nickrey

Hi Heidi, It's a dedicated deep fryer. I bought one that was stainless steel so when it is stipped down all the parts that come into contact with the oil (except the element) can go in the dishwasher. After use, I filter the oil through what looks like an oversized coffee filters.

I've eaten at both. Aqui has a more open space and seems to have benefitted from this as well as a broader approach that the larger kitchen allows.

Confirmed - I live in Sydney too, and every time I walk into Martin's I have a mild heart attack at the prices, though the fish IS beautiful. For reference, I get most of my fish in Sydney's Chinatown and the prices are roughly half. Though mostly the turnover is in whole fish, rather than fillets, and the whole fish are sparklingly fresh. Still pretty expensive compared to Nth America though. Nick - I see you have Movida Rustica. Is it a worthy purchase? I love Movida with a passion - planning a trip to Melbourne in Feb to get a fix of that and Cutler & Co/Cumulus Inc - but I'd been considering this book and am curious if you'd recommend it. I've eaten at the original and twice at MoVida Aqui. The reason I bought the book was for the recipe for hand filleted Cantabrian anchovy on a crouton with smoked tomato sorbet. I'm totally addicted to this dish. In fact, I also bought and ice-cream maker to make the sorbet and intend smoking some tomatoes on Saturday when I cook my bacon. Could appear on the dinner menu that evening

Make sure you ask for some tips on dining out when you come

Just so you don't think I have the limited range of books shown in the previews, thought I'd show you my collection. We will be stepping outside Asia this week

Hi Heidi, Yes it did. I actually took out the fish and removed the skin and it was not done to my liking so it went back in the deep fryer. It was crispy but was also skin-like; it's hard to describe. Anyway it had both crispness and textural contrast. The other textural contrast was roasted rice that is fried in a pan until dry (not burnt, no oil). It is then ground in a mortar and pestle and added to the dressing.

Thanks Shelby, we like to think so.

With regards to the fish sauce question, I tend to use Viet Huong as it is the preferred sauce for Vietnamese people here in Australia. That having been said: I do have options. Squid brand is one that a lot of the Thai cooks use here and the one on the right is one that was recommended to me in a cooking class I did in Thailand (which was 25 baht). As to the salt question, and having done a number of Thai cooking courses, the whole point is balance. If you know your sauce is a bit more salty than others, add less in the initial stages. David Thompson and chefs he has trained taste their sauces continuously and tweak the taste so it is in balance. That sauce had lime juice, fish sauce, tamarind, and chilli powder. I didn't measure them, instead using approximations to the ones that Martin gave and balancing by adding an ingredient that seemed under represented. If you can get this right, you're Thai dishes will kick up a few notches straight away.

Hi Bruce, See the above comment about the prices. Martin Boetz has two very successful Thai Restaurants, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne. They are both call Longrain which, not suprisingly, is also the name of his book in Australia (Longrain Modern Thai Food). In the US version, it is called Modern Thai Food with a subtext referring to Longrain. David Thompson wrote the introduction. The reviews on Amazon speak for themselves. The dish that I made came from a cooking class he did rather than from the book.

Hi Peter, Yes it is a high end boutique and the prices reflect this. I'll definitely go back to the fish markets on Saturday and show you the more conventional retail prices.

Thanks Linda

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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

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.

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'll collect some pictures and run you through the routine. The quick answer is yes I tend to shop at specialty shops. The long answer will have to wait until tonight after work.