply in fluent Swedish.
The biggest box under my arm contains a pressure cooker. Getting hold of one of these has been in the back of my mind for a while, an old-fashioned kitchen appliance – go to any garage sale and you’re sure to find at least one, along with buckets of sporks and ice crushers. They all hark from a time when our parents cooked the bejesus out of stuff, needed the convenience of cutlery that they can use as a knife, fork or spoon, and were pretty tanked up on icy cocktails.
This doesn’t look anything like the old stove-top version. It’s sleek, has a digital read out and a controllable temperature. It looks kind of like a mini R2D2, and promotes itself as an option for the time-strapped modern family, so I fit the bill.
Why use pressure to cook? As we all know, water boils at 100C at sea level, but go for a stroll up Mount Everest, and just under 9000m above sea level where there’s less atmospheric pressure, water will boil at 69C. So working it out, using the Clausius-Clapeyron equation with an ideal gas constant of 8.314 J/k/m … Well, maybe it’s enough to know that under high pressure, water won’t boil at 100C – more like 120C in a pressure cooker. In short, temperature, time and pressure are all related, just like during my shopping trip.
Stocks tend to go cloudy when the liquid boils and when the pot is open, plus lots of the good stuff – aromas, flavours and nutrients – escapes. And you’re working against yourself, having to constantly add more energy. Lock it all away in a pressure vessel and look what happens. The water doesn’t boil so there’s no clouds in the stock, the vapourising molecules are trapped in the vessel and condense back to a liquid, you need far less energy because it’s not escaping, the food cooks much faster, and it’s more nutritious. Have I sold you on it yet?
This pressure cooker seems to be as amazing an invention as my new thongs. Having discovered a big hole in the bottom of my well worn pair of Havaianas at the fish shop the other day – mmm fish water on the feet – I headed off to replace them with a thicker, more robust pair. I found some, bought them and discovered later that they have, I kid you not, a bottle opener on the sole of each. Brilliant, so I don’t need to haul my new bottle opener to the beach next time. So obvious, so handy, why didn’t I invent this?
The dish I’m using to test out this domestic autoclave is that southern French fish stew, bouillabaisse. These are fighting words in Provence. The easiest way to get into a biff with a Frenchman besides asking him to delay retirement for a couple of years, is to claim your town makes the best bouillabaisse.
There are as many versions as there are villages but most will settle on a few common ingredients: fish obviously, the local rock fish mainly, and if the king of bouillabaisse, rascasse, a spiky weird-looking warm-water fish that we call scorpion fish, olive oil, garlic, saffron, anisette flavour such as fennel, star anise, tarragon, pastis and water.
The other components will vary. Let’s use leek, tomato, celery and finish it with the intense little spicy emulsion, rouille.
And back with my wet feet at the fish shop, I pick up mussels and four kinds of fish – John Dory, leather jacket, bream, coral trout. Don’t use oily fish like salmon, sardine, tuna, kingfish or mackerel. You use the heads and skeletons for the stock.
If you don’t have a pressure cooker, the cooking times will be more than doubled, but this technique really does keep in all the flavours and is quite quick if you’re organised. And when you open the pot, the kitchen fills with this lovely smell of the south of France – anise, herbs and seafood.
Bouillabaisse
Rouille
1 egg yolk
2 tbsp lemon juice
olive oil
saffron threads, soaked
1 small chilli,
1 clove garlic, minced
Blitz all the ingredients to a mayonnaise. Set aside.
Stock
fish heads and bones
1 leek, chopped
2 sticks celery, chopped
2 cloves garlic
half cup white wine – Kina Lillet, if you can, or any dry white
herbs – a mix of tarragon, parsley, chervil, bay leaves
Carefully fillet the fish, leaving the skin on, and cut the flesh into similar sized pieces, not worrying too much about lateral bones in the little fish, and set aside.
Wash briefly and dry the heads and skeletons. Clean the mussels. Heat oil in the bottom of a pressure cooker and cook the fish bones and heads over high heat. Once coloured, add the leek, celery and garlic. Cook until soft. Deglaze with the wine, cover with about a litre of boiling water and season.
Seal and cook under high pressure for 10 minutes. Allow the steam to escape, open and add a handful of mixed herbs. Infuse for 15 minutes with the lid on, then strain and reserve the stock. You should still have about a litre of pretty intense stock – if not make it up to that amount with water.
Soup
fish – a mix of red rock cod (scorpion fish), John Dory, coral trout and small rock fish
mussels or clams
1 leek, chopped
1-2 baby fennel, chopped
citrus rind – orange, lemon, tangerine etc
herbs – same as above
1 cup tomato puree, preferably from your own tomatoes
4-5 threads saffron, soaked in warm water
50ml pernod
Fry the leek and fennel in olive oil. Once it’s soft, add the rind, herbs, tomato puree and prepared saffron. Cook down a little and add the reserved stock.
Panfry each piece of fish skin side down first. Bring the soup to the boil, then add the fish. Quickly seal the pressure cooker and cook under full pressure for five minutes. Release the steam. Add the mussels and pernod, close again and cook at high pressure for two minutes.
Serve with toasted, garlic-rubbed bread and rouille on the side.
Canberra Times, November 3, 2010
The swedish chef, mushrooms & the last temptation of Jansson
I seem to be channelling the food culture of Scandinavia. I’ve no idea why, though. I might ask my therapist next time we have a tete a tete but most the time is spent dwelling on why I want to continually bait slightly militant vegetarians, it’s complex to say the least. My knowledge of Nordic cooking, like the food of Finland, Sweden, Denmark and that other country I keep forgetting, is pretty thin on the ground, much like their receding permafrost.
In fact, all I can come up with is the Swedish chef from the Muppets, “oodydi oody, shuten du mooffin, see de hool”, and meatballs.
So when I arrive at work and the Finnish embassy has visited and left me a pile of recipes, I’m thinking I need to explore these frontier countries. Around the same time, one of my suppliers of interesting animal parts, Geoff – straight shooter, country nudist and bearer of all knowledge – rocks up with his wife, Aija, who has this deep-seated Nordic urge to forage for food and make use of every part their quarry. That day we got a lamb’s liver terrine of sorts, along with a bottle of preserved lingonberries, which are the traditional accompaniment to this type of dish – think cranberries or red currants.
Last time, I was sent away with a little jar of salted wild mushrooms. These were picked last autumn from the pine forests around Tumbarumba. The salting is to stop them going mouldy – the greenish mould is the poisonous part. As they say, there’s a few people in life you don’t want to mess with – plumbers and suppliers of wild mushrooms. It’s beyond me how you tell the difference between a delicious fungus and a similar-looking one that will, if not kill you then and there, give you some pretty weird hallucinations. far.
It’s this pickling/preserving process that is intriguing to me. (Well, it’s got me interested at the moment and my short attention span will no doubt have me on another tack sometime soon. By the way, a friend of my sister, who is a keen bowist and has an arrow quiver made out of a feral cat. See, off I go. I’ll tell you about that another time.)
You will no doubt be aware of Rene Redzepi, the world’s numero uno cook, having knocked the Spaniard of the roost and kept at the Brit at bay. His success lies in the use of all the foods of his native Scandinavia. Has an army of specialised foragers who collect the herbs, roots, lichen and the like that grace his magic cuisine. His book, Noma, found its way to my intray the other day, completing the triumvirate of circumstances that awoke my fleeting Nordic interest.
So I’m head down in his book trying to find some dishes or ideas to pass on this week. I open the pantry to look for elderflower blossom, beach mustard flowers and wild ramsons, ahh no. How about yarrow or woodruff, birch wine, a little block of Swedish goat butter, sweet cicely? OK, not much joy there. I’ll check out the freezer for some protein – loin of a musk ox, reindeer shoulder – what the? Aren’t they mythical like unicorns and a herbivore sense of humour?
The 12 to 16 different mosses from his dish “snails and moss” have me more confident. I can find at least three distinct growths in the bathroom. But in closer inspection, some look suspiciously like mildew.
In short, you’ll need to insert a few alternative ingredients if you want to create the ultimate Nordic dinner party in Canberra.
I head out to forage for myself some local food around the farm. I’ve been out here a couple of hours, but all I’ve come up with is an interesting thistle, some poisonous-looking toadstools and the bones of a dead cat that I think went missing last year.
This is proving difficult. Back to pickling, then. There’s a lot of pickled and preserved products in Redzepi’s book, which makes sense when most of your country is in darkness for half the year and likely to be frozen the rest.
Preserving or pickling mushrooms really changes the taste and gives a dish a kind of Swedish/Finnish feel. Here are two versions – pickling mushrooms as a general all-purpose preserve and Aija’s salted wild mushrooms. Teamed up with venison, you can almost feel the Arctic sun on your face.
These work best with wild mushrooms but you can easily insert a mixture of interesting fungi from the markets: shiitake, woodear, enoki, chestnut and honey browns make up a workable blend.
Aija suggests serving this with Jansson’s temptation, which is equally Swedish and Finnish, and is a gratin of sorts. I haven’t cooked this part of the dish, but it sounds easy enough.
You’ll need good wine and music to finish this meal. Mount Langi Girhan Billi Billi is a medium-weight spicy shiraz that hits the spot, along with some old Beatles music that I’m re-rediscovering: “I once had a girl, isn’t it good …” But that’s Norway, my oft-forgotten but much-loved other Scandinavian country.
Roast venison with preserved mushrooms, creme fraiche and Jansson’s temptation
1 thick (2cm) fillet steak a person, seasoned with salt and pepper
rocket
olive oil
creme fraiche: mixed with herbs like chervil, tarragon and chives
lemon
preserved mushrooms (see below)
Jansson’s temptation (see below)
Aija’s preserved pine mushrooms (for autumn)
Have with a bucket of fairly strong brine with you when you hit the forest. Pick the young caps, quartering them and dropping them into the brine to stop any mould forming. When home, bring the mushrooms in brine to the boil, remove from the heat and drain. Pack into sterile jars layered with salt flakes.
Alternative pickling solution
Make enough to fully submerge mushrooms
assorted mushrooms, such as shiitake, woodear, enoki, chestnut and honey browns
1 part white wine vinegar
1 part red wine vinegar
1 parts balsamic vinegar
3 parts water
herbs – chervil, chives, tarragon
spice – black pepper, juniperberries
1/4 part salt
Slice them all, except enoki, into quarters/eighths, all about the same size. Bring a pot of water to the boil, toss in all the mushrooms, then drain and immediately cool in an ice bath and drain again. Heat the vinegar and water to the boil, reduce a tad, add the herbs and spices. Add the mushrooms, then take off heat straight away and leave to steep for 10 minutes, drain and pack into sterile jars.
Jansson’s temptation
washed potatoes
Swedish anchovies, chopped, reserve oil
onion rings
butter
cream
Cut the potatoes into a thick julienne, soak in water until needed, then drain them.
Saute the onion rings in butter until soft. In a big oven dish, make a layer of potatoes, dot with anchovies and sliced onion, repeat about three to five times. Add one or two tablespoons of anchovy oil to the cream and pour over.
Bake until caramelised on top.
Have the oven set to its highest temperature. Heat oil to smoking in a thick-based, ovenable pan, and add well-seasoned venison steaks, sear for one minute on each side, then into the oven for about five minutes. Be careful not to overcook them.
Remove the steaks from the oven, squeeze over lemon juice, and wrap them in foil for five or ten minutes while you get the rest ready.
Rinse a handful of pickled or salted mushrooms then panfry them just to heat through. Set aside.
To serve, arrange a pile of Jansson’s temptation in the centre of the plate. Add rocket, scatter mushrooms around and slice venison on top. Serve with a good dollop of creme fraiche.
Canberra Times, October 27, 2010
Slow lamb, people & music
I’m beating myself up out here, trying in vain to cook up something that won’t offend readers. I’ve now got farmers who believe I shouldn’t encourage certain broadleaf weeds – just blast ‘em with Roundup. Others who are members of the non-rabbit-eating community, and then there’s those who don’t want to see their dinner alive and kicking before they tuck in.
Seems like a lot of people prefer their food divested of any remnant of its growing environment: potatoes scrubbed to remove any trace of soil, lettuce cleaned and packed into convenient plastic bags, fish without a head or bones. Get over it, people.
I fully support those who don’t and take on board their concerns far more readily than the complaints of people who just don’t want to see a photo of dinner before it was dead. But, and I have probably said this before, if you have made the decision to eat meat, it would have been alive at one stage – and most likely it was cute and cuddly.
So, if I was to discuss lamb this week, I don’t want you thinking that lamb exists in nature as neat little cutlets on a Styrofoam tray. Nope, they are happy, frolicking creatures that are bred to eat. If that’s a problem, I can recommend some really good writing on vegetables and fruits.
Phew, got that off my chest. So the lamb. This one is eight months old, apparently having four teeth in its head carbon date it thus. It doesn’t look that young though. The lambs this year are great big fat things with so much feed. If only they knew the greedy ones get knocked off first.
After a little hanging time, the meat is ready to cut up into large primal joints and great piles of chops and the like. The neck is huge. It looks a similar size to Michael Wayman’s during his brief appearance in the NRL finals before he was polaxed.
But I’m heading to the haunches. The legs must weigh in at 5kg each. One barely fits into my new, recently commissioned Ilve stove that’s almost a metre wide. The kitchen’s not finished, but I cannot wait any longer, so I’m cooking in a construction site. I just move all the builder’s paraphernalia, hook up the sound dock and shuffle some songs to get the creative juices going.
First up is the eerily sombre last vocal performance from Johnny Cash, nice and slow like the lamb, since I’m going to leisurely cook it all day.
Being such a big cut, all the flavourings and seasoning need to be the same. Grab a handful of river salt and start rubbing the leg all over, and let it hang around while the oven heats up to inferno on the dial. You need the heat to carmaelise the outside because the low cooking temperature won’t do this and we’ll miss out on all those high tone flavours and textures. Once the oven is at 250C, drizzle some oil over the leg and roast for 20-30 minutes. Remove and lower the oven to 90-100C.
Turn the leg over in the pan. Scatter about three dozen peeled shallots and the cloves from three heads of garlic (don’t peel). From the garden, half a rosemary bush or at least five big sprigs, along with a handful of thyme. Gather these all around the leg, and pour over a bottle of dry white wine – maybe not the best Corton, but something drinkable and a few cups of stock.
Cover the entire roasting tray in a few layers of foil to seal in as much moisture as possible – success lies in this and in checking every now and then that it’s not drying out. Into the now warmish oven.
While this is cooking, I head off to work for the day, just popping home at lunchtime to pull the kids off each other since it’s school holidays and to check that my moisture levels are sufficient and turn the leg.
After nine hours, it comes out looking beautiful, yielding, tender and glistening in its thickish cooking juices which are reduced down a little further to make a loose sauce. It’s served with steamed spuds that I clean myself and a simple old-school mixed salad.
Low and slow lamb roast
1 big leg spring lamb
salt
shallots
garlic
olive oil
dry white wine
stock, chicken or otherwise
rosemary and thyme
Johnny Cash’s last album, America VI: Ain’t no grave
Wild weed soup, eating local & curing what ailsya
You think it wouldn’t be hard to find someone with weed to sell. I’m not talking about anything illicit here. Nope, those days are well behind, if indeed they ever existed. What I’m after now is some young and wildly growing stinging nettle.
Seems strange that this startlingly green, attractive and yummy plant is on the hit list of every farmer in the area, along with rabbits, roos and greenies. Sure, it can take over paddocks in the blink of an eye.
It’s also pretty nasty if you grab a handful of it unsuspectingly. Those little stinging hairs are incredibly annoying and slightly painful, like an itch that won’t go away. If you rub them on to a spot where you have different pain, that pain will go away and you’ll just have the itch to deal with. I’m not sure if this is useful, but it’s definitely interesting.
But the positive is that nettle is without doubt the deepest colour green you’ll eat, aside from the wheat-grass shots everyone was drinking a few years ago. Stinging nettle is the real deal – and has positive flavour, rather than tasting like the lawn. Like super-concentrated spinach, full of iron and vitamin C and all those other essential minerals.
And I’ve found some. Down Tallagandra Lane way, my mate and olive-oil maker Ernie has been unsuccessfully spraying his nettle for years now. It keeps coming back like Malcolm Turnbull, so the regrowth is mostly young and tender, which is what needed, staying away from any woody trunks. So I end up with a bucketful of weed. What to do?
If you want a real hit of nettle, soup works well. For this, I just make a nice chicken stock and pile a heap of nettle into the pot. Cover and cook down until it’s all wilted. Blend thoroughly and pass through a fine sieve to remove the courser stems and any stinging bits which in theory should be inactivated by the cooking process anyway, but just to be sure.
Return this thinnish soup to a simmer and add – say you have a litre of soup – three or four peeled and diced small potatoes, something like Sebago, which I have plenty of after grabbing some from the regional markets last weekend.
Cook quickly, so you don’t tone down the colour, until the potatoes collapse and now blend again, and season with salt and pepper. The soup doesn’t need much else. Herbs are lost in such a rich, green broth. I added some shredded rabbit confit leftover from last week, so it becomes a farm pest potage of sorts.
And wow, what a soup. Velvety. It takes quite a bit of seasoning to bring on all the background flavours. It has a nutty, slightly spicy character, definitely better than spinach and doing me the world of good, unless of course there’s any residual Roundup on the leaves. But hey, this is good soup and makes you feel purified. Did I mention nettle is a diuretic and possible laxative? And good for your joints. That sound I’m starting to make when I sit down or stand up – ughhhhhh, ahhh – has miraculously gone.
So I’m hooking into this weed now and actually encouraging the small outcrop I have in the chookyard. It might transplant it to a container. Like rabbits and hares, eating something that just exists and is a pest is a fundamental joy, no carbon footprint save for the energy it takes to walk outside and grab some, and no staying awake at night wondering what horrible things are happening in feed lots, sheds and commercial high-intensity farming. Couldn’t be more natural and fulfilling.
Canberra Times, September 29, 2010
Bunnies, brothels & good parenting
I weep for your generation, is all I can think. Up and about early to pick up some vineyard help in the form of my partner-in-crime brother and a late-teen nephew. He’s taking his time getting ready, and as uncles, it’s our duty the hassle him incessantly. “What?” when he finally jumps I the back seat “Did you run out of product to keep your look going?” Nothing, he knows the drill, so we head for coffee.
Since it’s before 6am there’s obviously nothing will be open besides McCafe. It seems like all the local baristas need their beauty sleep, too. And then you can’t get fed after 8.30pm at night. We’re the polar opposite of New York – the city that never sleeps. Canberra, the city that has a sleep in and goes to bed early.
Being a New Age kinda guy, coffee comes in two forms – short and black, ristretto for a quick hit or double, or in the case of Macca’s, triple-shot flat white to get any resemblance of concentration. So, what’ll it be? Vanilla lah-te? What the? No, really, that’s a god-awful colour the interior designer’s trying to get us to paint the house, what do you really want?
What the morning drive also unearths is a new piece of equipment for the house. Like most modern parents, we pander to the kids’ whims like sport and music, thinking we might miss the avenue that will actually pay some dividend as a return on the investment in time and money. So said nephew has an unused drum kit that my son needs more that breath itself. As any parent knows, there is a small window when boys want a drum kit, before they hit puberty and their interest moves to the beat of another drum.
But it’s my other passenger who carries the food story this week. My brother Dave is doing a roaring trade bartering oil, wine, anything for the huge rabbits he gets from the South Coast. Beautiful, they are, about 2kg each and dressed in a cryovac bag with their liver in a cute little bag inside them. A real step up from flavourless chooks and more fleshy than the lean buggers running around the property. I’m happy with both – the farmed carry less gamey flavour, but have excellent thighs and back legs to tuck into.
It’s funny how much the food channel and shows like Masterchef have penetrated society. My brother asked a while ago for a recipe to cook the hoard of bunnies he’s accumulating so I MMSed him a simple confit recipe, thinking it’s pretty foolproof, loads of fat, low temp, easy.
Now at the local sports bar in Kaleen, which is his second home, the talk around the bar table is not on finals fever or the unfortunate luck that put a couple of guys, robed and bare-arsed, in the wrong place at the wrong time when the alleged Maribrynong brothel was raided recently. No, as funny as this would be, now they’re all swapping recipes for how to cook rabbits.
The first thing about rabbits is don’t freeze them. It wrecks the protein so the bunnies will be tough as all get out. The airless bag they come in will allow them to be preserved for a few weeks and in the process, the wet ageing will help break down the proteins that make the muscles contract. So you get a softer, less tense meat, and it gains some flavour as well. If you unsure or nervous about ageing them, just buy them fresh and use without freezing.
The rabbit needs to be broken down into a few pieces and cooked using different methods. Sure, you can just roast it, but it will be pretty firm. The hind legs are the main focus and we’re going to cook these super slow, then the loin will be cut down into cute little racks as a garnish and the rest makes the stock.
So cut off the two hind legs carefully, trying to section off as much meat as possible. Set aside. Cut the saddle, using a heavy knife, down the middle along the back bone to break it into two, and then across to make four sections of three ribs, like a little lamb rack. Clean up the ribs by scraping the meat off, and set aside.
Cut up into small pieces all that is left – the carcass, rib cage, front legs, bones and all. Roast these pieces it in a hot oven with mirepoix drizzled with oil until just starting to colour. Tip this into a pot, cover with water add splash of wine. Cook for one hour, strain, and then reduce over the heat to a cup or so.
Now back to the legs. Use a small sharp knife and cut out the thigh and leg bone, also remove any thick, strappy cartilage, so you end up with a Maryland-like piece of rabbit with leg and thigh attached to each other, except that it’s hollow. Season with salt and rub in thyme leaves, rest for a few hours, wash off.
The next is hard to explain, but you’re going to push the thigh meat into the hole in the leg meat, making a dense little cone of meat. Push this into the corner of an oven bag, pour over two tablespoons of fat and tie up the bag tight with string, expelling any air. Repeat with the other leg.
Put a large pot of water on the heat and bring the water to about 60C. That’s quite low, but will cook the meat given time, which will be about one to one-and-a-half hours. You have to keep an eye on it to ensure it doesn’t approach boiling point, and add cold water as needed.
Out of the water, you can rest the legs until needed.
For the sauce, heat a little oil and fry the shallots and garlic to translucence. add white wine and reduce to a syrup. add stock and cook down to a saucy look. Stir in creme fraiche, tarragon and mustard. Don’t boil it, but cook it a little more. Season.
To finish the legs, have a salamander (that’s a grill in the oven, not a lizard) set on high. Unwrap the legs from the oven bags and place under the grill to caramelise.
To cook the racks, heat a little oil in a heavy pan. Add little racks, season and cook quickly to medium rare.
Serve, piled neatly on top of each other, the leg underneath, on celeriac mash and drizzle with sauce.
This is a nice meal. The flavour of a good rabbit is distinctive and really rewards thoughtful cooking, so we sit and enjoy the meal over a bottle of chardonnay. We can’t hear each other, as our son has almost perfected the drum roll from Phil Collins’ ‘I can feel it comin’ in the air toni-ight’ Dodod! Ddodod! Ddodod! dod dod”. Oh lord, what have we done.
Confit rabbit with seared rack, celeriac mash and mustard tarragon sauce
1 big rabbit
salt
thyme
olive oil, or goose fat for confit
Mirepoix: leek, onion, carrot, celery plus garlic, thyme, peppercorns and bay
white wine
2 golden shallots, minced
1 garlic clove, chopped
2 tbsp good Dijon mustard
80g creme fraiche
Canberra Times, September 22, 2010
Smokey dog, diesel & sauvignon blanc
I stand alone, bar my dog, a man with a plan and a jerrycan full of diesel.
Spring is here and with it a whole lotta of jobs to get through. I can feel the grass growing under my blunnies, the soil warming, chock full of water. In no time at all, we’ll be knee deep in grass, so I’d better get to one of the more fun jobs before it gets too dangerous – burning off the huge piles of vine cuttings.
Why do I have so many? Well we could blame New Zealand, I know this sounds weird (and I could use some therapy for this blame-shifting habit) but hear me out. Twelve years ago, when we planted this vineyard one variety that had huge potential was sauvignon blanc – or as we winemakers call it, cat’s pee. It’s served us well, and we’ve been selling it happily to a large company in South Australia. But over the past three years, a tsunami has been radiating from Marlborough in the South Island where this variety has done amazing things, and it seems the entire population has planted a patch.
With the tidal wave hitting us, the price for our fruit has plummeted, since major companies can buy readymade wine from New Zealand for the price that we used to sell fruit for. So I’m pulling all the sauvignon blanc out in a fit of torment and now stand before a pile of trunks that blocks out the rising spring sun, with some fuel to speed things on.
I need to be careful though. Years ago, when I first moved out here and had my farmer training wheels on (I’m down to just one wheel and still pretty wobbly), I had this great expanse of blackberries near the dam that were harbouring a colony of rabbits. I figured if I removed the blackberries, the bunnies would be fair game, so I had a dozer push the vines into this massive ball of tangled vine. I let it dry out over my first summer then my brother and I took to it with some accelerant and fire.
Having no experience with combustible materials like this, we thought it would take a bit to get going, so dumped 20 litres of fuel into an exposed section, figuring, in retrospect a tad childishly, that the vines fire’ll start slow and spread.
“Got a lighter there bro?” Click, click, click. “How do you start this? OK, shake it.” Click, click…..
It’s hard to put into words the sound of what happened next – vvvrooomp – maybe, but this brief onomatopoeic word doesn’t sum up the sound, which was more like a fighter jets shooting past, of the inferno our pile of cinder dry blackberry vines erupted into. A blaze, hotter and brighter than a thousand suns flashed before us two small, kneeling, silhouetted shapes, just momentarily, then a cloud like a mini nuclear device shot into the air.
We looked around, both a little startled at what happened and both looking the part with no eyebrows or fringes, our features slightly blackened, the pile of blackberries now in the stratosphere. Luckily, no one was looking.
So the trick is, start a small pile away from the mountain of vine trunks and judge the outcome. Today, I’ve notified every authority in the area and all the neighbours.
While I’m setting alight my thankfully slow-burning heaps, I’m overcome with this lovely smoky character, it permeates all my clothing and indeed the dog. It’s toasty with a slight caramel lift from the internal carbohydrates of the not-quite-dry vines, so I’m thinking, how can I use this with food?
I might as well smoke up some meat. The vines release a lot of smoke with the heat building up slowly at the base. I reckon I could cold smoke a few quails on one side of the fire, then cook them later when the embers have burned down.
For smoking, small birds and cuts work the best. Prepare them by salting them for a period first – how long depends on the strength of the brine I’ve put the bird through my Kenworth process – backbones cut out, flattened, then skewered through each opposing appendage. I’m working on a light brine of sat five per cent salt (50g for a litre of water) and soak them for about four hours. I’m keeping it simple, so I can see what effect the smoke has on the flesh, so leave out any spices that I’d usually throw in. After they’ve soaked, I rinse them well and pat dry as I build up today’s inferno.
It might seem counterintuitive to salt meats for smoking, since salting is a preserving technique. It dries the meat out by pulling out moisture, and you don’t really plan to deliberately make food drier. But the salt also prepares the protein cells to reabsorb moisture, along with any flavourings, so they stand up to cooking a lot better.
I found an old 1970s vertical grill in which the fat runs our the bottom – remember these? Like George Forman’s the fat runs out the bottom. Sandwich the quails inside the grill, and tie it together with some fencing wire. Place this package, nesting on the unburned section of vines, during a particularly smoky period for 10 minutes. Seeing as I’m making this up as I go, don’t take all this as gospel – more a field trial in the literal sense.
Remove the quails, basting in a simple marinade of olive oil, lemon juice and parsley while the fire burns down to glowing embers. Grab some rocks and make a platform to rest the grill about 15cm above the embers. You need a nice sizzle to happen fairly quickly, so they can cook for just five minutes on each side. The prepared skin crisps up a treat. Squeeze over some more lemon juice, wrap them in foil and head back to the house.
Toss together a salad of mixed baby lettuce, herbs like chervil and parsley, red onion, apple, croutons, shaved pecorino, cooked broadbeans and, if you’re trying to impress, soft-boiled quail eggs.
For the dressing, one part red-wine vinegar, one part olive oil, two parts grapeseed oil, a whisper of maple syrup, half a teaspoon of seeded mustard, a grind of black pepper, balanced with lemon juice, shaken vigorously, then poured over the salad, not too much. Add the sectioned, vine-smoked quails.
If you haven’t got a large pile of grape vines to burn, use a simple hot smoker, which will use heat to cook the quail so negates the barbecuing.
It’s been fun, but I’m not getting much closer to finishing my job list.
Vine-smoked quail salad
4 plump quails
salt
olive oil
lemon juice
garlic
1 tonne grapevine cuttings (optional, see above)
salad ingredients, as above
dressing ingredients, as above
Canberra Times, September 15, 2010
Ovens, Maple trees & what Canadians eat
It’s getting a tad desperate in the kitchen department at Martin farm, the new kitchen is almost here with promised loads of bench space and the new huge professional oven, we’ll sort of professional, its stainless steel and Italian main point it’s a gigantic step forward from the little Westinghouse that we’ve been dealing with for close to ten years. I’m sure this company makes great things but this wasn’t their highpoint so it’s Italian for me. I tossed a coin between the old school English ‘London cab’ like Ascots and Aga’s along with some sexy Italians like Bertazzoni, the big draw card here is that they are painted in the same factory and using same colours as Lamborghini but the classy Ilve’s won the contest, simple, solid and made in Italy.
I just need it in so here’s a little reminder to Peter, we’re starving out here, let’s get going!
I’m down to one or, on a good day, two electric hobs and the BBQ so you can see my problem coming up with different ideas each week. Scratching my head again when, back at the winery, my colleague David comes back for a sojourn in his native Canada with a little bottle of Ontario maple syrup. As my daughter says “Bam” a whole raft of ideas spills out, we don’t really get decent maple syrup here as far as I have found. The real thing is a fine balance between sweetness and flavour, a little goes a long way.
For a few years, back in the last decade, I was asked to supply the food for Canada day at the high commission with my class at the AIHS, a challenging 2 hour lunch service with the main theme obviously being Canadian food. We thought hard, what does that mean, what’s the difference between Canadian food and US food, or modern cooking in general for that matter. Sure maple syrup comes up and wild salmon but what else defines the food in this rather large country.
Some serious research, order a Canadian pizza you get bacon, mushroom and pepperoni, which I thought was an Aussie based on my childhood local in Kaleen, so we had to investigate further; cookbooks, Canadians and the then very limited Google: Fern tips, bison and rabbit; wild duck, wild deer, wild mushrooms, wild rice – seems everything is wild up north; little meat pies called tourtiere; turkey, cod tongues, little lobsters, corn, beaver tails – what do they do with the rest I ask – all sorts of berries; CC and dry, icewine and the all popular Nanaimo bar. Main point there’s lots to play around with and they don’t like being linked to the food culture in the States, in fact it better to not bring this up at all.
A quick lesson on making this stuff, firstly you need a tree in Canada and for it to be spring time, like everything, spring brings on the sap. This is run into some sort of collection vessel, the indigenous folk showed the scruvied settlers this little trick.
Next it needs the water evaporated from it which basically preserves itself as in honey, like all these processes the best is usually the most time consuming so most would be factory concentrated. The syrup comes in two grades and four colour classes. The best being the Canada class #2, Amber. All maple syrup has to be over 66 brix or percent pure sugar and is used primarily as a sweetener for pancakes, desserts, waffles and even as a curing agent. If you know someone travelling through get them to smuggle you some back, particularly the maple butter which is best for pancakes.
Given I’ve only got about 100ml to play with this is what we used them for, show the kids something other than nutella on their weekend pancakes. I’ve poured over a few recipes, trying to make them as thin as possible but to tell you the truth, my old tried and true recipe works fine, they’re not super thin crepes nor are they piklets.
Mix the eggs and milks together, sieve flour and make a well in centre, pour in liquids, mix thoroughly. Couldn’t be easier, if you make these ahead of time add about 10% more liquid, the end result should look like thickened cream. Using a non-stick crepe pan if you have on, I’ve a well used scanpan which is perfect. Have a little clarified butter on hand, set your temperature, might take a few tries to get it right, the butter should sizzle but not burn, add batter, swirls around until you have a nice thin pancake, toss, cooking about 1-2 minute per side.
Stack onto a plate with a little butter and maple syrup in each layer, resist the temptation to flood the plate, good syrup is expensive and should be used sparingly, about 1/2 teaspoon per layer.
Buttermilk pancakes with pure maple syrup (make 8 25cm diameter)
250g plain flour
1 ½ cup buttermilk
¼ cup milk
3 60g eggs
To serve
Butter
Maple syrup
Canberra Times, September 8, 2010
Pheasant hunting, Pulp kitchen & lunch
Tap, tap, is this thing on? Good, we’re go. Interview starts 11.49. “Hi Christian, so what’s cooking?”
“Pheasant.” “Cool, let’s dig in.”
Interview concludes 11.51.
Outside, the weather is very wintry, with rain sweeping in again and the temperature around 5C. An invitation to lunch today won easily over standing out in the rain pruning my vines, a job that really should be well on the way to completion with the October fast approaching.
We’re sitting in a window seat at Ainslie’s Pulp Kitchen, as chef and owner Christian Hauberg explains the circumstances that have brought us together, with a fair amount of excitement (me too), over a bottle of sparkling cider. His team is preparing lunch based around a little bird – a pheasant.
Hauberg is an unapologetic hunter, not for the wood-lined study with big fireplace and walls crowded with elk horns and elephant tusks – the trophies of a man not just versing the wild but conquering it. No, he’s in it for the food, a kindred spirit who, like me, believes in the whole process.
Sure, if you’re a vegetarian, we totally understand your stance, and thankfully you have plenty of believers who also contribute to this section. We true meat eaters, with our scientifically proven larger brains, seem to be in journalistic decline. But most people do eat meat, and given it was all alive at some stage, how would you like its last moments to be spent – gracefully loping across a hillock, or crowded into a cage, a concrete pen or a feed lot?
Up first today is a wonderful terrine, served seared and warm, unusual. The filling is a wobbly mixture of pheasant, foie gras and lamb’s tongue, with an eggplant condiment. It’s a textural dish, complex, well flavoured, there’s little bits of salty tongue, the pheasant itself, quite pure all wrapped in these velvety goose-liver bits. Hands down,. I’m lovin’ it, so far from the cold slab of undefined protein that is the norm in terrine cooking.
Hauberg and fellow food-loving shootists and chefs shot these pheasants at a weekend hunting bird on the wing in Victoria. You can’t do this in NSW because a group of persistent souls feels we should only be able to get food that is kept in pens. As a restaurateur, he can’t serve this to the public because it hasn’t been slaughtered and butchered in approved facilities (hence our private lunch). I wish he could. Sure, it’s right to have health rules covering the supply of food commercially, but there should be a way to allow restaurants to serve wild game.
Not that this is precisely wild. Hauberg shot the birds at Dunkeld, where the pheasants are released from their free-ranging enclosures. The hunt, with gun dogs ‘n all, plays out over the day and the hunting party returns with about a 70 per cent strike rate.
Game can be pretty tough and disappointing – frozen pheasants cost the earth and tend to taste like tough, lean chicken. So back in Canberra, Hauberg hung his birds in a cellar for 10 days, some at about 12C, others at fridge temperatures. The higher the temperature, the higher the flavour.
This isn’t for everyone. Not only do the various proteins breakdown via enzymatic processes, a whole lot of microorganisms get their turn, so mould is not unusual. Yep, I’m going to continue. Before Mr Westinghouse brought us the fridge, most meat was kept thus. Sure, mortality rates were higher, but we knew what flavour was. And eating a high-protein diet rather than having to forage endlessly gave us have more time for other pursuits. As Plato said, we’re not ordinary animals, how else do you explain poetry?
The terrine was made with the refrigerated pheasant. The main course is the 12C pheasant, which Hauberg has cooked sous vide then pan-fried to a crispy skin, simply served on top of a rustic bread sauce, and with another sauce made from the bones. This is strong. The meat has a strange combination of smelling both alive and dead, reminiscent of ripe cheese, compost, mushrooms and a gym. Intriguing. No doubt, this would be too much for some. Me, I’m totally embracing it. It’s finally true complexity, like truffles, good wine and cheese, with this intense savoury character.The rest of the pheasant was cooked en confit and served shredded and tossed through a watercress salad. Again, the intensity and headiness of the hanging process wafts around the table – earthy, guttural. Most of the diners have left already, which is probably lucky as they might wonder what we’ve been up to.
I brought with me a bottle of 2006 Clonakilla shiraz Viognier, still a young wine but the plush palate, driven by fine tannins and aromas of violets, red current and pepper is just brilliant with the pheasant. There’s something quite memorable about sitting down over good food and wine that both parties have had a hand at making.
The lunch is finished with a little slab of washed-rind sheep’s milk cheese, which is quite fresh, but you can still faintly smell the similar mouldy smell of the cheese.
Neat. Now I just need to pass on a recipe – well, not really a recipe. Hauberg, with his strong Euro training, put all this together with recipes, so he doesn’t have quantities, but I’ll make some suggestions.
Serve the terrine with a little pickled condiment of some sort, good bread, and a bottle of Le Pere Jules Cidre Bouche sparkling cider (available from Denman cellars, Gungahlin, 6253 9000) The purity of this cider, slightly fermented wind-fallen apples, is just brilliant with the terrine. Happy hunting.
Warm terrine of pheasant, lamb’s tongue and foie gras
1 pheasant, about 900g
1lt fat, goose, preferably, or duck or olive oil
salt
thyme leaves
black peppercorns
3 pickled lamb’s tongues (salt, onion, garlic, pepper)
1 foie gras, mi-cuit
2 eggs
cream
You’ll need a 1.2 litre terrine, well greased.
Pickled lamb’s tongue
Use a 30 per cent salt solution with a touch of sugar and spices. Heat to dissolve, and when cold, add lambs’ tongues – as the saying goes, when you’re corning lambs’ tongues, you might as well do 20. Keep them completely covered for about three days. Then wash and rinse in three changes of fresh water, soaking for about an hour. To cook, bring them to a simmer in a court bouillon of one litre of water, half a cup of white wine, plus a small chopped onion and crushed garlic. Poach gently until the tongues are soft enough to pierce easily. Cool slightly and peel off the skin. Dice two tongues.
Confit legs
You can use a store-bought pheasant or any game bird. Rinse and rub the legs with salt and thyme leaves, plus crushed pepper and juniper. Marinate overnight. Brush off the salt and submerge the legs completely in your fat of choice. At a low heat, around 70C, cook the legs in the fat until cooked through. Cool in the fat, drain and chop. Add to the tongue. Don’t be too stingy – leave fat clinging to the meat.
Forcemeat
Rub the breast with salt, pour over half a glass of dry madeira, add thyme leaves and marinate overnight. Dice and blend, adding two egg yolks and a little cream until forms a homogenous thick liquid. Push through a sieve.
Foie gras
Hauberg uses a goose foie gras mi-cuit (half-cooked) from Essential ingredient (Galette foie gras 330g $130, 80g $35). It’s not cheap, but adds a richness. Dice and add as much as you like, but not more than the weight of the pheasant confit.
Mix the tongue, confit, forcemeat and foie gras together. It should be salty enough without adding extra salt and just needs some freshly ground black pepper and very finely chopped thyme leaves.
Pour into a prepared terrine, cover with greased baking paper and lid. Place the terrine in a water bath at 120C and cook until set – about one and a half hours. Check by lifting the lid and shaking – as soon as it stops looking like a liquid and wobbles, it’s ready. Cool on a rack and then in the fridge.
To serve, turn out by submerging the terrine in hot water briefly. Cut slices about 1-1.5cm thick and fry them gently in their own fat to warm through.
Canberra Times, September 1, 2010
Cauliflowers, driving lessons & Heston
Our first born is learning to drive, a tough time for any parent, not only trying to overcome the intense impulse to reach over, grab the wheel and resume control of the car or trying to dis-embed your fingers from the dashboard without her noticing.
The really tough bit is what it says about the passing of time – and its acceleration, much like the universe. Another road sign flits past on the super highway of life and there seems to be a bridge out ahead. Can I get off here, like now.
Once you calm down, deep breath, it’s going to be OK, you can take life in from another angle, no longer in the driver’s seat. The country side, lovely and green, full of happily grazing and birthing stock, cultivated fields, crops sown, the angry looks and gestures of the dozens of impatient drivers from the long chain of cars waiting for the right – or not – time to pass our steady 80kmh car on the Barton.
Even driving down our pleasant country lane the view looks different from the passenger seat. Just around the corner we have a guy that’s taken the idea of a vege garden to dazzling heights. I’m pretty impressed with my 60 sq m at home. He’s got acres of it.
You have to remember that vege patches are part of the armoury of things we guys like to have or be around. We’re comfortable here, in control. Just as long as we’re not growing daisies, we love the outdoors. Barbecues, too, chainsaws, wine cellars. The list goes on.
So Bernie Little around the corner at Larado farm fresh produce has gone commercial with a huge hot house, outside beautiful weed-free rows full at the moment with the crisp white heads and green collars of heaps of cauliflowers. He’ll deliver these, plus many other vegetables and real eggs around Canberra (email him on art01@bigpond.com.au he’ll send you through an order form each Wednesday and deliver your request on Friday).
You’ll also find cauliflowers piled up for as little as $1 each in the markets, so it seems a good time to get into them.
An unusual vegetable, quite unique in that it really just tastes like itself, slightly nutty and peppery. Cauliflower doesn’t remind you of anything else, just cauliflower. And the entire plant – leaves, stems and flower buds – pretty well tastes the same. Its part of the Brassica group, which doesn’t help the sales pitch to the kids. “It’s like Brussels sprouts, bok choy, broccoli. Any of this grabbin’ ya?”
Goodness-wise, its full of Vitamin C, folate and dietary fibre and pretty low in calories – you’re probably going to use up more energy pulling it out of the ground, cleaning and cooking it than what it will yield.
Have I sold you on it yet?
Cauliflower needs to be seasoned well, and not overcooked. One compound that is quite dominant in cauliflower is indole. Sounds pleasant enough, an aromatic, in both the chemical and sensory sense – fused benzene ring. It’s used quite a lot in perfumery, but, and here’s the nastier bit, when worked on by bacteria, it can also produce a nasty off smell, so if the kids say it smells like crap, they may be on to something. Whoa, let’s stop there, and just remember if you overcook it you’ll get a sulphide aroma.
Having made a nice cauliflower soup with braised leeks, and then pasta with mashed anchovies, I’m running out of ideas. There are endless cauilflower and cheese bakes that all sound the same, and you can head down the Indian spice route, but I’m wanting more of this vegetable or I’m heading for the meat cupboard.
Let’s check what some masters do with it. Tetsuya Wakuda makes a basic soup, served cold and then piled with good caviar – it does respond well to seafood and salt.
Heston Blumenthal, my man, never fails to make the most simple idea very complicated, requiring a doctorate in chemistry and access to a cryogenics lab. When he has a crack at cauliflower, the recipe goes for two pages and you end up with a risotto flavoured with chocolate cubes, covered with a cap of raw stem and dried twiggy things poking out.
I’m not going to lie to you here. No way can I do all this. My daughter is waiting at the door shaking the keys and not likely to eat it anyway. But I’ve played around with the ideas a bit and made a huge mess – and here’s a Reader’s Digest condensed version. It tastes great.
You need two medium heads of perfectly fresh and pure white cauliflower – one for a stock and the other for a cream and a light caramelised soup, whatever is left juiced to add raw flavour. Sounds simple.
Sort-of Heston’s cauliflower risotto
2 medium heads of cauliflower (assuming 5 cups of florets a person)
Stock
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, mashed
1.5l water
olive oil as needed
Creamed cauliflower
curry powder – Herbie’s Korma or similar
cream stock – 1/3 each cream, skim milk and cauliflower stock
Soup
skim milk
curry powder – Herbie’s Korma or similar
Risotto
2 cups risotto rice
½ cup finely chopped golden shallots
1 clove garlic, mashed
wine – dry white or mixture of this and vermouth, warm
2 tbsp mascarpone
½ cup grated parmesan
3 tbsp beurre noisette – cook 60g butter over low heat until amber and nutty, strain and cool
3 tbsp chopped chives
The stock first. Using one head, reserve and chop half the leaves and set aside with about a cup of grated florets. Chop the rest with the onion and garlic, saute in oil for five minutes. Add water, cook for 20 minutes. Remove from heat, add reserved leaves and gratings, stir in and steep for an hour and strain. Chill.
For the creamed cauliflower, blanch one cup of florets in boiling water, cool and cook with one cup of the cream stock plus a pinch of curry powder until very soft. Season, puree, sieve and chill.
For the soup, saute two cups of florets in hot oil until caramelised. Add one-and-a-half cups of milk and another pinch of curry powder. Bring to boil and cook until soft. Season, puree, sieve and chill.
Juice the remaining florets. Chill.
Now for the risotto. Which rice? Arborio is too soft, vialone nano is too hard, carnaroli is just right, like Goldilocks and the three bears. Cook the rice in oil until it just takes on some colour. Add schallots and garlic and saute until soft. Add a 1/2 cup of wine, lower the heat and once absorbed, start adding hot stock, either a little at a time, stirring constantly, or three-quarters in one go (Blumenthal recommends the former). I’m cool with adding a lot and not disturbing the rice too much, until the end, when you add the rest of the rice and stir.
Remove the rice from the heat when its cooked but still firm in the centre. Beat in the butter, rest it a bit, then stir in warm creamed cauliflower, three tablespoons of the juiced florets, mascarpone, parmesan and chives. Season.
Serve the risotto with the hot soup, which can be frothed up with an espresso machine to a foam of sorts, spooned around the rice. There’s other components to Blumenthal’s recipes, like the chocolate, but this will give you an idea of how the dish portrays one flavour so well. It sounds more complicated than it is, and like me, you might need to wear some L-plates for a while.
A nice wine to serve with this is a modern chardonnay – try Mount Majura for a zesty wine full of delicate and precious minerals, and spice and nuts to complement the rice.
Canberra Times, August 25, 2010
A hunter’s tale, gluttony pants and Bambi’s innards
I’ve managed to create quite a name for myself out here in Murrumbateman as someone who’ll eat anything, the weirder the better. “Just leave it on the kitchen bench,” the neighbours tell each other. “The house is never locked. Ignore the ball of tangled hair he calls a dog.”
Right now, I have a promise of a brace of wild rabbits, a couple of lambs, 25kg of freshly cured pork sausages and the corresponding coppa and prosciutto. I’m also expecting my doctor, wondering why am I not coming to see him and ready with a lecture on not eating so much meat.
As an aside but on topic, I just found out that one of my favourite overseas chefs, Chris Cosentino of Incanto, San Francisco, is selling specially designed “gluttony pants”. You can buy them for me at http://betabrand.com/betapants/gluttony-pants.html Brilliant!
There hasn’t been much joy within these pages for vegetable lovers lately, but all I can say is, hang in there, it’s winter. If you look at any old-fashioned Mediterranean diet it will be strong on meat in winter, when the cold temperature allows for meat handling and curing, and slow-cooked meat warms the heart, storing energy for the coming growing season. Plus, there isn’t much action in the vegetable patch, which is being prepared for spring.
The phone rings, aha. It’s a mobile and a bad line – sounds like someone’s calling from inside a clothes drier. “It’s …eoff, are yome … gun … soon?” How I love those part words – unless of course I owe him money, but we’re square at present I think. This guy, Geoff, no last names, is a real hunter. He turns up with some pretty weird stuff and when he says the magic words “Ya interested in a deer’s liver?” – I can hear these words clear as a bell – I don’t ask where he found one. I’m on my way.
But first to consult Fergus Henderson. His book gives me some clues – not recipes, but ideas. Venison offal in general is highly praised, he says, the liver being “sweet and delicate” and the brain sublime. But he warns you need to know the providence of the deer. I skim over that, since I’m assuming it is wild, unless he’s jumped the fence at the zoo. So I just check my private health insurance – nope, no small print about eating the internal organs of a Disney character, so we are on.
I’m thinking about treating this like I would a fresh calf’s liver, or maybe making sausage. But I have no idea how big a deer’s liver is.
So I head to Geoff’s place, which is down a very long, dark and eroded lane. It’s eerily quiet down here. Rustic buildings, a few utes, heaps of dogs, I think I hear a distant banjo as I enter the yard of the dimly lit shack. Why am I feeling all of a sudden like I’m in the opening scene of a horror movie? I know this guy and he hardly ever creeps me out. The door opens, I enter.
Turns out, it’s just the man, his partner and some shooting buddies winding down. I’m taken to the shed where a cool room is filled with the recent kills. Three deer, already cut into large sections, and one rabbit hang in the dim light. I’m thinking Santa might have to go on a recruiting drive this year.
Back to the house and I’m handed the liver, and introduced to all manner of Finnish fare (his wife is from there) – a cookbook on Savonian cuisine, a taste of some lingonberry preserve, a jar of pickled wild mushrooms.
As I walk away, I’m thinking how amazing this area is. Everyone has a food story, and it’s so real, and so very far from Masterchef. I’ll get back here soon and quiz them more about Finnish food. Right now, I have a liver to deal with.
The liver is very dark purple/black, the colour of a deep bruise. Obviously, it’s very fresh. It’s the size of a decent lamb’s fry, coming from an 80kg fallow deer, which is one of the smaller breeds – spotted, runs wild out west, Tumbarumba way.
I sit it on the bench at home to size it up as I get the kids’ meals. They are far from impressed, but it’s not an unusual occurrence, and they leave me be - “Dad’s working”.
I dust a few slices in flour and fry them up to see how they cook. It’s quite firm and gamey. It does have a sweetness to it, but I wouldn’t call anything about it delicate. I cut it into two lobes and spend an hour surgically removing all the hard material that makes up the biliary tree.
One half goes into a bowl covered with equal quantities of salt and sugar. This will eventually, say in one to two weeks, be air-dried, Fergus Henderson style, and then we’ll see how it turns out. I’ll keep you posted, sensing your eagerness for my endeavours.
The other half, I’m thinking sausages, reminiscent of the English faggot – a liver rissole. So I use the same quantity of pork belly, mostly the meat but a good dose of fat too.
Chop the pork and liver finely (chopped, rather than minced). Mix with a splash of olive oil, 15g of salt flakes per kilogram of meat, the rind of one orange (I think this goes with liver, we’ll see), finely chopped thyme leaves – about a tablespoon for my kilogram of meat, and a tablespoon of cracked black pepper. A splash of Dubonnet – no reason, just like it. Mix and rest overnight.
Now, it’s the next day. I’m carefully filling pig casings, as the kids wake and glare at me, into six-inch links. I’m going to cure them so they’ll resemble salami, by pricking the skin all over and air-drying them alongside my curing hepatic proscuitto.
But let’s fry one up to see how the flavours work.
It’s good, very livery, strong, the zest gives it a freshness. It tastes salty enough, and should benefit from a few weeks’ curing time. Again, we’ll see.
Meantime, here’s a quick recipe for the fresh liver using the same flavours.
Chop up the onions and saute for about 20 minutes – no browning, just to soften the vegetable. Add muscat and reduce to a syrupy jam. Set aside.
Now the bacon – we don’t do bacon very well in this country, but buy the best you can. Saute it in a little oil until it releases its own special fat. Once cooked through and just starting to caramelise, remove and keep warm.
Dust the liver in flour and season with salt. Increase the heat and sear on both sides to your liking – maybe medium rare, but well done might deal with any concerns. Set aside. Deglaze the pan with Dubonnet and reduce the liquid a little. Add orange juice, zest and thyme leaves, and cook down into a sauce. Off the heat, season with salt and pepper.
On a plate, a spoonful of onion jam. Arrange the bacon and liver on top. Sauce it, and to complete the dish, a mash made of turnips, cream and chives.
This is a rustic dish, a hunter’s dish, full flavoured. Plus it gives you a larder full of joyous afettati for later.
While you’re cooking, why not try a Dubonnnet cocktail to bring on your appetite – a lovely, elegant, pre-dinner cocktail of Dubonnnet with a splash of gin, a smidgen of Kina Lillet and a scraping of orange zest, over ice. I’ll call it the Hunter’s Delight or maybe the Doctor’s Surprise.
Venison liver and bacon with onion jam, orange and Dubonnet
4 large onions, sliced
100ml sweet fortified wine like muscat or pedro ximenez
400g of good belly bacon in one piece, cubed
olive oil
500g venison liver, clean, deveined and sliced, about 5mm thick
flour
200ml Dubonnet
100ml orange juice and shredded zest
teaspoon chopped thyme leaves
salt and pepper
Canberra Times, August 18, 2010
Smackdown, AC/DC & goats – there is a link
Boys’ road trip! I’m off to the big smoke with son and two other dads, whom we will call the Engineer and the Hotelier – as always, what happens on tour stays on tour. Our destiny, WWE Smack Down. Are you with me?
Gotta pack the bag – black tracksuit pants, check, black t-shirt, check, dark hoodie. If I had a championship belt, that would go in too, and any other paraphernalia relating to this much-maligned sports entertainment genre. No crap either about it not being real. If you think strongly about that, jump in the ring with pleasantly smiling, 200kg 7-foot Big Show, tell him. After all, do we really believe that when a 50-year-old opera singing gets on stage she’s a 14-year-old Juliet?
Music for the trip: I dial up the lately-much-played 1970s playlist and have old-school AC/DC’s Highway to Hell belting out, with Bon Scott’s soon-to-be-silenced vocals warming us up for the night ahead. Well, they would be if I can get my son to turn off ‘Glee’ on his ipod and listen to the real music. Little known fact: AC/DC played at the high school I went to, Ginninderra. We were too young to go in, as it was a Year 10 event, so we had to hang around out back trying to hold down Brandevino and Mum’s cooking sherry.
Back to the wrestling. It is entertainment so you need to go with the flow. I travel through life believing everything, every word spoken, every image on tele, youtube – even the plight of cashed-up Sudanese doctors, and that Tony Abbot won’t alter his mind again with the next change in the breeze in the hotting-up election campaign.
It’s a colourful crowd here at Sydney’s Olympic Park, none the less. If you were to come across these people in any other situation you might think you’ve discovered a new species. Even the AFL crowd heading to ANZ Stadium seems conservative and sophisticated, and Geelong is playing.
Our seats are up the back. My wife has bought them in the no-alcohol section, for which I don’t thank her. Have you attempted to spend three hours watching grown men in spandex sober?
But even at this distance, you can see daylight between a thrown punch at the head of what seems to be buffed-up Billy Idol by a rather portly and middle-aged-looking Matt Hardy.
I’m a bit sad, though. My favourite wrestler – I just bought the T-shirt with him on the front for about $50 – isn’t here. My son fills me in on what’s happened to the Undertaker, a big dude who has an uncanny resemblance to my younger brother. Apparently, he was sort of killed by Mexican Ray Mysterio – hang in there, I’m getting to some food soon – and exists in a nether world between life and presumably hell. I ask whether it’s called rehab, but my son’s faith remains untarnished.
A late night. I, the Engineer and Hotelier, all old enough to know better, thought it a good idea to drink a heap of James Boags and stay up most the night rewatching wrestling on Fox and reliving our youth. And as expected, I wake up, television blaring, feeling pretty lousy. This body at this age is not meant to do this anymore. I manage to have my son with me, which is a positive.
In this blurry state, I seem to recall Tony Abbott being interviewed by Jabba the Hutt on the television. Some problem with goats, I think, and he keeps saying it over and over again. We need to stop them, apparently.
I take this as a sign that I need to cook the goat I have at home. Luckily, our kid is already cut up and frozen. When you use goat, there’s a few points to have in the back of your mind. First, you need a pretty young one. They get very tough and strong as they age – camel or donkey comes to mind.
Second, have it all cut up into chops, all on the bone – leg, shoulder and loin. This helps the cooking, as you will mostly braise this particular beast.
I’m thinking curry, India and saag, a fairly simple curry based on spinach, spice and yogurt.
Mix the spices, place them in a small heavy-based pan, cover them with water and cook until the water evaporates, then dry toast until fragrant. Be careful not to burn. Remove to a mortar and pestle (break apart the cardamom and use the black seed) and grind all to a powder. Mix through prepared goat (or lamb), pour over yogurt, mix and marinate for a few hours.
In a stockpot, cook the onion until soft and just starting to caramelise, add ginger and garlic, cook again and now mix in prepared meat. You’ve probably had enough of me reminding you it’s a goat by now.
Mix together and add tomato, salt, turmeric, fenugreek and curry leaves, and enough stock or water to cover. Lower the heat right down and simmer for about two hours, depending on the lifestyle of the goat.
About the halfway point, watch for burning on the base, and add the greenery – English spinach is the norm here, but you can use any leafy green. I really like Tuscan kale, which has a wild-weed-like character, plus a little borage and sorrel, stinging nettle if you can find it, for a really wild curry. Whatever. Have it chopped up, add to curry, mix in and continue until meat is tender.
Serve with the various suggestions below, this is a nice restorative curry for when you’ve overdone the middle-aged body and need to explain why you have ‘Mexico’ tattooed across your chest.
Goat curry
2 kg goat, all on the bone
600ml plain yogurt
2 large onions, sliced
2tbsp ghee, or butter/oil mix
1 tbsp ginger, minced
3 cloves garlic, minced
10g salt
½ tsp turmeric powder
big handful fenugreek leaves (available from Indian grocer)
6 stalks of curry leaves
lots of leafy greens like spinach, see above
Spice mix
1 tbsp coriander seed
½ tbsp cumin seed
4-6 dried chillies, seeded and chopped
tspn fenugreek seeds
6 cardamon pods
3-4 point of star anise
To serve
Yoghurt riata (1/2 cup plain yoghurt, 1 tsp toasted and ground cumin seeds, 1 clove minced garlic, 1/2 lemon, juiced, big pinch of salt, mixed together)
extra toasted cumin seeds
chopped green chili
rice – basmati, cooked with some spices
naan and/or roti bread
Canberra Times, August 11, 2010
Meat pulling gloves, horses & the caveman diet
Oh yeah, Christmas is coming early to the Martin farm this year. Break out the banjo and chewin’ tabaccy, I’ve found my present: The complete hog, pig, lamb and goat trussing, cooking and meat-pulling kit – thank you, Pat Nourse. It’s been knocked down from $139 to $129 – if you’re interested, go to www.spitjack.com/page/SJ/CTGY/HOG
How many times have you had a pig, lamb or goat and no trussing, cooking or meat-pulling implements to complete the job? Not every week, I guess, but it does happen. This website has everything you need, and with a quintet of super-fat lambs about to be set free, we might just pick one off for the occasion – although I’m still checking whether spitjack has heard of Australia and can deliver.
Whole-food cooking isn’t for everyone. Even people committed to meat might find the process a tad confronting. Vegetarians, read no more. I’m getting down and dirty here, so if you go past this point, no responsibility.
OK, I get it, I’m going to hell on a high-cholesterol, artery-clenched, three-headed hound, but it’s my choice.
I do have a line I won’t cross though. Perth butcher Vince Garreffa is a man on a mission. He began selling horse meat out in frontier-land Western Australia last month, not deterred even by death threats.
“You miss it so much .. to Europeans, horse is a taste of home” he told ABC, defending his life choice. I know a few Europeans, so I’ll ask them next time whether the smell at the race track gets their gastronomic juices flowing. I’m impressed in the same way I was impressed when they used pink to represent the female vote during the “debate” on Channel 9. But for me, horsemeat goes too far. Horses are for teenage girls to ignore and for betting on.
For whole-beast cooking, you need a pig, lamb, or goat – lamb is easier than most. You need to plan the slaughter, hanging and preparation time and invite 20 happy folk along to your event.
If the animal is still alive, you need to call someone like my mate Jeff. He has perfected the art of humanely dispatching a plump lamb, and delivers the carcass after the hanging time.
Otherwise, order one from your butcher – although they’re not cheap. A drawback of all the rain we’ve been having is that lamb is in high demand to restock depleted herds.
Next, you have to set it on your spit. This requires inserting the metal rod through the length of the lamb and securing it in place with the metal plates and fencing wire as required. Main point, it shouldn’t be able to twist off the spit. It is quite unwieldy, as you can imagine.
Now you need to add some flavour and seasoning and it’s best to keep it simple with rosemary and garlic. Grab about four heads of garlic, break them apart, peel and halve each clove. You’ll need heaps of rosemary (you don’t grow it? why not? it’s the easiest herb to grow). Strip the leaves off and chop them as fine as you can, but don’t sweat it too much – this ain’t no restaurant. Roll the garlic in the rosemary, grab a bottle of wine, get comfy and start inserting these little flavour bombs all over the lamb, mainly into the joints and where muscle groups meet. Pierce the skin with a sharp knife and bury the treasure. Keep any extra and mix it with a few cups of olive oil for a basting agent while the lamb slowly spins.
For the seasoning, replace “pinch” of salt in any recipe you have with “handful” – you need heaps to bring out the flavour. Don’t listen to all the talk about salt and health – that’s overrated anyway. Like me, hopefully you’re only using Murray River pink salt. Sure, it’s more expensive, but it one of the world’s best salts, and you’re doing your bit for rising salinity in South Australia. So a big handful, and rub in all over the lamb. Repeat if you think you missed a bit.
OK, so prop the lamb up against a wall while you get the fire going. I’m a fan of the pit fire. Arrange large rocks that will contain the fire in roughly the size of the lamb so the spit can be suspended and all the lamb can enjoy the warmth. The rocks obviously store heat and help the process.
Aim at twice the weight of wood for the meat you’re cooking. Use well-seasoned timber like box, oak or apple wood. What you need is lots of glowing charcoal before the lamb can be introduced. Allow about one to two hours for the charcoal, and have the rest of the wood in smallish ingots to add as the lamb cooks.
You need five to six hours to cook a healthy, plump lamb of 30-odd kilograms. Have the embers piled up towards the shoulder and rump areas, which need more cooking than the loin. The spit should be about 40-50cm over the pit, and having the ability to lower and raise the suspended meat is handy.
Gently turn the lamb while it’s cooking. The fat will drip on to the embers and help the process along, If you find it colouring too fast, scatter the embers more or lift the meat higher. It’s a matter of experience to get this right.
An insertable meat thermometer is handy – you’re after just past medium on this, and once the bulk is ready, you can start serving as the undercooked meat you uncover will continue its journey.
You can serve this lamb with all the salads and extras you like, but just a pile of good bread rolls is our main service plan. Wait in line for the lovely, juicy, garlicky charred meat placed straight on to the bread and eaten with a suitable beverage.
So, thanks again to Pat Nourse, whose Twitter alert to spitjack.com has formed the inspiration for a great feast.
Guy Grossi, Tortellini & Roberto
A recent jaunt around the Great Ocean Road from Adelaide to Melbourne had us dining in some fab spots. Adelaide, really is just a big country town, has a thriving dining scene and you can eat very well on the cheap.
Ying Chow near Chinatown on Gouger Street is a must if you find yourself here without much cash. It’s an amazing place – no frills at all, just great Chinese. You can book but might still have to wait. Shallot pancakes, steamed scallops in ginger and shallot, snake beans in chilli and garlic are a few of the standouts, and fed a hungry family of five for $80.
Around the corner is British India, blazingly good Indian – try the goat curry.
But it is in Melbourne that we reach our mecca. We bought the Cheap Eats guide in a vague attempt to control the spiralling costs of travelling with three kids, and it leads us to the Grossi Florentino Cellar Bar. This comes highly recommended and is presumably cheap. Unfortunately, it’s also full. But a door opens in the heavens – there is a table available in the flagship Grossi Florentino restaurant.
Our parsimony is thrown out the window. Why not? This is a true Melbourne institution. It‘s been here for years under various owners, and since the late 1990s, under Guy Grossi. He’s a passionate visionary who has returned this beautiful restaurant to its former glory, possibly surpassing all predecessors on the way.
The meal is brilliant, as expected, a nice mixture of old-school Italian flavours and combinations with a thoroughly modern edge. It’s exciting food, with real service by professionals and a scary wine list. You can spend a lot here.
The kitchen tonight is generous, and while I have ordered well, we’re sent an extra free-of-charge course, a signature dish Grossi has created to evoke the flavour of freshly roasted duck, with wild mushrooms and, an interesting twist, candied pears, all wrapped up in three plump tortellini.
We love it – like, really like it and on the drive up the Hume, it’s all I can think about. So I call the restaurant and plead for the recipe as essential to continue life. Now I’m looking for the cookbook.
At home, I amass the long list of ingredients and cook the dish, nowhere near as well as the restaurant. I’ve come away with a few thoughts if you want to try it.
First, braise the duck the day before so you can remove the fat – but not too much; this is where the flavour resides.
If you haven’t got a mincer, you can shred the duck flesh with two forks like you would a rillettes.
You’ll need to cook out the sauce until it’s quite dry – maybe add the bread towards the end.
Take care with the pasta, keep it soft and work quickly, the tortellini are difficult to wrap if the pasta is too firm or dry.
You probably won’t find frozen porcini in Canberra, so you can substitute good Italian dried porcini, but only use about a third of the quantity and rehydrate well beforehand.
The flavour combination is perfect, the caramelised pears adding this beautiful flush of complex sugar.
It’s a great dish that might need a few attempts to perfect, but it’s worth the effort.
Canberra Times, July 28, 2010
Communication breakdown, YHA & Paul
“I’m not sure,” I say in a conversation with the kids. I’ve tried facebooking and twitter, even skype (although I’m just winging it here, having no idea what this is). So that leaves Morse code, smoke and possibly telepathy as my only means of communicating with my brother on our road trip that has taken us around the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, heading to Melbourne.
As a break from the endless Aussie motels, we’ve returned to our pre-kid, pre-mortgage-stress state and we’re staying at a few youth hostels. There’s plenty on this spectacular section of coast and they occupy brilliant parcels of land. The funny thing now is that they are filled with people of an age. Gone are the youthful blonde Svens and Vibekes; now salt and pepper grey dominates. In fact, the Y in YHA is more about a state of mind than anything else because most folk here are boomers clinging to youth, more likely to be listening to the vocal heroics of Robert Plant than Justin Bieber.
“Why don’t you just call them,” my ever-cynical 16-year-old contributes from the rear, getting back to my current communication breakdown. Sure, but all I’ve got is this rather expensive entertainment device. You mean you can actually call someone on it? The iphone has many useful programs. Like the Zippo lighter application, so when Led Zeppelin re-forms, I can light up for Stairway to Heaven. Or, when all other lights go out, I have Earendil to illuminate the way, plus a handy lightsaber for the dark side. There’s no end to the entertainment possibilities.
Of course, I also have the vuvuzela app. This three note, incredibly annoying sound is a must for my 4:30 in the morning dance around the house as Spain and the Dutch line up for football’s greatest prize.
To date, an octopus named Paul that lives in a tank in Germany has predicted each win. It got it right when Spain met Germany, sending the Iberian peninsula into a cephalopod feast – everyone is gorging themselves on tapas, paella and the like; anything containing this creature in a primal worship. Will it be correct for the next game?
Octopus is a dish that is fairly easy to prepare yet requires some wet work centered around preparing the rather slimy featured product. One of the main problems with large octopus is its tendency toward toughness. You’ve seen the glossy pictures in Mediterranean cookbooks of gumbooted, mustachioed, rustic fishermen, romantically pounding the already dead octopus against a big rock to tenderize it. This is possibly off-putting to many a cook but there is another solution.
Most cephalopods, including squid and calamari, get more tender when you freeze them. The freezing and thawing process has the same effect on the protein as Silvo beating them against a rock. So when you arrive home with the occy, wrap it up and freeze it overnight (as quick as possible) and then let it thaw slowly through the day in the fridge. Now it’s ready to cook.
Galacian octopus
1 large occy, about 1.5kg
1 leek, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
1 head garlic, halved
parsley
thyme
bay leaf
black peppercorns
juniper berries
1/2 cup white wine
salt
Dressing
Big handful roughly chopped parsley
2 tbsp chopped capers
1/2 teaspoon good Spanish smoked paprika, hot or mild
olive oil, big splash
lemon juice, small splash
potatoes and green salad to serve
In a large pot filled with water, add all the stock ingredients save your occy. Bring to the boil. Holding the octopus by its head, a handy handle, dunk it into boiling water up to its neck, if it had one, count to ten, remove and cool quickly in a pot of cold water. Repeat this at least four times, bringing water back to the boil each time. This keeps the nice red colour on the legs, plus stops it sticking to the pot.
Next, kiss the top of the head and dunk into the water, simmering very gently until cooked. Test by inserting something sharp into thickest part of a tentacle. Once easily pierced, it’s ready. Remove and cool over a strainer.
Bring the stock back to the boil. Add 10 peeled, waxy potatoes. Cook till soft. Slice these, along with the octopus. Arrange on a big platter and dress both.
Canberra Times, July 21, 2010
Clay pigeons, burgers & beer – enough said
Are you kidding me? Clay pigeon shooting, hamburgers and beer? Sounds like the absolute perfect weekend activity for a middle age bloke trying to define his life stage and relevance: Fatty food, alcohol and shooting stuff, it’s all a win, win, win to me but what to take for such an event?
This is probably not the weekend to try out, in this public arena, my new man-bag, as useful as this all purpose, multi pocketed, stylish accessory seems. I can picture the stunned silence. 20 armed and keen males coming to terms with one of their own fronting up packing a satchel. Even if it is made by Drys-a-bone and, as they say in the Hangover movie, Indiana Jones had one.
Main problem with the man-bag item is that you end up carrying everyone else’s stuff for them “Here honey, can you hold this…and my lipstick and these for me” and possibly will be asked to dance backwards when there’s a shortage of gals. So, it might yet again stay at home until I get invited to a weekend getaway with the finding ones inner female group.
Shooting clay pigeons does sure sound like fun, the beer is for afterwards as they have a wise yet unfortunate zero-tolerance for alcohol prior to loading the shotgun policy. This takes away, I think, a certain ‘Whoopsy, sorry-about-that’ edge to the weekend, you know that perfect Youtube moment we all dream of?
It gets better, there’s the ‘We hang around a BBQ afterwards and eat burgers’ advertising angle, all I can say is that you had me at clay pigeon. Sure, it so obvious; that’s what we’d do after blasting our 25 clay pigeons to smithereens, it doesn’t need to be said and I’ve got just the recipe for that after blasting glow.
No room for Wagyu or toasted brioche here. No English Burger King’s ‘£95 Bling burger’ that some dazzling marketer brought out just as the economy teetered back in 2008. This burger, which includes truffle, Kobe beef, Louis Roederer Crystal champagne and saffron, was possibly the straw that broke the proverbial British cash camel’s back. I wonder what these brilliant young men are doing now, lollypop guys at Oswaldtwistle?
What we want is good old fashioned Aussie grass fed beef, from the chuck or, even better, the rib cap. Both have good amounts of fat to lubricate the pattie plus there’s no better place for honest beefy flavour. Grind it on up coarsely or have your butcher do it for you, tell him your going shooting and drinking beer. He’ll get it and with determination and a certain jealousy, make sure the beef is perfect.
Add some seasoning and flavour: salt and pepper, minced onion, garlic and parsley, work in well so it’s even. Next liquids for juiciness: a splash of tomato sauce, tablespoon French mustard, a couple of eggs, mixing all the time. Lastly finish and bind everything with good breadcrumbs, keep adding until it forms a tight, cohesive ball. Test a small burger by frying it up to see if there balance to it’s liquidity, should hold together and leave a certain oily drizzle down the beard you’ll also need for the weekend, adjust as needed. Roll out into even sized balls with oiled hands and arrange on a platter to take with your buns, beetroot, onion, iceburg lettuce – I can’t stress this enough, do not turn up here with arugula or micro-herbs , it could get tense- plus regulation case of tinnies and the 12 gauge.
It’s sure to be a chest-beating, no holds barred kinda weekend, where we all come back to our cubicles on Monday with the knowledge that we tested ourselves, we achieved wondrous things and are content with our alter ego who would never, ever contemplate, even with persistent spousal badgering, the purchase and use of a leather hand bag designed for the modern man.
Canberra Times, July 14, 2010
