A blog by Kate Gibbs
From the category archives:
Little video I made about El Capo, a little place for Latin street food in Surry Hills. Our waiter brings grits with pork and an almond milk that’s supposed to cut through grease, and a kingfish ceviche with tiny white cubes of perfect fish. He talks of Oaxaca in southwestern Mexico, where you can eat anything from bugs to grilled perfect chicken street side.
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Peking duck pancakes and the most incredible, sweet, soft coconut flesh laden drinks, and Vietnamese rice paper rolls stuffed with silken prawns. Yes, this was lunch, found at a Miss Chu stall at the MasterChef Live event in Sydney.
A production line worked away scattering Vietnamese mint, coriander, and pretty bunches of marinated tofu, prawns or a satay minced chicken inside the rice paper rolls. Queues of people waited patiently to grab the event’s heathiest lunch. Larger bamboo steamers filled with dumplings sat over boiling water, stacked and billowing the scent of Asian ingredients. The prawn rolls contained almost sashimi prawn, cooked perhaps in a squeeze of acidic lime juice and wrapped with crunchy bean shoots and green paw paw. A peanut dipping sauce, spiked with chilli, is the dish’s crowning glory.
The Masterchef Live event, which is on for three days and finishes Sunday, was absolutely packed on Friday, more than 20,000 people shoulder rubbing to get a view of their favourite chef, learn new knife techniques, how to cook perfect calamari, and the secret to cooking perfect fish (don’t overdo it!). I was delighted to see Miss Chu’s healthy Vietnamese rolls inspire a longer queue than one doing unhealthy pies and fried things.
Prawn toast, that greasy Chinese staple served in yum cha outlets across Australia, was taken to a new level at a cooking session held by Sydney chef Dan Hong, who reinvented the dish for the foodie crowd. Hong, of Lotus, Ms Gs and El Loco, demonstrated how to make the chopped-prawn and sesame on toast appetiser in one of a few hundred events taking place over the weekend.
Hong cooked a prawn and sesame toast with yuzu mayonnaise, a favourite on his Ms G’s menu in Potts Point. The dish involves finely chopping raw fresh, adding a drizzle of sesame oil and coriander, and then spreading that thickly over thinly-sliced toast. The open-sandwich is then sprinkled with sesame seeds and deep fried for several minutes, cut into fingers, and drizzled with yuzu mayonnaise.
“You want a thin crispy base, and heaps of prawns,” Hong told the crowd. “Prawns give it flavour, and who doesn’t love mayo?” Ms G’s does a combination of Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese cuisines, said Hong. There’s a mixture of herbs like mint and coriander, “there are no rules, it’s all about lots of flavour”.
Also appearing over the weekend are chefs such as Tony Bilson, Greg Doyle, Peter Doyle, Peter Gilmore, Matt Kemp, Kylie Kwong, Spanish-born Miguel Maestre, Jaques Raymond the French chef based in Melbourne, and Junior Masterchef’s Anna Gare.
Dan Hong and his prawn and sesame toast. All pics by Kate Gibbs.
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How sweet it is to visit Kangaroo Island’s colony of Ligurian bees, writes Kate Gibbs
Perhaps its their renegade status that keeps us enthralled with the bee: hard workers, mass producers, a sense of social order, the mystical ability to turn an egg into a queen, and a violent sting to boot.
“Next to humans, bees are the most studied living things on Earth,” the manager of Island Beehive and a quietly spoken authority on all things honey, Peter Davis, says.
[FULL STORY here: 8 February 2011, The Sydney Morning Herald]
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Watching produce being created builds up an appetite, writes Kate Gibbs.
It’s milking time at the station and children are counting the sheep. This is culinary adventure tourism on Kangaroo Island, where you can walk with the animals, talk with the producers and watch soil, sea and man turn things into food.
A litre of milk, taken from each ewe every morning and mid-afternoon, is transferred to a refridgerated vat in the factory to be pasteurised and turned into Island Pure fetta, haloumi, Kefalotiri and yoghurt, either plan or swirled with local Ligurian honey.
This paddock-to-plate theme is the general premise of the island’s gastronomic attractions. The tourism mainstay of farmers and food producers is showing visitors exactly what they do and then how it tastes.
[FULL STORY here: 8 February 2011, The Sydney Morning Herald]
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This cooking school is the perfect opportunity for beginners to get their hands dirty, writes Kate Gibbs.
It’s a wet, monsoon-like morning in the Adelaide Hills and at 9.30am I have shrimp paste pushed under my nose to smell. It’s followed by coconut milk, coriander and fish sauce, each scent more powerful than the one before. It’s a less on how to cook a Thai feast and a lesson in the virtues of spices to shock you out of a morning blur.
Guest chef Kelly Lord, head chef at Noosa’s Spirit House, is leading the Thai Feasts for Friends class at the Sticky Rice Cooking School.
He explains the five elements of Thai cooking: hot, sweet, salty, sour and bitter. Above him, a wall is scrawled with the autographs of chefs who have gone before and in front is an impressive array of gnarly roots and fragrant herbs, 18 sharp knives, 18 plastic boards, 18 aprons and 18 eager students.
[FULL STORY here: 8 February 2011, The Sydney Morning Herald]
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The early bird catches the sesame seed bun. Hanging out today with my wee friend Atticus in Melbourne, traipsing around and making lamingtons and finding distractions instead of going for a run around Albert Park lake. We made an early stop at the South Melbourne version of Grill’d, the burger spot. Walls are amusingly scribbled and chairs are fire engine red. The burgers, his a mini with cheese and lettuce and mine with mustard, pickles, sauce, are soft and actually juicy.
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Incredible installation at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in Brisbane. Real finches flock in a hanging knotted scramble of metal coat hangers. The exhibition, 21st Century: Art in the First Decade, opens tomorrow and lasts until 26th April next year.
The ambitious exhibition will occupy the entire Gallery of Modern Art and focus exclusively on works created between 2000 and 2010. It will showcase more than 200 works and feature over 140 artists and artist collaborative groups – senior, mid-career and emerging – from more than 40 countries.
Recent acquisitions being unveiled for the first time include a work in neon by Tracey Emin (England), sculptures and photographs by Romuald Hazoumè (Benin), playful sculptures of camp dogs by Arukun artists including Arthur Pambegan Jr and Craig Koomeeta (Australia), powerful photographs by Mitra Tabrizian (Iran), Guy Tillim (South Africa) and Olaf Breuning (Switzerland), a suite of drawings by Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (Ivory Coast), and striking video works by SUPERFLE X (Denmark) and Sharif Waked (Palestine). See the website and new blog here.
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Kangaroo Island is not just about kangaroo and other cuddly things, a new culinary world is burgeoning as enterprising islanders take on pursuits other than the traditional wool farming. Abalone and marron farming, samphire pickling, rare breed farming and Ligurian beekeeping are bringing travellers across from the mainland as epicurean adventurists. First stop off the ferry from Adelaide is Penneshaw, where we find the best fish and chips on the island.
Sue Pearson’s Fish attracts tourist buses and locals for her whiting fillet in a beer batter. She also does more intricate local marron with a lamb chorizo risotto when I am there. Here are some pics, including the view opposite of the Adelaide ferry coming in.
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The Kitchen Inc. blog is written and edited by Kate Gibbs - a journalist, author and cook.
Food, travel, design >> How, when entwined together, these things inspire our daily culinary experiences >> The Kitchen Inc. covers food, kitchen-based inspiration, and workable design as it impacts our dining, eating, cooking lives.
Kate Gibbs writes a weekly column for Good Living in The Sydney Morning Herald on cooking with kids: Kitchen Cadets. She is the restaurant reviewer for Sunday Life magazine in the Sun Herald. She is a regular contributor to the SMH on food and travel.
Kate is a co-author of The Foodies Guide to Sydney 2011 and 2012 and is a contributor to SMH Everyday Eats 2011 and 2012 and Good Cafe Guide 2012. Kate has 10 years' journalism experience and has written for Russh, Australian Gourmet Traveller, Frankie and others. The interest in journalism began at London's The Evening Standard newspaper. Her first cookbook, The Thrifty Kitchen, was published in 2009. Kate's mother Suzanne Gibbs and grandmother Margaret Fulton are also in the food business.
In The Kitchen Inc, Kate writes restaurant, bar and cafe reviews, and shows the most interesting and inspiring places to eat and gastro-explore. Kate reviews new food-relevant design and books, she writes about new trends in cooking, how different ingredients are being used by our top chefs and cooks, and how to use these ideas at home.
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