ChrisTaylor

In a few months I'm heading up to Sydney. I'm primarily going there to eat nice food. I'll probably be sleeping in a cardboard box as a result, but hey, at least I'll be eating okay, right? There are a few restaurants that, for a myriad of reasons, have caught my eye (that list looks insane, I know, but I'm not planning on doing matching wines, etc). These include ... Quay Aria Pier Guillaume @ Bennelong est Marque Flying Fish Sake Four in Hand Becasse There are a few odd places, too. Pastry shops and such. Anyway. That's a pretty extensive list, as I see it. I was told by friends to book super early--especially for Quay and, if I wanted to go there, Tetsuya's. I was initially considering Tetsuya's ... possibly in place of, say, est. But I've heard very mixed feedback. Very mixed. I've heard people rate it as totally amazing but I've heard a lot of people make what seem to be very valid complaints ... not just the usual whinging you hear on sites like eatability (i.e. "I paid $200 for a meal and it wasn't the most amazing in the world therefore it was crap and a waste of money, even tho' I kind of had a nice time"). Should I be going to Tetsuya's? Are there any places on that list that really don't belong that, that should be replaced by something I haven't really considered? Should I be trimming one or even two places? I'm most excited about Becausse, Guillaume (having loved his Melbourne operation, Bistro Guillaume), Marque, Quay, Four in Hand and Aria. I won't be cutting those. But Sake and Flying Fish? I'm still not 100% sold on them.

Last night I made beef chilli 'ragu' following the recipe in Adrian Richardson's excellent Meat book. It was good. Amazing? No ... but one of the better examples of chilli I've eaten. I'm wondering if I'd be better off making chilli from pork neck or shoulder. I mean, pig content improves everything, right? Ingredients: cubed chuck, tomato passata, chicken stock, onion, garlic, capsicum, fresh habanero, chilli powder (a 'hot' powder from the Chinese shop and the lovely aromatic Kashmiri powder I bought from the Indian supermarket--I find a combination of both, in roughly even amounts, manages to give a nice balance of heat and flavour), smoked paprika, coriander seeds, cumin seeds and, right at the end of cooking, some fresh basil and coriander leaves. Apoligies about the crappy, out-of-focus photo. Served with roast potatoes. Olive oil certainly isn't as good as duck fat. Tonight I'll be cooking some chicken wings under the grill. Just put together the marinade now: both of the afore-mentioned chilli powders, smoked paprika, oregano, salt, pepper, a bit of ground cumin, a pinch of saffron powder to get the colour all pretty and such ... and to make my left hand look like I've stolen clothing from a department store.

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.

Do you have Advanced Bread and Pastry? There's a nice looking chocolate and white grapefruit dessert in there.

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.

A few of the titles on that shelf gave some clue as to locality ... Pizza Modo Mio Red Lantern Thai Food that Blue Ginger, iirc, book Local cover of A Cook's Tour

Hope the bump is okay. Was considering this issue myself. My method: * small potatoes (undecided if waxy or floury is better, leaning towards waxy, but jury is still out), peeled and cut into halves * on peeling: be a bit rough with your peeling, intentional, angled cuts and faces are a good thing here * barpoiled in water (with a good amount of salt--no half-arsed 'pinch') until almost falling apart * something I picked up from Blumenthal: returning potatoes to dry saucepan on low heat, cooking much moisture out of them, gently shaking the pan--this step is critical for potatoes with a nice crust, the sort of crust you see on ads for frozen fries and such. You want to rough up all sides of the potatoes as much as possible without destroying them--be gentle. * meanwhile, duck fat is pre-heating, a fair amount of it, in an oven-capable frypan * tip potatoes in, turn them to ensure they all coated all over with oil, sprinkle with salt * turn over every twenty minutes or half hour or so, cook for 80-90 minutes at 170* * forget about reheating them Currently considering ... * trying lamb fat (for serving with roast lamb, braised lamb shoulder, etc) * somehow infusing the cooking liquid with, say, rosemary or garlic (or 'marinating' the potatoes)--the idea being that maybe it'd lend a subtle flavour to the potato flesh (too, do I have to use water? Perhaps some kind of vegetable stock?) * messing around with creating a double crust

Pumpkin risotto with blue cheese is alright. A touch of fresh chilli is a nice addition.

Unlikely? I reckon it'd work. Maybe throw some cucumber in there too. Just use fairly small quantities or cut the pieces small, at least. At the very least I reckon a grapefruit vinaigrette would be nice. Incidentally, if the thought's crossed your mind at all, I've tried making grapefruit curd tarts before. Didn't work so well, in case you had that idea. Maybe there's just something about lemon juice that stands up better to the curd-making process than grapefruit, orange, mandarin, etc. EDIT Just cracked open Larousse Gastronomique because it's on hand. It suggests a grapefruit sorbert (served in the frozen grapefruit skins), grapefruit salad (in addition to grapefruit it contains apple, celery, lettuce and a yoghurt or light oil-based dressing) and 'grapefruit with prawns'--cook some prawns and toss them together with cucumber, dress with a vinaigrette made from vinegar, peanut oil, sugar, soy sauce, ground ginger, ketchup and honey and add some grapefruit segments.

But early human food ... and most human food today is merely 'cooked ingredients'. Be it a piece of meat cooked on the fire or porridge or beans or whatever. I get what you're trying to do but I think that's going to be hard to pin down. Really hard to pin down. A lot of old dishes would've changed considerably or died out. Hence the distinct lack of stuff that was cooked way back forever ago and exists now, pretty much unchanged, except for the fact you can buy a microwaveable version in the supermarket's freezer section. Are you looking at making historical dishes or something? Why not just mess around with Apicius or whatever. You can find free translations online a lot. As time has gone on and we've got wealthier, we've had more access to different cuts of meat, a wider range of meats and vegetables, spices, salt, sugar and so on. A lot of those ancient dishes wouldn't taste of much, at least not to our modern palates

That sounds nice. In fact, I've never had salt cod before but have been meaning to try it. This looks like the place to start. Google Translate did a reasonable job of translating the bits I didn't fully understand.

The presence of a couple of those books makes me think this person is Australian, even tho' I haven't been here long enough to know more than a handful of names--none of them locals. Or, at the very least, they buy a lot of Australia books. A decent collection, too.

Count me in. It's summer here, although with the weather we've had recently you wouldn't believe so. Purely for fun, I'm going to see what I can do with some summery vegetables. Eggplant, maybe.

That chilli looks good. Love the flavour of jalapenos. Especially the preserved ones.

Possibly of interest: http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/foc/

Yeah, brining. Give it a day. You could flavour that brine with something too, if you want. And the low and slow temperature. When I roasted turkey for the first time I didn't bring it but I did rub the breast--under and on top of the skin--with a lot of flavoured butter. I wrapped the bird in foil while cooking it. Obviously a vaccum pack would be better but I didn't have that and neither did you. I wouldn't 'seal' it in a pan. I wouldn't expose it, uncovered, to the drying heat of the oven. If you want to make a gravy you could just scrounge up some wings and bones and such and work with that. Forget getting anything from the breast. If it's just a one-off (instead of something you want to do every day in a shop or somethng) then you could try the ghetto sous vide setup described above. I've used it for 'roo fillets and it worked pretty well ... altho' I was even more ghetto and worked with cling film.

China? Maybe. Or somewhere in the Middle East. Yeah, I'm too thinking places where agriculture began because I think the idea of a 'dish'--a distinct thing that you prepare in a specific way using the same (or close enough) ingredients each time, like carbonara--is a very modern concept. Very modern. A dish is a pretty luxurious concept. You'd have to be pretty flush up for most of human history to prepare or eat 'dishes' as you see them. You can probably forget about anything from even the early days of agriculture if you're expecting to hear someone say, 'Duck confit on a bed of spinach, celeriac, chocolate & cherry jus paired with 10000BCE Pinot Noir, Golden Crescent, Middle East.' Put me down for pot au feu. If you include snacks or prepared ingredients (which can be eaten on their own) then throw in salt-cured sardines/anchovies/cod and beef jerky/biltong. 1st century Roman? Chocolate? Wrong continent. Anything European involving tomatoes or potatoes or chocolate--or anything Asian involving chilli, say--or capsicum is automatically out, I'd say. At least in it's current form. And I doubt anything has survived untouched.

Bread isn't a dish? That's an odd rule. Totally ruins my suggestion of unleavened bread. Let's say something akin to naan or chapaati. Then again, I can't suggest spit roast either. Or what amounts to barbecued fish, raw oysters and such. Boiled meat. Dried meat--the most basic form of charcuterie. Root vegetables and meats baked in coals. I'm not sure about lentils. We cultivated them early but I'm not sure how heavily they featured in the hunter-gatherer diet. Then again, if you're not going to accept roast meat or stew because they're too general a concept--and I get that, specific dishes and all--maybe that automatically excludes stuff from before agriculture and metalwork began.

Your guess was right.

Amatriciana with habañeros? Sure. Just a small one. I wasn't trying to make turn it into some kind of chilli con pancetta deal. But that's all I had in the way of chillies unless I wanted to use a generic 'long green chilli' with no particular flavour or heat from the supermarket.

Spaghetti all'amatriciana. I used the first of my home-grown habanero chillies.

I was always taught that adding liquid to the pan--and this includes butter, oil, etc--during roasting was a bad idea. Moisture destroying the crust and all, which was attained by the drying effect of the oven.

On New Year's Eve, I went to The Press Club, a well-regarded restaurant in Melbourne. We had the degustation: 8 courses and 8 glasses of wine. Given the event, the matching wines weren't optional. They were factored in to the cost per head. I can't think of a restaurant in Melbourne that offers a degustation menu without telling you you can pay an extra whatever per head to get matching wines with each course. Interestingly, I've looked at the websites of a few notable restaurants in Europe and the US and noticed that not all of them offer this service (altho' Noma offers matching juices--that'd be interesting, I reckon). Now there's something to be said for paying a lot of money and coming out full and drunk thanks to nice food and nice wine. But after 8 glasses I questioned the concept. I mean, perhaps it's just that I'm far more likely to spend a lot of money on a nice single malt or a good cognac or imported beer than I am on a fine wine. Maybe I just don't enjoy wine as much as I should, although I do like getting to try 6 or 8 different wines I've never had before. But I'm finding that, now that I've done the degustation with wine thing a couple of times, I'm not sure if I want to do it again. The food, yes. Maybe a bottle of wine or a couple of beers. But not matching wines with every course. Not just because of the cost and not just because I dislike almost all sweet wines (which naturally come with the dessert courses) but after a certain amount of alcohol I don't think I appreciate the food as much. I don't appreciate the subtle aromas and flavours as much. Thoughts?

Grilled chicken with a marinade of chilli, garlic and ginger Tomato salad Both Larousse recipes, of course.

What kind of pesto did you make? Looks heavy on the garlic! Yum! The ratios from Larousse Gastronomique: 2 cloves of garlic 25 grams pine nuts 40 grams pecorino romano 2 'sprigs' of basil (I added more than 2 'sprigs')