Oocytes and Loose Living

Its wonderful how ingredients can trigger memories...
Have you noticed these unusual bunches of raw egg yolks at the market? They come in a small bucket of about 30. They are called Oocytes, the unlaid egg yolks from laying hens dressed for the market. I love the parallel culinary path that ingredients take in different cultures. I can remember shopping for these with my mother at the kosher butchers in St.Kilda and they were used in our home for cooking chicken soups in a similar way that the Vietnamese from whom these were bought in Footscray, use them.
My mother also used them for cakes and noodle dishes. I haven't bought them for ages but thought they might provide a comforting accent to a dish of farmed prawns that we have been serving as the opening course on the menu. I usually avoid cooking Asian dishes here but I could not resist this salad of green papaya, green mango, kohlrabi and daikon all giving a moist crunch with different flavours that are echoed in the dressing of the classic lime scented Thai  trinity. Perilla, Holy basil, mint and coriander complete the aromatics.
While cooking at the Grace Darling Hotel in Collingwood in the late seventies we served a dish  mentioned in Lampedusta's novel The Leopard,  Timballo del Gattopardo an exquisite suede-like textured extravagance of chicken livers, cinnamon, pasta and many more goodies that also use these rich yolks in a spectacular pasta pie or Timballo.
Books can convey such a deep culinary resonance especially if they are not specifically about cooking. Food in a real context. One of the reasons that I have not been posting lately [the other is laziness] is  that I have been reading and also re-reading much of Frank Moorhouse's work.  Few writers can capture the mores and foibles of the table like Moorhouse. I have spoken of his book Loose Living before and when he agreed to come to Sunnybrae for a Melbourne Food and Wine Festival event this year we were thrilled and excited to soon have our hero here in person. Six spots left for March 18 click here for Details.
                                               A Taste of Summer in the Garden

Behind the Scenes

  

 

A  glimpse of a little of what’s been happening behind the scenes here on

the farm.

In February  we had to make some changes as the farmer who has been agisting his cattle here for many years found himself like all the farms in the district with more than enough feed in his own pastures  to take his cows home.... I have been a little lazy with this cosy arrangement for many years but the change gave us an opportunity to see what could be done with the land that fits into our other culinary pursuits. I have been a little obsessed with bread over the last 7 years or so since the wood oven was built experimenting with different flours and grains and realised that I knew bugger all about wheat.

But then I did not know much about artichokes and many other food plants till we began to grow them. The link between the garden and the kitchen is strongest when you can see, sample and taste food plants as they develop so a bit of bullet biting was required.   We needed to grow something that could be managed efficiently and able to be stored safely as well as providing a staple-like role on our menus.

The first workshop we conducted with the wood oven just prior to our re-opening in 2008 was with John Downes and for one of those workshops we sourced about 25 different types of flours that could only be bought in 10 or 20kg bags. After the workshops I had an arsenal of commercial and  artisan flours left over with which to learn how to use the new oven. Amongst the more interesting flour that was left  was the Khorasan [Kamut] and Spelt and these seemed to elicit the most interest from our diners. I am slowly getting to understand how they can be used in the kitchen. I hope to entice John down again next year to conduct a couple of workshops on grains.

So a leap into the unknown was made last May when I approached our neighbour  Don Liggerwood. Don has a large model farm and seed growing/cleaning business about 3km from here down the Cape Otway Road. I must have hit a resonance because Don very quickly embraced the concept with much enthusiasm. Both spelt and Khorasan are hard to find seeds in large quantities but some serendipitous convergence gave us a chance to begin this experiment. The strike rate has been excellent, the rains so far kind and { I hope I don’t put a mozz on it } the crop is growing magnificently despite the recent heavy downpours. Watching a new plant develop is exciting. As the shots grew the central stalks shoot up and before you know it they have self pollinated and the ears fill out providing a carpet of swaying fields that change colour each month.

The most striking difference in the look of the two crops is the height and vigour of the Khorasan. Its tall with a massive seed head and a very long beard. The long beard I have read is to make it more difficult for the birds to get at the seeds. The spelt is shorter and a quiet achiever with denser growth, very sturdy and  less likely to lodge[fall over ]. About 3 months after Don did the planting he rang and nonchalantly mentioned that he bought a second hand flour mill in pieces that is specified to process 250kg per hour! So the kit up is complete when Don figures out how to put it back together again.

Then we should have fresh flour and seeds to continue the experiment....

The other new crop developing is a few Pistachio trees that we planted in 2007 as we were getting the garden ready for re-opening. After 4 years they are full of immature nuts that should be ready in February.  For those of you taking a stroll between courses have a look under the trees in the orchard and you will see hundreds of tomatillo, tomato, cucumber, pumpkin and  other seedlings from the compost that has been spread below all the trees in the orchard. 

We have upped the ante with the compost making. 

 We get our eggs from Annete and Stuart Rayner’s  free range egg farm about 2km down the Cape Otway Road next door to Liggerwood’s and they have a brilliant industrial sized mulcher. For the last 2 years we have asked them to construct a composting shelter from their  last year’s straw and we make compost inside this slowly using the straw for layering the organic waste. When the pile is complete the bales are gone and Stuart shreds it and it erupts into a Jeff Koons-like Puppy sculpture of Pumpkins, Melons  and all the rest of the seeds that have sprouted from the kitchen and garden “waste”. 

  Its sits for a year to ferment and when it’s spread under the fruit trees the second coming of the self seeded windfall begins again. This year the straw will come from our paddocks after the quail get their fair share.  I saw one take off from the middle of the Kamut yesterday.. not sure how I will feel about letting the guns in.  Good I think.

Play with Fire or Sans Sous Vide

 On our first visit to France and we found ourselves in Hauterives on a pilgrimage to see the Palais Ideal the work of a retired postman who spent most of his life building a do it yourself concrete folly--Think Ankor Wat meets the Sagrada Famiglia. After a mind blowing morning wandering around this extraordinary site we decided to walk to the next village  in search of lunch. Its the classic French dream a small bistro on the edge of the town. Fresh mirabelle tart on the scrubbed pine presentation table, flowers, thunderstorm then sunshine and a new menu to explore. We order quenelles de brochet  sauce Nantua, a local Marsanne  then the tart.... walk to the hotel-- France at its best. The next day we are at yet another bistro and the temptation to try the local speciality again is too great to resist. By some miracle the dish is exactly the same as the previous day—you’ve got it by now. The first wave of the sous vide revolution is at its peak in France. In the seventies sous vide cooking hit France by storm. "Georges Pralus in the mid-1970s working with the Restaurant Troisgros (of Pierre and Michel Troigros) in Roanne, France who were looking for a new way to to cook foie gras, which shed 30 to 50 percent of its original weight in cooking. Pralus found that when cooking foie gras using Sous Vide techniques its original appearance did not lose excess amounts of fat and had better texture."

"Bruno Goussault was working along the same lines in the 1970's, but instead at an industrial level. In 1974, Goussault worked on a study that was presented on the sous vide cooking of beef shoulder at an international frozen-foods conference in Strasbourg, France. It was found that cooking the beef sous vide extended its shelf life to 60 days."

  The supermarkets were full of famous chefs’ branded signature dishes but the local palate and media dismissed it as a fad a bit too close to mass produced fast food. It was thought [ in a gastronomic sense]  that while it works well for foie gras for those that have not tasted it freshly   cooked, it was just a little too industrial for take home food and the restaurants realised that their "brand" was being diminished by mass marketing in  a country that still largely cooked at home and went out or to the local traiteur for fancy food. A few months later I am trying to survive in London buried in a basement room of a claustrophobic horror show hotel in Baker Street. The only job I can score is a twee bistro in Islington that has a parent restaurant across the road. The job involved following an intricate set of recipes [loosely used] that gives instructions like

Bag 1 to MW 2 for 15 secs on 4

Bag 2 into WB for 2 mins

Garnish: warm squeezebowl 1 to rim

Salad mix 1 centre

Bag 2 to top

Bag 1 over.

The owner chef of the flagship shop across the road cooked and bagged the whole restaurant menu at the big kitchen with one sous chef and my job was to run the bank of microwaves and pots of water to the simple instructions provided. His food was quite good, solid European cooking, good stocks fresh well picked greenery and good dressings. It took 2 days to get a hold of the system and while completely mind numbing the job demonstrated a minimalist modernity that had a certain perverse attraction if you looked at it from a strictly logistical perspective. We did twice as many covers as his excellent real charcoal grill across the road I came 20 minutes before first orders and left 15 minutes after the last hot dish. The waiters did the pud in a similar way. Luckily a good  job in Soho rescued me from who knows what?

You can argue for low temperature setting of proteins, minimal cell disturbance along with post preparation  Mallardisation or any other pseudo industrial modernity that takes your fancy but I love to play with fire and juggle a hot pan with a slow steamer, checking a wood oven while reducing a couple of stocks to splash on some freshly roasted meat to serve at the same time as a slow braised  stew and a couple of serves of grilled fish. Yes I know sous vide may streamline our service, minimize wastage but I still remember how my mothers freshly cooked foie gras tasted and stumble along to the Stones classic.....

Too Old Too Slow Too Good

Vale Narelle

Narelle 4 Feb 1998 -- 21 September 2011

Quail Sera Sera

It’s the end of a big Sunday service, let’s call him Bill, he quietly meanders into the kitchen with an impish smile, with thanks all round to the kitchen team asks if perchance we liked the taste of wild quail? Our collective eyes light up... a kindred spirit. Over a quiet drink he told us of his passion for hunting quail and how his father had also hunted and explained the intricacies of its storage and preparation.  A week later with a rendezvous in Camperdown we get a large box [bag] of superb stubble quail. Now the packaging was intriguing but so elegant. The birds are layered on straw from the fields where they were shot, a large icepack on the top and bottom. Bill explained that this was the same method his father had used during the depression to deliver game to local pubs to supplement the farming income. We spoke about how to dress them and his method is something like this...

First cut off the head, wing tips and feet with a pair of scissors.

 Plucking is a quiet skill best performed in company with some good bottles and plenty of conversation Bill does this in the field around a campfire with his mates. I like to age them in feather on the straw in the cool room for about 4-7 days. The feathers and skins are delicate but after about a dozen you get used to the way they are layered. Some start at the back and work their way to the neck  others go in reverse, the main thing is to try not to tear the skin. Do not try to use hot water as they are far too delicate When they are plucked rinse and place them into a bucket of icy salted water [10%] salt this begins to sterilise the skin.

When you have plucked your bag make another icy salt bath and cut along the spine with the scissors and remove the internal organs. Rinse and place in the second iced salt water bath. Leave them in the brine for about 4 hours . The quail are now ready to cook or they will store in the fridge for about a week. Sadly most hunters stew them for far too long. They are quite tender and only require about 10 minutes in a hot oven. I like to add a little garlic, salt and juniper into the cavity and bard them with some tasty form of pig fat like speck or bacon and cover with a fine layer of crepinette for roasting. Stubble quail are small with dark flesh but extremely tasty a real wild flavour. A couple of weeks later our rendezvous is in Inverleigh and the prize is Brown Quail from the islands in Bass Straight. Bill has a  hunt with his close buddies once a year,  the old dog patiently waiting in the car a calming companion.  Thanks Bill for reminding me that the best food hardly ever makes it to a restaurant.   Now where are those Morels?....

Capocollo for Claire

Hi Claire
We do a similar method to your Nonno but a wet cure as opposed to a dry one. Click on the photos for a larger resolution. First we choose the neck or scotch fillet of pork that does have fat and do not trim as we feel it adds more flavour. We rub a generous amount of salt very carefully into every little crevice of the meat, this is the most important part-- take your time. After 12 hours the meat will have given off quite a bit of moisture and we turn it every 4 hrs or so for 4 days. We then dry it and cover with a spice mix of paprika, coriander, black pepper and chilli. Then we wrap it in collagen paper and tie it very tight with string and cover with the sausage netting. We also use a piece of AG pipe to thread the stocking on. Then as you do, we hang it in the shed for a couple of months in cool winter weather. I hope you have done this with your Nonno so you can pass your families' methods on to the next generation. They will gather some moulds on the surface and its always good to have an expert to let you know if these are good moulds. The more surface mould the better the fermented flavour. This is the easiest of pork cuts to cure as there is no bone for air to get trapped in.
We vacuum pack them after they are done to stop them from continuing to dry out. Some people pack them in lard which does the same thing.  Photos from Steve and Ingrid.

 

How the National Food Plan Stole My Homework

As some of you have been reminding me I have been slack and not updating the blog for ages.So let me know which if any of these you would like expanded?

How it feels to roast your first batch of Coffee Peruvian,  Table Top, and Ethiopian Yirgfacheffe?

And is it a fallacy to wait for 3 days before brewing a freshly roasted batch? 

How to dress and age Wild Stubble and Brown quail with straw from the fields where it was shot?

  

Update on the Khorasan and Spelt trials now in its 3^rd Month ?

The Khorasan is winning by about 6 inches despite being sown a month later?

Is the first chapter of Grand Days by Frank Moorhouse the most appetising first chapter of any book?

 

How to make Capocollo?

How much cheese whey is added to generic supermarket milk?

Will anyone review Modernist Food or is it too heavy? 6 Kilos of ink.

How the upcoming wholesale fish market move has already changed the way you buy fish?

Why the National Food Plan, arguably the most important policy initiative that our little part of the blogsphere  seems to be obsessed with has been largely  ignored in both the mainstream and new media? Submissions are due on the 2nd Sept I have been trying to submit a response and will post it if I can?

Is there someone out there who could help me to redo the format of  this blog in a less clunky way?

And the only really serious question -

Will Geelong make it to the Grand Final?  

Praise the Roots and Flick the Nanganator

Rory our third year apprentice keeps us on our toes. He has found his feet at school, getting down and dirty in the garden, spending time doing work experience at PM 24 and also keeping us fossils streetsmart with local jargon.

 I try to keep him tuned on current trends but when he asked why I don’t have a nanganator both Richard and I were stumped.

I have been trying to hone his skills using traditional methods to create natural  textures and flavours, taking the old fogey view that all the so called new molecular methods  can be created with real food and traditional techniques if the cook has the required skills.

 The nanganator he informed us is urban slang for the gas bottle used for nefarious means that has crossed over into the kitchen lexicon for making foams. I tried to explain to him that there were a multitude of methods using various natural gums, resins and of course eggs that if he was able to master, would put him in a very good position with respect to essential skills that would serve him well into the future. Then of course he pointed out that in all the school competitions he was doing the winners were invariably nanganating their way to victory.

 I needed a trump card.

It’s taken 6 months but I have finally tracked down Soapwort Roots, an ingredient that Anissa Helou alerted me to last summer.

  I met Anissa with her friend Mary Taylor Simeti when they visited Melbourne after the Sydney International Food Festival Chefs Showcase. It’s always a joy to show Melbourne to visitors. Many of you would have read Mary’s wonderful books on her life in Sicily On Persephone's Island:  Pomp And Sustenance: Twenty-five Centuries of Sicilian Food, Bitter Almonds to name a few and we spent a lazy wet Melbourne day cruising the galleries and eateries getting to know each other.

 Anissa is an expert on Middle Eastern Food and had just presented a session in Sydney where she used soapwort roots to make an intriguing desert called Natef.

 Last week while on the hunt for liquorice roots I noticed a little bag of dried roots labelled Halwa Roots in a shop on Sydney road. I remembered that Anissa had also blogged about Halva and how soapwort was also used in its manufacture.

I had the Ace of Trumps. The King of Foams was my new best friend.

Firstly I tried Anissa’s recipe [click here]  for natef this worked a treat and found soapwort to be an extremely fascinating and versatile ingredient.The technique is simple boil dry soapwort roots in water.10% by weight roots to water and cook till reduced by 75%. That is 600ml reduced to 150ml. This brown dishwater looking liquid whips up, hot or cold, to a pure white foam that visually is hard to distinguish from beaten egg whites. I tried to increase the acidity to cut the sweetness of Anissa's recipe by adding more lemon juice. This also works well. The foam is neutral in flavour so concentrated stock also worked. It is stable hot or cold. We started to make other Middle Eastern flavours using Pomegranate Molasses, Quince Molasses then we tried making a Halva Foam that was very good with all the flavour minus the excessive sweetness that makes Halva a bit cloying for many palates. We found we could make the lightest of chocolate mousses by folding in bitter chocolate melted into a little water thereby making a vegan mousse lighter than anything I had made with eggs.  We froze all the foams and they stay stable for at least a week? giving a type of frozen nougat that completely disappears on the tongue.Importantly we discovered that we could reuse the boiled roots at least 3 times.While we were getting sudsy in the kitchen Diane quietly informed us that soapwort has been growing in the garden for 30 years, an unassuming plant that comes back after frosts each year. So Rory will be able to dig his own roots quite soon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And  I can put  my old fogey hat on and get back to learning how to use Natef in its traditional contexts starting with walnut biscuits called Karrabeej ma Natef. At least until the next challenge that Rory comes up with.

The Wright Stuff

 Its twenty years ago today that Diane and I first opened Sunnybrae. A  week out from our scheduled opening in June 1991 I realised that while most of the staffing, construction and functional  details had finally been finished: I had not yet worked out a final format for the menu. We had a full house booked - the heat was on. We started preparing food on the Friday but how it was to be presented was still yet to be decided.  I thought that we would pop the antipasto on a beautiful primitive Australian Cedar table in the middle of the dining roon that we had picked up at a clearing sale in Camperdown and serve the hot food from the kitchen. The idea was to create a menu that gave the diner an experience as close as possible to eating in a private home but with professional service.

   We went to a lot of clearing sales in those days-- strong tea from the ladies auxiliary , good sangers lots of time between lots... At one of these sales I met John Sutton a bright eyed collector/dealer seriously addicted to one off quirky items ... we soon realised that we were after the same stuff.  Over that long afternoon we talked about mutual mates, the bargains that got away, tall tales from sales past and we have remained friends ever since that day . So when John rang last week to say that he had accidentally bid A$330,000 on Ebay for Beatice’ s hat I thought that he might have finally lost it. After he explained how he only meant to bid 23,000 euros and mistakenly added a zero I still thought he was in la la land.

 I rang him the next day to find out what happened and he said that he was outbid by another nutter and as an embarrassed aside to hide a bit of “What were you thinking thinking” that I was giving him, he mentioned he had picked up some interesting chairs at a clearing sale Japan that had a bit of food history and might interest me. This instantly restored my faith in his ability to turn up real treasures.

Over the last twenty years while I have been here developing Sunnybrae Restaurant I have put my collectors habit into hibernation. John on the other hand has developed one of the most interesting second hand businesses in the country. From local clearing sales his interest turned first to Japan where he goes many times each year to bring back very unusual items as well as furniture, architectural fittings  and bric-a-brac . But now John also scours the sales and warehouses of Morocco, Mexico, India, China, South America and his warehouse/shop KYO in Ocean Grove is a veritable Aladdin’s cave for the curious collector. Where else could you buy a Bakelite 1960’s telephone in the shape of a penguin?

  From the clearing sale 30 years ago fast forward to this year when one of John’s scouts unearthed three remarkable chairs at another clearing sale, this time in Japan

When I think of restaurant or hotel projects few could be compared to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo for inspiration or scale.  Wright had always been interested in the Japanese aesthetic  [ as well as his architecture he was a serious collector and dealer in Japanese woodblock prints}  and when he was given the opportunity to design the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo it was a chance to express his love of the Japanese style with the coming of western modernity to Japan. The project ran from 1915 to 1923.

The “Peacock” chairs in the top pohto, now in Ocean Grove were constructed by an unknown Japanese craftsman, but were specifically designed  by Wright to be used in  the Imperial Hotel’s Peacock room.
I hope a gallery in Oz is able to secure at least one of them.

Now flash back to the opening in June 1991--- its now Saturday and about an hour before the first table is due to arrive I was still uneasy about the format . At the last moment I decided to serve the antipasto in three stages from the kitchen rather than on the cedar table that brought John and I together. It would be less messy and give the opportunity to take a break at any time during the service to go for a walk, have a private tete- a-tete stretch the legs.   The format has not changed very much since that day.  

 

 I am very grateful to all of you for allowing Diane and I to continue to let you enjoy our little patch. Thanks.