ChrisTaylor

It took me a good couple of years to get my head around pork belly. Truly. I followed many recipes but was always let down by the shitty oven in my shitty rental. Now I'm in a new non-shitty rental with a mediocre, as opposed to downright shitty, oven. It helps. The technique I follow to get perfectly crispy crackle is based on this guy's recipe. He uses a box cutter to score the skin, pours boiling water over it and then sits it in the fridge--covered, mind you--overnight while it marinates (the meat, not the skin) in whatever marinade pleases him. He then roasts it a very high temperature. Instead of rubbing little grains of salt into the pork, he uses rock salt, so it can easily be brushed off later. His method does result in crisp skin but you run the risk of burning the skin. Cranking the oven to 250*C and turning on the grill/broiler isn't really needed. So, having cooked his pork belly twice and adapted it a little--lowering the oven temp was the first, obvious step--I want to take it a step further. He says his recipe is all about the crisp skin and he's not lying. The meat doesn't break down anywhere near as much as I'd like it too. I'm kicking around various ideas for improvement ... * brining the meat before marinating it (assuming I marinate it at all--the marinades don't really penetrate the meat and merely increase the risk of the flesh burning, if anything I'd keep it really simple with a mixture of white wine, white wine vinegar, herbs, garlic, carrots and onions) * maybe half-submerging the belly in some stock or something--I'm just concerned that with that extra moisture I'd prevent the skin from crisping up, thereby taking a backwards step * aside from the first and maybe last 20-30 minutes, really cutting the temp.--I mean, surely the skin will dry out (which is all you're doing, really) at 120*C or 150*C * after scoring and scalding the skin, letting it dry in the fridge for at least a few hours with the skin uncovered I like the crispy skin but to me pork belly is--and should be--about more than crunchy skin and fat. I want the fat to render into the meat so it's juicy and tender and flavoursome. If I was just after crunch I'd buy a bag of potato crisps. Thoughts?

Wound up breaking my cassoulet cherry with: * Great Northern beans * 500 g-ish of none-too-fatty, if that's possible, pork belly * 300 g-ish of diced neck and shoulder * 3 pure pork sausages (I didn't really feel the need, on the first day of the school holidays, to make a trip to the really busy shopping centre where I'd maybe, if I was lucky and had sacrificed enough virginal goats, find some Toulouse sausages for $stupid per kilo). * a lamb shank * two confit duck legs * much caramelised onion It was nice. Heart-stopping. Warming. Rich as all hell. Nice. Is it an all time and forever favourite like coq au vin (made the right way--with rooster)? No. I think I want to curl up in the corner and sleep now. I'd argue the lamb really wasn't needed. If and when I make it again, it'll be pure pork and duck--and I'll try and up the duckiness by maybe cooking the beans in duck stock.

It's $700AUD. If building one was going to cost me as much as, say, $600, I'd buy the Weber, but it won't.

Wow. So much information to digest. It seems I can buy smokers in Australia--the BBQs Galore chain sells a couple of different makes--but the price means this will be a DIY project, much like the mini-tandoor I want to get around to in the next couple of weeks.

A local butcher or poultry shop should sell you chicken carcasses for no more than fifty cents per unit.

Duck breast, jacket potatoes (cooked in duck fat--of course, of course, of course), roast beetroot, bok choy, slow-cooked green beans with dill and garlic.

The Duck & Bull is lovely. Not a fan of the Original--it's too sweet--but that Duck & Bull is my all time and forever favourite.

I must admit that maybe I've got my head in the sand on such matters--I don't really watch television on a regular or even semi-regular basis, I tend to, er, 'acquire' the stuff I want from ad-free sources, I don't have cable--but I'd never really seen the guy doing anything at all aside from the supermarket ads a bit ago. Maybe he popped up once or twice on Masterchef, even. He publishes the odd recipe in delicious magazine, too. He--and his success story--don't really strike me as that different to the stories of many celebrity 'chefs', most of whom aren't chefs at all. I don't know ... but on Masterchef and some other shows, where they sometimes trundle out chefs who still earn 95% of their income from actually cooking steaks and cakes, a lot of them don't have the 'personality' to be some happy bouncing excitable television show presenter (and our presenters over here are a bit more subdued than what I've seen of, say, Extreme Foods or Top Chef). To host a cooking show--or sell frypans or put recipes into magazines pitched at supermarket shoppers--you don't need to be a 'real' chef. It's not what television show producers and magazine publishers are looking for. Some industry cred is nice, maybe, but it's not as nice as the ability to relate to an audience of everyday folk and flash a pretty smile. Nigella Lawson's boobs and seductive voice and accessibility--she draws attention to the corners she cuts, makes it clear you can do all this at home with stuff you buy on the way home from work--than how good, truly, her roast pork is or how she'd fare, one-on-one on some Iron Chef special, against Elena Arzak. I don't hold the success Stone (and Lawson and Oliver and whoever else) has had against him. I mean damn, if I could work a few years in a kitchen and then become really rich promoting Coles supermarkets and looking pretty for housewives while I told middle Australia how to grill the perfect steak, I'd go for it.

It seems 'barbecue' has several definitions. As a kid in Australia, a barbecue was something that involved cheap supermarket-grade sausages, chicken wings (marinated in something from a bottle, probably involving honey and soy sauce) and such. Maybe lamb shoulder chops (which, to me, are a pretty poor choice--loin chops or the more expensive cutlets are more suited to fast cooking). Maybe pork spare ribs (I know, I know--different definitions of ribs, these ones are slices of pork belly) also marinated in the bottled sauce. Maybe steak. It's all about fast cooking. Now don't get me wrong, people in Australia do more with barbecue. I do. Maybe it's re-watching Treme or something, but I want to learn about American-style barbecue, which seems less about the fast-cooking we do. The impression I get is that barbecue--good barbecue--is a slow-cooking method used with beef brisket, beef short ribs, racks of pork ribs, chicken legs, etc. Cuts that lend themselves to slower cooking. I'm unclear on what fuel is used. Or even the style of barbecue, as I don't envision most of the barbecues for sale at the local Bunnings being particularly good at slow-cooking anything. Most Australian BBQs run off gas, although you can easily get your hands on BBQs that you fill up with 'heat beads' (commercially-produced coal) or even timber. Are there any books or, even better, websites that provide a solid, eGulleter-approved introduction to the topic? I've stumbled across a wealth of information and it's unclear where one should begin--and it's hard to tell what's good and what's a load of crap. Something that walks me through the fuel/style of BBQ and then gets onto suitable cuts of meat would be exactly what I'm looking for.

Time to dig this chestnut up. I'm cooking cassoulet for the first time tomorrow. I've got my duck confit cooked and cooling on the bench at the moment. The beans (Great Northern) are soaking. I have a couple of recipes on hand: Neil Perry's, Anthony Bourdain's, Larousse Gastronomique's. I think maybe I have one or two others in Fearnley-Whittingstall's and Reynaud's books. So much--too much--choice. Skimming the thread, I see a lot of debate over the pork belly question. Aside from the confit and pork sausages, should be only meat content by pork belly? What about other cuts--neck, for example? I know some versions have mutton or lamb--is it worth throwing a small lamb shank? I'm not aiming to produce something that's authentic to a specific region so much as something that's true to the general idea behind cassoulet that tastes good. Is it worth brining the pork and/or lamb now?

Save it for something like duck a l'orange? A duck pie or ragu?

Best in terms of popularity or quality? Your post leaves that bit unclear and I think it's significant. I assume you'd be aiming for a range of 'bottom shelf' to 'top shelf' spirits, tho'? I mean, on the vodka front (as an example--not intending to start fisticuffs with those who know vodka better than I do) you might want some Belvedere or Grey Goose as your nice vodkas and some, I don't know, Smirnoff red label or something as your cheaper vodka.

A six-pack of Sapporo.

Or that, probably, the 'higher grade' potatoes wind up being sold as unmolested potatoes. The ones that people wouldn't buy--too big, too small, too battered, too bruised, shaped like something that grew up next to the Chernobyl power plant--wind up in processed products. And that processed fries aren't pure potato. They cut the potato content with other ingredients.

The crunchy texture of the breading on KFC burgers. I hate the sauce. I hate the bun. The fries, too, are rubbish. But that crunch. No other purveyor of fried chicken in Australia nails it. I can get superior fried chicken at the local Japanese takeaway--it's less greasy, tastes more like something from the 'birds' section of the tree of life, but it doesn't have that awesome crunch. I sometimes crave other fast foods but don't actually enjoy them. I guess it's just the hit of salt and fat that I'm after. I do, however, like burgers with the lot from fish and chip shops. It doesn't even need to be a good example of a burger with the lot for me to enjoy it. So long as the meat is half a step past dog food, I'm happy. Kebabs. I like kebabs made from good quality roast lamb ... but I also like kebabs made from what is basically lamb-flavoured sausage meat with nasty garlic sauce and grease and grease and grease--so much that if you don't eat it quickly, the grease starts to drip from the bag and go everywhere. I don't need to be drunk to do this. I've no appreciation for wine. I've tried. Cheap wine. Expensive wine. In-between wine. I've had a handful of wines I like. But even then, after more 3/4 of a glass, I've had enough. This one is damn near universal in Australians, best I can tell: a supermarket-grade sausage (sold as 'BBQ sausage' as opposed to 'pork sausage' or 'beef sauce') cooked to damn near burnt on a BBQ cleaned in the most half arsed of fashions, served with tomato sauce and supermarket white bread and, if you want to get fancy, caramelised onion. My fine motor skills are rubbish due to my Asperger's. Finely minced garlic? Finely diced onions? Fine anything? Forget about it. I used to try really hard. Now I just slice garlic and cut everything to a medium dice. Even then, it can look ugly. I'll accept offal in restaurants but I don't cook it. I hate the smell of most forms of offal in their raw state. It reminds me of a pet shop. Say what you will about it being a good thing that French cuisine has got lighter and healthier, but French food really loses something when you take away all the butter and flour. Coq au vin without the sauce all lightened and enrichened with dairy fat and flour? Do not want. Lasagne without a thick bechamel? Do not want. I like that glugginess.

I've seen Americans refer to hamburgers as sandwiches before so, I guess, I'm forcing this square peg into a round hole. There's a pub in the inner city, The Napier, that serves a hamburger--well, it's in Turkish bread, pide, so maybe you can call it a sandwich like you mean it--that contains beetroot, beef, chicken, bacon, cheese, egg, a goddamn hashbrown and some other standard burger-type stuff. All served with many chunky chips and much salad.

Got back late from a teaching PD so had a cbfed meal: took leftover roast pork belly from last night, sliced it and added it to a pretty basic broth made from (bought, mind you) chicken consomme, rice wine, dark soy sauce, pak choy, onion, chilli, garlic, celery, star anise, cinnamon, a bit of sugar and soba noodles. Was going to add carrot, too, but the carrot I had in the fridge had frozen rock solid and I really didn't have the energy to do much about it, given it was only the presence of leftover pork in the fridge that stopped me from dropping into the pizza shop.

Nope. Never even heard of the concept of tipping a butcher, even. That said, I can recall way back in the depths of the past--maybe some time last year--getting asked for an extra dollar or two at a fishmonger because I wanted my fish cleaned and filleted. Or maybe that was a butcher when I asked to get something boned.

Well I'll agree with that. I was trying to be tactful as when I raised this topic yesterday I stood on more than a couple of toes--seems a lot of people with home brew kits fancy themselves master brewers or distillers. I was told that with Cognac and whisky and other aged spirits, aging is merely marketing. And of course that's a load of crap. Try a line up of a couple of different vintages of anything that matures and you'll pick that right away. Age does not necessarily improve something--that's a matter of personal taste--but it does change it a lot. The difference between a VS and XO Cognac is astounding. That aside, even if you were aging your bathtub swill, how the hell would you get old sherry casks or whatever? And even if you could get those, I seriously doubt your product would even approach the quality of an old oxidised bottle of cheap blended scotch. On the beer note, some beers--Guiness, Stella Artois come to mind--are made elsewhere in the world. As in, Stella is a Belgian beer but it's also brewed under licence in Australia and, probably, other places. The recipe is the same but the terroir cannot be replicated. There is therefore a flavour difference. I can only think of one beer--and that's the Nigerian Guinness--that actually trades off that difference, points it out like it's a good thing. Water is a major contributing factor in beer. Try Duvel. It has such a unique flavour profile in large part due to the water (which supposedly runs through crappy old pipes past a graveyard or something).

Well, alcohol-free beer and wine don't work, so I think it's a bit rough to say there would be something special or significant in the commercial failure of booze-free whisky. Booze is an undeniably large part of the charm of whisky. It gives it that warming, comforting quality. But if I just wanted straight booze, and didn't think much of the other stuff, I'd buy the cheapest nastiest blend or vodka I could. Or take my friend's bath tub swill in old 2L Coke bottles. Age does make a difference. The timber does make a difference. If you taste three versions of the one product--a VS, a VSOP and a XO in the case of a Cognac--there is a significant difference in flavour. Curiously, I've always enjoyed the VS and VSOP more than the much more expensive XO.

The other day, I got into a bit of a dispute about home made spirits. I'm of the opinion that a single malt whisky, Cognac, etc is a beautiful product. A carefully crafted beer or cider has just as much merit. Or wine, of course. It's an expression of, in some cases, hundreds of years of tradition (tradition doesn't make something inherently good, but it helps) and terroir. The environment in which these products are made (or the parts of the environment, such as the water, that are actually ingredients of the product) matters and is tied to specific place. Your favourite single malt (or wine or Cognac or etc) is still a mass produced product, yes, and I've no doubt the distillers/brewers/winemakers cut some corners or compromise to a certain extent on quality, just like a restaurant kitchen, in order to ensure they can produce a product that is economically viable and of consistent quality, but I still think these are incredible. A guy I know, he reckons a home distiller, armed with a $1000 still purchased from the internet, can produce something superior to even the best commercial products, that a fine single malt or Cognac is essentially a poor quality product that has been refined again and again and again until it meets some sort of standard that basically says its fit for sale. A home distiller can, from the outset, produce a higher quality product. And let me be clear: I'm not trying to compare his moonshine to Talisker. He did that. He feels that commercial products are inherently inferior to something made on a small scale by someone who cares an awful lot about quality (yet at the same time is restricted, by economic and space constraints, to using 'cheap' equipment). He'll argue just as hard that home brew, if made with care, is inherently superior to even the finest of Belgian ales. Why? Because even Chimay Grand Reserve is a mass produced, mass market product. I think that a home brewer or distiller could make a nice product but he's going to be limited, even if he's rich enough to afford good quality equipment, in all manner of ways. You can't replicate the Islay environment in your Melbourne backyard. Somehow, tap water or even expensive Italian bottled water doesn't cut it. The apples you buy to make cider probably haven't come from the 300 year old orchards that make for beautiful French cider. And, too, the fact you're only aging your whisky for six months, as opposed to ten years or fifteen or twenty years, limits it to some extent. Is there merit to his attitude as a general idea? I mean when I saw home brewing and distilling, let's be fair: let's ignore the people who use the cheapest avaliable kit and those cans of what is basically instant beer, just add water. Let's ignore the guys who add flavours to Smirnoff red. I'm happy to acknowledge some products are very doable in the home environment ... but for something as strongly tied to a specific place and manufacturing technique as a top quality beer or spirit? Forget about it. Your home brew ale might be nice for what it is but if you really think you can best a Westvleteren you're delusional. Do you think it's possible for a home brewer or distiller--using only equipment and ingredients readily avaliable to the home distiller--to make a superior product to good examples of commercial products? Have you tasted home made beer or whisky or wine that you'd rate over even the most well-regarded commercially produced stuff?

Every so often I'll get a craving for McDonald's burgers. Can't explain it. I don't like them. I haven't eaten the stuff on a regular basis in years. I know, in advance, I'll regret it later. It's like, I guess, a reformed smoker craving a cigarette, just one, years after quitting. Maybe it's the childhood in which McD's was kind of a big deal rearing its head in the adult me. Even rarer, I'll actually cave and go buy a Big Mac. Not the fries or anything: the fries are, as someone said above, best described as 'ehhh'. Too salty, too. And of course, the burger will give me 'Macca's Belly' for a good couple hours afterwards and I'll feel the need to brush my teeth about three times afterwards because of how much I hate the smell. I must admit I did go into McDonald's a couple of times last year to try the then-newly introduced Angus beef burgers. Someone, somewhere in the McDonald's machinary realised if you doubled the size of the typical McD's patty and charged a bit extra for it and had the guy from The Castle and Packed to the Rafters say it was 'fancy', they could sell a lot more burgers. Even with my cynicism, I was a bit curious. They were bad. Worse, possibly, than the standard Big Mac. Curiously, when I make cheeseburgers at home I almost always sauce them with a combination of ketchup and dijonnaise. A nod to McD's.

Ardbeg? Good taste, has that man.

Cider. Henney's Dry, Keppler's, Cidre Breton, Weston's Old Rose Scrumpy, Weston's Perry and Ecusson.

One of my favourite things in the world is salad Nicoise. Canned tuna of a reasonable quality, white anchovies (hey, expensive tastes ...), boiled eggs, good tomatoes, cos leaves, olives and, possibly, capsicum and boiled potatoes. And, yeah, I know that purists would question a couple of those vegetables.