Hello par-hee

Here is what I have observed in the last 2 days

• There is a boucherie (butcher) or 2 always close by. In Melbourne, most people would by their meat from the supermarket. Otherwise, butchers are concentrated in the markets and you can’t just walk to one in your neighbourhood.
• The number of pâtissieres is ridiculous. Quality vary, but generally good to very good compared to back home.
• There are very few public toilets to be found – on the streets, and because the lack of shopping malls compared to back home, there just aren’t easy to find. I wonder if I missed something as I can’t figure out where the thousands and thousands of locals and tourists go for a toilet break
• Not as much dog poo as I thought
• When dusk renders the sky a dim and dark blue, the white/cream buildings are really beautiful. Then I realize I am standing in a maze of narrow streets, filled with shops, restaurant and French people chattering away. Sweet. I am in Paris for the rest of this year.

The French also have a liking of the lesser-known steaks in Australia. Bavette (flank – lateral abdominal muscles), onglet (hanger – part of diaphragm closer to the spine) and skirt steak (part of diaphragm) are frequently seen. Not exactly cheap either at 15-30 Euros/kg compared to less than 10 AUD/kg for skirt steak in Australia (although skirt steak is the cheapest). These cuts have large and prominent muscles fibers running parallel in a flat, sheet-like muscle. Often cooked rare by searing on both sides and the cut into thin slices against the grain, these steaks are very flavourful. Overcooking will make it very tough and dry. I read that in South America, these steaks are also popular, grilled quickly on open fire.

Bavette

Trimmed Wagyu beef cheeks with intramuscular connective tissue running through it

I tried 2 ways of cooking and both are very delicious. The first one is a red-wine base. Start by browning 4 cheeks in a large, heavy-based pot. Then sweat finely diced onions (2), carrot (2), celery (2 sticks) and shallots (5) in the same pot. Return the cheeks in the pot and add a bottle of a medium/heavy body red like a cab-sav or a shiraz. After this, add small amounts of soy sauce (40ml),  balsamic vinegar (40ml), 3 bay leaves and 3 table spoons of tomato paste. Oh, and 5-10 enthusiastic turns of the pepper grinder.  Put the lid on, turn the heat right down and go read a book. Stir/turn the cheeks every 40 min and after about 3 hours test the cheeks out with a fork. If you want to serve it thickly sliced with some sides you should be able poke fork easily into the cheeks without it falling apart. Cook it more if you want to serve it with pasta and tear it apart with a fork. Remove the cheeks when you think it’s done and reduce the remaining liquid until the thickness of a sauce. You could remove the solid bits before reducing if you want a more consistent sauce but I like the residual vegetable bits in my meal.

Red wine version

Molten goodness

The second method was Asian style. I had some braising liquid in the freezer that I reserved after cooking pork neck. The liquid is made of the same ingredients below and is really a version of the Asian ‘master-stock’ that just gets re-used over and over again. Brown the cheeks like before but this time add reserved braising liquid instead of wine. If you don’t have this, then add some beef stock or water. Top up either liquid with soy sauce (100-150ml), good rice wine (100-150 ml), xiao-shing wine (50 ml) and a little balsamic vinegar or black Asian vinegar (30 ml) for acidity. Then add the aromatics: garlic (6-10), shallots (5), chili (to taste), ginger (thumb size), spring-onions (6-10) a few turns of the pepper grinder and 1-2 star anise if you like. Put the lid on and go read another book.

Importantly, the pot size should be such that minimal braising liquid/wine is required. I changed to a smaller pot to allow be to pack the cheeks together better. Less braising liquid maximized the flavour as the cheeks don’t loose as much flavour to the liquid. Ensure the cheeks are just covered.

Asian style. Frozen braising liquid (top-left)

I served the Asian style with rice. Take a ladle of the remaining liquid in the pot and add some finely chopped spring onion, garlic and ginger. Dip/drizzle on the sliced cheeks and hope someone washes the dishes. Honestly, I think the Asian-style taste better.

Molten meat on rice

My friend served it up with a light soy/citrus dressing. Gold.

This will be my downfall. A friend of mine gave me a stick of this from Leo’s Fine Food in Kew a few weeks ago. It’s so delicate, light and the taste more complex and will elevate warm bread into another level. Commercial butter in Australia contains about 16-18% water and the rest mainly fat. Cultured butter contains a variable water content. European butters typically less (14%) which is good for browning butter.

But the main difference is the flavour. Butter is traditionally made from the cream that settles on top of fresh milk. After a few days, naturally occurring bacteria in the milk and air slightly ferment the cream and turns it into crème fraiche. The flavour comes from the fermentation process, just like cheese. The crème fraiche is then churned to separate the butterfat from buttermilk (mainly water). Over-whip cream from the supermarket and the yellow-ish substance is essentially butter.

So really, they are about to start a Butter Club. The proverb on the packaging reads “Eat butter first, and eat it last, and live till a hundred years be past”. Hmmm.

flower shop with glorious light

Vic Market is known for it’s size, useless junk and touristy crap, cheap produce and if you chose properly, some really good quality produce. In particular, Sardes meat shop just to the right of the entrance on the corner of Elizabeth and Victoria st have some amazing cuts of meat at very reasonable prices. When was the last time you saw 4 different cuts Wagu beef cut to order?

Sardes meat

Days off right before a string of night shift calls for some slow cooked food. The Japanese Cha Shao pork that is served with ramen adds so much flavour to the dish.  There are hundreds of ways to make this dish. I just fiddled with the sauce to make it taste the way I liked. I also added a modern touch of solidifying the sauce with abit of agar agar which seems all the craze with the western chef with the wave of molecular gastronomy.

• Pork – Leg (is what I used, but any cut with skin/fat/tendons will do)
• Soy
• Dashi powder
• Mirin
• Sugar
• Garlic
• Spring onion
• Shao hsing wine – 1/2 cup

Pan fry the pork first to add a little colour. make up the sauce and top it up with water (about 1 part sauce to 5 parts water). make sure it taste right and not too salty. it should be a little salty, a little sweet and full of flavour. Play with it. Cook it in the sauce for about 1.5hrs. Turn off the heat and just leave it in there until it reaches room temperature. Put it in the fridge. Slice thinly (best straight out of fridge) to serve.

The jelly is made with the sauce as above, boiled with agar agar (1 part agar agar to 100 parts sauce) until it completely dissolves. Pour it into a plate and chill it in the fridge until it turns solid. slice to shape.

A journalist in this month’s Gourmet Traveller already called spherication dead. But there is a little trend to smoke unfamiliar ingredients these days. Betroot, for example, appeard in Masterchef Australia and I swear I have seen it somewhere else before. Smoked butter, smoked duck and what else?

This is an easy way to impart an extra layer of flavour to food. Place the food you want to smoke on a large plate. Heat up a small stainles steel pot to very hot. Warm a small ramikin with hot water and wipe it dry. Place the ingredients you want to turn into smoke in the ramikin and place it all on the same plate our food it sitting. Pour 50ml of grape seed or peanut oil in the hot pan – it should smoke immediately. Pour the oil into the ramikin and then cover the whole plate with a large glass bowl turned up-side-down. Let it sit for a few minutes.

I tried using some chinese tea the other day. I think traditionally you can use fine wood chips made for smoking. Asian flavours also call in a mix of rice and tea leaf. You can play around with pepper, coriander seeds and pretty much everything else that can burn.

While the French have figured how to make souffles, the Chinese have been scrambling eggs the way I like. This is a major generalization without much basis. I am referring to cooking eggs in a bain marie. Beaten eggs are stirred and slowly cooked to make a very creamy scrambled egg. I like a little smoke in my oil and the eggs cooked so fast that nothing sticks in a stainless steel pan when finished. If you are quick enough the final product should still be soft, a little creamy and have no caramalized taste. This discussion really dosen’t have much to do with how the French and Chinese cook does it?

I roasted some tomatoes (they look beautiful). Made an onion, tomato and chilli relish for my heat loving friends. A smoked salmon wrapping with wilted spinach on the side for a manic addition.

I swear there is a 7th flavour. Ok, maybe our tongue can’t pick it up. But you know that gentle burnt flavour when you grill meat? Well try burning protein with a little soy, vinegar, rice wine, pepper and it takes on another level. It can’t be that good for me if it taste so good.

There is a difference between cooking beef on a very hot pan and cooking strips of beef on a very hot metal wire/grill. The extra surface area for the fat and protein to sizzle produced so much more flavour. Forget a thick cut. Strips around 3-4 cm long and 1x1cm thick allows good burning flavour to mix with a little medium rare and juicy texture.

A little lighy soy gives the superb savory touch to the smokey and chared meat. Add a little yuzu to conter the fat. One go at the beef in Takayama and it’s all wired in my brain.

This 2 kg piece of beef brought by my brother was sensational in every sensory way. From a Korean market in Brisbane. A little more expensive than the fillet cut from supermarkets. But wow… I am already feeling hungry now. And it’s bed time!

One of my weakness is that I find it hard to be content with what I have/achieve. A friend of mine said it’s such a ‘medical thinking’. I want to stop taking what society prescribes to me (or what I think society prescribes to me).

Apart from food that is. One thing is for sure, I will keep finding new things to eat: These are the best meat dishes I have tried.

Hida beef – Takayama, Japan: If you wince in disgust at the though of fatty meat then you can leave now. Selective breeding allows these cattle to accumulate lots of intramuscular fat. It’s similar to Kobe beed but not as well known internationally. Served in finger size strips and thinner slices, sizzling on a hot metal grill in front of you.

Duck rillettes – France: Duck legs cooked confit style (slowly in duck fat) then blended in more duck fat. Put it in a fresh brea roll and you have heaven in a bite. Quite easily found in good delis in Australia. Pork versions are also nice.

Roast pork – Bistro Guillaume, Melbourne, Australia: Perfect crackles, thick cut and so so moist and tender meat. I think it was soaked in brine but there was no hint of salt. The waiter said it was cooked slowly. Whatever the way, it was delicious.

Jamón ibérico de bellota, Spain: Free range pigs that live in oak forests and eat only acorns towards the end of their life. The sweet, nutty and savory flavour is dangerously painful to think about at 1 am. Although I havent yet stepped in Spain, in Australia it’s not had to find some fairly good stuff.

Ox tongue, braised slowly in spices and soy – Shoya, Melbourne, Australia. I guess this goes out to most cuts of tuff meats such as ox cheek. Over the past 3-4 years such cuts are getting popular again. A combination of being new to many people (even though in the past such cuts would not be wasted) and riding the economic crisis wagon.

A good pieces of steak cooked at home, with a glass of wine. And on the note of home cooking, pork mince simmered with onions, Taiwanese pickled cucumber, soy sauce, shallots served on a bowl of rice is hard to beat as comfort food. Cheers to that!

There are a bunch of books I want to get by Hervé This on Amazon.uk/us. The exchange rate is now great for buying things online from overseas. Great, because I am leaving for Barcelona and San Sebastian in a week.

Hervé This, a French physical chemist. Nicholas Kurt, a Hugarian physicist had an interest in applying their work to culinary problems. Perhaps it was Hervé who partnered up with the renouned chef Pierre Gagnaire because I have barely heard of Nicholas. But together they coined the term “molecular and physical gastronomy” in the late 1980′s (later termed “molecular gastronomy”). It was a start of a movement in cooking that gained wider publicity in the late 1990′s and early 2000 when chefs such as Ferran Adria, el Bulli, and Heston Blummenthal, Fat duck, pushed new and experimental concepts as a major part of the dining experience.

Foams? Spherication? Hot jellies? Liquid nitrogen? Anti-cooker? microwave sponges? If you have heard of any of these terms then you have an idea of what I am talking about. Like foams or not, this is the question.

The last few years seems to be all about practicing chefs defending the molecular gastronomy movement as genuine cooking rather and sci-fi, industrial, processed, unnatural food. Thomas Keller, Heston Blummenthal and Ferran Adria all mention the ultimate goal of cooking is to transform, to find new techniques and to better them. What difference does it make whether a computer is used or not? Browning a piece of meat is transforming too. Chemical reactions – just like cooking a egg at 63 degrees for a hour

For me, as long as it taste good, I am happy with it. New experiences just adds to the excitment. But too much and you risk loosing good taste. I’ll leave it for you to decide.

Perhaps the founder of molecular gastronomy, Hervé, had the ultimate answer in his quest to improve and experiment with culinary art. He brings our attention to our motivation to coook.

“This brings us back, finally, to the question of love. Serving a meal is to give happiness to others, not to supply nutriments: fats, proteins, carbohydrates, and so on. Even the best soufflé, both in nutritional and artistic terms, will be bad if you don’t make your guests feel at home. A meal shared with disagreeable people, no matter how elaborate or well prepared it may be, will never be good either—whereas a sandwich shared with dear friends is a perfect delight. And our grandmothers, whose cooking we all adored, may not have been very good technicians, but what they gave us before everything else was love. Yes, cooking is first and foremost about love, and only then about art, and after that technique.”

No better reason why food taste fabulous

A little eccentric about spuds. But if you owned a shop that specialized in potatoes since 1891 your mind is probably not running the same track as most people do. The shop at Prahran Market was first opened by Michael Mow’s grandfather Daniel Wong Mow. However, it was not until the early 90′s when Michael starteed bringing a variety of potatoes from all over Australia. His stock may not be consistent but there is always a good variety to choose from. Micheal is helpful with advice to match the right potato with your cooking ideas or if you want to try some spuds you never seen before.

From the 2009 Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. The next day we had dinner at Vue de Monde by Shane Osborn and Marcus Eaves. Left to right, top to bottom:

Theirry Marx on how his life in Japan and France influenced his philosophy on his food. In France it’s half about the ingredient and half on the technique. In Japan, it’s 90% on the ingredient (sacred and spiritual) and the 10% is traditional techniques. Seasonality from day to day is also something he observed in Japan

Thomas Keller and Heson Blumenthal, with Neil Perry on issues on their approach to the culinary arts. It’s also about a balance of haute cusine and giving something back to the community and environment.

Thomas and his 3 exellent books.

Party at Giuseppe, Arnaldo & Sons. This is the tuna station. Without a doubt, the toro portion was my favorite.

Carlo Cracco: Marinated egg yolk with parmesan water, toasted butter breadc crumbs, poppy seeds and dried tomatoes

Thomas and Heston and me!

Carlo Cracco: Egg yolk pasta, tomatoes, fried basil and sardines

It felt like overnight or something and the figs in the neighbourhood poped out of the branches and are begining to ripen. And after 2 weeks absent from Vic Market, every shop is boasting their own tray of figs. Safeway also got into the trend. I am just playing around with my new flash at the moment so cooking figs will come later. In the mean time I’ll just munch on them fresh.