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 […]
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Confessions of a cheese judge
First off I was late, dawdling this rainy morning. I missed the briefing and my lab coat was too small even for a ten year old child. On a bright note though, the hairnet was just perfect and I was wearing the correct all-terrain underwear and cashmere socks. I’m at the 2008 judging for the Melbourne Specialist Cheese Show (open Sunday 17th August 2008 at Crown) run by the Australian Specialist Cheesemakers Association. I admired chief judge Ian’s red hairnet […]
The Strangest Food in China
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 […]
Black gold
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 […]
Insects: When It’s Okay to Eat Them
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,” […]
Making a brand stand
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 […]
Truffle hunters come home victorious
Spice finds a giant Perigord truffle. The whole of Australia is Perigord truffle crazy right now. In the past few weeks alone I’ve eaten some of the best and most aromatic truffle dishes that I have ever come across. Chefs report they have never seen so many from Australia and summer ones imported from France. Today, one hour out of Melbourne about ten minutes the other side of some McBungalows I was part of a group hunting for truffles led […]
This chair must be stopped
Look around you. There is probably one similar near you right now. This is the New Zealand Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc ( the most popular and ubiqitous white wine in Australia) of cafe chairs. I keep tripping up over it everywhere. This picture was taken in Hamilton (worth avoiding). I’ve seen it in the Yarra Valley. It’s spread like a rash through my home suburb St Kilda – Mirka at Tolarno, Banff, Spuntino etc. Are we doomed to sit on […]
Hot hot heat
From SBS Food Chilli is an essential ingredient in many cuisines throughout the world, featuring in everything from from piping hot vindaloo to Portuguese piri piri sauce, but who started the fire? Ed Charles investigates. Christopher Columbus has a lot to answer for. He was the first European on record to find chillis, and now, together with the potato and the tomato, they are ubiquitous throughout the world, and for some reason prized for the burning sensation they produce. Historians […]