ChrisTaylor

Additions, small and great Slater - Tender pt. 1 & 2 Ottolenghi - Plenty Redzepi - Noma Hazan - Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking Von Bremzen - New Spanish Table Besh - My New Orleans Robuchon - Complete Robuchon Tsuji - Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art

Last night's pork belly

Been hitting the Russian Caravan a fair bit the past few days.

Hey, I'm willing to give damn near anything a go in the name of science and food. I mean, it's my understanding that these food pairing things--from these dinky Flash-based ones to the really expensive perfume software Heston Blumenthal talks about all the time--suggest combinations that 'could' work based on some arbitrary number of common flavour molecules. Some of the combinations (like, say, white chocolate and caviar) are famous for being surprisingly good friends. Others ... not so much. Still, I do have Niki Segnit's Flavour Thesaurus coming in the mail. I'll be curious to see if it has, er, better suggestions or if it, too, reckons white and milk chocolate go with everything. I'm interested in that, anyway. I mean, I figure it'd be the fat component, right? Too, that second food pairing gizmo, it's basically saying spinach and milk chocolate are equally good friends with grilled beef.

Just ordered a copy from Amazon.uk. Twentysomething bucks? No postage charge? Sold.

Kangaroo is still a minor meat here but the consumption is increasing. Until recently it was pretty much only used for pet food. I had someone comment to me that country blokes who wouldn't have anything to do with a few years ago are getting serious about grilling roo. It is very lean and doesn't really taste gammy to me. I'm not sure what the right word is, "rich" maybe. I bought one of those pre-marinated roast things (that's what they had in the store - kangaroo is almost always available but the choice is limited) and it was pretty good although it was way too raw even after cooking longer than the instructions said. I ate around the edges and the rest made a really good chili. Maybe some other Australians will chime in. The kangaroo topic is here. Pet mince smells pretty disgusting but the dogs and Wattle love it, even though it makes Wattle puke if he eats more than a tablespoon full. Pinot has better taste and won't touch it. I've had the same problem with those supermarket roasts. Thing is, there's no standard size for those roasts. Sometimes you get too little ones. Sometimes a big one. Sometimes a biggish one and a little one. The instructions are written for none of these and you need to work off temp. What's the right temp for medium-rare roo? God knows. I'd be shooting in the direction of venison, I guess, given the flavour profile isn't too different. Also, I've found the 'Macro Meats' stuff from the supermarkets isn't particularly good. It's inexpensive, yeah, but you get what you pay for. You can order better quality 'roo steaks and roasts (maybe stick with the steaks--the roasts are probably easier to over- or under-cook when we're not entirely sure what temp. we're aiming for) through butchers and poultry stores. If you're ever down in Melbourne, visit The Point @ Albert Park. The rest of the menu dances between so-so and nice, but the 'roo fillet is excellent. So, yeah, for foreigners ... raw or undercooked (as opposed to medium-rare--you can't eat this stuff above medium and you really don't want to eat it blue) it has a very bloody, irony flavour. Not nice. I'd have to put away a few beers before I could be convinced to try someone's 'roo tartare. Overcooked it tastes of little. Medium-rare, tho', and it's a bit--a bit--like venison. It's lean. Put the mince into something that's slow-cook-a ragu, say--and you end up with something that regular punters probably couldn't tell apart from beef, but the steaks are quite different ... while still having that basic 'red meat from a decent-sized mammal' quality.

I tried the combination of grilled beef and milk chocolate tonight. Man. Don't try this at home, kids. Curiously, it made the chocolate taste even more like chocolate than a neat chocolate bar. The chocolate flavour dominated the beef. Now maybe you could have some potential for something nice if you used a very small quantity of milk chocolate ... but I don't know what you'd do about that really greasy mouthfeel. That wasn't the sexiest thing I'd ever run over my tongue.

What about that classic 'seven hour leg of lamb' (altho' personally, I think the shoulder is superior for that kind of thing--cheaper, too). You sit your lamb with some aromatics and white wine in a covered pot and let it slowly tick away in the oven for, you guessted it, seven hours. Comes out tender enough to eat without a knife--which may not provide the textural contrast with the risotto you probably want, I guess. If you're roasting or grilling, tho', some parts of the leg are always going to have a certain amount of chewiness--like with rump steak, a certain amount of chewiness is unavoidable. It's a fairly lean cut.

I take it steaks--which you could grill or do whatever with, really--cut from a butterflied leg aren't really what you're looking at doing.

The URL is broken. Try this http://www.foodpairing.be/ EDIT Also, that's cool. Cooking some steaks tonight and I'm surprised to hear they should go alright with white chocolate and smoked salmon. I mean, hazelnut? Sure. Popcorn? Heh. Milk chocolate? Really? EDIT 2 Seemingly white and milk chocolate go well with everything ...

The reference fry? Jesus, those are some low standards. You'd need to be a champion limbo artist to get under those.

Nope. Maybe it's the meat I'm using, which is of a pretty poor standard, but this one didn't work. The skin didn't crisp up as evenly as the shorter cooking time version and the meat wasn't noticeably more tender. Again, I emphasise the quality of the meat. Locally I don't have many options. Local butchers compete on price and ethnic lines rather than the quality of the wares they offer. So, the next version, I'm thinking: Stick, by and large, with the successful recipe: just lose the 250*C bit of the recipe I linked, as that's way too hot for any roast Brine for 5-6 hours as opposed to the 3-4 I did today Score the skin and let it air dry in the fridge, uncovered, overnight Forget about rubbing fennel seeds into the skin along with the rock salt--I'm wondering if these detracted from the crispiness of the skin in some way Possibly rub some more brandy into the skin (or just buy a vodka mini, to replicate the Chinese pork belly experiment exactly) Forget about the butane torch

I also feel personally vilified and deeply hurt by the implication that there's something wrong with Nigella Lawson in a low-cut anything. Just kicking that out there, I mean.

Just added one more with Keller's Bouchon. Was tossing up between that and French Laundry and Ad Hoc (saving Under Pressure for when I eventually get the sous vide setup going) and figured the bistro book would be more to my interests.

I'm not from Chicago or even the States, but I am a primary school teacher. The first term of the year has just finished. Our topic for the term was 'Are we healthy? What's the big deal?' and focused largely on healthy eating. The vast majority of my students come from low socioeconomic backgrounds. The food is often bad: mum dropping off cold McDonald's fries, cold chicken nuggets stored in an unchilled lunchbox for a couple of days, sandwiches made from mouldy bread. A packet of sweet biscuits. Sometimes no food at all, meaning I have to walk little Sandra down the hall to make her a jam sandwich for the third time in March. Schools in Australia by and large have canteens or, where 'lunch orders' are rarer (in higher socioeconomic areas), get their food in from somewhere else. The Department of Education, in Victoria at least, deems canteens can only sell 'healthy' food. Healthy food includes frozen pizza, chicken nuggets, heavily processed pasta-based meals. Nothing, aside from the sandwiches, is made on site. The ingredients in the sandwiches aren't always fresh or particularly good, either. Mayonnaise that has nothing to do with eggs, not even a little bit, anyone? Our school canteen, despite the poverty of the area, is very popular as our ... demographic has the belief, I guess it's a cultural thing, that you're showing a lot more love if you buy your child something as opposed to make them something. Conversly, I have a couple of parents who come in with freshly made dumplings or noodles every single day (sometimes giving me some, which is pretty rad, no?). We tread lightly. Basically, I can't look at little Sandra's lunch of biscuits and leftover cake and tell her that's unhealthy, that maybe she should bring a sandwich tomorrow. I mean, we attempt to educate, without browbeating, the children, but they're not the ones who buy the food. Maybe, when they're given three dollars, they could choose an egg and lettuce sandwich over a tub of spaghetti bolognese-flavoured shit when they hand in their lunch order, but that's about it. Kids, mostly, will choose the nuggets or bolognese over the egg and lettuce, if the choice is left to them. Many of my kids make their own lunches out of whatever is in the cupboard--meaning maybe there's bread, maybe, but probably there isn't much more than the sweet biscuits and the leftover muffins, purchased when the supermarket was trying to shift produce nearing its use-by, from a few days ago. The parents themselves are often uneducated, too. They might really care but they might not realise that some of these options aren't really appropriate for a growing body. Getting used of this was, for me, difficult. The people I worked with were hardened to it. I was horrified, those first few days, at some of the lunches I saw. At the lack of lunches. And yet, it's not my place or the school's place to deal with it directly. We can hope to tackle it indirectly by getting the kids to make cut-and-paste healthy food pyramids. Or send them off to research terms like 'balanced diet' and 'vitamins' and 'protein' and 'cereal'. Maybe show them snippets of that Jamie Oliver TED speech. We can make Sandra and Jasmin sandwiches when they have nothing: when there's nothing in the cupboard, when Dad should've swung by at lunchtime to bring lunch but 'forgot', when the seven year old kid was piss farting around watching cartoons before school and didn't make sandwiches--after all, dad's God-knows-where and mum starts work at maybe four in the morning, so no one is around to remind the kids that they better get their act together and crack open the Nutella. And yet we can't tell the parents off for feeding their kid shit. We can't tell Tri that maybe it's not the best idea, especially for a kid already that big, to be eating cold, rock hard chicken nuggets day in, day out. If we do, we get in trouble. And really, these kids work with what they have. So do the families in some cases. It's not good. It's not right. But it's the way it is. I can't change it--and even if I could, I'm way outside of mandate if I try. It's not a school's place to enforce some policy that says, 'You must eat this or that.' It's worse, of course, when the food you 'must' eat is crap. But even if it was really healthy and really cheap, it's still not the school's place to enforce it--they can and should encourage it without condemning the parents who feed their kids crap but at some point it has to be on parents, not on schools, to devise and enforce suitable diets for children. I don't think our mandate should be expanded. We take on enough as it is.

I had a Big Mac yesterday for the first time in a good long while. Had a craving. Not too many options for burgers locally--especially in Melbourne. And man. Maybe I got a dodgy, even by McD's standards, burger or something, but it tasted of nothing but salt and salt and salt.

Just poured boiling water over the scored belly and sat it, crocodile-in-the-swamp-like, in a brine. I have rock salt sitting on the skin. The plan of attack: * Brush the skin with a bit of Armagnac (I don't have vodka on hand but I do have some Armagnac that's only good for cooking, really). * Roast at 75*C for seven hours. Taking a leaf from the Chinese pork belly thread, it will sit atop aromatics: in my case I have some onion and fennel. Maybe I'll add some garlic and sage leaves. I'll ensure one side of the belly sits higher than the other so any liquid, oil, etc can rub off. I'll keep an eye on the bottom of the tray: if the belly is swimming I'll drain it. * Crank the heat up to as high as my oven can go (~240*C) for about 20-30 minutes. If it looks a bit sad at this point I'll fire up the butane torch. * Serve it with an assortment of roast vegetables: beetroot, potato, sweet potato. I should add that for the three attempts at this I've made in the past fortnight, I've been using pork belly from one of the local butchers. It's not very good. Cheap, yes, but the quality is of a fairly low standard and it's clearly been cut by someone who doesn't give a shit. I have several butchers within walking distance but all but two are halal and are likely to get offended when I wander in and ask, 'Why no pork belly?' This, no doubt, has an impact on the quality of the end result. When I cook it on Friday I'll make a special trip to get some good stuff but I didn't want to go the extra expense while I was getting my technique down.

Adding some beans or lentils to the braising liquid never hurts. At the very least, load the liquid up with aromatic vegetables and some herbs.

Doubtful. BBQs Galore, that eBay store nickrey mentioned, some site that deals in American-style BBQs--all of them sell American-made (or at least, the company is American-based, even if the units are made somewhere else) gear. And most of it's really expensive. $700 was the cheapest I'd seen until nickrey directed me to the more reasonably priced Masterbuilt unit. As I said, Australian BBQ is 'grilling', by and large. You can get 'grilling' BBQs of varying degrees of quality for varying prices--ranging from less than $100 a pop to things a fair way into four figures. Some people roast on their BBQs, yeah, but it's just like oven roasting: the same temp as opposed to some many-hour epic effort.

I think 'duck up' is at risk of turning into something vulgar due to the unfortunate placement of keys on the QWERTY.

Yeah, I plan on treating it like a marinade--crocodile-in-the-swamp.

I have a blow torch. I'll experiment with that in place of my oven's electric grill, which I think is a bit ... abrupt. I know I can--and I do--scrape off the burnt bits but I find it doesn't burn the pork evenly, so while one part is starting to burn another part is still crisping up. Oddly, turning the pork around doesn't seem to resolve this as much as you'd expect. You can only do so much with a knife. The blow torch gives me more control.

I don't have a sous vide setup yet and don't intend to get one by Friday but you've raised a fair point--I'm reminded of Heston Blumenthal's quest for the perfect Peking duck. So basically I'd ... Take the pork belly. Brine it (my own addition). Score it. Roast it really low and slow. Place it in the fridge. Dry the skin. The next day--or a few hours later--stick it in a hot oven for a while? How hot? I mean, in the Table for Two recipe, it's a good hour before it's crisp at the ~200*C temp, all the while the flesh is drying out in addition to the skin. Bubbles appear at the 30 minute mark but it's not crisp all over for some time. I want to avoid grilling it as then I risk ruining my hard work. Would pouring hot oil over it be a good idea (as in Blumenthal's Peking duck episode)? Too, the Chinese pork belly thread makes me wonder if I should shun scoring and instead prick the skin all over. I guess another test run is in order before I serve this up to people on Friday.

I'm happy with the crackling. I'm concerned about the actual meat. That post--and that thread, altho' the experiment is very interesting--doesn't go into that.

Let me know how you find it, nickrey. $400 is more in line with what I expected to pay than the $700 Weber SM.