BRANCH OUT TO SURVIVE By Ed Charles From The Australian, Entrepreneur: AGRIBUSINESS Finding new ventures can help grape growers improve their profitability, writes Ed Charles THE lot of the winegrower is one of feast or famine. After years of bumper harvests and over-capacity, there’s a drought. While this will address the supply imbalance, says Mark McKenzie, executive director of Wine Grape Growers Australia (WGGA), the industry still needs to radically restructure. It needs to be entrepreneurial, finding other sources of […]
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Tuesday cheese porn
Oh yes, bring on the runny Camembert LaClarines and stinky blue Roquefort. As steve says below it’s a bit like vacherin although a bit more creamy. Somebody sold me this while using Camerbert in the same breath. Hmmmm.
A new smell?
The freshness of oxygen, nail polish, flash of metal, cellulosic smell, pure air of the high mountains, sand dunes, fire energy, ultimate fusion, washing drying in the wind, burnt rubber, mineral intensity of carbon, flaming rock. What on earth am I? I couldn’t resist.
Art flow chart
Photo pinched from Lost at E Minor. Sorry. I just couldn’t resist this, found via Lost at E Minor, for the wall of the Tomato offices. It’s a limited edition print from UK designer Jamie Wieck. He says: “This menu design grew out of my hatred for the number of rules eateries impose on their customers. Using the East London restaurant Bistrotheque as a foundation I rationalised all the reasons why someone would go to a restaurant. By taking into […]
Everything you needed to know about cooking beef (but were afraid to ask Heston Blumenthal)
…or experiments in molecular gastronomy parts 2 and 3 He’s a tricky one to have in the kitchen our Heston Blumenthal. Everything is very technical, usually takes about two days to prepare and I’m too scared to argue with him about any of his techniques. I’m even having trouble finding some of the stuff he uses like his stainless steel injection baster. I feel that I really need to work up to his recipes. To do this I’ve recruited a […]
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 […]
Who knew science tasted so good
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 32-year-old British chef doesn’t stomp around and clatter pans; everything among the five chefs here is calm and hushed. In fact, the quietly spoken […]
Searching for the best phố in Melbourne
It’s not something people talk about a lot but whenever I bring up phố there is enormous interest about where to eat it. People are always interested in the best places to eat in Victoria Street Richmond. When they hear I have a list of the best local phố restaurants from a phố expert in Sydney their notebooks and PDAs come out as they copy out the list. I discovered the “I Love Phố” exhibition that was held in Liverpool […]
In the trenches: The coffee business
From In The Black – May 2007:? You know that coffee is a big and profitable business when the drinks and snackfood giant, Coca-Cola Amatil, turns its attention to it. Two years ago it bought Grinders Coffee, whose founder Giancarlo Giusti is one of Australia’s coffee pioneers. Grinders was founded in 1962, when coffee in the English-speaking world, including Australia, was considered pretty awful, and the Asian market for coffee had yet to evolve. When sold it had a turnover […]