It’s right next to the 10’000 Budah’s Temple in Shatin that resides one of Hong Kong best honey maker: Mr. Yip from Wing Wo Bee Farm.

The sign at the bottom of the staircase

Before I even start to describe the honey, I believe important to bust one myth that is usually people’s first reaction when you talk about honey produced in a large [polluted] city. How does air pollution affects honey?

Check out this monitoring experience that was carried right next to Munich airport where bee hives were setup in the vicinity of the airport. You can’t get any closer to air pollution than that, including from the much feared heavy metals. The results were a surprise. All the honey was clean and free of any pollution. I guess nature makes all things great (until human decides to destroy it…)

However, other studies show that pollution actually confuse the honey bees ‘senses’. Apparently, bees have a very bad eye sight and they navigate using their senses. And with all the air pollution in certain areas, the bees are getting lost and the production rate of honey decreases.

Greeted by dozens of bee hives

Across the board, Mr Yip honeys are nice.

I brought back 2 jars of honey at home to use in tea and spread on toasted sourdough. One day, I brought back the winter honey at work to use it in a recipe and sampled it with my colleagues. We also compared it to other honeys we had. Yes, Hong Kong doesn’t have Manuka forest, chestnut trees or wild borage fields in its territory. Thus, the honey is indeed not as fragrant as the other kinds we’ve tried. Honey’s flavor comes from the flora were bees are harvesting their pollen.

While the honey is not ranking number one in terms of flavor, it remains a very good one and certainly suitable for baking and sweetening. Beside the flavor, the properties of the honey were perfect. But most importantly, it’s a good quality honey made locally and I find it very important to support the efforts of Mr. Yip and Mrs. Chan.

Bees coming and going with their load of pollen

The grid at the entrance of the hive is carefully cut to let the bees in and out, but the space are too small to allow their fatal enemies the hornets or the wasps to get inside. If you’ve seen an Asian Giant Hornet at work before, you will understand the precautions measure taken here. This is absolute madness! This BBC movie is super impressive!

The open beehive

What was also impressive was the little pollen lumps collected, dried and made available for sale. I asked Mr Yip where these were coming from and he said from the bees legs! I was really impressed and later found out that trays are placed on the base of the hive and the pollen lumps who happen to fall are then collected and dried.

Taking out the honeycomb

When Mr. Yip takes out the honeycomb he tells us to stay calm at all time and don’t get excited or else the bees will become excited. Despite the low temperature, I was starting to sweat!

Showing us the queen

Mr. Yip explained to us that there is only one queen per hive… I kind of knew that, but I was really surprised to learn that the Queen’s breed defines the kind of honey the bees will produce. Also, you will notice that Mr. Yip doesn’t use any protective gear nor did he smoke the bees beforehand. I was literally seating next to the hive and the bees were very peaceful. Bees are cool after all!

Can you spot the Queen? She is the larger one with a black body.

My new friends, the honey bees

Blowing to see the comb

Once you blow on the bees, they step aside...

The bees seal the comb when it's full of honey

Stay calm and try to smile was a hard thing holding the honeycomb!

Deserted comb - such a perfect architectural work from the bees!

Frame washed and drying

All the different products from the bees

Mr Yip produces a wide range of products and all the honeys are raw and aren’t heat treated, all natural! Amongst the most interesting product was that black color “honey” which consist of the unused hive blended with honey. Apparently good for flu treatment. My favorite was the creamy winter honey. Perfect on my sourdough bread!!

Buying local will help everyone for a better living. Keep the air clean and help local farmers. Visit Wing Wo honey website here for more information and the HK honey association website here.

Wax for candle making

Lovely and happy Mr. Yip and Mrs. Chan

Wasps, hornets, bees in very strong Chinese liquor

I haven’t tried that one, but I was assured by the honey makers that it was very good for rheumatism! :)

Last night was the social media week  day for the Food and Beverage industry.

Cooking show host Hilda ready to share her views on social media

Spending the evening with people you’ve been chatting away countless times through social media without actually having met them before is one of these moments where you talk to someone face to face for 2 minutes and you feel like you’ve known each others for years. Amazing!

The evening was a great time to meet people and to discuss our views on social media. I think I could have talked for hours about social media after that; the talks really made my mind boggle.

Like I mentioned on one of my earlier tweet, I thing social media and bloggers just made Earth a smaller place, connecting people. 

We are much more connected with customers, friends, like-minded people and you can’t just hide away behind the doors of your kitchen, shouting no one understands cooking! I received my first computer in 1989 from the brand Commodore, back then we had a dinosaur modem and could barely transfer files to friends computer, it was so cool! Then in 1996, I remember using ICQ… my Mom thought it was a tool from hell with the few stories popping in the media about people being killed by insane ICQ users. Today,  throughout the different social media platforms and my blog, I am connected to thousands of people. How different!

The pannel of speakers

In regards to the F&B industry and as a chef, I obviously don’t go out often and wouldn’t like to review my colleague’s work. On the other hand, and after having published 4 books, I felt the urge to share more and being open. If you look around, there are not too many chefs doing it at the moment. But I hope more will join. There is an old state of mind amongst chef where we don’t like to share our secret recipes and I think it’s very hard for a chef to pop out of this mind.

Once you publish books, you don’t really have a choice. You must reveal your secrets! :)

Being involved on social media brings me three main segments of activity:

• Connecting and reacting to customer’s feedback, requests or dream…
• Following the trends and what’s happening in our industry
• Connecting and exchanging ideas with like-minded people around the world

As a chef I also feel we have an important role to play in supporting locally produced foods. As we use these ingredients in our baking and cooking, I find it very important to share how great the produces are throughout the different social media channels.

The speakers on twitter

For your reference, here are the list of the speakers and the link to their blog:

Brad Lau (Renowned Singapore Food Blogger, also known as ladyironchef, he won the Best Food Blog in the Nuffnung Asia-Pasific Blog Awards 2011)

Victoria Cheng (Editor, Restaurant consultant and blogger)

Chef  Gregoire Michaud (hello!) (Head Pastry Chef at Four Seasons Hong Kong)

Gourmet KC (Food Blogger, most prolific blogger on Openrice, columnist at Time Out Hong Kong and Weekend Weekly)

Chan Chun Wai (Columnist at Oriental Daily and Ming Pao Daily)

Hilda Leung (TV Celebrity Chef)

Karen Tam (Assistant General Manager – Promotions and Marketing, Harbour City)

Moderator:  Geoffrey Wu (Director of Communications of IHM Group)

Event hosts: Harbour City & Integrated Hospitality Management

To celebrate this year’s commercial lovely tradition of Valentine’s Day, I thought we had  to give hearts a rest. Instead, I thought nice to give this year’s creation a bit of a floral touch based on the “deeply-in-love” red velvet cake!

A long and very thin slice of red velvet cake, the classic type, laying down. An unctuous raspberry sorbet, fresh raspberries, baby shiso leaves and dried Damascus rose petals (the crop, not from the actual messed-up city in Syria). The white round things? They are nothing less than liquified cheesecake in spheres (pretty awesome feeling to eat that I tell you!) All of this decorated with pink almond praline grounded into a fine powder and baked as a wild form of ‘petals’.

Very smooth and oozing dessert for a sweet Valentine’s! ;)

While Europe breaks all the sub-zero temperature records in history, we’re harvesting organic strawberries on this side of Earth! We’ve just started getting a great and steady supply of homegrown organic strawberries from Zen Farm. Delicious, beautiful and local to the point where I had to create seasonal desserts with it!

Generally speaking, strawberries are in every top hotel today, all year long, and it tends to get boring. And hear me right, it gets boring because the strawberries are most likely flown in from 8000km away and grown in greenhouses where the plants never met actual earth, but are merely bathing in fertilizer-loaded water. All this for the sake of productivity and demand from the market, the market is us, we are responsible. It always gives me shivers when I ask why do we need to have it all the time and the answer is “Because people expect it to be available all the time”.

Anyway, back to the local strawberries. A few days back, I had the luck to sample a beautiful Riesling from Frederic Emil (Trimbach, 2005) and when I took my first bite of the strawberries, they both matched in my mind. While strawberry in wine is excellent, it has been done and redone countless times. Based on one of the recipe from my book Never Skip Dessert, I pressed the fresh strawberries together with the superb Riesling and a really fragrant Madagascan vanilla bean split in half from Alain Abel. The pressing process happens with a vacuum machine and I left the bag in the fridge for a few hours once pressed. The pressure and extraction of air allows the wine to penetrate the fruit and impregnate it fully. Plus, while the texture remains fairly firm,  it sorts of reach an al-dente note, without actual cooking. For the dessert, I used the strawberries and some of the deliciously infused wine from the bag.

To add a touch of sweetness, I added black currant marshmallow coins and the floral touch was added with the wild borage flowers, also from Zen organic farm. The borage flowers are very pretty, and they actually taste very good!

It was very nice so far, but I needed an extra je-ne-sais-quoi… An ice cream? No… a granite? mmhhh… why not? But not your standard granite. This is what I did:

Ingredients

• 40 ml Very fine Cognac
• 10 ml White balsamic vinegar
• 200 gm of fresh strawberries in puree
• 100 ml water
• 20 gm sugar
• 2 gm of xanthan gum
• And a generous pinch of coriander powder

Method

• Mix the xanthan powder and the sugar.
• Blend all the other ingredient, and add the mixture of sugar using a hand blender until the xanthan thickens.
• Prepare metal tube of about 3 cm in diameter and seal one end of the tube with plastic film.
• Fill the tube with the thickened puree and freeze it hard.
• Take the frozen puree out of the metal tube. (I used a piece of plastic sheet in the tube for easier handling)

At the time of serving the dessert to your guest, bring out your mandolin or truffle slicer if you have one and shave the thin coins of ice on the dessert. It adds an unexpected spiced hint of freshness to the dessert and is complementing the flavors really well.

PS: You can use that recipe to freeze in a tray and grate it as a granite too.

 Watch the movie now!

The way Willie talks about his chocolate and the whole enthusiasm around it in his TV show has always left my mouth watering. The problem is that I could only imagine how his “world class” chocolate would taste… and licking the TV screen didn’t help much!

The four samples

And so, being on the other side of Earth from Willie’s chocolate factory, I’ve forgotten about it until David came to visit us at the hotel. We weren’t looking for a change of chocolate, but when I got the phone call, I thought wow! What a great chance to finally try and put to the test the much-talked-about chocolate.

Not alone, but with few of my colleagues, all bathing in chocolate for 20 something years, we first tasted the chocolate samples. There were four types of couvertures including a Javanese 69%, a Madagascan 71%, a Peruvian San Martin 70% and a Venezuelan Rio Caribe Superior 72%. We also received a bloc of 100% Peruvian San Martin cocoa which I was very much looking forward to grate on something just like Willie does on TV! A few sample of flavored chocolate bar were also provided…

I’m not exaggerating, but Willie’s chocolate are indeed world class and they are seriously up to par with the best. The chocolates aren’t as fluid as others, which isn’t a bad thing as you can always add cocoa butter if you want it more fluid. The smoothness is very good. Back in the days, I used to be an addict to El Rey chocolates which are very earthy and rough, but perhaps too rough on the edge. Willie’s chocolate are earthy, they stink of goodness and are superbly fragrant.

So good to the point where I wasn’t really convinced by the chocolate bars… As a matter of fact, when I tried the orange chocolate, I thought it was overpowered in orange essential oil and when I tried the popular hazelnut and raisin bar, I was greeted by a chocolate where fat had already bloomed around the nuts (this happens when fat migrates); nothing wrong in eating it, but it isn’t giving the best impression. Fat bloom can happen when storage isn’t perfect in temperature and humidity, however with nuts, it’s even more delicate. I believe there are coating possible around the nuts to avoid such fat migration.

Fat bloom isn't bad for taste, but definitely makes the eyebrows rise!

Anyhow, back to the pure chocolates. When tasted, we’ve found very different characteristics in each of the kind and were very impressed by the intensity of aromas present in the chocolates. They are smooth in mouth, have a proper snap when breaking it and are superbly fragrant, although they all end in a fairly dry note due to the strength of cocoa – and I loved it!

So, the couvertures were definitely beautiful, but would they work in our recipes?

For testing couvertures, I decided to make one simple ganache to see how stable it was and also a chocolate chantilly to see how the texture works compared to our regular chocolate. I wasn’t going to make the same fuss I did the last time I tested chocolate ganache for tarts, but I was rather going to test for the basics.

I measured four batches of 50 grams of cream (35% fat) and 80 grams of each chocolate to measure how each would work out. Warmed up the cream and melted it together. All where fairly equal in smoothness. The 72% Venezuelan Rio Caribe was definitely a notch above the others in term of terroir – I really liked it! The surprise came with the strength of the Peruvian 70%, acidic and powerful, even more so than the Madagascan 71%. The Javanese 69% was pleasant and the more mellow of the four chocolates. Thus, I decided to use the Indonesian crop to test it in the chantilly cream.

Testing and tasting

The whipped Chantilly in the tube, frozen.

I melted 80 grams of Javanese chocolate in 350 ml of cream (35% fat) and blended it well, I added a leaf of gelatine and left it in the fridge overnight. The next day, I whipped the cream and piped it in a metal tube with a plastic sheet and froze it. Once hard, I took it out of the tube and cut it into pieces. As soon as the cream was defrosted, I tried it and it was really good and intense. There was no need for sugar I thought. Actually, I thought there is always too much sugar in everything! (That might be me being in Asia for too long! ;)

Microplane grater, 100% Peruvian Cacao!

And so, to bring it even a notch higher in cocoa kick I pulled out the secret weapon, the Microplane grater, and loaded it with 100% San Martin Peruvian cocoa, grated it onto the tube of cream and there it was: a mouthful of cocoa like never before! Sensational cocoa flavor, way more sophisticated than any of the big names on the market. (that’s according to me of course!)

It definitely inspired me for our next afternoon tea pastries! And yes, Willie’s cacao are really world class!

Delicious bite of cacao!

The basil oil dripping through cheese cloth

Fresh herb infused oil.

I know. You just wanted to click on the home button of my blog just now, hoping to find a saner article to read, thinking “that’s it, he lost it!”

When you think about it, there is nothing mystical about making oil infused with fresh herbs and for that matter basil oil too. Yet, there are a few “good to know” tips you might want to read before going full speed in the wall. (Like I did on my first try, and as usual, not listening to the advices from my experienced colleagues)

Recently, I prepared a dessert for a TV show where I was using a fresh herb meringue served with a slow baked lemon tart. I based the success rate of my idea on the principle that meringue blend well with fatty elements (i.e.: in Italian meringue butter cream) and I thought it would blend well with basil oil too. And it did. Also, as I was talking about the idea on Twitter the other day, Jeremy (from the famous stirthepot.com) prompted me with a dish he had once which was a cod fish with basil meringue. Someone else did it before me, so it must be delicious and yes, it is REALLY good!

The frozen oil in blocks

Basil oil can be used simply drizzled over fresh strawberries or blended into a preparation, such as the above meringue for example. It enhances the flavors and blend superbly with many dessert ingredients like cherries, lemon or chocolate to name a few.

To make a nice basil oil, try to get basil that looks nice and fresh. Starting with basil who is about to die isn’t going to help with the color and the fragrance. Get a nice bunch of basil and also a bunch of flat Italian parsley. The parsley is going to be our deep green coloring helper as the basil itself is a bit week after the blanching process. The other ingredient you’ll need is a nice grape seed oil, or any another oil which doesn’t have a strong fragrance. A good olive oil tends to mask the herbal tone and is not really recommended, unless you are really going for a perfumed olive oil.

Chocolate and basil oil, a beautiful pairing!

Now that you have the three ingredients, here comes the process:

1. Pick the basil leaves and the parsley leaves.
2. Boil a pot water and prepare an ice water bath on the side.
3. Blanch the basil and the parsley for about 1 minute in the simmering hot water.
4. Using a strainer, take out the blanched herbs and plunge them right away in the ice bath – this will seize a maximum of flavor and color.
5. Take the herbs out of the ice bath and squeeze the excess water. The key point here is to squeeze the water out, but not the essential juices.
6. Using a bar blender, puree the herbs and add them to the oil.
7. Leave it for 10 minutes and finally pass the oil through a double cheese cloth or a paper coffee filter.

Once your oil is done, it’s ready to use. And if you made a whole pot of it, you can keep it nice and green by freezing it. Freezing it? That’s something else altogether! You will notice that your oil becomes solid and with a little creativity, the next time you serve your world famous melting chocolate pudding, you might want to serve it with a piece of frozen basil oil on the top, it’s delicious!

Draining the blended basil leaves through the sieve

You might have read that story on my blog colum from Asia Tatler Dining. :)

Got Cheese? and La Boulangerie! 

Great team work can move mountains!

A few weeks ago, I was thrilled and very humbled to have received awards for both books. The awards were respectively best cheese book and best bread book in Hong Kong. That said, I am taking this very lightly as I am not sure there was anyone else publishing a book on cheese or bread in Hong Kong! This award qualify my books to go for the second round competing for “Best in the World” award. With the heavyweight bread and cheese books that came out in 2011, I am fairly sure that I won’t need to fly to Paris in March to attend the ceremony at the Follies Bergeres Theatre, but hey! It’s the greatest feeling in the world to have my books standing next to Chad Robertson’s Tartine book or next to all of those French cheese books!

La Boulangerie and the award for best bread book in Hong Kong

Whatever the scope of these awards may be, it feels good to be recognized and when I received the awards, not by a beautiful host, but by courier services, it made me very proud. As a team, we worked very hard to create, innovate and pull out a great deal of work in all the books published over the past 5 years.

A big thank you to my team for which I am immensely grateful!

Got Cheese? and the award for best cheese book in Hong Kong

Finally, the books couldn’t be what they are without the beautiful photographic work of Johnny Han. We get along really well together and the chemistry blend resulted in superb photos! All of this edited and worked out by Cecilia from Wan Li Book Company – Thank you!

Roselle Macaron

 Whishing you and your family all the best for the year of the Dragon!

Sustainable and homegrown, eventually farm-to-table are the new words on the street; yet, it is most of the time referred to as for meat, fish, seafood, fruits or vegetables. But should we worry about everything else in between?

I am a fully grown adult (and a bit overweight for that matter) and I take full responsibility when it comes to the food I eat. If I am about to eat an apple which is covered with pesticide and that has been genetically modified to stay green, it means I made the decision to buy it and that I also decided to eat it, despite all my beliefs. But what makes me worry the most is what goes into my son’s stomach. Every time he takes a bite of food or a sip of juice, I can’t stop thinking about all the chemicals present in almost every other processed food on the market, and even if we try to plan groceries with the healthiest products on the market, the occasional treat got to be loaded with butylated hydroxyanisole & Co.

It reminds me of Hans Rosling washing machine speech where he explains that even the most hardcore green person in any developed country that is, living the greenest life possible still uses a washing machine to clean his or her cloth. Well, with food additives it’s pretty much the same. No matter how hardcore organic food eater you are, it’s everywhere and very hard to avoid if you buy anything from the supermarket. Organic vegetables or marketing scam? Do we really know the truth?

There have been studies linking the amount of preservatives and other chemicals in food with the overall increase of allergies, cancers and other illnesses. There are 10 times more food additives used in food compared to 40 years ago! And even if someone tells you that ascorbic acid is ok because it’s vitamin C really, it’s not. Like everything else, there is a limit that our bodies can take. That very reason puts the gluten free and other special diet on most top 10 food trend for 2012. No wonder.

The one food I think is often left aside and not promoted enough is whole grain food. You might think I say that because I’m a baker, maybe, but not entirely. It’s definitely harder to get homegrown whole grain products in Hong Kong you’ll say. Yes, but why not? When I landed 13 years ago, quality local homegrown figs were just a dream for any chefs. Today, we use them in our operation and that’s just one out of many available goods.

Whole grain products, whether bread, pasta, biscuits or muffins are a very important source of proteins, minerals and vitamins. But more than that, it’s a great source of energy, especially for kids. When we eat plain white bread, the digesting process is fast as the level of fibers is very low. That’s when the kids fall asleep in class at 10:30 a.m. The opposite happens with whole grain food, where the grain envelop and other parts makes the digestion process much slower and gives a much better energy output, spread over a longer period. That’s when the kids are back home full of power and start painting funny things on the walls!

We are used to eat everything based on white wheat flour. And when we try the same product based on whole wheat or other whole grain, we find it weird. It’s not bad, it’s just that we are not used to it. What I think would make a lot of sense would be to include whole grain products in kid’s diet from the earliest age possible, so that it becomes a sort of built-in habit to consume these products. Or perhaps we should start with classes for the parents?

Whole grain foods and healthier eating habits are an important part of the kid’s diet. Either for your kids, or as a Chef, for your customer’s kids, perhaps adding one or two whole grain dishes on the menu might be a good start for the year of the Dragon!

What a great day it has been! From the planning, receiving the goods, preparing each step carefully to finally do the filming of the upcoming gourmet show for Hong Kong’s main TV channel TVB Jade’s was just positively intense!

I mean wow! How more lucky can I be! I had to make a dessert of my choice for the show and quite simply, I thought about a dessert that would make a lot of sense in Hong Kong. Of course, it had to be a western dessert since it’s my side of the job (+ I think I wouldn’t make a very nice tofu fa!). Anyhow, I wanted to feature what I see as a trend for the coming year and I hope for the future. I tried to feature as much organic and locally grown ingredients in the same dish. So pretty much everything in my lemon and ginger tart has been homegrown in Hong Kong!

The lads at Homegrown Foods were very helpful, professional, and got all the ingredients wrapped up in a matter of days. Organic lemons, basil, thyme, roselle in honey and even strawberries – everything was confirmed. I also wanted to use musical eggs, not fully organic, but locally produced. However, it was not possible to get hold of those eggs due to the H5N1 alert at the time. So I used US organic eggs for the occasion.

The dessert was a slow baked lemon and ginger tart, fresh herbs burnt meringue and sweet strawberry sorbet. Fresh, clean and seasonal – Hong Kong seasonal that is. Alan, the handsome host of the show helped me along to prepare the dessert. It was fun, interactive and definitely a great experience to see what is going on behind the scene of a TV show!

Homegrown Foods delivery, superb quality, local and organic produces!

The lemon tart is baked at very low temperature in a shut off oven, it makes it silky smooth and goes so well with the fresh herbs scents of the meringue and the sweet strawberry sorbet decorated with honey pickled roselle, candied lemon zest (from the same lemon I squeezed the juice from) and fresh baby basil leaves which I kept a few while doing the basil oil for the meringue.

A nice dessert made with fresh, homegrown and local ingredients is possible. I really hope this could become more than just a trend… I hope it will start and stay here for good. 

I am not aware of the broadcasting date yet, but I’ve heard it is going to be at 8 p.m. on a Sunday night, prime time!! I will be sure to let you know the date as soon as announced!

Alan, the host of the show walked away with Got cheese? and La Boulangerie! ;)

It even gave me an extra boost for photography! (photo from Raymond Kwong)