One Hungry Chef

Splashing Out

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:59:00 +0000

One of the primary concerns of my job as head chef (and I have many in the kitchen) is keeping an eye on how much everything costs to produce. In fact, after ensuring that the food tastes good and that the quality is consistent, food-cost occupies the majority of my attention. As a result, all good chefs are experts in the fluctuating costs of fruits and vegetables. I watch the farm report on public-access television, because the price of livestock directly affects me. I even keep an eye on the national weather patterns, as a week of rain in Queensland or a few days of heat in Victoria could mean spinach prices will skyrocket, or half my herbs will be unavailable.

All this focus on price and availability, as is especially required in a bistro, is typically on what things are cheap and most available. I spend a great deal of time agonizing over the price of asparagus, lamenting the price of lamb, quarreling over the price of quail. I pinch and skimp and recycle and stretch so often that I sometimes forget that premium ingredients exist at all. What would it be like, I wonder, to order a couple dozen lamb racks? White asparagus? Truffles? I love cooking all of these things, but I cannot imagine cooking them in my restaurant: I just can't justify the price.

This frugality, wanted or not, spills over into my home life. I often find myself standing in the supermarket isles, frozen with indecision, incapable of deciding which cuts of meat represents real value. Are carrots really worth $4/k? Mangoes seem reasonable, given the time of year. What's the farm report say the harvest has been like this season?

As a result, I forget, from time to time, that it is ok to splash out and buy nice things, just for the hell of it. I have to tell myself that, yes, $20/kilo for honey dates is expensive, but my boys love them so. Broccoli is three times the price it was last week, but it would go so well with the roast dinner I've planned. Lobster has gone to how much? Ok... I guess it's a treat.

This sort of thinking doesn't do you much good in the professional kitchen; no matter how good a product is, the price determines if I can use it or not. For those of us trying to keep a lid on the spending at home, similar thinking is useful.

Don't let it, however, keep you from going a little crazy with the shopping from time to time; you deserve a treat.

This is exactly what you have to to if you want to make this pie. Splash out and buy a lot of raspberries, which are expensive as hell, even when they are in season.

Raspberry Cream Tart

This rich little tart speaks of summer luxury. The filling is made by mixing crème fraîche, sugar, and eggs, and then pouring the mixture over a tart shell filled with raspberries. When the tart has baked and formed a caramelized crust, fresh raspberries are dropped in before the crust has a chance to cool; embedding themselves in the tart like tiny ships locked in a frozen sea.

4 cups raspberries
200ml crème fraîche
200gm sugar
3 egg yolks
1 tart shell, blind-baked and trimmed (below)

Preheat your oven to 160ºC. Fill the tart shell will 3 cups of raspberries, reserving one cup of the best for the topping. Mix together in a bowl the crème fraîche, sugar, and egg yolks. Pour this mixture over the berries in the tart shell. Bake for 1 hour, or until the tart is bubbly, slightly browned, and set in the middle. A set tart will giggle as one when gently shaken, an under-cooked tart will giggle in separate parts. You'll know what I mean when you see it.

Remove the cooked tart from the oven and immediately drop the reserved berries in so that they are at least half submerged. Cool to room temperature before serving with a bit of cream or ice cream. Refrigerate any leftovers.

Tart Shell

For the tart you'll one piece of special equipment: a fine tart ring. It's a little ring of metal, about 24cm wide, and only 2cm tall, with no bottom and perfectly vertical sides. The idea is that you bake on a perfectly flat tray and when the tart is trimmed, filled, and cooked, the ring lifts off to reveal neat, straight little sides.

200g flour
135g cold butter
pinch salt
30ml cold water

In a food processor, combine the flour, salt, and butter. Pulse until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. With the processor running, add the water a bit at a time just until the pastry pulls together and forms a ball; you may not use all of the water. Stop the processor immediately to avoid over-mixing.

Remove the pastry dough from the processor and shape it into a ball. Flatten this into a disk about 2cm thick, wrap in cling film and refrigerate for at least half an hour.

Line a flat tray with baking paper and place the pastry ring on top.

Remove the pastry from the refrigerator and roll it out on a floured board until it is about ¼cm thick. Starting at one end, roll the pastry onto the rolling pin like a scroll, move it over the pastry ring, and unroll it. Using a small piece of pastry dough (torn from the overhang gently press the rolled pastry into the ring, lifting the edges up as you press down so that you stretch the rolled pastry as little as possible. Leave the over hanging pastry intact., reserving a golfball-sized piece for later. Refrigerate at least half an hour.

Heat your oven to 200ºC. Line the inside of your tart shell with baking paper or foil and fill with rice, beans, or pie weights. Bake for 20 minutes, remove from oven and remove the weights. If the tart shell has cracked anywhere, use the pastry you reserved earlier to make repairs. Bake an additional 5 minutes. Allow the shell to cool.

Using a serrated knife, trim the overhanging crust from the tart so that it is level with the height of the ring. This step is tricky, and you want to be sure not to break your tart crust. To do this, make sure that you keep the blade perpendicular to the tart ring and take care not to saw back and forth – rather pull the knife towards you with each stroke so that the tart shell is pulled up against the side of the ring, preventing breakage. Take your time and make small slow strokes with the blade. When you are finished, you should have a tart shell which is exactly the height of the ring with no pastry actually hanging over the edge of the ring, as you want to be able to lift the ring off after your tart is baked.

On Dumplings and Cousins

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 23:00:00 +0000

I've mentioned before that professional cooking is about numbers. How many portions of fish did you get from that salmon? How many olives per chicken garnish? Have we enough beef cheeks to last the weekend? All this purposeful counting leads to unintentional counting. I find myself counting along as I peel potatoes, or shell prawns, or dice tomatoes. This habit is mostly annoying, especially when I do it aloud, because no one, myself included, cares how many carrots I've peeled. I would definitely rather not know how many gnocchi I've made in my cooking career. (In case you are wondering, it's a shitload.)

If I'm making them, someone is eating them. Lots of them, in fact. Gnocchi, in whatever form I've served it over the years, is always one of the most popular dishes on my menu. A quick bit of googling reveals a near-infinite list of gnocchi recipes on the internets. Browsing through a page or two I'm struck by one common element: every recipe calls for potato.

But that, I can hear you say, is what gnocchi are made of; you mix potato (usually roasted, sometimes boiled), with flour and cheese to make a dough, roll it into little balls and boil them until they are cooked. That's how you make gnocchi.

Well, it the most popular, modern method, anyway. Gnocchi is a generic term for a dumpling, and can be made from any type of dough. Some gnocchi are made from nothing more than flour and water. Italians have been making gnocchi since Roman times, when they adopted the Middle Eastern habit of blanching paste made from flour and water. In fact, pasta and gnocchi share a common history, and it is difficult to tell sometimes what should be classified as pasta and what gnocchi. Potato gnocchi, obviously, didn't exist on the peninsula until well after the introduction of spuds to the Old World in the 1500s.

For whatever reason, the potato variety is clearly the most popular, meaning that many of the other versions are rarely served.

One such is the French version: gnocchis à la parisienne. These dumplings are made not of potato but a savory choux pastry. They are airy and light, much less stodgy than even the best example of their potato cousins. And like their counterparts, they are infinitely versatile. You can brown them up in a bit of butter and they'll be delicious, or you can create with them an accompaniment to any meal.

If you like potato gnocchi at all, you've got to try these.

Gnocchis à la Parisienne

Not only are choux pastry gnocchi lighter than most other forms of the dumplings, they are much easier to make, and require lass of a cleanup; no roasting of potatoes, rolling of dough, flour everywhere. Joy.

I've flavored these with lemon thyme, but you can use most any herb.

180ml water
90g unsalted butter
½ Tbsp salt flakes
120g flour
1 Tbsp dijon mustard
1 Tbsp chopped lemon thyme
½ tsp cracked black pepper
25g parmesan, grated
3 eggs + 1 yolk

In a medium saucepan, bring the water, butter and salt to a simmer. Whisking, add the flour. Stir with a wooden spoon until a dough forms and pulls away from the sides and bottom of the pot. Reduce the heat to low and continue working the dough in the pot for about 3 minutes, allowing some of the moisture in the dough to evaporate. Remove from the heat and transfer to a large mixing bowl.

Stir in the mustard, thyme, and pepper. When these are well incorporated, add the cheese. Stirring constantly, add the three eggs one at a time, making sure each is completely mixed in before adding the next.

When the three eggs have been mixed in the dough should be sticky and soft, but not slack. If it seems too firm, add the additional yolk.

Transfer the dough to a piping bag fitted with a 1cm nozzle and rest. (The dough, not your arm).

While the dough is resting, bring a large pot of water to the boil. Reduce to a gentle simmer. Holding the nozzle over the edge of the pot squeeze the dough out and, using a knife, cut little dumplings into the boiling water. Cook about 30 gnocchi at a time.

When the dumplings float, give them a further 2 or 3 minutes to cook and then remove them with a slotted spoon and drain them on paper towels.

Once all the gnocchi are cooked, refrigerate for at least half an hour before finishing.

To finish the gnocchi, heat a pan on medium-high heat, add a touch of oil or butter and sauté until browned and puffy.

You can serve these dumplings as you would any gnocchi dish. Here I rendered some speck, sautéd some zucchini, and then browned the gnocchi in some of the reserved speck fat. Yum.

House Dressing

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:00:00 +0000

I was recently reading an article in a trade mag which gave pointers on setting up the perfect, trendy bar. The focus was mostly on decor and good staff and what not, but one tip stood out: develop a house cocktail. That's brilliant. A simple, eponymous, concoction that people will remember you for. While I'm not exactly in the business of making drinks (consuming them is more my style), it got me thinking. What's the kitchen equivalent? Signature dishes aren't exactly it... that's a level above. I'm thinking of some sort of flavor shorthand; a little, punchy bite that says: “Damn, I'm good.” A great house dressing is the sort of thing I have in mind. This, in turn, has got me thinking about the house dressing at a little Italian dive in my college town, which was nothing short of legendary.

The dressing at this unnamed eatery (no names, they might be the suin' type) was a cheese and garlic affair that most people I know who've sampled can't quite dislodge from their culinary memory. It is the singular flavor the entire business is built around – appearing on salads and sandwiches and even pastas – and has been for the better part of the past couple of decades. Which is exactly what you want, I suppose, when it comes to the longevity of a business. Regardless of what features on the menu at this particular establishment, as long as the dressing remains, the customers will come.

My problem is I can't imagine sticking with one flavor for longer than a month or two. Beyond that and I become bored. Making the same dressing for 17 years is not an idea I can really fathom. I get bored with cooking the same food after a week or two. That's why my specials board is where I spend most of my attention. I'm not happy cooking the same food over and over for more than a few days at a time. Changing it up thus is the only way to keep interested in a job which is repetitive by nature. Many who do not understand this concept of variation of repetition do not last in th industry. And the phenomenon is not restricted only to professional cooks, but, by tangential association, to ingredients as well.

The ever-changing fashions in cooking, which I have mentioned before, are no different to any other trade or movement. They are broad, sweepingly dismissive, and are characterized by the momentary exultation of a singular concept, for no discernible reason, over all others. Professional cookery is, as I have often pointed out, no different to any other industry known to man; that is: subject to the whims of taste.

This means that when I try to balance my perpetually-evolving specials board with the shifting sands of culinary fashion, I often have to omit common foodstuffs which are no longer in popular favor.

Iceberg lettuce, is, arguably, the poster child for just such an occurrence. It has fallen so far from the prominence it once held in the cookery of my youth it is all but been abandoned as a food source. I remember a time when iceberg was the only lettuce, with the possible exception of romaine (called cos, here Down Under) which we all know is only a elongated version of the same.

Now, try and sell iceberg on your menu and see what happens. Nothing happens, is what. I know, my side salad of iceberg, soft boiled eggs, and herb dressing attracts few takers, even though it is my favorite item on the menu.

I don't really understand this. Iceberg is a great lettuce. Sweet and cool by nature it is light when shredded yet compact enough to hold it's shape when cut. You want to serve a cube of lettuce? Only iceberg makes this possible (when you cut iceberg into a shape, it stays that shape; try that with any other lettuce). Need to crisp up a sandwich? Consider iceberg. What should you serve with the dry-aged, rare-roast, Angus rib eye for two? Iceberg (with a blue cheese dressing).

Only no one will order any of those things. Iceberg is decidedly out of fashion.

So, it is via two separate paths by which I come to the topic of today's post. I give you my interpretation of the house dressing of my former, college haunt, skewed by memory and all (and without the dried herbs), on a salad made solely of the best lettuce grown by man. Get in quick; I'll be tired of this shortly.

Iceberg Salad with House Dressing

Ok. I can admit that, given as a menu choice, I would not go out of my way to order this at all, based on the description alone. However, it is exactly the sort of food I want to eat.

½ head iceberg, rinsed and torn into chunks by hand. Dressed with below.

House Dressing

300 ml vegetable oil
1 head garlic, roasted*
½ bunch chives
½ bunch tarragon, leaves only
100g grated parmesan cheese
60 ml white wine vinegar

In a blender or food processor, mix the oil, garlic squeezed from its skins, herbs and cheese. Add the vinegar, pulse, adjust seasoning to taste and serve on hand-torn iceberg.

*To roast the head of garlic: Heat the oven to 200ºC. Cut the top from the head of garlic, exposing the cloves. Sprinkle with salt and oil, wrap in foil, and roast until soft and golden. 45-60 min.

Perfect garlic is roasted until just sweet but not burnt (bitter). Color is a good indicator; deeply golden roasted garlic is often sweetest. Sublimely roasted garlic exhibits not only great color, aroma, and flavor, but hair-like filaments when freed from it's foil wrapper; indicating the inherent sugars have been caramelized in the optimal manner. The tiny fibres, if you produce them, are spun garlic sugar: natural sugars perfectly caramelized.

Because it is There

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 23:00:00 +0000

There exists, in certain corners of the world, a culture of eating exotic and strange animals simply for the sake of eating them. Most of these foods started out as necessity driven by poverty and can now be lumped into two categories: those that have been elevated to “delicacy” status (shark-fin soup) and those eaten out of tradition (fried tarantulas). Anthony Bourdain, in A Cook's Tour encounters more than a bit of this in his travels, most notably swallowing a still-beating cobra heart. It is a Mallory-esque attitude towards food; eat it “because it is there.”

While I have been known to ascribe to this particular mode of thinking – that I'll eat just about anything – I don't find myself rushing out to try, say, balut (half-fertilized duck eggs). I'm all for trying new things (when the revolution comes, I will be the last to starve, I assure you), but, in general, I want to eat things which have a chance of tasting good. I do not hold any such hope for deep fried spiders. Though, when eating a tarantula, I guess no one has to fight over the drumsticks.

Speaking of eight legs...

Eating for the sake of doing so is not the case with baby octopus, though I was accused of just that when I served up a grilled octopus salad at the bistro recently. “NO one could possibly enjoy eating that,” said my new waitress. “Look at those little... tentacles.”

The tentacles, in fact, are the best part of eating baby octopus, especially when they are char-grilled. The tips of each tentacle becomes blackened and crisp. There are so many ways to cook octopus. You can braise it in wine slowly to soften it, flash fry it, pickle it. It is a wonderfully versatile menu item. I like to marinate it in a flaming-hot marinade, char-grill it, and then serve it with a refreshing salad.

I also like having octopus on the menu because of the smile it brings me during service. I love to call out: “Order in... OCTO-SALAD!” Sounds so crazy and futuristic somehow.

Char-Grilled Baby Octopus and Niçoise salad.

“Niçoise salad” is used loosely here. Traditionally it has a strict list of ingredients; we're going to toss a few of them together and call it good.

10 baby octopus, cleaned (ask your fishmonger)

Marinade

2 birdseye chilies
4 cloves garlic, peeled
roots of one bunch coriander
small knob ginger, peeled

Chop all the ingredients roughly. Combine in a mortar and pestal with a generous pinch of salt and a few tablespoons of oil. Pound until a paste forms. Alternately you could pulse in a food processor, but the results wont be quite as good.

Marinate the occy overnight in the paste.

The next day, heat your grill or BBQ and cook the octopus on high heat for 5-10 minutes (depending on the size of your occy), or until the tips of the tentacles char and the bodies are cooked. Remove from the heat and rest for about 5 minutes before serving.

Niçoise Salad

Toss together any amount of any of the items below with a handful of parsley or lettuce and you are away. Do you really need me to tell you how to make a salad?

boiled baby potatoes
green beans
tomatoes
olives
anchovies
soft-boiled eggs
croûtons

Dress your very personalized salad with a vinaigrette:

2 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 heaped tsp dijon mustard
100 ml vegetable oil

Mix and season to taste.

Bending Rules

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 23:00:00 +0000

There are certain things which are just not done in the culinary world. For example, the Italians, as I have often been told, do not combine seafood and cheese. It is something of a foodie law on the peninsula. Any self-respecting diner, therefore, wouldn't dare to ask for a sprinkle of parmesan for their spaghetti con le vongole. The same attitude prevents any chef worth his whites from offering such a pasta on his menu. Every waiter I know scoffs a bit when a customers asks for a side of grated cheese to go with their sardine and fennel pasta. Trust me, it's a no-no.

And it is a no-no for good reasons. First, cheese and seafood don't, generally, mix. When was the last time you wanted to melt a bit of cheddar over your pan-fried salmon? Second, and I've mentioned this before in relation to pasta, most people who reach for cheese when eating pasta really want a bit of salt. Try it. Sprinkle a few flakes of sea salt on your next pasta wand watch your parmesan cravings evaporate.

There are many such rules governing the dos and don'ts of cooking. Taken together they make up a sort of cooking law code, full of contradictions and conflicts and anachronistic beliefs. A great deal of it is still useful, as the laws are based on observation of what things work and what things do not.

The cooking of dried beans, which can be done by simply boiling them, has a list of rules attached. First once must rinse the beans, then submerge them and discard any floating ones. Next a certain amount of oil is added to the post and the beans must be slowly brought up to a simmer and then cooked ever so slowly until they are just cooked through. At no time during this process is any salt to be added to the water, according to traditional wisdom, as this results in (depending on who you ask) mushy beans, or beans which never cook through properly. Not salting is the key rule here, as it is contrary to every other cooking method, where food is seasoned at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of cooking.

Another cooking process with a litany of requirements is that of braising meats. I get quite passionate about the whole procedure myself, and consider many of the steps indispensable. While the method varies a bit from cut to cut, one step remains in nearly every braise recipe I've ever read: sealing the meat. The idea is that the cut has to be seared on all surfaces in order to lock in the moisture. Any meat not treated thus risks the chance of drying out in the braise.

Many of these rules, actually, amount to little more than superstition. Beans, it turns out, don't really differ much in the cooking no matter when you add the salt. This is based both on my observations and on those of Mexican food expert Rick Bayless. He notes in Mexico: One Plate at a Time that there seems to be no difference between beans salted at the beginning of cooking and those salted at the end. Nevertheless, for no good reason at all, I still salt my beans at the end of cooking.

Likewise for the searing-step in braising meats. While conventional wisdom might state that browning a chunk of meat “seals” it, there is no evidence this is actually so. In fact, apart from the advantages of flavor, searing meat makes no difference to a braise at all.

Even knowing the fallibility of such culinary laws I still believed that seafood and cheese absolutely do not mix in Italy until I arrived mid afternoon on the island of Capri. After a wander through the comically steep streets and a sunset trip down to a tiny grotto with matching beach (comprised mostly of sea-worn glass and rounded bits of ancient, glazed roof tiles), we stopped to eat. The restaurant, filled half with tourists and half with locals (with a separate price structure for each, no doubt) offered a small selection of mostly pasta dishes.

My attention was drawn to one in particular: “Farfalle con gamberetti, zucca, pancetta e parmigiano.” Right, my Italian is neigh-on nonexistent, but I know that “gamberetti” is prawns or shrimp, and “parmigiano” is cheese. Seafood and cheese. What? In Italy? But... I... thought....

Oh, what the hell. I ordered it. It was delicious. Besides, who's surprised that the Italians don't follow rules, even self-imposed ones?

Farfalle con Gamberetti, Zucca, Pancetta e Parmigiano

or, rather

Farfalle with Prawns, Pumpkin, Pancetta, and Parmesan

It's not often that the translation into English comes up sounding better, but I like the alliteration going on here. And it's tasty. This will make 2 generous serves.

250g farfalle (that's bowtie pasta), cooked and drained and kept warm
½ butternut pumpkin, peeled and diced into small cubes
100g pancetta, cut into small cubes
1 bunch sage, leaves only
3 Tbsp butter
200g peeled prawns, uncooked
100g parmesan, shredded

Heat your oven to 200ºC. Toss the pumpkin in a touch of oil and a sprinkle of salt and pepper and roast on a baking paper-lined tray for 15-20 minutes, or until soft and beginning to color. Remove from oven. Meanwhile, in a large pan on low heat, combine the diced pancetta with a tiny bit of oil and slowly render out some of the fat, cooking until the meat colors and becomes crisp in places (but not dried out). Remove from the pan with a slotted spoon, leaving the rendered fat behind.

In the same pan, gently cook the prawns in the reserved pancetta fat until they are just cooked through. Remove from the heat. At the same time, in a separate pan, melt 2 Tbsp of the butter on medium heat until it starts to foam. Add the sage leaves and, by adjusting the heat and adding he remaining butter a bit at a time, keep the butter foaming – remember, too cool and the butter will stop foaming, too hot and it will stop foaming. Keep a happy medium and the sage leaves will crisp and the butter will brown. Remove from the heat, but do not drain.

In a large bowl combine all th ingredients, excluding the cheese. Toss them all gently (including the butter in the pan with the sage), season, and serve with a generous sprinkling of cheese on top.

The Library

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 23:00:00 +0000

There are so many, many known flavor combinations out there. Thousands of years of paring ingredients, experimenting, rejecting, refining, repeating, has yielded a vast library of possible culinary alliances. A great deal of becoming a chef is familiarizing yourself with this library and learning the cross-referencing system, that is, how to determine what foods will taste good together. The knowledge-base is not limited to just flavors, but includes aromas, temperatures, and textures as well. The best chefs can navigate this reference so well that they don't even need to taste a combination to know that it will work. In The Soul of a Chef Michael Ruhlman tells of a conversation he had with the chef Thomas Keller about a dish on his menu – oysters and pearls (tapioca pearls). When queried on what Keller himself though of the dish he replied: “I've never tasted it.... I know it tastes good. You don't have to stick your hands in a fire to know it's hot.”

I, and I am quick to admit, am not one of these chefs. Neither, in fact, are any of the chefs I know. This sort of ability to know, with great certainty, that two or three flavors will come together in a pleasing manner without actually trying them is the realm of true masters.

That's not to say the rest of us professional cooks don't possess some of this ability. We often have an inkling, a hunch that some weird combination of flavors might just taste good. The difference is we have to try them out, test and tweak and taste again, before we're ready to try them out on you, the customer.

The skill works in reverse, too. One chef describing to another a new dish will list the ingredients and preparation methods. Any decent chef will be able to construct in his mind an idea of what the dish will taste like. This ability is particularly handy when dining out. Upon reading a menu description wherein the ingredients don't seem to add up, I ask myself: “Do I trust this chef?” If the answer is “yes,” if I really believe that this particular person has the skill to make an odd combo taste amazing, I'll risk it. If the answer is negative, well... look for the safe option.

All of these things are fallible. I, at times, opt out of a dish which turns out to be amazing; I order one which is as odd as it reads on the menu. I occasionally envisage combinations which are, in fact, unpalatable. And, sometimes, I fail to appreciate a grouping of ingredients which go incredibly well together.

This failure, that of lack of imagination is, at times, the case with all chefs I've met, especially when it comes to the subject of this week's post. It is a summery salad, Greek in origin, combining a small number of ingredients which one might not otherwise consider eating together. Nearly every chef I know who has encountered this salad in concept before tasting has turned up his nose, including myself, until the first bite.

Feta, Watermelon, Mint, and Pomegranate Salad

This is the sort of salad you pull out at a summer pot luck. Sit back and watch the looks of quiet amazement as everyone realizes how bloody good this actually tastes. You can serve this on its own, as we are here, but it makes a delicious accompaniment to some honey-glazed, bbq-chicken wings or some such.

1k watermelon, cut into 1cm cubes
100g feta, cut into 1cm cubes
seeds from ¼ pomegranate
¼ cheek spanish onion, finely sliced
6 lg mint leaves, chiffonade

Toss all the ingredients together, taking care not to break any of them up. Season lightly, dress (below), and serve.

If you are particularly good with a knife and you can make perfect cubes of both the the melon and the feta, you could serve this salad as a sort of rubick's cube of red and white with the other ingredients (green, purple and ruby) stuck in between. Sounds like a lot of work, but it sure would look good.

juice 1 lime
50 ml olive oil

Combine the juice and oil, season liberally, and dress the above salad.

Catastrophuffle

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 23:00:00 +0000

About three seconds before I unleashed the twenty-litre tidal wave of foam and beer and broken glass, I remember thinking: “This is not going to go well.” Things, in truth, had not been going well for about an hour. My already saturated pants and sodden shoes attested to that. If you want to get technical, things started to go sour a month or two previously, when I put together a new batch of home brew. Perhaps I should back up and explain. This is a story about my deep love for beer.

I adore beer. I'm enamored with the its history, the rituals surrounding consumption, its color(s), the magical manner in which a head forms, the perfect columns of tiny bubbles which cling desperately to the side of each condensation-streaked glass. And I love how beer tastes. There are few moments I look forward to in a work-day more than my end-of-shift beer. I can conjure, at any given moment, that delicious malty-sweet and bitter-bubble dance, that rush of sub-arctic, floral-hop-and-yeast, liquid breeze which is the penultimate antidote to fourteen hours of sweating over a stove. I really like beer.

Enough, in fact, to brew my own, and have been doing so for years now. It's not bad, my home brew; most of what I've made has been drinkable, more or less. There have been a couple total failures: one batch of beer tasted like chemicals; a cider had strong notes of wet dog; my attempt at reproducing a 200 year old home brew recipe resulted in fizzy, acidic, sugar water. However, only one batch of beer was an absolute catastrophe.

Or, to use a word my four-year-old and I invented: it was a “catastrophuffle,” that is, a calamity which causes a great deal of commotion and mess. This sort of thing is a common occurrence when you have two toddlers who both like to “help” in the kitchen.

My most recent catastrophuffle began when I brewed up a batch of beer not long ago. Beer ferments in bulk for a week or two and then is bottled for a second ferment which carbonates the drink. After about two weeks in the bottle, you should be able to crack one open to see what it tastes like, though it will improve with a bit of age. Upon opening the first of this particular batch, I was greeted by a small geyser of beer. It foamed and rushed out in a fountain about half a metre high and continued until about ¾ of the beer had been ejected from the 750ml bottle. I'd seen this sort of thing before. This usually means one of a few things: perhaps the beer is still too green, that is, it hasn't finished the second ferment, or it is possible that the bottle was not clean and residual yeasts have infected the beer. Finally, and least likely in my mind, was the possibility that the entire batch has been infected in the bulk-brewing stage and is a total write-off.

I gave the batch another week or two in the bottles before I tried again. Old Faithful once more. This was starting to look bad. The beer should be well finished fermenting by now, and two out of two beers foaming like mad is not a good average. I opened one more in the hopes that I'd had a bit of bad luck. Beer everywhere. The whole batch was bad.

Unwilling to face the fact that I now possessed nearly twenty-five litres of bad beer, I stored the bottles away, lying to myself that they might get better with a bit more age.

When I brewed and bottled the next batch of beer I decided to get rid of the bad lot. I opened one of them again, to be sure, and the sheer force sent the cap to the ceiling and beer in all directions. They'd gotten worse. The bottles were super-carbonated and I was beginning to worry that they might explode. In something of a panic, I loaded the lot of them into a large laundry basket (the biggest vessel I could find) and set off to carry them down the three flights of stairs to the basement level and the rubbish bins.

As soon as I hit the first flight, the jarring began to knock the lids loose and about half the bottles began to fizz violently from around the edges of their marginally intact caps. This sour-smelling, warm beer-foam made its way, through the many holes in the laundry basket, down my legs and into my shoes.

Picking up the pace, in an attempt to limit the mess in the stairwell, only increased the jostling and the beers fizzed even more. By the time I reached the basement and started to make my way to the opposite side where the bins are located, my clothes were soaked and my shoes were filled.

I got as close as twenty metres from the rubbish area when I started to loose my grip. I tried so hard to guide the basket down gently, but my beer-soaked hands were nigh on useless.

It was at that moment I knew things were not looking good.

When the basket full of bottles hit the ground it did so at an angle pointing away from me, thankfully. Every single bottle exploded simultaneously. A wave of yeasty, warm beer washed through the basement, carrying shards of glass well over thirty metres away. In my shocked haste to clean up the mess I jabbed my finger deeply on a bit of bottle and began to bleed at what might be described as an alarming rate.

By the time I'd gathered up the majority of the glass, I'd spread enough blood on the concrete floor to give the general impression of, if not murder, grave physical violence. I returned a short time later, bandaged, changed, and armed with a broom, only to find a few residents in the building marveling at the scene. “Dropped a few beers,” I said, playing things down a bit. “And nicked my finger.”

God I hope no one looks at the security footage.

By way of an epilogue, I found four of the bad batch of beers in the back of a storage cupboard not long ago. I now know how bomb squad members feel when they pick up a suspicious parcel. I filled a sink with water and tapped the top off of each submerged beer grenade. They sounded not unlike depth charges.

Wholegrain Seeded Beer Bread

All of my above problems arose from yeast gone wrong. I thought I'd use some brewing yeast and malted barley to make a hearty loaf of bread. Yeast makes good.

This makes a single, heavy loaf of grainy, seeded bread. Why use brewing yeast? It works a bit slower than commercial baking yeast, allowing for more flavors to develop. Brewers yeast also tastes different; I don't really like the flavor commercial yeast lends.

50g flour
60ml warm water
1 Tbsp malted barley extract
1 tsp brewing yeast

Mix all ingredients and stand for half an hour. This is called the sponge. It allows the yeast to get going and gluten to form without much extra effort.

175ml warm water
1 tsp brewers yeast
125g flour
125g wholemeal flour
½ c mixed rolled grains
½ c mixed seeds
½ tsp sea salt

In a large bowl, mix all of the ingredients, except the salt, together with the sponge. Work into a ball and knead on a lightly floured surface for about 10 minutes. The dough will be a bit sticky – use a dough scraper to un-stick it rather than adding more flour. Rest the dough, covered with a towel, for 20 minutes.

After resting, sprinkle the salt over the dough and knead for a further 5 minutes to mix the salt in thoroughly. Transfer the dough to a lightly oiled bowl and allow to rise, covered, until doubled (about 2 hours).

Knock the risen dough down and turn onto a board. Cover with a towel and rest 20 minutes. Shape the dough into a tight round. Transfer, upside down to a proofing basket or into a bowl lined with a linen cloth saturated with flour. Cover with a towel and allow to rise until doubled (1-2 hours).

Meanwhile, preheat your oven to it's highest setting with a baking stone on the bottom rack. When the bread has risen, turn the loaf onto a bakers peel or a flat tray and slash an X in the top with a sharp knife. Slide the loaf onto the hot bakers stone and reduce the oven temperature to 200ºC. Don't open the oven for 20 minutes.

When 20 minutes have passed open the oven, rotate the loaf, and bake for another 20-25 minutes. Test the loaf by turning it over and tapping the bottom with your knuckle; when it is done it will sound quite hollow. Cool on a wire rack completely before cutting.

Keeping 'em Happy

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 23:00:00 +0000

I've spoken before about the intricacies of preparing staff meal in restaurants. Mostly I've focused on the challenge it presents a chef; how transforming offcuts and trimmings and discarded bits into a delicious meal for twenty or more people is a deeply satisfying experience, when you pull it off. What I have not, in the past, focused on is the reason restaurants bother with staff meal at all. Why make the effort to give away free food to people you are already paying? The reason is simple: you have to keep your staff happy.

This is not always easy.

There are several laws dictating the way the workforce is treated here in Australia. These laws outline pay rates and shift lengths and break times and several other odds and ends. I can assure you that not a single restaurant I've ever worked in has paid the least bit of attention to any of these laws.

Rather, restaurant staff are asked to work down right illegal conditions. These people – your team – are going to work for eight hours, no, run for eight hours, if not more (much more for the kitchen staff) without a single break. The good ones won't bother drinking water so that they won't have to waste time in the toilet later. They are going to sweat, get burned by hot pans or hot plates, endure abuse from the customers or you or the angry dish hand who wants the plates stacked just so. They are going to resolve most problems before you know about them, and except blame, regardless, for the one you do hear about. If adversity brings a group of people closer, these people are your fucking family; until the end of service, at least.

The least you can do is feed them a meal.

It's a challenge keeping the staff satiated. The truth is, when cooking staff meal, you are limited in time and budget and ingredients. Every member of a restaurant's staff is expected to work as much as is physically possible in the time given. Work is to be completed at a frenetic pace, leaving no time for uselessness such as socializing or coking for the staff. Preparing staff meal is supposed to be squeezed in between all the other jobs that need to be done. Add to this that most restaurants allow little or no expenditure on food for the staff, expecting them to eat only leftovers and other random kitchen detritus. This leads directly to a dearth in the variety of ingredients; the same menu yields the same off-cuts, and the same off-cuts inspire the same staff meals. It's a (welcome) challenge to, somehow, take the same few scraps, zero budget, and no time, and come up with something copious, novel, filling, and delicious.

Like I said, it is not always easy keeping your staff happy. Which is why I bribe mine with treats.

Notably, I have been known to crank out pancakes on the rare Sunday morning I agree to work. The rationale is something like: I don't want to work Sunday morning; none of these people probably want to work Sunday morning; we deserve a treat.

In the same vein... Tradition dictates I work every News Year Day (the most hungover day of the year) and I turn it into an event of sorts; putting on a staff brunch of epic proportions: scrambled eggs with truffle oil, eggs Benedict, homemade bacon, ham and cheese croissants and so on.

And sometimes, when I really want the staff onside, I bake cookies. Chocolate chip, usually, or some variation thereof. Surprising my workforce with a batch of warm cookies has something of a magical effect. Most of them (especially the men) turn into excited little children. Glasses of milk are produced and the lot of them giggle away, like toddlers, hoarding cookies and generating milk mustaches and chocolate lips. And they'll do anything I ask.

White chocolate and Macadamia nut cookies

Remind me sometime to tell you about how macadamia nuts are native to OZ, but Hawaii treats them like their own. I'm telling you now that the hard-to-crack nuts are best of friends with white chocolate. Trust me.

This flavor combination is completely the idea of my wife's; it was her flippant comment that macadamia would make a mean contribution to my cookies which led to these.

250g butter, room temperature
125g sugar
300g brown sugar
1 egg
300g flour
1tsp bicarb soda
150g macadamia nuts, very roughly chopped
300g white chocolate cut into large chunks

Cream together the butter and sugars. Add the egg and mix well. In a separate bowl mix the flour and bicarb. Fold this dry mix into the butter and sugar mix. Stir just enough to combine. Add the chopped nuts and white chocolate. Mix well. Chill in the fridge for at least half an hour.

Meanwhile, heat your oven to 180ºC. Spoon rounded tablespoons of cookie dough onto baking paper-lined trays, leaving plenty of space for the cookies to spread. Bake 12-15 min. Cool on wire racks.

Little Racks

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Years ago, when working in the kitchen of an insanely busy restaurant, where the workload was exactly what every chef could only barely handle, one, tiny extra job broke me and sent me, just at the start of service, crashing, screams and all, face first, into the ground. The screams, for the record, were not mine; my teeth were quite clenched throughout. Rather, the yelling came directly from the head chef/owner and his sous chef, and generally alluded to my complete lack of skills as a cook, and my parentage. The tiny job responsible? The front-ends of a few rabbits.

It was more than “a few” rabbits, actually. Earlier in the week, Matt, the chef/owner, caught wind of a bargain from his meat supplier: rabbit on the cheap. It seems, in the typical fashion of fine dining restaurants, that one of our competitors was buying only the hind legs of several rabbits for a popular dish on their menu, paying a higher price to buy only the bits they wanted. Matt, rightfully, wanted to know what was happening with the other bits.

I say “typical fashion” because the nature of a fine dining establishment is to lavish a bit of excess on the customer. This sort of thing is, after all, included in the price. Diners expect a bit of pampering from the wait staff, a bit of flourish from the kitchen, a roll-call of premium ingredients (think prime cuts and foie gras and truffles and the like). A menu might include dishes like “Celery Heart Soup” (where does the rest of the head of celery go?) or “Rare Roasted Quail Brest Salad” (with no mention of the rest of the bird). It is wastefulness which is both warranted and paid for by the consumer.

Somewhere near the other end of the scale lies the classic bistro. Step into a bistro and you can expect none of the above, neither pampering nor flourish nor extravagance. What you can anticipate is a certain level of food: satisfying meals which can be produced at a reasonable price and still turn a profit for the restaurateur. That's why we patron these sorts of establishments; when it is done right the food is cheep and delicious.

A good bistro chef runs a tight kitchen, financially. All dishes are carefully monitored so that the cost of plating them does not exceed a certain percentage of the selling price. In general, a bistro will try not to spend more than 25% of the selling cost of given dish. A successful special, for example, will cost, in total, $4 to make, and sell for $19. Bistro chefs live by these mathematics.

It is no surprise at all that such a chef might want know what is happening to the 2/3 of several rabbits not being used by another kitchen. This sort of insider knowledge alone, if it leads to a bargain, can keep a little bistro afloat for weeks.

The thing is, the restaurant I was working in was not a little bistro looking to churn out a cheap meal whilst eking out a profit. It was another of Sydney's fine dining mainstays. Only Matt didn't want to play by the rules.

Matt served the same ingredients which you might find on a bistro menu – secondary cuts and what not – but demanded a mammoth effort from his kitchen staff so that those less-than-fine products could be hammered into fine-dining fare. The goal, which was achieved more often than not, was to operate at more or less the same costs as a bistro whilst serving (and charging for) fine-dining meals. Matt, in order to ensure that this transmogrification was indeed possible, hired more staff; enough to make his wage cost nearly swallow up the savings he made on food cost. However, he only hired just (and I mean by the narrowest of margins) enough kitchen staff.

Those of us in the kitchen were under constant, angry pressure to get every possible amount of work completed. Any difference in the work required and actual work being done was covered by ample, angry screaming until one managed to stretch and juggle and sweat enough to accomplish everything that was expected. As with any difficult experience or ordeal, especially those self-inflicted, I hated it when I was amongst, and love it, looking back. I wouldn't trade the time I worked there for anything.

I didn't feel that way at all when I arrived at work one morning to greet the forequarters (the butcher had sold the saddles to another restaurant again, making the bits we purchased even cheaper) of something like sixty rabbits. Feeling, as we all did, that my prep list was already longer than the day ahead, I was more than a little annoyed at the prospect of any extra work, much less a job that was, quite literally, a mountain of meat.

Luckily, my only task was to salt the legs for half a day and then confit them, with the view of storing them under fat until we were ready to use them. I had the meat salted and put away in minutes. It was upon rinsing the forequarters that I hit a snag. Matt came over to have a look at how things were going and picked up a specimen, turning it over and over in his hands. “They've left a bit of the loin on here,” he said pointing to a strip of meat along the backbone. “If you carve like this,” and here he picked up my knife and started butchering the tiny rabbit bits, “you can get a 3- or 4-point 'rack of rabbit'.”

This, I knew, was bad. I looked at the tiny rack of ribs, bones frenched (that is, devoid of meat). Very bad. Terrible, in fact. I could just imagine Matt asking me to carve 120 (that's two per rabbit) 3-point racks. To be served as an amuse-bouche to every customer that evening. “How many serves of rabbit and quail terrine have we got total?” Mat asked, referring to a dish we were running on my section. “Forty-ish,” I replied. “Ok, carve fifty of these racks. We'll pan-roast 'em to order as part of the garnish. I'll change the menu description now.”

I know that fifty isn't as bad as over one hundred, but it is still quite difficult. This was all extra work, mind you, and that thought alone sent me into a panic. Creating rabbit racks is tedious, to say the least. It is tiny work which is impossible to do quickly. (The racks in the photo above are on a tiny side plate, the kind you'd use for a bread roll, to give you an idea of scale.) Frenching rabbit ribs? The very idea is evil genius. Asking someone who is already in a hurry to produce two such racks is asking too much. Fifty? It was insanity. Pure, crystal, crazy.

Skip ahead to service time and I am ready for service, with the exception of an avalanche of rabbit ribs which are threatening to crush me. It's the ludicrously finicky nature of the task which broke me, but I was neither physically nor mentally ready for service and I went down. Hard. I couldn't string together more than a dish or two at a time, all the while trying to sneak out another rack or two.

It was disaster. Commence screaming, missing dishes, botched tables, horrible timing, and finally a (merciful) rescue from one of the pastry chefs. All for one, little job: tiny racks of rabbit.

Was the end result worth it? I don't know. It sure looked good.

And, just in case you are partially insane, I give you rabbit racks:

Roasted Rack of Rabbit with Caramelized Carrot Purée
Spring Salad, Mustard, and Vinaigrette

I usually tell you to leave these finicky meat jobs to your butcher. I dare you to ask a butcher to do this one for you. Most butchers I know have a great sense of humor, but when you have this conversation, remember which one of you is holding the knife.

Rabbit Racks

1 forequarters of rabbit

Place the rabbit legs down on a board. Using a boning knife, cut down either side of the spine to loosen any meat. Flip th rabbit over and peel away the belly flap with your fingers, it should pull off the ribcage with little resistance. With the rabbit still ribs-up, use a heavy knife to separate the legs from the body at the shoulder. The belly flap should be attached to the legs. Reserve this meat for some other purpose.

You will be left with a spine and the ribs. Using a sharp knife cut the ribs from the spine at the point where they meet. Press against the spine with the flat side of the knife, ensuring that you keep the meat you've earlier loosened above the blade and attached to the ribs. Repeat for the other side. Discard the spine (or save it for stock).

What is left is a set of ribs, usually about 6 or 7 per side, with a tiny bit of meat at the end. Trim off the upper (starting from the head of the animal) 2 or 3 ribs (there won't be much meat associated with these) and discard (again, stock). Carefully remove the bottom most rib without removing any of the meat. You should now have a 3- or 4-point rack of rabbit.

To french the ribs, remove as much of the meat as possible from between the ribs above the loin (the bit of meat attached at the bottom). Scrape them clean with a small knife, taking care not to break them as they are fragile.

When you are ready to serve, season the racks generously, roast them in a small pan on medium heat in a touch of oil and butter. Cook on each side for a few moments only – just enough to color, and serve medium.

Serve the racks on a bit of carrot purée with a spring salad (both below).

If you are extra crazy, carve the racks just before you serve them.

Caramelized Carrot Purée

I love this purée. No one ever believes me when I tell them that the only ingredients are carrots, a bit of butter and salt. It's the long, slow cooking that draws out and then concentrates all the natural sweetness in the carrots. It takes time to do it right, but the result is amazing. This is a tiny batch, but the recipe can be scaled up for larger quantities.

1 carrot, peeled
1 tsp butter
salt

Slice the carrot into rings, as thinly as possible. I suggest using a mandolin or the slicing blade on a food processor. Heat a small, heavy based pan on medium heat. Add the butter and, when it starts to foam, add the carrots and a pinch of salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, scraping the bottom to prevent sticking, for 1-2 hours. The carrots will break up, dry out considerably, and deepen in color. When the mixture is deep orange and richly caramely sweet, transfer to a mouli (ricer) or food processor and purée. It is possible to make this absolutely smooth, but not necessary; I leave a bit of texture in mine. Adjust seasoning.

Spring Salad, Mustard, and Vinaigrette

I'm going to leave this section up to you mostly. The “mustard” I just dab a bit on the plate (rabbit and mustard are the fastest friends). As for the “spring salad,” get some fresh peas, some sprouts (here I use snow pea sprouts), maybe some mint, a few edible flowers wouldn't go astray. Toss them all together and dress them with a bit of oil and a bit of your favorite vinegar.

It's the only part of this dish that is simple. You should be grateful.

Fraiiiiiiid Chickin

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Every day I work, I begin and end my day with the same little ritual. It's more a custom; a tradition really. I spend the first and last few moments of every shift looking over the specials board. I take the time, habitually, in no small part to satisfy my narcissism. Sure, I read it over at night to make sure I've ordered the foods I need and written all the jobs to be done down on my prep list. I scan it again to make sure I haven't missed anything and to note any changes that need to be made. Mostly, I peruse the board twice daily solely to admire my handiwork, to fluff my pride. I love looking over all the dishes, visualizing how they look when plated, thinking, as I often do when I serve food, how pleased I would be if I were served any one of those meals. It is pure vainglory. I'm OK with that. As I've said more than once, a disproportionate sense of self-worth is a prerequisite for being a chef. Nothing new there. What might be news is that, if I read my specials board to satisfy my ego, I write my specials board to satiate my appetite.

When I put dishes on the specials board I consider several factors. First is cost. I have to figure out exactly how much I am going to spend plating each serve of a dish. How much do I spend on the protein? The veg components? The sauce? The butter used in the cooking? The salt? (Confession: I don't actually factor in the salt. “O, that way madness lies.”) This cost breakdown is, of course, tied to the variable market cost of fresh foods, and must be reevaluated on a daily basis. A great part of this evaluation, and my second overall consideration when putting a dish on the menu, revolves around produce as it comes in and goes out of season.

The cost of fresh fruit and veggies follows a reverse bell curve. As a particular item – say peaches – comes into season, the price starts out prohibitively high, drops slowly initially, and then plummets in price as the market is flooded with in-season peaches, only to climb again sharply at the end of the season when availability drops off. Part of my job is to keep an eye on these prices and change the specials board accordingly.

Less obvious factors are that of weather and climate. I'll lump these two together because they are obviously connected, but they are not really the same concern. The weather, and its day to day variations greatly affect what people eat. Had a week or two of cold, spring rain but the forecast tomorrow is for a mild, sunny afternoon? Don't bother stocking up on pasta or your slow-cooked dishes. Everyone will be ordering the salads. Think it's difficult enough having to follow the weather forecast in order to forecast your sales? Now factor in the fact that sweeping movements in climate, both local and abroad which affect the price of meats, fruits and vegetables. Floods in Queensland mean a spike in the price of lamb. A mild spring in Chile means a bumper asparagus crop and spears will be obscenely cheap.

Even more obscure factors influence my specials board. I have to, believe it or not, consider international politics. Southeast Asia no longer accepting our rice imports? The US ceasing cattle exports? Japan refusing to buy Australian blueberries? All of these have an effect on the prices of my goods, and therefore on the items which make the specials board cut. I suspect running a kitchen is good training for being an international stock broker – you have to understand how decisions on one continent will affect prices on another tomorrow.

The single most influential factor which determines the contents of my special board is, diametrically, as local as possible: my stomach. I cook the foods I want to eat. And not in a general sense, but on a day-to-day basis. In other words, the special board is a sounding board for my cravings. Do I feel like French onion soup on a cold morning, check my specials board in the afternoon. Pasta with sauce putanesca sound good for dinner? I'm betting my customers will feel the same.

A quick check of my specials board recently would indicate I'm craving a Southern-style picnic. Recently I've been selling BBQ pork ribs, corn and bacon fritters, and peach cobbler. Cobbler, is not a known desert here in OZ, and my customers find it quite exotic. If all of that were not enough, this week, thanks to a a flare-up of something of an annual craving I have, I added fried chicken and coleslaw.

Fried Chicken and Coleslaw

I love fried chicken, but only about once a year. I usually have my fill of grease and then can't stand the thought of doing it again for quite some time. Which is why this time I decided to fry chicken wings. They are tasty, juicy, and small. As long as you don't fry too many, it's difficult to overeat.

The wings need to be soaked in a brine overnight to ensure that the meat is flavorful all the way through. The next day it is drained, dipped in buttermilk, dredged in a seasoned flour, and fried at a relatively low temperature so that it cooks through without becoming too dark.

Fried chicken is just as good hot as it is cold. If you think you can eat this meal two days in a row, make extra and treat yourself to a lovely cold lunch.

1 k chicken wings, tips removed, cut in half at the joint

For the Brine

1 litre water
40g salt
60g sugar
5 cloves garlic, cracked
1 sprig thyme
2 stalks of parsley
6 bay leaves
12 black peppercorns
1 lemon, quartered

Combine all the ingredients and bring to a boil. Simmer for two minutes. Remove from the heat and cool to room temperature. Strain, discarding solids, and transfer to the fridge. When the brine is cold, submerge the wings and refrigerate overnight.

The next day drain well, discarding the brine.

Seasoned Flour

100g flour
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp salt
½ tsp cayenne pepper
½ tsp white pepper
2 Tbsp smoked paprika
pinch chipotle powder (optional)

Combine all the ingredients.

Frying the Chicken

1 cup buttermilk

Heat your fryer (or pot of oil) to 140ºC. Working in batches, dip the wings in the buttermilk and then toss them in the flour. Lower into the oil and fry for 8-10 minutes. Drain well and serve with coleslaw (below).

Pickled Coleslaw

Calling this pickled cabbage coleslaw is a bit of poetic license. I like vinegary bite as a contrast to the rich chicken. I also like that the red cabbage becomes an unnatural shade of fuchsia – not many natural foods we eat are quite this bright. This improves with age, make this a few days in advance.

½ red cabbage, cored and sliced as thinly as possible
½ spanish onion, peeled and sliced as thinly as possible
1 carrot, peeled and shredded
white vinegar
water
sugar
salt

Mix the cabbage, onion, and carrot. Pack this mix tightly into a sterilized jar just large enough to hold the lot. Bring a 50/50 mixture of vinegar and water to a simmer – enough to fill the remaining space in the jar. Season to taste with salt and sugar (roughly equal amounts of each. Pour the boiling liquid into the jar with the cabbage mix, tapping the jar gently to remove any air bubbles. Fill the jar to the top and seal. Cool to room temperature and refrigerate until ready to use.

To serve, drain the liquid away, dress with a bit of olive oil and toss in some parsley, if you like.

Tools of the Trade

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 23:00:00 +0000

I have no lack of self-confidence in the kitchen. Anyone who knows me will attest. When I don my “whites,” there is no culinary feat I'll balk at, regardless of actual skill. My chef's jacket is like a coat of pure, cotton hubris. Amongst the many boasts that “You'll never see anyone cook quite as fast as this.” or “At least you'll never see anyone look quite as good doing it.” I have been known to assert that I could cook a restaurant quality meal in any kitchen. I mean any kitchen, with any tools. Give me a tiny, single-burner camp stove, a tin can, and enough time, and I will give you coq au vin. Such is the faith I have in my own abilities.

If I were more humble, this would be the part where I admit that my assumptions are wrong; that I am not master of all when I wield a wooden spoon. But I am not humble. I have eked out five-course meals for ten people from a kitchen a single metre square. I've battled my way through impossibly busy services with half the staff I needed. I've decimated gargantuan prep lists in great sweeping gestures, King Kong-like. How am I not to be a bit cocky; I am, inarguably, good at what I do.

Well, not all of it is inarguable. In fact, a great deal of my self-aggrandizing is quite arguable indeed. While a good dose of self-confidence is required to make it as a professional cook, when I doff the uniform and take an objective look, some of my boasts come under suspicion. Not the least of which is my claim that I can cook any dish under any circumstance (see my tin can/braised chicken assertion above).This is not, strictly, true.

For, just as when I write I am a child of spell-check (and therefore cannot spell), I am also, in cookery, the progeny of an arsenal of culinary machines, which I cannot live without. I'm not talking about the plethora of useless little tools available at the local cooking store: the strawberry hullers, the corn cob-holders, and the like. I speak of the blenders and food processors and ice cream machines which make all the difference in the culinary world.

One machine I can't live without, for example, is a meat mincer. The owners of the bistro I run recently bought a electrical-powered meat mincer to replace our manual one. I've spent the last year putting kilo after kilo of meat for sausages thorough the hand-cranked mincer at a great physical cost. The new machine saves me so many hours of repetitive grinding it is worth at least twice it's cost, whatever that might be.

While I am on the subject of “cranking,” another piece of kitchen equipment I cannot live without comes to mind. Pasta makers. A pasta machine may not seem like a common kitchen item, but the majority of fine dining restaurants have one. Try making pasta without. You'll work your arms off trying to roll out the pasta dough with a rolling pin and still not get it thin enough.

In fact, in my flurry of ego-fluffing I failed to acknowledge just how dependent on tools chefs are. In the course of any given day I might reach for pliers, scissors, a ruler, tweezers, and an array of spatulas and tongs and ladles and spoons. I utilize such a variety of implements I have an entire shelf in the kitchen dedicated to them.

The tools I use most often, however, are the most primitive: knives and fire. It amazes me that, when I look around at all the various machines and toys I have at hand – the slicers and blenders and what not – I still do most of my work with a piece of sharpened metal and a flame. It is primitive to the point of being primal.

Speaking of primitive tools, one of the more ancient cooking implements is right up there amongst my favorites: the mortar and pestle. The first mortar and pestle would have been two rocks, banged together, used to grind grain. The technology really hasn't changed. I own, believe it or not, something like 5 mortars and pestles, in various sizes, made of a variety of materials. Some are small and porcelain, for grinding spices. Others are large and course, for making rough pastes like perfect guacamole. Still others are deep and smooth, for pounding herbs into curry pastes. I use all of them regularly and can't imagine cooking without them. It's become a bit of a joke in our household, the number that we own. Whenever we see a mortar and pestle in a shop, one of us will ask “Do you reckon we could use one of these?”

Pesto

Pesto, like it's French cousin Pistou, is named after the pestle – that is, named after the method in which it has traditionally prepared. Modern cooks eschew the mortar and pestle (and the labor involved) for blenders and food processors. However, while the manual method may take longer and yield a less uniform result, the blended version often lacks the intensity of flavor that comes from crushing the basil leaves by hand. Trust me, it's worth the effort.

1 bunch basil, leaves only
75g pine nuts
50g parmesan cheese
30ml olive oil

Combine all the ingredients in a large mortar and pestle. Add a pinch of salt and pound away until you have a paste. Season to taste, add a bit more olive oil if necessary, and toss a spoonful or two through some cooked pasta.

Purple Pavement

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 02:50:00 +0000

It is easy to forget, living in some cities, about the life of plants. L.A., for example, is nearly unbroken concrete from the sea to the spot where the vast, inland suburbs finally break up and dissolve back into the great desert the whole thing is built on. There is, to be fair, an occasional palm tree, and the odd patch of lawn, but in general, green space is hard to come by. Apart from the odd rosemary hedge, a few bulbs of wild fennel in a vacant lot, and one avocado tree, I can't remember seeing much in the way of edible plants growing in Los Angeles. Even here in Sydney, a city not without it's own urban sprawl, it is easy to forget about the things which grow. To be completely honest, Sydney is a beautiful city, full of parks, roads lined with giant trees, carefully landscaped and gardened median strips. There is plenty of green. It's just easy to overlook when you are navigating traffic, looking for your turn, or trying to flag down a bus. It's easy, in other words, to become distracted.

That is, until someone points out purple pavement.

There are tricks you learn when you are an urban forager like myself; methods for discovering where you might find edible plants in your neighborhood. I have become obsessed with flowering plants, as flowers mean fruit. One simply has to either recognize leaves or keep coming back to see if anything delicious is going to grow. Conversely, and perhaps counterintuitively, a great deal of my searching for free food finds me staring at the ground. I'm not necessarily looking for herbs and mushrooms, but for evidence of things I might eat in the plants above. I'm seeking prune pits which tell me the nearby tree will fruit next year. I'm looking for any evidence: rotten acorns, dessicated berries, fermenting fruit cores. All of these are instant indicators that edibles grow in the immediate vicinity.

One other indicator, which I often fail to notice, is the color of the pavement. Fallen fruit, you see, is often removed – by animals or obsessively tidy residents – leaving little physical evidence. It takes someone with an eye for color to catch the obvious signs I sometimes miss.

Which, more or less, is what happened to me just the other day. When my wife pointed out that the mulberry trees in my neighborhood were fruiting.

Mulberries are a member of a family of tropical and subtropical flowering plants that includes the breadfruit, figs, and mulberries. There are three varieties of mulberry: red, black, and white. Red mulberries are native to the southern parts of North America and both the black and white Mulberry varieties are native to Southeastern Asia. Famously the silk worm, from who's cocoon silk thread is produced, eats only mulberry leaves, preferring those of the white mulberry. Silk worms are considered domesticated, they cannot breed in the wild. This domestication began at least 5000 years ago in China, implying that the cultivation of mulberry trees far predates this. The tree is ideal for cultivation, it grows quickly and produces an abundance of berries. The fruits resemble elongated blackberries, are deeply sweet and slightly tangy, and drop readily from the tree when ripe.

And the delicious, black, little berries stain both the pavement and your hands a special shade of crushed purple. It's a fruit thief's tattoo.

Mulberry Cobbler

Why cobbler? Because I've been craving cobbler of just about any sort, and picking free mulberries seemed like just as good a reason as any.

2-3 c mulberries, stems removed
60g brown sugar
1/8 tsp cinnamon
pinch nutmeg
½ lemon, juice
1 tsp corn starch
1 Tbsp berry liqueur (optional)

Mix all the above ingredients and allow to stand for half an hour at room temperature. Transfer to a baking dish large enough to hold double the volume of the berry mix. Spread into an even layer.

125g flour
60g white sugar
60g brown sugar
1tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
100g unsalted butter, cold
60ml boiling water

Preheat you oven to 200ºC. Mix the dry ingredients together. Using you fingers or a pastry cutter, cut in the butter until the mix resembles bread crumbs. Add the boiling water and mix until just combined. Pour or spoon the batter over the berries. Sprinkle the top with a tablespoon of extra sugar and bake (use a baking sheet underneath, as this is likely to bubble over) until the top is deeply golden and the berries are bubbling through – about 30 min. Remove from the oven and serve either warm or at room temperature with cream or ice cream.

On Bad Chefs

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 23:00:00 +0000

“You can learn a lot from a bad chef.” A head chef of mine once told me that. He was not, I assumed, referring to himself, as he was quite a good chef. Beyond that, I wasn't quite sure what he was talking about, but I was still new enough about the game to be afraid of admitting I didn't understand, and therefore look like an idiot. For the record, I'm no longer afraid of looking like an idiot from time to time (some might suggest I excel at it). At any rate, it took me a few years to figure out what he meant, or what I think he meant. Honestly, there are at least two ways of interpreting his statement, and I'd find it difficult to choose which was his true intent. I'll explain.

The statement – “You can learn a lot from a bad chef.” – can be read as: “Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.” It is only from the most absolutely abysmal chefs that we have no skills, knowledge, or techniques to pick up. You don't know, when you meet a fellow cook, what you'll learn. It's easy to dismiss a burger cook as the grill-monkey we all know he is, but if you take the time to ask him, he'll probably show you exactly how thick a burger patty should be and just how long to cook it to yield the perfect burger. Sure, he doesn't know which end of a knife to grab, but you'll learn something.

The other interpretation, the more cynical one, is that you can learn how not to cook by watching someone else do it poorly. This is possibly more true than the first reading. Spend a bit of time with a mess chef and you'll quickly get your fill of chaos, and you'll work clean for the rest of your career. Taste the aftermath of a cook trying to cover burnt, bitter pasta sauce with a sprinkling of sugar (yes, I've seen it happen) and you'll never try to cover your mistakes again. Bad cooks have quite a bit to offer.

I know this as fact because I learned more about the best way to cook a steak by watching an endless parade of no-hopers ruin perfectly good cuts of meat.

I was working, at the time, in a cosy, country pub where customers ordered starters and sides, but chose and purchased from a display case raw steaks which they then cooked on a giant grill within sight of the kitchen. I watched hundreds of steaks silently endure torture at the tongs and spatulae of so many clueless cooks. I noted, in horror, such a number of meat cooking no-no's I couldn't possibly recount them all here. Observing the procession of mistakes, however made me a better steak cook.

Here, in a nutshell, is the worst way to cook a steak: Begin by choosing the largest-looking steak, one with the greatest surface area, though this will most likely be the thinest. Look for a lean one; fat, they say, is bad. Now, don't bother seasoning the meat at all, and oil is optional. If the meat sticks to the grill, you can tear and scrape it off later. Put the steak on a warm, not hot, part of the grill. It would be a shame to overcook the meat quickly, “stewing” is the aim here. As your steak stews and steams in its own juices, be sure to turn it several times, and if, god forbid, it ever ceases to produce a pitiful plume of smoke or the death knell also known as “sizzling” press it as hard as you can with the flat side of the spatula, attempting to squeeze the last bits of moisture out. This should cause a spectacular flair-up and will dry your steak nicely. Continue cooking until all traces of life have been wrung from your cut of beef and then transfer directly to a plate and eat immediately.

Cooking a steak properly, obviously, includes none of the above. (“Properly” also means no more cooked than medium, preferably medium-rare.) A good steak requires special handling, high heat, lashings of seasoning, one or two turns (at most), and a good, long rest between cooking and eating. Learning to do all of this well is, unfortunately, only done through practice. I can, however, offer a few tips.

First, choose thick cuts. You want to cook your meat on high-heat long enough to form a caramelized meat crust. This doesn't happen with steaks a mere one centimetre thick.

Second, season the bejesus out of the meat, just before you cook it. Tons of salt and pepper mean tons of flavor.

Third, cook the meat on the highest heat possible. You want to sear and seal, not stew and steam.

Fourth, leave the fucking steak alone. That's right. Leave it alone. Let me introduce a term into your cooking vocabulary: “passive cooking.” Let the meat cook half way before you think about flipping it. Once you flip it, don't touch it until you pull it off the grill. This also means no mashing the steak down with your tongs. Sure, this makes pretty fire, but ask yourself what exactly is going up in flames. The flavor and the juices, that's what.

Finally, rest your steak. Rest it in a place which is warm but not hot enough to cook it more. Rest it for as long as you cooked it. This relaxes the meat and allows it to finish cooking (pull your steak off the grill a bit before it is done – a take it off at medium-rare and with a proper rest it will become medium). If you can't stand the thought of meat at just-above-room-temperature, slap the sucker on the grill for thirty seconds each side just before serving.

Getting the difference between rare and medium-rare is a matter of repetition. Cook a few thousand of the same cut and sooner or later you get it right. While you are learning, I suggest you do what every chef who has ever learned does: poke the meat every few seconds. Get to know how it feels as it cooks. Periodically, cut a slit and have a look at the inside, to see how cooked it is. Before long you'll be a pro. Trust me.

Steak Frites

Since, as I have outlined above, cooking a steak is a matter of practice, I suggest pairing the many steaks you will cook on your way to perfection with some homemade french fries (and some mustard). The golden, crispy, “frites” as they are called in French bistros, will encourage you to practice again and again.

2 large starchy potatoes
2 litres frying oil

Cut the potatoes into long, thin sticks. Try to keep them as uniform and as even as possible. Soak the cut potato in several changes of cold water until the water remains clear. This removes as much starch as possible. Drain well.

Heat the frying oil to 140ºC. Working in batches, fry the potatoes for 5 minutes, and then drain thoroughly on paper towels. There should be little or no color change in this cooking step. The potato is cooked now, and can either be left at room temperature for a few hours or stored in the fridge or freezer.

Just before you are ready to eat (that is, when your steak has rested) heat the oil to 180ºC and cook the fries until golden and crisp – about 2 minutes. Drain, season well with sea salt flakes, and serve.

Green Season

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I've been teaching my oldest boy, nearly four, to appreciate fruits and veggies in season. When we visit our local fruit market, we talk a lot about why we can't buy peaches all year 'round, and why raspberries are expensive more often than not. He gets it; he asks me all the time when, say, mandarins are in season and when is the best time to buy watermelon. I'm happy to answer these sorts of inquiries; we get to chat about climate and farmers and the seasons. Then he asks me about tomatoes. Or bananas. Or carrots. Or about the innumerable other fruits and veggies which, through a combination of cold storage, hot-houses, and inter-hemisphere transport, are never “out of season.” It's tricky, trying to explain these things. Not the concepts, as my boy is quite bright, but I've put so much emphasis on in-season being “good,” I don't know how foods which are the opposite can be anything but “bad.” It's not that simple.

The issue isn't simple at all, actually. Eating local produce, in season, is generally considered better; for you, for your taste buds, and for the universe. I, more or less, buy into this way of thinking. Mostly, I'd rather eat asparagus that was picked sometime in the last week or so from a farm in my part of the world rather than the same product sent across the pacific in refrigerated shipping containers. I'll always pick field tomatoes over their hot-house cousins. I know, however, that it isn't possible to always eat locally and in season. I can't cook without onions, whether or not they are in season. Does that mean I eat old onions, or onions from the northern hemisphere (or both)? Yes it does. Potatoes? Green beans? Pumpkin? Bring on the cold-storage, other-side-of-the-world stuff.

It is entirely possible to eat only locally-grown and produced foods (depending on what distance you define as local) but it is not terribly practical. A healthy diet is a varied one, and choosing not to supplement one's diet with a few out-of-season veggies, severely limits dinner options. Which is my point; while in-season might be unequivocally good, the opposite is not necessarily bad.

The key, I think, is committing to a imbalanced balance. That is, a balance of local and in-season foods, which far outweighs your consumption of produce obviously from the other side of the planet. It's a fairly simple bargain to strike with yourself: I'll eat mostly delicious, fresh, local, inexpensive fruit and veggies and fill the rest of my diet with the occasional out-of-season interloper.

The polar opposite to all of these foods which seem to have no season are those rare bits of produce which have a achingly brief appearance on fruit shop shelves. These are your white peaches, your mulberries, your fresh borlotti beans. These are the sort of items which represent the nexus of rarity, difficulty of storage or transport, and relatively low demand. On a practical level, it means that, for the greatest part of the year, these foods are simply not available. On a more personal level, it means that the anticipation of any of these foods returning to the shops makes eating them all that much better.

It is just such a foodstuff that has me thinking about all of this, one I have glimpsed, in years past, for brief seconds in little bins at the local market: fresh, green almonds. These soft, green, fuzzy, immature nuts can be eaten whole and have a jelly-like kernel which is clear and tastes slightly milky and vaguely nutty and sweet. The green husk tastes, well, green; it is reminiscent of cucumber, only more bitter. The overall impression is intriguing rather than outright delicious, but the combination of flavors and textures is undeniably moreish.

The facetious side of me would like to point out that a quick Google search for “green almonds” yields a great deal of vegan and vegetarian recipes. Read a bit further and you'll find that these under ripe nuts are the darling of the raw-food movement and a staple in vegan diets. DON'T THESE PEOPLE REALIZE GREEN ALMONDS ARE THE VEAL OF THE VEGAN WORLD. These little nuts never had a chance to make it to maturity. So, so cruel. And tasty.

Fried Green Almonds with Serrano and Melon

Green almonds come in two types: (1) the very young, where the shells haven't formed at all and the nut is gelatinous and (2) the slightly more mature with a formed shell around a milky nut. This recipe is for the very young almonds. There is, actually, very little here in the way of a recipe at all. I'll tell you how to cook the almonds, though they can be eaten raw, and it is up to you so serve them with some thinly-sliced Spanish ham – Jamón Ibérico is the goods – and some fresh, sweet, musky melon. Think you can handle that?

200g young green almonds
3 Tbsp olive oil
pinch sea salt
½ lemon

Heat the oil in a fry pan over medium heat. Add the almonds and sauté, shaking the pan frequently, until the almonds brown slightly. Remove from the pan, drain on paper towels, and season with lemon juice and sea salt.

Eye to Eye

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 05:25:00 +0000

This week's topic is something of a perennial issue here at OHC. It's one of those culinary hangups I have, and I can't seem, no matter how often I air my grievances, to completely get over it. The truth is I have a problem with a certain, fundamental attitude most people have towards food, and since neither attitude nor outrage are likely to change, I'm predisposed to angry outbursts. This time around it was a serve of school prawns that set me off. School prawns, for those unfamiliar, are tiny little prawns (shrimp, in the most literal sense) are typically fried and served whole; you are meant to eat the shells and heads and all. They are crunchy and taste intensely of shellfish. Delicious. I do understand, however, that eating whole baby shrimp might be challenging for some people. I get that. In fact, I understand this so well I make sure that every customer who orders the school prawn starter is told exactly what they are getting. Most recently, it was one such conversation that set me off.

“I don't like to eat things that look like the things they are.”

This, you see, was the response I received after describing the prawn stater to a patron. She cited the recognition of the animal she was consuming as reason to stop eating it. Which is when my rage kicks in. You don't like meat that looks like an animal? You don't want to think about what your food is, what you are eating? Why not? Facetiously, I inquired “What if I were to fashion a bit of chicken into the shape of a fish, so that it looked exactly like a fish, would you eat that?” No answer. This is why Chefs are not generally encouraged to talk to the customers.

Recently, one of my wife's coworkers pointed to her quail lunch and proclaimed: “those poor little baby birds never had a chance!” No, they didn't (and they are not babies). Neither, however, did the doe-eyed cow you ate for supper last night. I really don't understand the disconnect. I do understand that it is slightly harder to imagine that the pork in your sausage was once an animal, but only slightly. People will gladly tuck into a burger, but balk at quail? Insanity.

On another occasion I was serving whole sole, a delicious flat fish, at a bistro I worked in. The preparation was so simple, panfried whole fish with brown butter, capers, and lemon. In the middle of a busy Saturday lunch a customer brought back a her sole seconds after I had sent it. “I can't eat this. It has a face.” I mustered all my customer service skills and replied: “Lady, all the meat you eat had a face.” “Well, I shouldn't have to see it.” Of course not. Meat comes in packets, not from animals.

These are obviously hyperbolic examples, but the truth is people are disconnected from the source of their food, and tend to look at meat at a product not as a creature. I think the most responsible thing you could do is to look your next meal in the eye, so to speak, and imagine what it was, and what it means that you are eating it. And then enjoy, for the love of god.

Whole Flounder with Capers, Brown Butter, and Lemon

I know I mentioned sole above, but sole wasn't available at the fish market this morning. Flounder, a perfectly suitable substitute, was. This fish needs little attention or fuss in the cooking; it is naturally sweet and delicious. A good part of the fun is in the eating – delicately removing all the flesh from the bones.

2 flounder, fins all trimmed close to the body with scissors
2 Tbsp butter
2 Tbsp salted capers
lemon wedges

Soak the capers in a bit of water to remove excess salt. Drain. Heat a large, non-stick fry pan over high heat. When the pan is quite hot, pour in a couple of tablespoons of oil. Wait until this is smoking and then season the fish liberally with salt and pepper. Slide the fish into the pan, giving a little juggle to keep the skin from sticking. Cook for about 4 minutes and then flip the fish, taking care not to break it up. Continue cooking for another 3-4 minutes and then add the butter and capers to the pan. The butter will foam up, crisp the capers, and eventually subside and begin to brown. Remove the pan fro the heat at this point and serve the fish topped with the capers and butter with a lemon wedge on the side.

For the Love of...

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I have always loved cooking. For as long as I can remember, actually. The basis for the love has evolved over time, but my earliest, happiest memories are of standing on a stool at the kitchen bench, waiting impatiently for any opportunity to help: stirring, measuring, pouring, wooden spoon-licking. What started as an intimate food relationship in my Grandmother's kitchen changed as I grew up. Later, the love was based on the joy of creativity, then on the challenge of learning to cook professionally, next on the joy of mastery, later still on the comfort of deep familiarity. Most recently my love of cooking has again become about an intimate, loving relationship with someone in the kitchen: my two little boys. I know how special my time in the kitchen with my Grandmother was, I hope it is the same for my two children.

I digress, a bit. My point is that I love the act of cooking and all that is involved; I get up every work day and genuinely look forward to going into the kitchen. Given the long hours, the physical demands of standing for 14-or-more hours a day in a hot, smoky environment, the emotional stress, the required constant, unwavering focus on the job (jobs, rather, several jobs at once) at hand, and the pressure to get every, single, detail, right, – given all this – you'd expect every chef to feel as passionate as I do about cooking. But they don't. Some chef's don't even like food.

This discovery came as something of a shock to me, because I do love food, and I sort of assumed such affection was a prerequisite of working in the industry. It turns out that is it not only possible to be a chef who likes nothing about food, but to be a damn fine chef whilst doing so.

There are, I have since learned, quite a few reasons people chose to cook. The first chef I met with an indifference to food was a Canadian who, incidentally, was equally indifferent to humor. We shared a section in the kitchen of a fine-dining restaurant and my first sense that something was wrong was when I realized he was more concerned with how many spoons we had ready for use during service than he was with the food we were serving. We'd often prep, side-by-side, all day, me chattering away about the amazingly fresh scallops or the perfectly ripe tomatoes, while this guy was thinking predominantly about silverware.

Evidently, though I did not know at the time, there is a whole genre of professional cooks who are more or less the same. They are chefs not for the love of food but rather for the love of structured monotony. Cooks like my Canadian friend thrive on the structure of a day, on the hierarchy of a kitchen, on the discipline. These people would have done equally well in the military. The well-defined structure and general organization which define commercial cookery – daily routine, prep-lists, expectations, duties, workflow, and the like – provide a solid framework around which the rest of their working universe is structured, and order, rows-and-columns order, is their single driving factor. That the food is good is secondary, but only slightly so. A side effect of this chef type is that reproducing perfect copies of a given dish is a natural extension of this obsession with order. Such obsessives make great chefs.

Other chefs are in it not for the order, but for the chaos. Not total chaos, mind you, but the marginally contained confusion of fire and stress and sweat and shouting that is a busy dinner service. Working chaos, let's call it. These cooks are more or less adrenaline junkies. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but the food takes something of a back seat to to the trill of an insanely busy service. Prep is a necessary evil required to get to the fun at the later half of the day. I didn't know such a creature existed until one of them pointed himself out to me. “You really love cooking. I can see that. I don't love it at all. I just can't wait for the dockets to start flying in.”

Finally, there are cooks who do it solely as a job – those who come to work only to finish the shift. These cooks don't seem to enjoy any aspect of the career. Cookery is no different to any profession in this respect, I suppose. I've worked with plenty of such “chefs,” though I've understood none. It is so easy to make the same money working half as hard outside of hospitality, I don't understand at all why anyone would persist.

Anyway, this week's post is about quail. Why quail, you ask? Because it is exactly the kind of food you have to care enough about to prepare. Quail are fiddly little creatures with little meat on their minuscule bones. You have to love to cook (and to eat) in general to bother preparing quail.

Actually, that is not remotely true in the US of A. Quail in the states are widely available semi-boned. That is: with all the bones from the chest cavity removed. Leaving only the leg and wing bones intact. This makes nearly any preparation of quail overly simple. The rest of us, well, we have to work for it.

BBQ Quail with Honey-Lime Marinade and a Grilled Pear and Rocket Salad.

The trick to tasty quail is to be delicate at all times. First, when trimming up the birds, be careful not to break their tiny bones, it's no fun to chomp into a bone fragment. Second, marinade the quail only long enough to add flavor, but not so long tat the lime juice starts to cure the meat; about half an hour. Finally, use gentle heat – hot but not blinding and cook the birds until just done; the meat should still be quite pink on the bone.

This is a great spring meal – pears are still in season, and it's just warm enough to fire up the BBQ.

4 quail, backbones removed (I use kitchen shears)
1 lime
2Tbsp honey
2Tbsp olive oil
5 sprigs thyme
3 garlic cloves, cracked
12 black peppercorns

Mix the juice of the lime with the honey and olive oil. Roughly chop the leftover lime skin. Place the quail in a small container, just wide enough to hold them all in one layer and pour the lime juice mixture over. Sprinkle the remaining ingredients over and refrigerate for half an hour, turning the quail over once.

Remove from the fridge. Take the quail out of the marinade, brushing off any solids. Generously salt the birds just before cooking. BBQ them on a medium heat, breast-side down, for 2-3 minutes. Turn them over and continue cooking for 3-4 minutes more. Keep in mind that we've added sugar the the bird, which will cause it to burn quickly; keep a close eye on the quail when cooking. Give the breast a little squeeze. If it still feels a bit raw, flip the quail again and give it a minute or two more. Remove from the grill and rest a few minutes before serving with a grilled pear and rocket salad (below).

Grilled Pear and Rocket Salad

I love this simple salad. It only needs to be dressed with oil and a splash of balsamic. Yum.

1 pear, peeled, quartered and sliced ½cm thick
shaved parmesan
handful of rocket
oil
balsamic vinegar

Clean your grill. On high heat, grill the pears just until they color a bit, flip, do the same, and then remove from the grill. Overcooking will give you mushy pears.

Toss the pears together with some shaved parmesan and rocket and dress lightly with oil and vinegar.

Pioneering

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

There is more than one way to be a food pioneer. Most obviously, you can invent new flavor combinations; paring ingredients and cooking methods in ways never before tried. Much culinary credence is given to such innovators: one need only to look at the accolades associated with names like Ferran Adrià or Heston Blumenthal for evidence. The custom is not a new one either. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously wrote in 1825 that: “The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity, than the discovery of a new star." Hyperbolic and factual at the same time. Clever.

There is also room in the business of food pioneering for those who embrace a national or regional cuisine and elevate it to fine-dining fare. While the French and Italians have been doing this for a couple hundred years, the phenomenon is relatively newly applied to, say, North Indian food, or the various cuisines from regional Mexico. The chefs and gastronomes refining these traditions into fine-dining fare are at least as worthy as those creating new dishes altogether.

On a much simpler level, it is possible to be something of a food pioneer by introducing unfamiliar foods and flavors to a population. Think of the quiet, but ground-shaking food revolution which must have heralded the introduction of dairy products to Japan. It was a culture unfamiliar with cheese, for the love of god.

On an even smaller scale, one can be a local pioneer by introducing ways of combining known flavors in a manner unknown in the collective culinary knowledge base. For example: the idea of pumpkin as a sweet flavor is unheard of in OZ, but pumpkin pie is the first thing I think of when someone mentions the fruit. I've tried it out on a few of my friends Down Under, and I think I am making converts.

Likewise with the subject of this week's post; I think with a bit of time I might convince a few that the combination of mango, lime, and chili is a winner.

Mango and lime, or mango, lime, and coconut, actually, are not a novelty in this country. It's the North American (probably Central American, if we are giving due credit) contribution of a pinch of chili powder that I am hoping to introduce to the people of my adopted country. This tiny addition moves the sweet combo from “tasty” to “memorable.” The heat gives such an unexpected, savory, bite to this otherwise cloying dessert, that it commands a careful consideration of the beautiful balance of sweet/tangy/hot/creamy flavors and textures within.

There is a something of a precedent of chili in sweets in OZ: I've eaten dark chocolates with chili and had a hot coco or two served with the same. Still, the idea that chili might have a place in dessert, much less a fresh fruit-based dessert, is still quite foreign. Consider this my tiny attempt at pioneering.

Mango, Coconut, Lime, and Chili Tapioca Puddings

Mangoes are just in season here in Australia, and I plan on eating about a billion this summer.

Often tapioca, or sago, a nearly indistinguishable substitute, is over-sweetened to compensate for it's bland, almost rice-like flavor and texture. Here, I've gone light on the sugar with the coconut milk, as I not only want you to notice the natural sweetness of the mango and lime, but also the contrast between sweet and hot, which, on my tongue at least, are polar opposites (eating something terribly hot makes everything else taste terribly sweet).

½ c tapioca pearls
60ml coconut cream
1 Tbsp brown sugar
1 mango
1 lime
pinch chili powder

Bring a large pot of water to the boil. Whisking constantly, pour the tapioca pearls into the pot in a slow, constant stream, to prevent clumping. Simmer, stirring often, until the pearls just go translucent. Strain and rinse under cold water until cool.

Meanwhile mix the brown sugar with the coconut cream. Add this mix to the cooled tapioca and combine well. Divide between 4 glasses and set in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours.

Just before serving, quarter, cut the cheeks from the mango, skin them, and dice the flesh. Squeeze with lime juice from half a lime divide between the 4 glasses. Sprinkle sparingly with the chili powder and garnish with a slice of fresh lime.

Gypsy Curses

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I don't eat nearly as much as one might expect. At work, I spend 14 hours a day preparing and serving food. I am surrounded by it, immersed in it. By the end of each day I reek of roasted garlic and fish and oil and herbs and smoke. I could do no worse if I were rolling in the stuff. On any given work day I prepare ten-to-twenty serves of each dish on the menu and specials board, totaling a couple hundred possible meals, with the expectation that I'll serve at least half of them. Amidst all this cooking, all this preparation and serving, I often fail to eat much at all. It's an affliction that affects many of the chefs I know. It's silly, I know, to be surrounded with food for more than half of the hours in a day and not eat enough, but it is quite common. Ask a chef, at the end of the day, what he's eaten during work; I guarantee he'll have trouble recalling a single meal.

It's not that I don't like to eat. Don't, for the love of god, get that impression. I love food. And I love to cook it just as much as I eat it. I spend a great deal of my spare time either cooking, or reading (or writing) about the history, science, and theory of food. I can think of little I enjoy more than eating out. I love to sit down to a meal someone else has prepared for me; I appreciate the effort and look forward to eating something I haven't personally followed from providore to plate. The greater the quantity and variety in a meal, the better. Twelve-course degustation menu? Hell yes. I love food.

It's just that at the end of a day in the kitchen, after innumerable tastes of this and that (add more salt, taste again), dozens of carrot nubs and celery stick tips and tomato cores which find their way into my mouth rather than the rubbish, the stomach-tightening stress of service, I simply don't feel like eating. I suppose I should understand when other's feel the same.

Usually, people come to me and ask me to cook for them. That's how a restaurant works. I ask that you, the diner trust my cooking abilities; you, in turn, tell me what you'd like and how you'd like it cooked. Outside of work I don't take orders, per se, but when I ask people over for dinner, I generally feel that their anticipation is genuine. Having people want to eat my food becomes the natural state, and I begin to mistrust anyone without an appetite. In short: I expect people to eat.

There are two people, however, who are not always excited to eat when I cook for them. In fact, more often than not I find myself asking, aloud, what is so wrong with the food I've prepared. I'm loath to admit to reducing myself to begging, but begging I do. I've been known to desperately plead my two little boys to eat.

Perhaps this is a gypsy's curse for a chef – that I dedicate my life to cooking and then have to beg my own children to eat anything at all. I should stop angering gypsies.

The one thing I know my two little ones will eat is rice. Both of my boys lap it up, in nearly any incarnation. Why they'll concurrently decide that they don't want to eat roast pork with applesauce, or that they no longer like salmon, I'll never understand, but I do get why they'll eat their collective body weight in my pilaf. It's really tasty.

Orzo and Rice Pilaf with Lemon Thyme and Leek

This is a side dish. A garnish. And one of my favorites. This is a versatile and delicious dish which acts as support personnel for the main event. While you could quite easily sit and make a meal of this rice-based dish, it is a great accompaniment to just about any protein. With this version in particular, I like to pan-roast a baby chicken, backbone removed and flattened, and then rest it on the just-finished pilaf. The juices from the bird soak into the rice and impart a flavor which is a perfect match for the leeks and thyme.

Pilaf is essentially just steamed rice. I add orzo, or risoni, as it is sometimes called, a rice-shaped pasta. Combining this tiny pasta with rice, treating it like rice, lends a contrast in texture and a bit of creaminess to the finished pilaf. This is the sort of recipe you should know by heart: ½ cup rice, ½ cup pilaf, 1 ½ c stock, 1 onion, diced, and something to add flavor: some garlic, a handful of herbs, whatever.

This pilaf is infinitely adaptable: add a half lemon to the pot when you pour in the stock (try substituting fish stock) and serve with pan-fried trout; add some diced carrots when you are toasting the rice and pasta, use beef stock, and serve with a braised veal shank. You can even change up the ratio of rice to pasta. All you need to know is that the the volume of stock should be one-and-a-half times the volume of the rice and pasta together. Other than that, go crazy.

½ c aborrio rice
½ c orzo
1 leek, split, cleaned
1 clove garlic, peeled and cracked
1 ½ c chicken stock
4 sprigs lemon thyme, leaves only

Bring the stock to a simmer in a small pot and keep warm.

In a medium pot with a tablespoon of vegetable oil, sweat the leek with a generous pinch of salt until it is soft and sweet. Add the garlic, the rice, and the pasta. Toast until the rice becomes translucent around the edges. Add the thyme and stock, bring to a simmer and cover.

Reduce to the lowest heat for 15 minutes covered. Remove from the heat and leave undisturbed for another five minutes. Fluff with a fork, season to taste, and serve.

Fancy Baked Beans

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

NOTE: THIS POST CONCLUDES OUR THREE WEEK SERIES, WE'LL BE USING THE ELEMENTS FROM LAST TWO WEEK'S POSTS TO COMPLETE THIS WEEK'S RECIPE.

Some dishes are about far more than a paltry meal. These are the foods so very saturated with tradition and history and ceremony that eating them is as much about ritual as it is sustenance. One need look no further than American Thanksgiving dinner for an example; where tradition supersedes practicality, and each individual feast is marked by a bird far too large, flanked by sides far too numerous, and manned by relatives eating far too much. It's tradition. The French, in particular, excel at this sort of elevating food beyond a meal to a rite (sans gluttony). France, and it's culinary history, are filled with such stereotypes. Take, for instance, the ceremony surrounding the release of each new vintage of Beaujolais, or the pomp during the first winter truffle harvest. There are several such specimens, but my favourite, if I might cut to the quick, is cassoulet.

Cassoulet is, essentially, baked beans. There are several regional variations in southwestern France, where this meal originated, but most of them contain white beans, pork, sausage, and smoked/salted/confit meats. Namely, a spicy pork sausage, hamhock, and confit duck or goose, with the occasional addition of lamb or mutton, but variations abound. These items are all slow cooked together in a wide, earthenware dish called a cassole until the beans are rich and creamy, and a caramelized crust has formed on the top. Fancy baked beans.

Not content with the fact that fancy baked beans taste good, the French (particularly those of the self-proclaimed capitol of cassoulet: Castelnaudary) have cassoulet festivals and special events celebrating the tradition. Locals have even formed the Grande Confrérie du Cassoulet de Castelnaudary. “The Great Brotherhood”, according to their website, “is to ... disseminate and defend the reputation of the cassoulet of Castelnaudary , ensuring respect for tradition and quality.”

Really. It's just beans.

So, cassoulet is beans, made bigger than life, in France, through tradition. Outside of it's country of origin talking cassoulet with fellow chefs is not unlike talking politics: it shouldn't be done. It only takes someone to mention that they favor one ingredient over another, or that they add tomato, for moisture, and the argument is on. Soon it's all “That's not how it's done.” and “You can't leave out the ham.” or “Your method is stupid.” Feelings get hurt. Many of the chefs I know are abnormally attached to their cassoulet. Obsessively. Relationship-ending stuff.

If this weren't reason enough to leave cassoulet alone, making the dish requires a great deal of work. You've got to cook beans, sausages, hamhock, possibly a stock, and confit duck, all separately, some of which can take days, and then combine them and cook them for a further day or so. Some methods call for the cooked cassoulet to be rested overnight and then cooked again for a further few hours before serving. It almost sounds like too much effort.

Luckily, too much effort is something of my M.O. here at OHC.

Borlotti Bean and Rabbit Cassoulet

Those in the class who payed attention will notice that neither “borlotti” nor “rabbit” were ever mentioned as ingredients in traditional cassoulet. We're not going to talk about it, in the interest of preventing a fight. Trust me. It's desperately delicious.

For this you'll need the sausages from a couple weeks ago and the beans, rabbit legs, and stock from last week.

500g rabbit and pork sausages
1 tbsp rendered duck or pork fat
2 small white onions, peeled, rough chop
3 cloves garlic, peeled
500ml rabbit and ham stock
4 cups cooked borlotti beans
2 confit rabbit legs, removed from fat, meat removed from bones
bean cooking liquid

Heat the fat in a large fry pan on low heat. When melted and warm (not hot) and add the sausages. Cook the sausages gently until they color on one side, flip and continue cooking. Meanwhile, in a blender or food processor, blitz the onion and garlic with 100ml of the rabbit stock. Add this paste to the pan with the nearly cooked sausages and bring the lot to a simmer. Cook gently, stirring occasionally, until the onion no longer smells raw. Remove from heat.

Preheat your oven to 150ºC. In a wide, deep (earthenware if possible), baking dish, layer the cassoulet. First, a layer of cooked beans, then the sausages and onion paste. Follow this with another layer of beans. Top this with the picked confit rabbit meat. Finish this with a final layer of beans. This should, hopefully, fill your dish and leave with you no additional beans (although you're probably hungry by now, so a few handful's of perfectly cooked beans wouldn't kill you).

Ladle in enough of the rabbit and ham stock so that the level of the liquid is equal with that of the top of the beans. Bake, uncovered, for 4 hours. After the first hour, open the oven and push down the crust of that forms on the surface of the cassoulet, and top up the liquid using the rabbit stock. Repeat this process every half hour until the four hour's cooking is complete led. At any time the stock runs out, switch to using the reserved bean liquid to keep the beans moist.

For the last half hour, do not disturb the crust, but add a bit of stock if the cassoulet looks dry.

At the end of four hours, remove the cassoulet from the oven. Your beans should be individually intact, not mushy (a product of slow cooking), and the crust on top formed of a mattress of crisp beans and caramelized bits of goodness. Cool slightly, and serve a warm cross-section of beans, meat and sausages.

I usually suggest accompaniments, but not here. Perhaps you'd like some bread, I don't know. I just eat my fill off cassoulet and shut up. Oh. Wine. You'll need red wine. Tons.

How to Cook Beans (The Prep Shift)

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

NOTE: THIS POST CONTINUES OUR THREE WEEK SERIES, WE'LL BE USING THE ELEMENTS FROM LAST AND THIS WEEK'S POST TO COMPLETE NEXT WEEK'S RECIPE.

It's not all glory. Not remotely. You need to know this; someone should tell you. It's not at all like TV. Professional cooking is, at best, only about 10% glory. The rest is, well, the rest. Actually, “the rest” makes up the majority of what a professional cook does on any given day. That 10% of the goods – service, finishing meals and sending them out, getting the odd bit of positive feedback from the customers – is completely eclipsed by the amount of work required to get ready for dinner service on any given day. Typically, I work a fifteen-hour day and only during a tiny bit near the end do I actually cook meals for customers. The rest of it fills up will roasting this, peeling that, blanching and rolling and confit and boning, chopping and sauteing and salting butchering, cleaning and simmering and a whole host of other generally menial activities. Not glamorous at all.

The prep portion of any shift is, as I mentioned, full of little jobs. It involves endless buckets of vegetables, giant pots of stocks and soups, and countless hours of fine brunoise and julienne and chiffonade. It's how every chef earns his knife skills.

To many professional cooks, the prep shift is a shitty one. The dull repetition, the crushing weight of impossibly long prep lists, the requisite constant concentration so that none of the seven or so jobs you have on the go turn sour, all breed resentment in some chefs. I, on the other hand, quite look forward to all of it. I love ticking jobs off my list as I go, juggling dozens of tasks at a time, stocking up my cool room with food ready for service; it's like preparing for a siege.

More than any of these things, I find pleasure in perfecting the simplest of jobs. This, in fact, is one of the things which differentiates a good chef from a great one. Are you able to maintain high standard when prepping? Sure, it's easy when sending out a steak, to imagine the customer eating it, and how they'll not enjoy their meal if the meat is overcooked. It is not so easy to imagine that 40 customers will be eating your parsnip puree, three bites at a time, and each one needs to be perfect.

This week is a prep shift. Today we'll be making a couple of seemingly unrelated foods, all to be used next week in part three of this triptych we started last week (anyone out there guess yet what we'll be making next week?) None of these things are meant to be eaten on their own, though both the rabbit legs and beans are tasty enough to be eaten thus.

In fact, this is the best way to cook beans, either fresh or dried, and is well worth keeping this method tucked away in that pretty little head of yours.

Borlotti Beans

These appaloosa-like beans (also called pinto beans) are my favorite beans. I wish only that cooking did not erase their pink and white patterns; alas, the beans turn an earthy brownish-gray. Upon tasting, however, any color-related concerns evaporate. These are the King of beans – meaty, firm, and creamy.

This cooking method works well with all beans, fresh or dry. The key is to cook them as slowly as possible until they are just cooked. No matter how long that takes.

1.5k borlotti beans, in their pods, or 2 cups dried beans
2 sprigs thyme
olive oil
4 cloves garlic, peeled and cracked

Pod the fresh beans (or soak the dried beans briefly in cold water and remove any which float). In a pot, cover the beans with water, so that they are submerged under 2cm of water (double this depth for dried beans). Add enough olive oil so that there is a 1cm layer floating on the top. Add one sprig of thyme. Do not season the beans.

Bring to a simmer over medium head, taking care not to let the beans boil, and reduce the heat to low. You want the beans to just tick over. Cook thus until the beans are soft through, about an hour for fresh beans, at least double that for dried. The key is to remove the beans from the heat when they are cooked, but before they start to burst.

Add the cracked garlic, the second sprig of thyme, and season liberally with lashings of salt and pepper. Cool in the liquid, then drain. Remove the garlic cloves and thyme sprigs.

Well need both the beans and the liquid they were cooked in for next week's post.

Rabbit and Ham Stock

All white stocks, that is stocks with raw (as opposed to roasted) bones, are made in more or less the same manner. The bones are covered in plenty of cold water, brought to a simmer, skimmed, and then the vegetables are added. The lot simmers for a few hours and then strained. Stocks sould remain un-seasoned. This allows you to luse thm in your cooking with worrying about adding to much salt to your final dish. The bacon or ham bones add a hint of smoky flavor to the stock, as well as adding a bit of body (rabbit bones don't have much gelatin in them).

500g bacon or ham bones
bones from 1 rabbit (from last week's post)
1 carrot, peeled, rough chop
1 onion, peeled, rough chop
1 stick celery, rough chop
1 head garlic, cut in half
1 sprig thyme
1 bay leaf
12 black peppercorns

Combine the bacon or ham bones and the rabbit bones in a large pot and cover with water, submerging them completely with about 5cm water above the level of the bones. . Bring to a simmer over high heat, reduce to a low simmer, and skim any fat and scum which rises to the surface. Add the remainder of the ingredients and simmer for four hours. Remove from heat and strain, discarding the solids.

Confit Rabbit

2 rabbit legs
2 cups duck fat
confit salt (see below)

Weigh the legs. For every 500g of meat, you will need 5g of confit salt. Place the rabbit into a nonreactive container just large enough to hold the legs. Sprinkle the salt evenly over both sides of the meat. Cover, and refrigerate for 8 hours.

Heat your oven to 150º C. Rinse the salt from the meat and pat dry. Gently melt the duck fat. Lay the legs flat in a baking dish or small pot and pour the fat over the top. Make sure the legs are completely submerged.

Cover with a lid or foil, and cook in th oven for at least 3 hours, and up to 6, until the meat is tender but not falling apart. Cool the legs to room temperature in the fat. Gently remove them from the warm fat, strain the fat into a tall container, allow any liquid to settle to the bottom, and pour the fat back over the meat, making sure to leave the liquid behind and that the legs are completely covered.

Confit Salt

100g rock salt
12 bay leaves
5 sprigs thyme
1 head garlic, skin on, rough chop
2 Tbsp black peppercorns

Combine all the ingredients.

Snags

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

NOTE: THIS POST BEGINS A THREE WEEK SERIES, WE'LL BE USING THE ELEMENTS FROM THIS AND NEXT WEEK'S POST TO COMPLETE THE THIRD WEEK'S RECIPE.

“Perhaps,” Brian, a friend and fellow chef said to me, shaking his head, “we should have listened to hundreds of years of tradition.” The tradition he was referring to was that of sausage making, a long and fine tradition indeed. Making sausages is one of the rare instances in savory cooking (as opposed to pastry work) where science meets creativity. Crafting a sausage requires strict adherence to certain, long-established ratios of fat-to-meat-to-salt. There are other rules as well, regarding the number of times you pass the meat through a mincer, the temperature of the meat, and more. Obviously, there is plenty of room for improvisation and tweaking, leading to a near-infinite different types of sausages. Know this: all of them, if they taste good at all, fall within the guidelines set forth by countless generations of sausage makers.

Foolishly, the sausages Brian and I had just produced, did not.

Making a sausage from scratch is a lot of work. No. A ridiculous amount of work. As with most things I consume, I don't think I'd eat them nearly as often if I had to make my own. Snags, as they are called in OZ, are possibly the cheapest thing you can buy at your local butcher, but I don't understand why. Sure, they are the final resting place for all the little bits and offcuts which can't be sold otherwise, but taking those bits and offcuts and turning them into something delicious is time-consuming, physical (especially if you use a hand-cranked mincer, as I do), dirty, and tedious.

First you must determine the ratios of your various ingredients. Generally, a sausage is around 25-35% fat. You can easily figure this out if you are using lean meat and pork fat, as is often the case, but if you are using a fatty meat, well, the ratios get a little more complex. Doubly so if start to mix animals. Then there is the amount of salt, not to mention any of the other flavorings you might want to put in.

Once you've gathered your ingredients in the right proportions you've got to dice the meat, mix it with the flavorings, and then mince it. This process, when done through a hand-cranked mincer can take 5-10 minutes per kilo of meat. Imagine sweating, manually mincing 17 kilos of meat, all the while striving to keep the meat as cold as possible. And then some recipes call for you to mince the meat a second time. Ouch.

After the meat is mixed it needs to be worked in a bowl until it becomes a sticky mass. Large-scale butchery operations use a machine that looks like a concrete mixer to do this. I use a spoon. At this point the sausages can be piped into the casings (skins, or if you'd rather, intestines), which have been salted, rinsed thoroughly, and slid, endless-condom-style, onto a sausage nozzle. This nozzle is attached to the front of the mincer and the meat is passed again through the machine, this time sans blade.

Stuffing casings is a two-man job and in my kitchen we refer to the two jobs as “pitcher” and “catcher” (“bowler” and “keeper” as well). You see, in this step, not only does one person (pitcher) have to re-crank the meat through, but the other guy (catcher) has to control the speed at which the casing feeds, so that the snags are plump but not too taught. Any air bubbles must be removed with a pin, and a uniform thickness maintained throughout. You end up with a really long sausage snake.

Next the sausages must be tied. There are so many fancy methods one can use to tie sausages, but I don't really know any of them. Not well enough to teach anyone else at least. The simple, non-fancy, method involves pinching off a link, turning it towards you, then pinching off a second link roughly the same size and turning it away from you. You repeat this alternating towards and away for the length of the sausage snake.

The snags, if you have followed procedure more or less exactly, are now ready to cook. (Whether that be poaching, frying, cold or hot smoking.)

The sausages which Brian and I made, the ones which prompted his musings about our general disregard for a knowledge base several hundreds of years old, were not made in exactly this way. We might have ignored suggestions to re-mince some of the meat, and our ratios of meat to fat, would have been better measured, rather than eyeballed. We could have paid a bit more attention to the temperature of the mix as a whole as well. I'm speaking in the hypothetical because any one of these mistakes (we probably made all three) would have lead to the roughly 15 kilos of grainy, fatty-yet-dry sausages we produced.

The next batch, with more care, were great. Lesson learned.

Andouille-Style Rabbit Sausages

(I mentioned above that sausages are a two-man job. That's true. Today, my wing-man was my 3 ½-year-old. It's hard work, not complicated work. He pipped the meat and I shaped the sausages. My guy's a little champion. I couldn't have done it without him.)

These highly spiced sausages are traditionally smoked – either hot smoked to cook them through, or cold smoked to add an additional layer of flavor. I've elected not to smoke them at all, as I don't want to completely overpower the flavor of the rabbit. We'll also be using a blend of fatty pork with the lean rabbit.

As I mentioned above, this post is the first in a three-part series. These are intense sausages; you can eat them on their own, as they are delicious, but make sure to save about 500g for the master project.

1 farmed white rabbit

Breakdown the rabbit by first removing the back legs. Pop the hip joints out of socket and cut any connective tissue holding the joint together. Cut the leg muscle away from the body, keeping the knife as close to the backbone as possible so that the leg stays completely intact. Reserve the two hind legs for next week's post.

Using a sharp, flexible knife remove the rest of the meat from the rabbit. Start by cutting two parallel lines in the channels which run down either spine of the animal, the backbones will form two channels for your blade. Working the knife around the ribcage you should be able to remove all the meat from the chest of the animal and cut through the two shoulder joints. Using the point of the knife pierce through the flesh where the spine meets the ribcage of the rabbit and collect the loin which lies inside the chest cavity. Cut, with the knife running along either side of the spine, towards the tail end, until the two sides of meat are free. Cut and scrape the meat from the two front legs. Check all the meat for bone fragments and then dice into 1-2cm chunks. Reserve the bones and keep everything refrigerated.

Alternately, ask your butcher to prep the rabbit for you.

Sausages

Start by preparing about three metres of sheep casings. Soak them in warm water for about an hour and then rinse them. Find one of the ends and squeeze a few drops of oil into the casing. Using pinched fingers, work the oil down the length of the casing, squeezing any excess out the other end. This light oiling will make loading the casing onto the nozzle and feeding it off much easier. Load up the nozzle according to the instructions included with your mincer.

You'll need about 1 kilo of meat to match the spice measurements below. My rabbit yielded about 500g of meat, and I made the rest up with pork neck, a flavorful and fatty (and cheap) cut.

rabbit meat
fatty pork, diced into 1-2cm chunks
(the meat weight total should be 1 kilo)
15g sea salt flakes
1g cayenne pepper
¼ whole nutmeg, grated
1 clove, crushed in a mortal and pestal
1 allspice (pimento) berry, crushed in a mortar and pestal
pinch dried oregano
2 g mustard powder
1g fresh black pepper
2g fresh thyme, leaves only
35g milk powder
1 large brown onion, fine dice
5 cloves garlic, fine dice

Mix all of the ingredients together in a bowl by hand. Mince through your mincer with the smallest die, keeping as cold as possible. Work the mince in a large bowl with a wooden spoon until it is sticky and looks more-or-less homogeneous. Stuff the prepared casings with the mince. Tie into sausages using the towards/away/towards method I described in the post above. Cut the snags apart just before gently pan frying. Yum.

These are great with sauerkraut and mash, but remember, you need to keep about 500g-worth for the final dish we'll make in a couple post's time.

The Rip-Off

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I get a little worked up about culinary plagiarism, as I might have mentioned once or twice before. There is a restaurant here in Sydney which is consistently rated in the very top echelon of the City's dining scene. The meal I had there was technically flawless, worthy of Michelin Stars, but for one thing: three of the six courses we ate that evening were direct copies of dishes I've seen elsewhere. I'd seen them in my cookbooks at home, to be more precise, and what was presented to me at the table could have been the photographic twin of the dishes in my books at home. I can, on some level, appreciate the technical ability required to re-create these meals, but I didn't then, and don't now, understand why the wholesale duplication of another, sometimes well-known, dish qualifies one for “best-of-the-best” status in Sydney. If I copied the same dishes and sold them in the bistro I now run I'd be called a copy-cat. However, when one fine-dining chef rips another fine dining chef off, it's rewarded, and called artistry. I don't get it. What happened to originality?

My wife, with whom I shared both the meal and the trepidations, took the opportunity, not long after our meal, to confront Sydney's preeminent food critic on talk back radio, when he happened to be a guest. Why, she (and I) wanted to know, did this blatant plagiarism go either unnoticed or ignored? Why are we eating food conceived and designed by chefs in another hemisphere and paying dearly for the privilege. The Critic failed to explain, really, saying something along the lines that the execution was good enough to merit a nearly perfect rating.

Really? Perfect copying is just as good as innovation? I can't buy that. Imagine if that same principle applied to all consumer goods: Sure your iphone is a fake, but it is a pretty good replica, so what's the problem?

I suspect that distance has a fair bit to to with this attitude. iphones are shipped all over the world, signature dishes from European restaurants are not. An Ozzy chef wants to try his hand at some of the in-vogue dishes made by his European peers and the local food circles turn something of a blind eye to the fact, as it might just be the most simple way of tasting what's going on on the other culinary side of the world.

Still, I expect more from the leaders of the Australian culinary movement. I'm just sayin'.

This week, I am doing absolutely nothing to advance the cause, for I am ripping off a North American recipe. Well, not exactly. To be more precise, I am trying to reproduce one. Here in Oz, you see, we have these cookies called Tim-Tams. They are, and this is science, more addictive than heroin. Australia should use these little chocolate, cookie, and salty caramel numbers in lieu of international currency. I've learned, since moving here, to be cautious as to which of my friends and family in the States I expose to Tim-Tams, as I can only afford to meet the export needs of so many relatives.

Now, there is a cookie that exists in America which I crave in much the same way. The Girls Scouts Of America go door to door selling cookies every year, and one variety is the absolutely irresistible: Samoas. These chocolate, caramel, and coconut cookies, also called Caramel deLites, are possibly the greatest example of cookietry known to man. I love them, and as they are not easy to come by in OZ, am going to make a batch.

Well, no. Because the version you buy for the Girl Scouts are hexagon doughnut-shaped. Not only is replecating this step terribly time consuming, it means that there is a little hole missing out of each cookie you get. No thank you, Ma'am. Instead, I am making one giant cookie, and then cutting it into bars, giant ones sure to encourage over-consumption.

Samoas Rip Off Bars

(Let there be no confusion as to the origin.)

Cookie Base

125g sugar
175g butter, room temp
1 egg
1/2 vanilla pod scraped
250g flour
pinch salt

Preheat your oven to 180ºC. Cream together the butter and sugar. Add the egg and vanilla seeds and mix well. Add in the flour and salt and mix until just combined. Turn into a baking paper-lined tray and press out until it fills the pan in an even, smooth layer. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until just browning on the edges. Remove from the oven and cool in the pan.

Chocolate

Right. This step is simple. You melt some chocolate, then spread it on. What's that you say? I don't temper the chocolate? That's right, both because I'm a pastry cowboy, and because I plan on eating all of these before anyone will have time to notice un-tempered chocolate.

250g dark chocolate

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler. Flip your cooled cookie base upside down and, using a pastry spatula, spread the chocolate in a thin, even layer on to the flat surface. Allow to cool completely and then set in the fridge.

Coconut

Choose unsweetened dried coconut for this, as these cookies are already sweet enough.

3 cups dried coconut

Preheat your oven to 160ºC. Spread the coconut out on a tray and toast in the oven, stirring occasionally15-25 minutes, until golden.

Caramel

This recipe makes about 500g of chewy caramel, but you'll only need 400g of it to make to cookies. Just pour the rest into a container lined with baking paper, and then cut them into caramels and wrap in waxed paper when cooled.
250ml cream
60ml sweetened condensed milk
250ml glucose syrup
250g sugar
60ml water
60g butter

Combine the cream and condensed milk in a small pot on low heat, stirring to dissolve the condensed milk. Heat until hot but not boiling.

Meanwhile, stir together the glucose, sugar, and water in a large pot with steep sides. Bring to a boil and reduce the heat to medium, boiling until the mixture reaches a temperature of 121ºC. Add the butter and warm cream mix and return to a boil. Reduce the heat to low and cook slowly, stirring often, until the temperature reaches 118ºC. This step should take at least an hour, as the slow cooking allows the caramel flavors to develop deep roasted sugar characteristics, rater than scalded milk and burnt sugar.

Mix 400g of the caramel together with the toasted coconut (above) and spread onto the non-chocolate side of the cookie base (also above). Cool, cut into squares, and drizzle with a bit more melted chocolate if you wish.

Risks

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Someone needs to fill one of those glossy, image-driven cookbooks which live, barnacle-like, around cash registers in book shops, with a collection of all the meal-in-hand street foods of the world. It would be all croque monsieurs and falafel rolls and tacos and crepes and pupusas and meat pies and pastizzies and hot dogs doughnuts and tamales and the like. I say “someone” because I'm not going to do it. Whoever does make the book should call it “Hand-held” and make the spine look like the layers of a hamburger, and the two covers like a bun. There, I've done most of the work for you. I'll buy the book when you've finished. I do so love me hand-held street food.

I spend a good deal of time, in fact, seeking out and eating hand-held street food. I am a bit obsessed, really. I'll more or less try anything that is sold from a cart, roadside stand, or suspect take-away-only hole. I do usually sit back and watch for a moment or two, just to see if any of the locals are buying, but that's about the extent of my risk-analysis. I suppose, given the foods I'm willing to consume, from the vendors whom I'm willing to purchase, it's only a matter of time until I poison myself. These are the sorts of chances I'm willing to take.

Poisoning, actually, is quite at the fore of my thoughts, as I spent the day yesterday in a government-mandated food safety course (one employee from each kitchen in the state is now required to complete the course). I am now, (check yourself) a certified Food Safety Officer. Well, I made the “officer” bit up. And I don't yet actually have a certificate, per se, but it is, I've been assured, as good as “in the mail.” I'm considering having a engraved badge, sheriff-style, made up in the meantime.

I've been refreshed on cooking temperatures and cooling times and stock rotation and hand washing. It was, as you can imagine, a captivating eight hours. I did learn a bit about the exact behaviors of the most common bacteria which cause problems for the food industry. The one thing that stuck foremost in my mind is that beef is just as dangerous chicken.

The message, actually, was: “Don't eat rare meat.” It turns out, you see, that when it comes to food poisoning risk, chicken and beef are more or less equal. Australian chicken flocks, on the one hand, display about a 50% infection rate for salmonella. Beef, on the other, in OZ, have about a 30% infection rate for e. coli. Both salmonella and e. coli represent a group of pathogens of which only a small handful make us sick. It turns out that you have more or less the same chance of becoming ill eating undercooked chicken as you do eating undercooked beef. However, none of us ask for rare chicken. Several of us ask for rare beef.

The same rules which apply to chicken are applicable to all fowl. I eat duck medium-rare, quail rare, and squab nearly raw. While, from a cooking perspective, this has much to do with the flavor and toughness of the meat, as far as risk goes, I might as well be having diner at a chicken sashimi restaurant. Rare bird is as dangerous as raw beef.

That said, I'm still probably not going to start cooking my chicken thighs medium rare, on the bone, though I know it amounts to little more than superstition. In fact, everything I've just learned about the likelihood of microbial contamination mostly just piques my curiosity; I'm not going to change my eating habits. I'm not about to stop ordering my steaks bleu.

Nor do I suggest you cook the meat in the recipe below any more than a sear on the surface. The combination of crisp char paired with impossibly moist, rare – nearly raw – meat is a culinary treat in itself. The flavor is an absolute delight when combined with the fresh herb salad and the sharp, aggressive flavors of the dressing.

This is not actually, to my knowledge, a street food in any part of the world. It is rather, my ideal summer street food: an adaptation of Thai beef salad with strong Vietnamese influences. I've packed this for innumerable picnics, as it is light and clean and tidy and tasty.

Thai Beef Salad Rolls

This is perfect summer picnic food. It's not remotely summer here, in fact we've just had a week of endless, cold drizzle, punctuated by occasional downpours. However, the combination of the footage of the U.S. heatwave and my general desire to imagine warmer times has me in the mood for this meal.

1 300g steak, room temperature

Ok. I'll really teach you all how to cook a steak sometime in the near future, as it is a simple, but delicate craft. Here it is not so much so. You'll need a 300gm cut of beef – something with a bit of fat in it, not too much – like a sirloin, or a scotch fillet, that will end up being about 3 cm (just over an inch) thick, and a really, really, hot pan.

Heat a heavy-bottomed skillet on the highest of heat. Add a touch of oil to the hot pan. Quickly season the meant all over liberally with lashings of salt and pepper. Sear the steak on one side until a dark brown, crisp crust has formed. Flip the steak and cook until the same dark, caramelized crust has formed. Remove from pan and rest until the steak is at room temperature.

Cut the rested, rare meat into thin slices. It will be quite rare.

Rolls

Steak slices (see above)
1 bunch mint, leaves only
1 bunch Thai basil, leaves only
1 bunch coriander, leaves only
1 small bunch vermicelli rice noodles, cooked according to the packet
1 spanish onion, fine slice
1 red bird's eye chili, fine slice
100g mung bean sprouts
100g cashew nuts, toasted, lightly cracked and salted
12 rice paper wrappers

Mix the herbs leaves together. Soften the wrappers one at a time in warm water, according the the packet instructions. Lay out one softened rice paper roll and add lay two or three slices of beef down vertically in the centre. Top this with some of the mixed greens, a few noodles, a few slices of onion, a couple chili rings, a few bean sprouts and a sprinkling of cashews. Fold in the top and bottom and then roll from right to left, pulling the filling in tight as you go.

Repeat until all the ingredients are used up. Serve with a dipping sauce (below).

Dipping Sauce

Here is where I am going to call upon your ninja cooking skills. This is the sort of recipe that a Grandmother gives out. Not so much a list of quantities, but a relationship of ingredients. I'll give you a list of what goes in, and it it up to you to combine the items in a way that you can taste all of them in a balanced manner.

bird's eye chili, fine slice
fish sauce
lime juice
lime zest
palm sugar grated (or dark brown sugar)

What you want here is a flaming hot balance of sweet and salty and sour and heat. Play with a combination of the ingredients until you achieve this. I suggest starting with two tablespoons of fish sauce, two tablespoons of lime juice, one whole chili (finely sliced), and two tablespoons grated palm sugar. Work them all together until you find a flavor balance.

Over-sharing

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Menus are excessively verbose. That, in a uncharacteristic burst of straightforwardness, is the thesis of this week's post. Reading a modern menu is an absolute onslaught of adjectives and ingredients and verbs and animals and adverbs. The whole experience of sitting down and choosing a meal is wrought with a veritable avalanche of information about origin and method and accompaniments. It all serves only to confuse, and I say this both as a chef and a diner. No one is really to blame, these things often have a life and momentum of their own. I have to list most of the ingredients in a dish, when I write a menu, because the customers expect it; customers expect as much because every other menu they read has the same. Every menu is crammed with information because it is the new convention. Some of my patrons, after reading a dish description which might include only (only!) half a dozen items, ask the waitress: “What else comes with the Snapper?”

The down-side of all this verbosity is threefold. First, it is confusing. No one really wants to know about every single herb used to marinate the quail. Too many ingredients are too difficult to combine mentally, and the patron can't, generally, imagine what their meal might taste like. The highlight reel is better.

Second, it encourages overconfidence. If I give you a list of foods and sprinkle over the top a handful of culinary verbs, customers build expectations. Now, it is well known that the major job of the wait staff is to let people know what they are in for. “Just so you know, there is a half-hour wait on food.” “The squid is more of an starter size...” Building expectations. If customers are left to form their own expectations, well, they are almost bound to be disappointed in one way or another. Knowing every bit of what you are about to eat only serves to form a too-precise image of what is to come, and any disparity spells heartbreak, no matter how great the meal might be.

Third, the practice of listing every ingredient of every dish is So. Fucking. Boring. What happened to mystery? Why should I have to tell every single patron how I execute every single step? Actually, I don't. When I tell you it is a roast ½ chicken, for example, I mean it is a confit leg and pan-roasted breast. There is no reason you, as the diner, needs to know that. Be pleasantly surprised by how good your meal is. When does oversimplification become dishonesty? I don't know. However, I do know that I'd rather a bit of mystery in lieu of over-sharing.

Mystery and surprises are, actually, precisely what I love when writing a menu. And I am not the only one. Some fine dining restaurants are going to the opposite extreme, providing one or two words to describe a dish. I'd like to live somewhere in between, writing a menu that offers enough information to sell the meal, whilst leaving plenty or room for interpretation. It's inside this wiggle room where chef's get to have a bit of fun. For example, I often list ratatouille as a side for various proteins, and customers expect to see stewed Mediterranean-style vegetables; instead they get a pretty little parcel of those same veggies, wrapped in char-grilled eggplant, zucchini, and red capsicum. It is, I hope, something that makes people smile.

I've never served the dish in today's post in the restaurant, but if I were to, I'd call this collection of five different tortellini, each with a different vegetable filling, and brown butter, simply “Roast Vegetable Tortellini” and let the customer discover what's inside each one. Fun!

Roast Vegetable Tortellini

You'll need some fresh pasta for this one, which we covered a few weeks back. Roll the pasta out to the second thinest setting on your machine.

To make tortellini, cut the pasta into 6cm disks. Place a teaspoon of filling into the center of the disk, wet the edges with a bit of water, and fold them over into half circles, pinching gently to seal. Gently grab the two corners and bring them together, giving a half twist so that the edge of the pasta turns up like a little collar. Pinch the two corners together where they meet.

Bring a large pot of water to the boil and blanch each type of tortellini separately. Not because they have different cooking times, but because this will help you tell them apart. Cook each batch for about 3-4 minutes, until the torts float and stay on the surface for a minute or two. Drop the tortellini into an ice bath to stop them from cooking. Drain and set aside until ready to serve.

You'll need to make one of each tort for each serve, and you should be able to make about 4-6 serves with the quantities below.

Caramelized Carrot Purée

Right. Purée is a bit of a misnomer here, as it is not nearly smooth enough. The goal with all five of these so-called purées is not so much smoothness as thickness. They need to be firm enough to stand up in a spoon. Caramelized carrots are a favorite of mine, and I have featured them on this blog in the past. Carrots require nothing but a bit of salt and patience to become richly sweet.

1 large carrots, peeled
1 tsp butter

Slice the carrot as thinly as possible (using a mandolin or the slicing blade on a food processor). Heat a small, heavy based pan on medium heat. Add the butter and, when it starts to foam, add the carrots and a pinch of salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, scraping the bottom to prevent sticking, for 140 min – 1 hour. The carrots will break up, dry out considerably, and deepen in color. When the mixture is deep orange and richly caramely sweet, Remove from the heat. Mash with the back of a spoon, or pass through a ricer if you like. Texture is just fine here. Taste and season liberally. Cool and refrigerate.

Parsnip Purée

I love parsnips. They have a vague spice flavor that I can't quite place. They are great roasted, mashed, and boiled. I simply blanch a parsnip here until it is just cooked, and then pass it through a ricer or mouli.

1 parsnip, peeled, roughly chopped

Bring a small pot of water to a boil. Drop in the chopped parsnip and simmer until the pieces can be easily pierced with a knife. Drain. Pass the cooked parsnip through a ricer or mouli. Season the resulting rough purée well. Cool and refrigerate.

Roast Tomato Purée

This is actually tomato fondue – a concentrated tomato paste of which I have written a few times before. This is a recipe, as I keep saying, which you should know and love.

3 large ripe tomatoes, (about 500g total)
½ brown onion, peeled and chopped
1 heaped tsp tomato paste
½ clove garlic, cracked

Remove the core from the tomatoes and slash an x at the bottom of each one. Plunge them into a boiling pot of water for 30 seconds to loosen the skins. Remove and shock in an ice bath to cool. Peel away the skins. Cut the tomatoes in half along the horizontal and roughly squeeze out most of the seeds. Roughly chop the remaining flesh.

In a heavy-bottomed, stainless steel (aluminum is a reactive no-no for tomatoes) pot on medium heat sweat the onion in a bit of oil with a pinch of salt until soft and translucent but not colored. Add the tomato paste and cook until it splits, that is until the oil and tomato separate. Add the ½ garlic clove and then add the tomatoes. Cook over low heat for 1-2 hours, stirring frequently to prevent it catching, until the fondue is very thick and smells of deeply roasted tomatoes. Remove the garlic and season the fondue.

Roast Beetroot Purée

Beets, or as they are called here in OZ, beetroot, are not one of my favorite vegetables. I might have mentioned that before. Something about sweet dirt. That said, beets do have a distinctive flavor and amazing color.

1 beetroot

Preheat your oven to 180ºC. Wrap the beetroot in foil with a pinch of salt and a dash of oil and roast, on a tray, until cooked through – about an hour. You'll be able to easily pierce the beet with a skewer through the middle when it is cooked. Remove from the oven and the foil and cool completely. When cool, peel away the skin with your hands (I suggest gloves) or a pairing knife. Cut the beetroot into cubes and then pulse in a food processor until it is a fine kibble. Without the addition of liquids or oil, the beetroot will never become a perfectly smooth purée. Remember, a bit of texture is a good thing.

Pea Purée

Ok. Confession time. I use frozen peas. In fact, I often use frozen peas. Fresh peas, unless you grow them yourself, are wildly variable. The problem is that peas don't fare well once picked (they become less sweet and more starchy over time). Frozen, sadly, for those of us without a garden, are the best alternative.

½c peas, blanched

Drain the blanched peas. Pulse them in a food processor until they form a very rough paste. Season liberally.

Finishing the Tortellini (With a Brown Butter Sauce)

Bring a large pot of water to the boil. Drop one serve (that's one of each type of tortellini into the water. Boil 2-3 minutes and remove with a slotted spoon.

Meanwhile, in a small pan on medium heat, melt a tablespoon or two of butter. Allow it to foam up and then subside. Remove the butter from the heat at the moment the milk solids (that is, the yellow flecks which separate out when the butter foams) begin to brown. Add a squeeze of lemon juice to the pan to arrest the cooking and keep warm.

Toss the cooked and drained tortellini in the butter and arrange in a bowl. Sauce with the remaining brown butter and add a herb or two, possibly a bit of ricotta, maybe a few shavings of parmesan, as garnish.

On Recall

noreply@blogger.com (Jerad) — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It seems as if every food writer who wishes to address the subject of culinary nostalgia is somehow obligated to to mention Proust, his Remembrance of Things Past, and madeleines. I intend to do almost no such thing. You, if you find yourself at all interested, can look up what the hell I am talking about. There is such a broad literary tradition of igniting childhood memories through the medium of food you might nearly call it a genre. The convention even exists in kids films: the penultimate scene in Ratatouille involves the antagonist, upon taking a bite, jolting loose a memory of his own childhood and subsequently being completely won over. My childhood, in contrast, holds nearly no like examples of formative food experiences, of nibble-triggered, emotional food bombs. I remember, rather, only an endless stream of processed foodstuffs, just-add-water dinners, and 70's hold-overs. Not much to grow teary-eyed about. Still, I find myself occasionally nostalgic.

This week is one of those occasions, and, specifically, I am nostalgic for a childhood, American desert: Strawberry Shortcake. Not to be confused with the greeting card character of the same name, strawberry shortcake was a staple of my childhood. Originally, the dessert, as the name implies, would have been made with shortbread (which was once commonly called shortcake). Over time in the States this evolved into a couple variations: layers of sablée pastry, or a type of sweet, American-style biscuit with berries and cream between and on top. Either sound great to me.

What I remember is much more dire. I recall, for sale, packets of preservative-rammed, dimpled, sponge cakes, conveniently placed between the punnets of fresh strawberries and little tubs of gloopy “strawberry glaze” which I can only now imagine must have been some sort of evil combination of red dye, corn syrup, and corn starch. All of this was cross-promoted with aerosol tins of whipped cream, completing the package. What I knew as strawberry shortcake was a pile of glossy, artificially, glazed berries atop a vanilla-flavored, dry sponge cake, garnished with lashings of instant whipped cream. Nothing much to long for.

I don't necessarily want to reproduce the exact flavors of the strawberry shortcake of my childhood. Actually, I don't remotely want to reproduce those exact flavors. I would, however, like to encapsulate the idea of my childhood strawberry shortcake. In fact, I want to break it down a little. I want all the great flavors that I remember, only better - not so saccharine and fluffy and processed. Strawberry shortcake, in my memory, is the flavor of the freedom of summer in youth and of desert sunsets and the smell of everyone in the neighborhood manning a BBQ. What I remember most about eating strawberry shortcake is how perfectly cool and sweet it was, always at the end of a dry, Wyoming, August day. To have again the ability to enjoy so completely such immediate and visceral pleasures...

Strawberry Shortcake

Right. I'm going to mess with every single element here, and layer the dessert in a shot glass. Something about dessert in a cup reminds me about my childhood as well. Also, a few bites of any one thing is better than either none at all (obvious) or far too many. I suggest, therefore, making this in shot glasses or small tumblers, so that everyone gets a tiny, manageable serve. This should make about 6 serves, depending on the size of the glass you use. You might have a bit of extra jelly and custard left over, and quite a bit of shortbread, but it is difficult to work in smaller quantities. Besides, it's better than not having enough.

Shortbread Purée

That's right. Purée. Ok? Well, not exactly. More like a shortbread crumb mixed with just enough cream to make it moist. Think cookies and cream at its best.

Shortbread

225g unsalted butter, softened
110g sugar
450g flour

Preheat your oven to 180ºC. Cream together the butter and sugar. Mix in the flour just enough to combine. The mix will be crumbly. Press into a buttered 20 cm round tin and transfer to the oven. Reduce the heat immediately to 160ºC. Bake 25 minutes, taking care not to let it color. Remove from the oven and cool in the tin.

Purée

The word “purée” is a bit of creative license, as this is too thick to be really qualify. It is more of a cakey cookie. Delicious, whatever you call it.

50g shortbread
100ml cream

Process the shortbread in a food processor until it becomes fine crumbs. Mix with the cream just enough to combine.

Divide the paste between 6 shot glassed, taping it down flat.

Strawberry Jelly

250g berries, hulled, and roughly chopped
100g sugar
2 tbsp water
gelatin (sheets or powder)
6 strawberries, fine dice

Bring a medium pot of water to a boil. Combine all the ingredients in a bowl, toss, and cover tightly with cling film. Place the bowl over the pot (like a lid) and remove from the heat. Sit, bowl on the pot, until the lot reach room temperature. Remove the cling film from the bowl and strain, reserving the liquid and discarding the solids.

Measure the liquid. For every 100ml of liquid, you'll need 1 sheet of gelatin, or one tsp or gelatin powder. If using sheet gelatin, soften it first by soaking it in cold water, removing it, and then dissolving it in a bit of the warmed, reserved berry liquid, and then add the lot to the total reserved liquid. If using the powdered form, simply sprinkle the gelatin over the reserved liquid. Either way, apply the gelatin and cool the liquid in the fridge until it starts to thicken, but not set. Divide the diced strawberries between the glasses. Pour the jelly into the glasses, over the shortbread purée and berries, and set in the fridge at least 4 hours.

Burnt Honey and Vanilla Custard

This is, by far, the greatest stretch: I'm replacing whipped cream with a flavored custard. I wanted to introduce both an adult flavor in the caramelized honey and a dense richness to replace the airy whipped cream. The combination makes the whole experience a bit grown-up, smoky, and mysterious.

150ml cream
150ml milk
½ vanilla pod, split and scraped
4 yolks
80g honey

In a large pot on medium heat, bring the honey to a boil. Reduce the heat to low and simmer until the temperature reaches 130ºC. Pour in the milk, cream, vanilla pod, and scraped seeds, and bring just back to a simmer. Remove from the heat.

Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, whisk the yolks until they are light and fluffy. Ladle a few scoops of the hot honey cream into the yolks, whisking as you go, to “temper” the eggs; that is, bring them up to temperature without scrambling them. Pour this mix of eggs and honey cream back into the pot with the remainder of the honey cream and stir, on low heat, until the mixture thickens and reaches 82ºC, or thickly coast the back of a spoon. Pass the custard through a strainer and cool.

When cold, layer on top of the set strawberry jelly.

Dried Strawberries and Strawberry Dust

200g strawberries, hulled and sliced ¼ cm thick
50g sugar

Preheat your oven to 50ºC. Lay the berry slices in rows on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Sprinkle the berries with the sugar. Dry in the slow oven overnight. Remove and cool.

Remove the berries from the baking paper and reserve a dozen of the prettiest ones. Transfer the remainder to a mortar and pestal and pound until a fine powder forms.

Bringing It All Together

At this point, if you have followed instructions, the dessert is nearly finished. You've got the shortbread on the bottom, followed by strawberry jelly, and a topping of honey custard, in lieu of cream. All you need to finish is to stick a slice or two of the dried strawberries into the top, sprinkle some berry dust, and provide a spoon.