Five days later and the bacon is cured. Salty and sweet, with a hint of juniper and sage, it was worth it. Nothing is ever easy for me. Frustrated by the poor quality of filling and pastry in local pork pies it is my mission to make the perfect one. Or at least start wandering down that route. Where local artisans and manufacturers go wrong is the filling, which should be three types of pig chopped into different sizes and […]
Cooking
Is the raw milk review biased?
Finally some news – or perhaps information – has emerged from Food Standards ANZ on the submissions last year on the review of raw milk processing standards. FANZ has distributed this pdf which I can’t seem to find on their website where it discusses raw milk products (but their again I have a short attention span if I can’t find something easily). If you are new to this debate the standards in Australia are inconsistent and the current review is […]
My secret chocolate kiwi fruit shame
À la recherche du temps perdu: Anthon Berg marzipans Back in the 90s in London I was doing a lot of Valrhona. Specifically, Manjari. I would hop on a moving Routemaster – the 137 – and sneak up to the Kings Rd to score big chunks of the stuff and Valrhona truffles made with Normandy cream and calvados. A friend was complicit in it encouraging me to bring Mangari to his Clapham South dinner parties. We were into some really […]
Go to work on a 65/85 egg
Ingredients: serves two 2 eggs 4 slices of pancetta (he says thin but the only stuff I could find was round) Herby stuff 100g butter 1/2 an onion. Diced finely. i garlic clove. Diced finely. One cup each watercress and flat leave parsley leaves. One and a half cups baby spinach 25g grated parmesan Salt and pepper to season It’s just cooking not molecular gastronomy. But it is very precise cooking with the help of my new-fangled device, an Auber-WS […]
The recipe for a perfect Yorkshire Pudding (the scientific way)
When is a Yorkshire pudding not a Yorkshire pudding? Yorkshirefolk would say when it’s not made in Yorkshire. But according to one scientist it is when it’s less than 4 inches tall. That’s about 10.24 cm. But somehow Yorkshire puddings don’t seem right metric so let’s stick to a good old-fashioned 4 inches despite this definition coming a good old metric organisation The Royal Society of Chemistry. According to the RSC: “The judgement followed an enquiry from an Englishman living […]
Ferran Adria’s influence on food here now soon
[youtube:http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM8enrRk_1o] Yes, yes, yes, I still haven’t worked out to edit sound on video. But this, from Midsummer House in Cambridge, wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for Ferran Adria who I interviewed on Monday. He gave me more than my allocated 30 minutes. At least that’s what I think. I was due to see him at 9.45 at The Langham. We started a bit late but when I next looked at my watch walking past Crown it was 10.55. It’s […]
Hot day. Cold soup
What do I miss most about home? It has to be the dear old Currant Bun. Today’s headline: Phew what a scorcher! Although they could be holding the front page to the Aussie cricketers a good firm kick in the bollocks. The last time I was home in England, en route to Spain, it was bloody hot. And when I landed in Seville it was 48C. A few seconds of heat melted my suitcase and my cricket bat wilted. There […]
Flower power – it’s my summer of garden love
Too young to have participated, too old to be conceived then I really feel that I missed out on the summer of love. Now, the 40th anniversary of the summer of 1967, I enter what can only soon become my autumn of Viagra. For now though I’m enjoying flower power. Last southern summer while traveling in Cambodia and Laos my structured front garden of small hedges died. I didn’t like the design too much and replaced it with a 4 […]
The future of food and fascism
The future of cooking: In the kitchen at Interlude A couple of weeks ago I spent the afternoon in the kitchen of Robin Wickens and his chefs at Interlude. He was developing a new lamb dish which involved spraying coffee in the air while eating it (you may recall later that night I sucked on the glass straw). This weekend my account of that afternoon and subsequent meal was published in The Australian. Local chef George Biron points me towards […]