When you have been cooking all wrong...

There is a trend in cooking - I think driven by the extreme scientific types - about concentrating flavours.

When Thomas Keller makes a little soup (just a mouthful) from brocolli - the flavour of a whole bunch of brocoli is concentrated in that soup.

When Hestor Blumenthal makes his (fantastic) spagetti bolognaise he has a dozen tricks to make the meat taste meatier - and its all about trace ingredients such a a touch of thai fish sauce and star anise.

And I admit that I used the star anise pretty liberally for exactly that purpose.

So then I go to another style of restaurant. I am staying with my inlaws in Western Victoria so the wife and I went to Stefanos. This is one of the best restaurants I know anywhere in the world. It is better than any in Sydney (including Tets and my favourite Seans Panaroma). Its certainly better than any in Melbourne - and hey it stands up against St Johns in London too.

But Thomas Keller it is not.

The meal was one of delicate balance after delicate balance. The first dish was a cured kingfish.

But I was struggling to work out how it was cured. Everything I cure tastes pretty salty. This did not. But if it was citrus cured you could barely taste the lemon.

It turns out it was cured in the juice of five oranges and 30g of salt. Relatively little salt given the task - and oranges are so much gentler than lemons (though I am determined to try grapefruit).

It was served with capers - but very few. Sort of like the melodrama of putting saltanas in your saltana bran. You want a few - but no so much that there is no surprise when you get the sweetness of one. This was perfect.

There were a few cubes (2mm cubes that is) of beetroot - which struck me as very Australian - but I can't work out why they were there.

My wife - and this was a compliment - described this as so delicate it was almost flavourless. It set the tone for noting subtlety - and that was what was really special about Stefanos.

The next course was the most delicate beef carpacio I have ever had. Not rich - and with some home made mayonaise and a few other odds - truly scrumptious - but without being anything like as overwhelming as the Bourdain Steak tartar.

Then followed zuchini flowers stuffed with a light goats(?) cheese and fried. Nothing complicated - with some shaved ham of the most amazing but delicate flavour. The cheese and ham platter from heaven.

Then followed a hand made ravioli stuffed with quail and served in sage butter. Simple stuff - well executed (but I guess it is a pain to make). My wife who is allergic to wheat had one of the most original pastas I have ever tasted - a buffalo mozarella and caramelized onion sauce on a gluten free pasta. I think it was a one-off but if so Stefano is a genius.

Mains however were a disappointment. The lamb was good - the potatos were excellent - but it did not sing. I can cook better lamb - and so can Stefano. Last time we were here the mains were an italian style roast chicken. Good -but not as good as Seans.

Desert was simple - vanilla and orange panacotta (but he called it something other than panacotta). He must have used some very bitter oranges and they offset the sweetness of a very sugary sauce. Fabulous and delicate again.

What this taught me though is that there is a sterility in the modern flavour concentration methods of cooking - and that some things can be obtained through balance rather than brute force.

This is not a restaurant of the modern fashion. The Hestor Blumenthals of the world dominate the debate because they are so darn clever. But it is real food done with a flair you will find few places in the world.

I know the readership of my main blog (and hence this) is London and New York - but if anyone has influence this deserves a place in the top 50 restaurants in the world... and it should be so rated.



John Hempton

Sausages, salad and wine

It was a busy weekend with multiple trips to the beach,  a visit to Alice (more on that later) and my son revealing that he has always thought of me as a "fat mutant zombie bloodsucking freak".  So dinner on Sunday (often elaborate) was really simple.  

Just sausages from the organic butcher in Randwick, fine fresh white bread from a run-of-the-mill (non chain) bakery, a french salad of beans, tomato and fresh basil, some home made tomato chutneys and a very fine bottle of wine.

Here was the wine.

http://www.75cl.com/v15155.connetable-de-talbot-1994.htm

Or in Euro because I gather you can still buy it for a suitably modest amount:

http://www.wineandco.com/connetable-talbot-rouge-1994--second-vin-du-chateau-talbot-484-fr-eur-fr.html

And yes it did come from the cellar and I have stored it since original issue.

And the pleasure of it all showed nothing needs be too complicated to be delicious if the family is loving and your son will forgive you for being a mutant zombie.

And the good wine helped.

John Hempton

Well that was a disaster...

So I have been experimenting with pigs trotters.  Its the Fergus Henderson fan in me.  

But I have learnt a few lessons.

1).  When you boil up pigs trotters you need to strip the meat out whilst the pig trotter is warm.  Otherwise they become really difficult to handle.

2).  When you strip the meat and mix wiht the onion you better roll it into a sausage or put it in the terrine pretty quickly because as the fat congeals the meat will sort of stick together - and probably in an uncomfortable pattern.  

But even then I got to deal with a few issues.  Is there a difference between front-pigs feet (hands?) and rear feet with respect to the amount of meat?  Almost every trotter had nothing on it.  Just fat and gristle.  Yummy fat and gristle - but fat and gristle.  Is there any reader amongst my few who can answer that?  

And when I have finished with that I might explain the rest of the extent of the disaster.

John H

The joys of smoked bacon

Sitting on the stove at the moment is a pot with 450grams (say 1lb) of smoked bacon, twenty pigs trotters, a couple of onions, carrots, bay leaves, parsley, water.  Simmer for three hours.

I am going to pick apart the meat, stir in some caremalized onion, make a sausage and serve with more caremalized onion and some chives if I can find them...

What to do with the liquor... mix with stock, make ox tail risotto...

Unctious I guess...

I promise to let you know how it goes.

J

The joys of unsmoked bacon

The bacon recipe I gave was unsmoked.  You can smoke it at an intermediate stage - but my experiments have been mixed.  (You need someone to chop down a fruit tree for you because the wood is good for smoking.  Where is George Washington when you need him!)

Anyway unsmoked bacon is not fashionable - but it makes the best baked beans.  There is a wonderful baked beans recipe in Fergus Henderson's first cook book.  Works even better when you have made the bacon.  He insists on unsmoked bacon - and having done his recipe with both smoked and unsmoked varieties he is right.

John

Don't bring home the bacon - make it

This blog doesn’t have many readers – but one of them managed to ask a bacon recipe.

Easy enough.  Two thirds a cup of salt, one third sugar, small teaspoon of pink salt (sodium nitrite).  Mix it lots of spices including star anise.  If you want it to be sweet mix in extra sugar or honey or maple syrup.  I have never used maple syrup but the US recipes include it.  It just costs an absolute bomb in Australia.

I tend to go for spicy not sweet – but the I am not American.  The Americans are into sweet pork which they cook to a crispy candy cinder…

Anyway rub it all into a big slap of pork belly – skin on -  and put in a zip lock back.  Cure for a week turning the bag over regularly and making sure that the cure covers all the pork.

  

It will get awful wet in that bag as the cure sucks the liquid out of the pork.  Thick pork bellies take longer to cure – but I have always been a little sloppy about the seven days.

Preheat oven to 80-90 centigrade.  Some American recipes are at 200F – but just below boiling is the idea.  

Measure the temperature at 1.5 hours and then every 15 mins.  Stop about 65C.  It should smell great.

The books say remove the skin now whilst it is very warm.  

Let it cool.  Freezes well.  Keeps OK in the fridge - but a big pork belly is more bacon than you can handle in a week...

The liquid at the end of the brining process is probably carcinogenic.  

Eat some yourself before you give it to your family.  If you have botulism you want to kill yourself not your loved ones.  Even better - give it to the scraggy cat that hangs around asking for food.  Actually don't.  It will just encourage it.

John

Charcuterie in the age of terrorism

I went through a brief period of trying to cure my own pancetta.  Mostly super-spicy – mix say one gram of sodium nitrite with 300 grams of salt and an enormous number of spices (including my trusty star anise) and put it with a pork belly in the fridge in a zip lock plastic bag.

  

Turn the bag over every day for about 10 days and then wash and dry.  Roll it up and tie up very tightly with butchers twine and hang it under the house.  Hope the mould that grows is only white.  (All the white moulds are edible…)

The stuff is salty, very strong flavoured and delicious.

  

You can try making traditional bacon too – easy enough as long as you have an oven you can keep at 80 degrees centigrade for a couple of hours.

This is exciting stuff – real cookery – making exotic stuff from the cheap pork bellies you buy in Chinatown.  It also leads to hours of conversation with some Italian bloke you meet in Haberfield who suddenly thinks you are worthy of his time.

The problem of course is you need the sodium nitrite.  It’s the stuff that makes bacon pink, makes preserved meats carcinogenic and stops you getting botulism.

  

But sodium nitrite is hard to obtain because you can also make explosives out of it.  At least it is hard to obtain in Australia though it might not be in the US because the gun lobby has ensured its availability for the sort of nutcases that like to make their own gun powder and pack their own traditional rifles (or muskets).  

So here I am stuck in Australia in the age of terrorism, unable to find critical ingredients to make my bacon and wishing (just for once) that Australia had the National Rifle Association ensuring that I can obtain my core ingredients.

John Hempton