232 replies to this topic

[ChrisTaylor]

The Vegemite/savoury thing is an interesting point I've never thought about.

As for tasting Vegemite, I'd recommend--for the first time, at least--cutting it with butter.

[Shelby]

I'll do weekday breakfasts in one post as they are always the same.

Like many Australians, I'm a vegemite addict. For those of you who haven't tried it, it is basically a salty umami flavoured paste. We grow up on it -- I remember spreading it on a teething rusk for my daughter to suck/chew on.

It may not surprise people that is a by-product of the brewing process, which means we can have our beers in many more forms.

My suspicion is that exposure to food items such as this tend to hard wire some preferences into people. As a general observation, Australians' savoury inclinations may stem from being raised on this stuff.



If you are tempted to try vegemite. Remember, it is not jam/jelly. Do not spread it thickly no matter what the Australian with the wry smile is trying to get you to do to see your reaction.

I've always wondered what that stuff was. I was first introduced to the word by the group Men At Work.

Do you also add it as an ingredient in any cooking?

[kayb]

If you are tempted to try vegemite. Remember, it is not jam/jelly. Do not spread it thickly no matter what the Australian with the wry smile is trying to get you to do to see your reaction.

We have an Australian emigre' as a receptionist at my office. Her mother sent her a care package with Vegemite and she insisted we all try it.

I could get used to it!

[ChrisTaylor]

I'll do weekday breakfasts in one post as they are always the same.

Like many Australians, I'm a vegemite addict. For those of you who haven't tried it, it is basically a salty umami flavoured paste. We grow up on it -- I remember spreading it on a teething rusk for my daughter to suck/chew on.

It may not surprise people that is a by-product of the brewing process, which means we can have our beers in many more forms.

My suspicion is that exposure to food items such as this tend to hard wire some preferences into people. As a general observation, Australians' savoury inclinations may stem from being raised on this stuff.



If you are tempted to try vegemite. Remember, it is not jam/jelly. Do not spread it thickly no matter what the Australian with the wry smile is trying to get you to do to see your reaction.

I've always wondered what that stuff was. I was first introduced to the word by the group Men At Work.

Do you also add it as an ingredient in any cooking?

You can if you like. My dad used to put a spoonful in spaghetti bolognese. I think some people rub it over roast chicken, which to me sounds a bit ... much.

[ChrisZ]

Personally, I've always thought that Vegemite/Marmite/Promite are quite similar, and that someone who has tried Marmite shouldn't be too surprised when they try Vegemite. But when I lived in London I was always surprised/amused by the way people would strongly prefer one over the other, and I worked with a few people who had Marmite on toast every day but were completely repulsed by Vegemite... Each to their own I guess!

[Snadra]

First some things about myself.

I first developed an interest in cooking when I read Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at school and saw the recipe for Monsieur Bon Bon's secret fooj. It is telling that I wrote out the recipe without remembering which book it came from. This information came to me from the Internet when I looked up the recipe. In my later years I did read many more books by Ian Fleming but did not remember that I owed him the origins of a lifelong obsession.

The interest continued through my teens with the mandatory cooking of cakes and sweets. A friend's mother did some catering and I enjoyed discussing cooking with her. She recommended that I buy the "Cordon Bleu Cookery Course" as it gave detail as to why you did things rather than just giving instructions. She felt this would reflect a more male style of cooking. Judging from my continued interests in such matters, she read me well.



I worked my way through the eighteen books in the series (and two supplements) and just really continued cooking (and collecting cook books).

Nick, I'm so excited to see you doing a foodblog! Can't wait to see what you're cooking. What's your take on the quality & availability of australian produce & food shopping in your area of Sydney? I meant to talk about my impressions from Western Sydney during my blog, but didn't get around to it in the end, and I'm keen to hear yours. Do you do most of your shopping at speciality stores, or do you use Woolworths/Coles?



Seeing that Cordon Bleu book cover made me gasp a bit - we had that book when I was growing up and the cover dessert of brandy snaps and caramel oranges is something my mother made for dinner parties - all the way on the other side of the world!

[nickrey]

Do you also add it [vegemite] as an ingredient in any cooking?

I don't personally. If you overreduce something like a beef jus, it can taste a bit like vegemite so people tend to use the taste as a referrent for a fault in a sauce.

That having been said, when Alvin Leung was out here from Hong Kong (he is a two Michelin-starred chef and is a self-proclaimed "enfant terrible" of the food scene), he used it successfully with Wagyu and rice noodles in the place of soy sauce.

[nickrey]

Personally, I've always thought that Vegemite/Marmite/Promite are quite similar, and that someone who has tried Marmite shouldn't be too surprised when they try Vegemite. But when I lived in London I was always surprised/amused by the way people would strongly prefer one over the other, and I worked with a few people who had Marmite on toast every day but were completely repulsed by Vegemite... Each to their own I guess!

My wife was brought up on marmite and she does not like vegemite (and vice versa). They are kept on separate shelves.

[nickrey]

Nick, I'm so excited to see you doing a foodblog! Can't wait to see what you're cooking. What's your take on the quality & availability of australian produce & food shopping in your area of Sydney? I meant to talk about my impressions from Western Sydney during my blog, but didn't get around to it in the end, and I'm keen to hear yours. Do you do most of your shopping at speciality stores, or do you use Woolworths/Coles?

Thanks Snadra i hope I can do as well as you did in your blog.

The food in my area of Sydney is very good. I remember one of those TV exposes that said that our area received (shock horror) the best meat when compared to other areas of Sydney. What they failed to say in their inimitable style is that it is also 2-3 times as expensive.

I'll be running through some of my normal shops and shopping patterns in a later post.

Seeing that Cordon Bleu book cover made me gasp a bit - we had that book when I was growing up and the cover dessert of brandy snaps and caramel oranges is something my mother made for dinner parties - all the way on the other side of the world!

The series was created in the UK so I suppose it's not surprising with Australia and Canada both being former colonies.

Though I guess that dates me with your mother using it to cook from.

[nickrey]

There was a bit of tuna left over from last night's dinner.

Just had it for lunch as a toasted sandwich with mayonnaise and rocket. No picture as it disappeared quickly.

[David Ross]

I so long for a fresh fish market like the one you have down there.

[Shalmanese]

Vegemite Cheesecake is something which turns out to be unreasonably good. It's truly scary just how much Vegemite you have to put in but the result is worth it.

[Shelby]

Is there a U.S. source for Vegemite?

[maggiethecat]

Nick, I'm not only excited to see you blogging -- squee! Nick! -- but I'm loving the summer view from Sydney as I freeze every body part in Ottawa. My daughter and her husband spent a week in Sydney last winter and were bewitched, seduced and wowed by the fish and the peeps. They thought it was the most laid-back ville on earth.

(Big ups to Pam for arranging the recent mind-boggling blogs.)I appreciate your link to my old piece on soft boiled eggs; any egg-loving cook knows eggs ain't easy.

Aussie cooking, about which I don't know enough, seems heavily weighed to seafood protein and umami. Will you have time to write about the sweet side?

[Kent Wang]

Could you provide some samples of prices of items you're buying on your trips and restaurant bills? I'm curious how it compares to US prices, I think pretty close now that the two dollars are close to parity. I'm also curious about wine pricing.

I'm considering a trip at some point and would like to work out how much it'll cost.

Edited by Kent Wang, 09 January 2011 - 10:08 PM.

[ChrisTaylor]

Could you provide some samples of prices of items you're buying on your trips and restaurant bills? I'm curious how it compares to US prices, I think pretty close now that the two dollars are close to parity. I'm also curious about wine pricing.

I'm considering a trip at some point and would like to work out how much it'll cost.

As a general overview, I've been pricing up some degustation meals in Sydney and the most expensive would be $210 per head at Quay (Tetsuya's is the same price). That's not including matching wines. Maybe there are other, more expensive places. In Melbourne, the most expensive is Vue de Monde at $250 per head. I haven't heard of anything else in Australia that expensive. At the other end of the spectrum, you can get a few (either degustation or three course affairs) for around $100. Most degustations in Sydney and Melbourne sit somewhere between the two price points. For example, Aria is $160. Becasse: $130. Guillaume at Bennelong is $180. Those places that charge more than $200 per person for food alone are pretty rare. We're talking well-regarded restaurants here, of course. Places that win local awards such as hats in the Good Food Guide and earn respectable places in the Gourmet Traveller Top 100. If you're talking about regular, 'okay' places I've got no idea what Sydney's prices are like. Down here you'd pay anything from $15-40 per main.

Matching wines is variable. For the premium wine matches at Quay, I think it's an extra $190 per head. When I want to Melbourne restaurant La Luna--a meat-centred bistro place--the degustation with matching wines set me back $120, I think it was. The food alone (six courses) would've been $85. That's the cheapest matching wines deal I can recall seeing. Wine matching is usually charged for the whole degustation (altho' Vue de Monde charge anywhere between $10 and $25 per course) but can range from, yeah, that up to the $190. Usually it seems to be about $100 extra, give or take. Individual bottles can range from, say, $50 to however much you want to pay. An individual glass can range from $8 to, yeah, $25 or so, depending on what you want and where you are.

When I went to The Press Club, again in Melbourne, it was $295 for the special eight course New Year's Eve degustation--and that includes matching wines. Just for reference. If you're planning on coming to Melbourne as part of your trip I can point you in the direction of a few nice places.

Edited by ChrisTaylor, 09 January 2011 - 10:27 PM.

[Snadra]

The food in my area of Sydney is very good. I remember one of those TV exposes that said that our area received (shock horror) the best meat when compared to other areas of Sydney. What they failed to say in their inimitable style is that it is also 2-3 times as expensive.

I'll be running through some of my normal shops and shopping patterns in a later post.

I guess that goes alongside the shows that regularly point out that shoppers in the eastern suburbs pay more for all their groceries!

The series was created in the UK so I suppose it's not surprising with Australia and Canada both being former colonies.

Though I guess that dates me with your mother using it to cook from.

Maybe... although looking at yours again, my mother's book was a hardcover (still cordon bleu cookery course, and the exact picture, I'm certain) - I think published in the late 60s/early 70s, rather than the newsagent series publication you've got.

Which brings me to another question: given the influence it had on you, do you still cook from it at all, or any of your 'early cookbooks', or have your interests and tastes changed?

[nickrey]

Aussie cooking, about which I don't know enough, seems heavily weighed to seafood protein and umami. Will you have time to write about the sweet side?

Hi Maggie, thanks for your support.

Although I'm fairly good at making sweets, I'm more a matured cheese sort of person. Most of my dessert repertoire would not differ significantly from that seen in any of the other blogs (creme caramel, souffle, home made ice cream, fruit tarts, and the like).

Australia does have some archetypal sweet things, such as lamingtons (small cubes of sponge bisected horizontally and filled with jam then iced with chocolate icing and rolled in coconut. The other (which is going to get screams from our NZ brethren who lay claims to its origins) is the Pavlova, which is a large mound of lamington topped with fruit and cream. I neither particularly enjoy nor make either of these.

In summer if I am doing a sweets course, depending on what preceded it, I might do something like strawberries tossed in balsamic with some basil (Italian touches there). My kids are up on Saturday and I will be cooking a nice dinner. Will see what I can do in the sweets arena with an Australian bent.

[nickrey]

Could you provide some samples of prices of items you're buying on your trips and restaurant bills? I'm curious how it compares to US prices, I think pretty close now that the two dollars are close to parity. I'm also curious about wine pricing.

I'm considering a trip at some point and would like to work out how much it'll cost.

Hi Kent,

As you may have seen from Snadra and my discussions, Sydney has wide variation in terms of food costs. I'll insert some of the prices as I go along but bear in mind that you could get the items much cheaper in other areas of Sydney. As far as wine goes, Australia has good quality wine for comparatively cheap prices. You should be able to get a good quality (not fine quality, but solid) for the $20-30 mark. We tend to drink wines too young here so I'll tend to stock up on slightly better class wines and lay them down for a few years. If you want to buy already matured wines, and can find them, expect to pay a significant premium.

The wine shops tend to be controlled by large grocery players and they are normally able to beat the wineries down in price through leveraged buying. You will typically get 10-30% off the price of wines if you buy six or more (of any mix), so this is a good way of purchasing wine.

[nickrey]

Maybe... although looking at yours again, my mother's book was a hardcover (still cordon bleu cookery course, and the exact picture, I'm certain) - I think published in the late 60s/early 70s, rather than the newsagent series publication you've got.

Which brings me to another question: given the influence it had on you, do you still cook from it at all, or any of your 'early cookbooks', or have your interests and tastes changed?

That's a hard one to answer. Do I go back and look at the recipes? Sometimes. Am I strongly influenced by the processes that it taught me for things like pastry making so much so that it comes into play automatically? Absolutely. If I'm adapting a recipe, which you will see tends to happen virtually all the time, I'll use foundational techniques acquired from the books without a second thought.

Some of the recipes are very 60s and 70s directed (brandy snaps, Beef Wellington, etc) so I'm less likely to do them. Yet I will still go in and look at suggestions for things like herbed butters that I sometimes still put on grilled steaks.

[nickrey]

Thai tonight. Going to make up a deep fried ocean trout, pineapple, coriander, cucumber and tamarind salad. This will be preceded by oysters in stout batter.

[nickrey]

First with the dinner posting. Am going to follow this with some foodie shots of shops.

Entree (appetiser) tonight was oysters in stout tempura batter. I thought this was an original recipe until I found out that Mark Hix in UK does a variant, and he has published his in a book!

The oysters were the ones I bought yesterday at the market. Ten oysters in all. Two were consumed fresh from the shell, which is actually how I prefer oysters.

I bought them unshucked as I was distressed seeing the lovely liquor being washed out in the cleaning process.

So shucking was the first task. This is what they looked like with the liquor still in place.



The batter was a simple tempura of 7/8 plain flour, 1/8 cornflour mixed with an equal quantity (or thereabouts) of icy cold stout.



Mix gently as the lumps add character.

The oysters were deep fried, taken out when golden.

They are served on a bed of wakame seaweed in their shells.



Main course was a Thai salad from a recipe by Martin Boetz who was trained by David Thompson so I'd suggest it has more than a bit of him in it.

The salad ingredients (missing kaffir lime leaves which were on the way from the shop as this was taken and the roasted, ground rice which was roasting).



The salad dressing was sweet, sour, salty, hot as is usual.



The ocean trout was dredged in fish sauce and deep fried until golden but still rare inside. The skin was removed and crumbled over the dish as a textural contrast. The ocean trout was broken into edible sized pieces and placed on the salad.

The final dish looked like this.




Ollie, who features as my avatar, and whom I swear is part bear, looked like this scoffing a bit of the ocean trout.

[nickrey]

I so long for a fresh fish market like the one you have down there.

It is excellent but there are also lots of other options given the plentiful nature of seafood here.

[nickrey]

I've taken some photos of local shops to give you all an idea of my local shopping haunts. The first is where I bought the fish for dinner tonight. Fine Fish is an offshoot of Martin's seafoods, which is one of the prime suppliers to fine Sydney restaurants. The fish shop sells some of the freshest fish I've seen outside of a jetty on the return of the boats. The ocean trout we had tonight simply had no fish odour at all and this is typical of the fish from here.

Here are some pictures from the shop. The range isn't anywhere near as great as the fish markets but the quality is outstanding on all that they have.

[Shalmanese]

The other (which is going to get screams from our NZ brethren who lay claims to its origins) is the Pavlova, which is a large mound of lamington topped with fruit and cream.

That should be meringue, not lamington ;).

And good lord is that some expensive fish...

[LindaK]

That dinner looks fantastic--thanks for sharing. I am having serious seafood envy. What a selection--and clearly it's impeccably fresh.

[nickrey]

The other (which is going to get screams from our NZ brethren who lay claims to its origins) is the Pavlova, which is a large mound of lamington topped with fruit and cream.

That should be meringue, not lamington ;).

And good lord is that some expensive fish...

Dang, started as meringue in my head, came out as lamington.

As you can see, the produce around here is good (and expensive).

[nickrey]

That dinner looks fantastic--thanks for sharing. I am having serious seafood envy. What a selection--and clearly it's impeccably fresh.

Thanks Linda

[Peter the eater]

I think most of us in the Northern Hemisphere are enjoying a good foodblog from down unda. I like the Fine Fish shop but I have to say, I don't like those prices. Are they typical or is it a high-end seafood boutique thing?

[C. sapidus]

nickrey, I am looking forward to this week very much as I always enjoy seeing what you cook up. I did notice David Thompson’s Thai Food sitting prominently on your bookshelf, so I am glad that you led of with a fish salad, one of my favorite summer meals.

For someone who already has a fair selection of Thai cookbooks, would you recommend adding one by Martin Boetz? If so, any one in particular?

Do you prefer Viet Huong fish sauce? I liked it, but usually choose a less-salty brand for maximum fish sauce flavor without over-salting the dish.

I am jealous of your seafood quality, but not the prices. I have heard that Australia and / or New Zealand have particularly enlightened ocean fishing policies. Do you think that drives up the price, or is the price more a function of location?

Can't wait to see what's next.