From SBS Food For something that is more or less an underwater snail, the humble abalone has done pretty well for itself. Twenty years ago a Chinese grocer would pay a few dollars for a barrow load of the ugly blighters known as ‘Muttonfish’ picked out of Port Phillip Bay. Nowadays this mollusk, or to be more precise Haliotidae, is prized by chefs to the extent that many regions including South Africa, the Middle East and California have overfished and […]

From GQ Australia How does a heritage-listed synagogue become one of Melbourne’s hottest new restaurant-bar venues? Ed Charles finds out from Trunk’s Nick Kutcher. It was the irresistibly enticing site that drew Nick Kutcher into the restaurant business, a block big enough to build a skyscraper on, half of it open land. But the site on the corner of Little Lonsdale and Exhibition streets – with a heritage listed 1859 synagogue – was bought for its charm rather than its […]

Cover Story: Herald Sun extrafood Top chefs tell Ed Charles their secret tips on how to cook like a professional. Cooking a meal by simply following a recipe is one thing,but turning it into a masterpiece by adding a few secret tips and tricks can take your cooking to another level. As extrafood discovered, sometimes it’s the most obvious things – such as properly preheating the oven – that can make the biggest difference. We’ve managed to get some of […]

From SBS Food Ed Charles takes a tour of Beijing’s culinary underbelly and uncovers the seven strangest foods you’ll find in the Olympic City. You can encounter some pretty weird food in Beijing. But mostly it is designed for tourists more than the locals. “For westerners going to China for the Olympics, if they want to they can go and eat silk worm cocoons and go and eat penises and snakes,” says author and Chinese food expert Fuchsia Dunlop. “But […]

From SBS Food The hunt is on! Ed Charles joins Victorian truffle farmers as they seek out the heady aromas of this most mysterious funghi. Spice, is two weeks from pup, but the two year old Australian Shepherd, whose pedigree name is Mazasuka Star Struck, wants to do the job she was trained for. That is to sniff out the tuber melanosporum or black Perigord truffle, an exotic fungi that lives symbiotically with the roots of oak and hazelnut trees […]

From SBS Food Deep-fried scorpion, silk worm pupae and wok-fried beetles – all excellent sources of protein. Ed Charles takes a look at Western food taboos and the people who break them. Cows are seen as a civilised food. Insects are not. It is a division that partly accounted for Australia’s first European settlers villifying the indigenous population for their enjoyment of strange foods and grubs. “Food intake was a very important part of situating people as not properly human,” […]

From The Australian, Entrepreneur ONE of the major challenges for small companies is to make the transition from being a small-volume product to being a brand sold in a large number of retailers. For Sydney-based Nikki Michel and Lisa Ross the challenge was to move from selling their dream Pickles and Loop pyjamas at Paddington Markets in 2005 to 120 specialist independent retail outlets today. In March last year the sisters, themselves nicknamed Pickles and Loop respectively, started by exhibiting […]