From The Weekend Australian: Travel and Indulgence Ed Charles sorts the wheat from the chaff in the wide world of food websites. Harold McGee: Not everybody wants to know how to cook an octopus. But many of us want to know the difference between cheap frying pans and expensive ones, how and what to cook [...]

THE CURIOUS COOK: Ed Charles THERE are so many excellent markets, cafes and food shops in Melbourne it is sometimes difficult to know where to start. Even as an intrepid local I relax into my shopping comfort zones and forget to explore new territory. Curious cook Luckily, I’m one of about 20 souls from as [...]

From The Australian. Indulgence: Brunswick, Melbourne: Most visitors to this neighbourhood venture no further up Sydney Road than the Brunswick institution Mediterranean Wholesalers, which stocks more types of anchovy, tuna, cheeses, cured meats and olives than you could poke a salami at. But it is worth pressing on. Sydney Road may look downtrodden and the [...]

From The Australian, Indulgence: The Curious Cook By Ed Charles I’M at Melbourne’s Prahran Market tasting tiny portions of dark European-style chocolate truffles on the end of cocktail sticks at Monsieur Truffe’s stall in the main hall. Some are of 74 per cent single-origin chocolate. Others contain a lower ratio of cocoa solids and are [...]

THE CURIOUS COOK Ed Charles June 02, 2007 I’M in the Melbourne restaurant of much-awarded molecular chef Robin Wickens, who is inventing a new dish, and I’m sneaking a preview. My experience of professional kitchens so far has been through Gordon Ramsay’s Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. But in Wickens’s kitchens at Interlude (211 Brunswick St, Fitzroy), [...]

The Weekend Australian, Travel & Indulgence Ed Charles goes fossicking in Melbourne’s city alleys and discovers a treasure trove of dining gems April 14, 2007 MELBOURNE may recently have landed its own Rockpool Bar & Grill, but with this one exception, high-profile restaurants are not where it’s at in this city right now. Rather, central [...]

Ed Charles quenches his beer thirst in wine country April 07, 2007 AFTER a hard day of wine touring, there’s nothing like a cleansing ale. Happily, in the past few years microbreweries have started popping up in Australia’s many wonderful wine regions. The notion of running a small beer-brewing business has attracted refugees from the [...]

• THE CURIOUS COOK 
Ed Charles I AM at the new central market in Siem Reap, Cambodia, enduring the smell that pervades every market here, from Battambang and Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville on the coast. The odour comes from a red washing-up bowl filled with grey sludge in which float pieces of silver fish. The [...]

THE CURIOUS COOK 
 IT’S 11pm at the Portarlington Bakehouse, on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula, and the wood-fired oven is still warm from the morning’s baking. I watch as Terry Christofi lights some pieces of newspaper stuffed between the old palings in the oven’s firebox; flames shoot out. Christofi taps on the antique brass temperature gauge, [...]

THE CURIOUS COOK I’M sitting with strangers at the bar of Melbourne sushi restaurant, Jamon, when chef Charles Greenfield begins a reminiscence about Kobe beef. It’s 1968 and Greenfield is supping beer at a sushi bar in Japan when he first tries the delicate, fatty Japanese steak. “That was it,” he says, savouring the memory [...]