by Kate on October 8, 2011
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.
by Kate on January 26, 2011
You really need to have started these yesterday, so you can have them in all their glory on this momentous day. But I secretly didn’t and they worked out just fine, still soft and the chocolate icing firm enough to hold the coconut in place and avoid too chocolatey fingers. Is there anything more Australia Day than lamingtons? Ok yes there are snags and VB and pies, but for those the smell and idea is everything and the actual eating nothing at all. Really, we’ve come so far. Lamingtons, and maybe pavlova, are sustaining Australia Day stalwarts; happy and easy and a reminder of a time we used to take English things (like bake) and make them our own.
First you need to make a basic butter cake, and then cut the cake into lamington squares, leaving them like this for a day to prevent catastrophic crumbling when you ice them. To make the butter cake:
125g butter
1 tsp caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 eggs
2 cups SR flour
pinch of salt
1/2 cup milk
Preheat oven to 180C. Line the base of a 27cm x 18cm lamington tin with baking paper. Cream the butter and gradually beat in the sugar with the vanilla in an electric mixer, until the mixture is light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.
Sift the flour and salt, then fold into the creamed mixture alternately with the milk, do not overwork the mixture. Spread the mixture evenly in the tin and bake for 25-30 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean. Cool on wire racks then cut into cubes or oblongs.
Chocolate icing
3 cups icing sugar
3 tbsp cocoa
4 tbsp boiling water
1 tsp butter, melted
vanilla essence
desiccated coconut, for dusting
Sift the icing sugar and cocoa into a bowl, then add the boiling water, butter and a few drops of vanilla essence. Stir until smooth and shiny, adding another tablespoon of boiling water if needed. If the icing sets, stand the bowl in boiling water and stir. Dip the cake squares into the icing and immediately roll in desiccated coconut, to coat. Leave on a wire rack to set, at least 1 hour.
by Kate on January 9, 2011
This time last year I was in the extraordinary New York City. Today, a year ago, I was making chocolate souffles at the Institute of Culinary Education, perfecting my beating and work with chocolate, then tasting other groups’ apple and calvados variations, wondering how cointreau would go in mine.. Cooking magical things in the snowy city, crunching ice under long boots back to my wood-floored and high-ceilinged room in mid town, pulling my hat down low and my scarf over my cheeks as I leaned into blusters and swung open the doors to gilded department stores. And then I discovered Anthropologie. Oh bliss. And the elaborate window displays are just the beginning. I sit here now with an Anthropologie cup filled with camomile tea next to me. I washed the dishes tonight and dried the plates with anthropologie towels. I wrapped a pretty floral apron around my waist as I pan fried a thick-cut sirloin, I timed the potatoes in the oven with a turquoise clicking binging timer on my fridge. A mass consumer I am not, but things remind us of where we have been, and where we must return.
by Kate on September 21, 2010
A Sicilian will tell you cannoli has to be filled with sheep’s-milk ricotta and they must be eaten the day they are made. There may be chocolate-cream filled, custard loaded, coffee creme varieties sold in Australia but a real cannolo, Sicily’s most famous pastry, is something quite different.
In Sicily, crisp-fried pastry shells are filled with a not-too-sweet mixture of dense and creamy sheep’s-milk ricotta – either plain or laden with candied citrus, usually blood orange – a pinch of cinnamon, crushed pistachios, a few drops of orange blossom water and bittersweet chocolate chips.
Story published in The Sydney Morning Herald today.. by Kate Gibbs
pics.. not exactly cannoli but they’re sweet and Italian and still very delicious…
Don’t be fooled when you hear chef Adam Humphrey’s thick Yorkshire accent. He may sound like he knows only stews and pork pies, but the man is a genius.
Humphrey says Yorkshire pudding is too easy, so doesn’t bother putting it on his English-inspired menu at Arras. His creative menu includes fish and chips and mushy peas and rice pudding, but not like we’ve ever seen it. With partner Lovaine Allen (who earned her front-of-house stripes at France’s three-star Michel Bras in Laguiole and The Fat Duck in Berkshire before turning to pastry), Humphrey prefers to keep the English touches subtle. The menu errs on the french, but with Australian ingredients, French creativity, and a wonderful English sense of humour.
Dishes like ‘breakfast risotto’, an amuse bouche, are a nod to the full English breakfast, with a quail yolk, which has been cooked sous vide so is runny as it should be, homemade brown sauce and crispy paper-thin bacon included.
An entree, ‘the raw and the cooked’, is a glass plated pallet involving 40 different types of vegetables done in different ways. Pureed and pickled vegetables sit with micro herbs and tiny violet flowers, transparent thinly-sliced beetroot and radishes, curls of raw cucumber and in-season baby peas. (More on the food at Arras in an upcoming post…. )
And there is nothing stodgy about the location. Just a few doors down from Sydney Theatre, in the uber cool Walsh Bay (where Fratelli Fresh has just opened, and where Cate Blanchette spends a lot of time at work), Arras is warehouse-tastic, and the interior design of the restaurant reflects that industrial edge and history.
For dessert, the fun has really exploded in a sugar-coated crack of glorious colours, textures and light-as-air pots and creams. A popcorn souffle with its own little side bag of popcorn, and a funpark-inspired pink plate including rice pudding and whipped pink jelly, twirls of fluorescents, rhubarb slides and tiny cubes of jelly. There’s a Coulant au Chocolat, by Michel Bras (bottom left), a hot melty pudding with an outer cakey exterior and a separate runny middle sitting within (this is not your not-quite-done chocolate fondant). There is even a tube of chantilly cream served in the ‘adolescent breakfast’ that you can squirt on to your chocolate as if it will do your teeth some good after all that sugar.
Oh yes, and the petit four. There’s rum and raisin chocolate and little toffee lollypops and coconut ice. Humphrey makes eating out so much fun.
{photos by Kate Gibbs}
Restaurant Arras
24 Hickson Road, Walsh Bay NSW ; (02) 9252 6285
www.restaurant-arras.com.au
A couple of articles published in The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Living today for its special coffee issue. Here is one!
Trickle-down effect: Entrepreneurs are taking advantage of our coffee mania, writes Kate Gibbs.
“A coffee-flavoured condom was released in Ethiopia aimed at encouraging safer sex – a move considered to be a resounding success and attributed to the popularity of coffee.
As coffee-geek culture percolates across the globe, a new breed of inventor is jumping on the coffee wagon. Syrups and liquors, cupcake flavours and sweets, even stout and lager are getting an injection of the most socially acceptable drug…”
Read the full article here.
This is where cream and design meet. Adriano Zumbo is a cake institution in Balmain, where queues to get in lengthened dramatically when the man himself appeared on the last season of Masterchef. But it’s not for the television appearance that Zumbo is famous. His cakes have dramatically raised the bar of Sydney’s patisseries thanks to his always extraordinary and often unusual creations.
Zumbo shot on to the scene, seemingly from nowhere, with his Balmain shop in 2007, and since then the 28-year-old pâtissier has attracted endless rave reviews from the best cakeratti. Zumbo has become Sydney’s most sought after pâtissier, and he did a white chocolate cake for margaret Fulton’s 85th birthday last year, held in Parliament House.
His oddly named macarons, from Miss Marple (a miniature maple sugar crêpe cake) and Wheely Good (passionfruit mousse sandwiched between slices of almond meringue), also include Beetroot & raspberry, Pumpkin & orange risotto, Custard crunch, Chickpea lemon & caramel, Mont Blanc, Citrus & mustard, Blackened vanilla bean, 3 textures blueberry, Kalamata olive & bergamot candy, Pear pistachio & fennel, salted peanut caramel, Oatmeal & ylang ylang.
The shop itself is teeny, with beautiful distressed brick walls and rustic bread appearing half as a design element and half as just bread-for-sale. But the real show is the cakes. Like a chorus line of showgirls, brightly coloured and frilly and fantastic, the cakes dance in a long shop-length glass cabinet. Fluorescent greens and pinks, yellows and gold regularly appear on stage. Colours, however, tell you nothing about what the cake is about. Yellow is no longer reliably citrus or pineapple – it could be anything – ginger, lemongrass, coriander. Yes, this place is where sugar and cream become remarkable. It’s where something looking like a simple lemon meringue pie is actually.. “Liquorice pate brisee, olive oil creme citron, butterscotch caramel, oven roasted apples, mint meringue ball & thyme italian meringue.” Adriano Zumbo has recast the pastry world, where the unusual takes centre stage and all desserts want better lighting.
All photos, except those immediately above, by The Kitchen Inc.
Pictured second from top:
CHARLIE’S HOMEMADE GINGER FEAR (top): Ginger beer gel, ginger pudding soaked in coconut syrup, chocolate ginger foam eggs, ginger crunch, ginger chantilly & passionfruit bavarois
ED THERE’S ONLY ONE BALL!: Hazelnut sable, flourless chocolate biscuit, mascarpone creme legere, coffee brulee, baked hazelnut creme with a coffee shot
Adriano Zumbo: 296 Darling Street Balmain, Sydney. (02) 9810 7318
Saw these brand new toffees, chocolate centred and chewy, and well tried them in the name of research. And I’m pleased to report that empirical evidence suggests they are fit for a tiny bowl near the front door in case of a low-sugar level impending catastrophe. My boyfriend used to keep little handfuls of chocolate and sugar in his pocket when we lived in London, in case I got suddenly urgent and the crinkles on my forehead became pronounced. These would have been perfect.
The eclairs come from the makers of those Werther’s Originals, which had that buttery crunchy texture, eventually softening a little in order to get stuck in your teeth. These are also buttery, but to crunch through is to get a little nut of dark chocolate, not bitter but not sickly sweet. The waxed white paper twirled at the ends like proper lollies make them old fashioned and therefore so .. now.
All pics by Kate Gibbs.
In sunny, rainy, humid and tropical Port Douglas, in far north Queensland, with my best buddy. We came here when we were nineteen, and now again with her two girls and the chap Drewy. Days so far by the pool, drinking icey banana soy smoothies as the main staple. Book stores on the main Macrossan Street, and hiding in the shade of our villa come the afternoon temperature and exhaustion boil over. The main choices of the day.. Mossman gorge for a swim, one of the local lagoons for a swim, which icecream flavour, another coffee? What for dinner? Last night I used some perfect coral trout fillets, wrapped them in very finely sliced pancetta, and pan fried them until the pancetta was crispy and the fish just cooked. Served on a white bean puree with green beans and a bottle of rose. Perfect Port Douglas meal. Dessert: A packet of Green & Blacks organic chocolate between three very relaxed adults.
Mossman Gorge tomorrow I think.
by Kate on April 27, 2010
A newish haven for sweet-tooths is a perfect sort of urban Parisian outpost in Balmain – the Zumbo Chocolat Cafe. The cafe, a few doors up from the patisserie, stocks Little Marionette coffee, and serves breakfasts and light lunches, and chocolate. We had “Mighty Eggs”, essentially boiled eggs with vegemite soldiers, and a sticky thick slice of French toast with crispy bacon. The mighty eggs were a little overdone, but one can’t be too fussy on a busy Saturday morning when the queue for seating is getting longer and the beach is waiting.
Adriano Zumbo: Shop 5, 308 Darling Street Balmain. (02) 9555 1199
