Simon Lewinson

Another place to try for real Malaysian food in Melbourne is Sue'z Delights in Clayton. Run by a Malaysian couple - Sue and Victor. Makes a fantastic nasi lemak, char kueh teow, rendang daging, mee rebus ..... must stop ..... stomach growling. Seriously, this place is as good as it gets in Melbourne. Only better Malaysian food I have had is in KL and Kuching last year. Mmmmmmmm Sarawak Laksa Mmmmmmmmm Interested to hear other prople's opinions on this place.

Hi all, I have been to Thailand and all of the cooking schools that I attended used the same method for the curries: Add a few frops of oil to the wok and start to very gently fry the curry paste. When it starts ti get "going", add one tablespoon of coconut cream and gradually turn up the heat till the oil separates. Do this another 3 or 4 times, then add the remining coconut cream and continue with the recipe. My experience is that I can get the separation reliably within a minute with any number of canned coconut creams or milks.

One place to have a look at is Tho Tho in Victoria St Richmond. Not too "up market" but definitely kid friendly and has fantastic Vietnamese food. Their prawn spring rolls are legendary. I do not think that it is the most upmarket place, but compared with most Vietnamese restaurants it is great value and always spotless with lightning fast service. I would consider having a bite there and seeing what they can offer - I think that they have a function room or can partition off part of the venue. Dragon Boat or Westlake in Chinatown are great for a yum cha style feast but again not sure on the function rooms.

Hi all, I have been sous-vide cooking for a few months now with great results but I now have a question for the learned chefs. I have been given a piece of venison that came from a large, older animal. This animal was a sambar deer and the meat is renowned as being very difficult to cook. I got approximately 6Kg of the backstrap,which I have portiuoned into pieces of aabout 750g. These were seasoned with salt, pepper and dried gbarlic and packed with a glug of extra virgin olive oil. They hhave had 72 hours at 54C (130F) and are still quite tough. The flavour is excellent, is rare and extremely moist but very cchewy. I have put the remaining pieces back for a longer soak but would love comments and thoughts on how long to leave it in for. My equipment is basic - a 5L deep fryer with a TET612 PID controller. I vacuum packed the meat quite hard - I have a Chinese chamber sealer that will just boil room temperature water after 60 seconds. I am tempted to leave it in for another 48 hours but do not want to ruin it. Thanks in advance Simon

I tend to agree that simple is best. I have been sous vide cooking for about 6 months now, and the only thing that would add to the experience of my home brew PID controller is the ability to pre-select temperatures for the various proteins that I regularly cook. Startup time is easily taken care of by a $5 plug timer. That said, I am now looking to convert an eBay bain marie to a dedicated sous vide unit by adding the PID controller and possibly a small circulating pump Simon

Hi Howard, I too am building sous vide gear and have a couple of questions for you What are the programming parameters that you have in the D1S? How much overshoot do you get? I have a REX-C100 controller (only 1 degree resolution) and can get less than 2 degrees C overshoot, but using the Sestos I get huge overshoot - almost 10 degrees! I am quite familiar with tuning PID controllers but cannot make much sense of the D1S parameters. I will be posting an article on my build once it is finalised. Thanks Simon