Cravings Magazine: Spring 2009. Pata Negra

Coming Full Circle

Star Anise owner/chef David Coomer with Pata Negra chefs Matt Stone and Kurt Samson were amid the embryonic shambles of their new Nedlands venture when I chatted with them. Upon meeting up with David, he quickly launched into an introduction to his new baby, Pata Negra, while the builders provided a convincing backdrop of clamor behind us. Pata Negra (which opened its doors in July) is Spanish but, it is emphasised, does not only offer tapas. Spain is a country close to the hearts of these chefs, with David relishing the simple, rustic cooking traditions and Matt having recently spent several weeks touring the country.

"I went to Spain and got to taste a lot of different types of food," says Matt.

"It was great. You go into a pintxo (Basque for tapas) and have an anchovy on a bit of bread, then walk up the road and have a totally different tapas experience - it might be croquettes or freshly sliced ham with tomato bread. It was definitely very inspirational and got me totally excited about this cuisine".

"There are very few restaurants around Perth that do a realistic style of Spanish food," adds David.

"So we are looking to introduce something very new. There'll be a real Moorish theme to it. Historically, Spain was heavily influenced by the Arabs, and they introduced cinnamon, cardamom, coriander and all sorts of spices that are found in Middle Eastern and North African food. These have become entrenched in Spanish cuisine. In Spain, a lot of the tapas bars are moving to all sorts of global foods. You might find sashimi-style tapas in Barcelona. But I['d rather start here with real Spanish food".

It's quite a seismic shift from the fine dining and gastronomic wizardry that has made Star Anise what it is today. But things weren't always so rosy for the much-lauded establishment. Opening its doors in 1998, Sydney-born David and his wife Kareen's plan was to create a nice suburban bistro that locals could flock to that served simple, modern food.

"But people, for some ungodly reason, didn't get it". says David.

"They complained about the chairs, or the noise, or the lack of atmosphere. Plus we had no money at all. No equipment and all our ovens were lousy. It was a really difficult time. So it took us a little while to get where we're at - around six years for things to start coming around and for people to say 'this is great'. And whether Perth has caught up to me or something, I don't know. I used to serve a curry with lamb shanks or a wagyu beef pie, pretty straightforward stuff. We'd always had a duck dish on the menu too and a lot of Asian-influenced food as well. I loved the food. It was so much simpler back then".

Nowadays, of course, Star Anise is best known for being uber-creative in the kitchen, with adventurous dishes such as oyster and hiramasa kingfish tartare with horseradish foam and pavlova with fairy floss peppering the menu. Techniques used in molecular gastronomy, such as freezing with liquid nitrogen and poaching in vacuum bags, are among David's bag of tricks. But, he believes, it's all just a part of progress.

"There are a lot of misnomers about the whole molecular thing," he says.

"We had the stove, then convection ovens, and this is just the next progression. I can see everyone will be doing it on ten years' time. The liquid nitrogen thing is just freezing the heck out of something. But it's probably no more of a crazy concept than deep-frying, or microwaving.

"I think if people knew how easy it was to cook in a bain-marie, for example, then everybody would be doing it. Your food is consistent every single time. It retains all the juices and succulence and doesn't tighten the muscles like high heat does. In other words, a steak will be medium rare on the outside as well as the inside and not seared on the outside as people are used to. It doesn't have that graduation".

"Instead of whacking it into a hot oven, we just whack it into the freezing cold," adds Matt.

"Visually it's amazing, steaming and smoking, but it's just another way of cooking something. It's a concrete way to get a food consistently cooked every single time".

But while David is pleased with Star Anise's runaway success, it is his craving for simplicity that has brought him full circle in the restaurant game. The fundamentals of home cooking with fresh, seasonal ingredients hold a lingering place in his heart, and it is clearly a methodology to which he is keen to return.

"I think the more I keep cooking, the more I like cooking simply," he says.

"It's the way I cook at home. In a little tapas restaurant you can chuck six prawns on the grill and a blob of garlic and parsley and it's so pure and simple. Whereas I can't do that at Star Anise. People would complain it was just prawns and garlic. While here, I can and it's food I really like to eat".

Cravings Magazine: Winter 2009

-->

Molecular Gastronomy

Cooking has come a long way over recent years. No longer satisfied with using the conventional oven, many chefs are raiding the laboratory for new and interesting ways to serve up their gastronomic delights. So is it cuisine, or science, or art? We’ll leave that for you to decide!

So What Does It All Mean?

Essentially, molecular gastronomy explores the science & technology surrounding traditional cooking methods. Coined in the late 80s by two European chemists, the phrase was adopted during the nineties and early noughties to describe the experimental style of cooking favoured by some of the world's most innovative and creative chefs. In more recent years however, many of these chefs have distanced themselves from the movement, even releasing a joint tatement repudiating the term that had begun to define them. So is it allnow just glory from a bygone era? The term 'molecular gastronomy' may be passe, but if some of the braver restaurants are anything to go by, many of its techniques are still as hot as ever.

Culinary Jargon

Bubble bubble, toil & trouble. Sometimes the non-traditional cooking techniques used by modern-day chefs can look more like a science class experiment than haute cuisine. For those who don’t know their sous vide from their spherification, here is a list of must-haves for the modern-day kitchen:

Anti-griddle: a device that quickly freezes sauces and purees, producing interesting solid and semi-solid creations.

Foam: a culinary technique invented by Spanish chef extraordinaire Ferran Adria. It involves mixing natural flavours (such as juice) with a gelling agent and then forcing them out through a whipping cream canister using nitrous oxide, which produces a light, airy substance similar to fairy floss.

Pacojet: a fast, automatated ice cream and sorbet maker from Switzerland that requires far less sugar than its predecessors, if any at all.

Sous vide: a cooking technique where food is sealed in a vacuum bag and then submerged into a water bath, to be slow-cooked at a low temperature. This ensures the food is cooked evenly throughout, as well as retaining its shape and texture. It is especially popular for cooking meat and fish, and puts paid to the old ‘seared on the outside, raw in the middle’ method of cooking a steak.

Spherification: a gelling reaction also coined by Ferran Adria when he first created the olive sphere. It involves dropping a ball of liquid into a chemical bath, creating a jelly-like shell with a liquid centre.

Thermomixer: Now the top ‘must-have’ appliance in domestic and commercial kitchens around the world, the thermomixer is ten kitchen gadgets all rolled into one. Its many talents include mincing, chopping, weighing, heating, kneading, juicing and steaming, and anyone who owns one generally has a lot of good things to say.

Yes Chef!

George Calombaris

In the relatively short time that George Calombaris has been a chef, he has risen through the ranks at a scorching pace to become one of Australia’s most high-profile chefs. Initially working at ‘Fenix’, George branched out with his own experimental restaurant ‘Reserve’ before opening his award-winning Greek restaurant at ‘The Press Club’, which he has written a cookbook about. He has since gone on to open two more restaurants in Melbourne and one in Mykonos, Greece, and is one of the judges on Channel Ten’s soon-to-air MasterChef Australia. As with everything, George comes straight to the point when asked about molecular gastronomy.

“For me personally, molecular gastronomy was so eight years ago. It was an amazing movement that is now unfortunately being bastardized by many chefs. For many, it’s about putting things in a gas bottle or adding chocolate to their chops. It’s not. It’s about modernized modern cuisine. It’s about new techniques. It’s about understanding produce and where it comes from and when it’s at its best. We cook pork loins at 61.5 degrees in a water bath for 14.5 minutes and it’s like eating butter rather than roasting it in a pan then throwing it in a hot oven where it’s going to lose 60% of its goodness. People have been cooking things in bags for centuries. It ain’t new.

“Yes okay, we do spherification and airs, but at the end of the day it is food. I’d prefer people to say ‘Wow that tasted great’ rather than ‘Wow, that was freaky’. I think that’s where you’ve got to balance it. It took some time to understand that”.

George can’t live without…

• Paco-jet
• Thermomixer
• Water bath
• Convotherm oven

Shannon Bennett

Shannon Bennett is the chef and maestro behind multi-award winning Melbourne restaurant 'Vue de monde'. He is as renowned for his cutting-edge cuisine as he is for his dedication to classical French cooking, and his latest books is called 'My French Vue'. His new offering is 'Vue by Shannon Bennett', which opened last year in Oman on the Arabian Peninsula in the Middle East.

Shannon's preferred molecular-related cooking techniques are distillation (to concentrate the flavours), slow cooking in oil baths and bain maries, and spherification. But the term does not sit well with him.

"I believe 'molecular' is really the wrong word for this type of cooking," says Shannon.

"It's a term that should be seen, not heard. Working with molecules is the basis of all cooking, so molecular gastronomy will always be around. Some very clever chefs, particularly in Europe, have made great advances in working with molecules to enhance their cuisine, and we will continue to build on that".

Shannon can't live without...

• Good coffee
• Chocolate
• French butter
• Goose fat
• Olive oil
• A copy of Le Repertoire

Ray Capaldi

Scottish-born chef Ray Capaldi was the mastermind behind one of Melbourne’s most adventurous restaurants, ‘Fenix’, serving such whimsy as green tea gas and scallops with licorice before it sadly hit the ashes last year. But rest assured, Ray’s latest venture Locarno 150, which opens mid-2009, promises to continue with the showmanship he became so renowned for.

“There will always be people who mock this style of new and creative cooking,” says Ray.

“But chefs are suffering from a shortage of staff and experience at the moment, so why not look to science to cook a perfect steak and understand what part of the animal did it come from, what it ate, and so on? We all want to cook to perfection.

“It has taken many years to understand why we cook the way we do to realise much of it is all wrong. The creation of some of these new dishes sounds a bit like Alice in Wonderland. But to learn new ways you have to have a limit and it takes time for a good chef to set his limit. Like all new techniques, it is the chefs that doubt that will be left behind.

“The phrase ‘molecular gastronomy’ is the science behind why we do what we do, and is nothing to do with a trend. Personally, I prefer to call my style of cooking ‘traderne’: traditional cooking in a modern way”.

Ray can’t live without..

• Tin opener
• Thermomixer
• Pressure cooker
• Homogenizer
• Water bath/ sous vide. All kitchens should have one
• The best man in the kitchen, the dishwasher

Cravings Magazine, June 2009 - Blokes + Sausages = Bliss

Throw forty wheat farmers into an old stone barn with a few metres of sausage, some Shiraz and various animals flung onto a fired-up barbie, and you’re onto a sure winner.

This isn’t your typical Sunday session. Rather, it’s a cooking class for men who are interested in the finer points of culinary proficiency. The class, now into its second year, was dreamed up by Wyening Mission Farm owners, Ruth and John Young, and was such a massive success last year that they were begged to repeat it.

“We’ve been running smaller cooking classes for around five years now,” says Ruth. “But we noticed there were never any local men attending. So one of the farmers from up here suggested we run a cooking class for blokes, and the idea just took off from there.”

Meanwhile, back in the barn, it’s just turned 11am and the boys are cracking open their first stubbies for the day. Chef extraordinaire, Ann Meyer, is to be the class maestro, and her remonstrations soon see the boys edging out of their seats and up to the two long stainless steel demonstration trestles set up at the front. 

As they jostle around the tables, butcher Joe Princi begins to show the boys how to de-bone and roll an enormous slab of brisket. He makes it look so easy, yet there are clearly some formidable knife skills at work. One of the boys is offered a turn, and quickly becomes unstuck before being guided under Joe’s quiet tutelage. 

The wind howls outside and the flames flicker under a giant pot of beef stock simmering on the barbecue. Inside though, the atmosphere is warm and genial. As the boys become more comfortable with the set-up, the beer starts to unearth the larrikins and they are promptly put to work. 

When Ann asks if anyone owns a sieve, one jibes that he uses his to de-grease his engine parts. But there’s more than mirth. It’s refreshing to see how many Blundstone-clad farmers actually know how to make couscous, or when to add saffron to a dish. On Ann’s request, one particularly large chap makes his way to the front and begins to shyly explain to the group how to make gremolata.

As the day rolls on, the barn becomes redolent with aromas of goat, rabbit, smoked quail and the now-cooked brisket, all of which are dispatched post-haste by the lads for lunch. But now, what will become the highlight for many has arrived: the sausage making. Joe heaves an enormous crate of beef up onto one of the trestles and sets up a heavy-duty mincer.

The boys roll up their sleeves and jockey into position. As the diced beef is pressed through the mincer and guided home into its membrane-like intestinal casing, there is much jocularity as the boys taunt each other over proficiency and technique. Meanwhile, Joe coaches from the sidelines: keep your casings wet and soft, don’t pack them too hard, and for God’s sake don’t break them or it’ll reduce the flavour of the meat.

The boys work on a rotating basis, and before long there are metres of sausage snaking all over the table. Joe then proceeds to twist them into bunches with dexterity that so impresses the lads, they beg him to slow down so they can replicate it.

Before too long, all the meat has been minced, piped, twisted and cut into sausages. As the sun moves westward and the new sausages are thrown onto the barbecue’s hot plate (with a final plea from Joe not to prick them), the merriment in the barn reaches a crescendo and Matt the winemaker finally gets a look-in. At this point, there’s little doubt in anyone’s mind that they’ll all be back here to do it again, next year.

Cravings Magazine, Autumn 2009: A Molecular Maestro

Star chef Ferran Adria visited Australian shores recently and, while Western Australia was unable to secure a visit from the great man this time round, he did leave behind his new book, A Day at elBulli, for us to linger over and savour.

Arguably the most celebrated and creative chef on the planet at the moment, Ferran is maestro to one of the most extraordinary restaurants in the world - elBulli. This three Michelin-star eatery is huddled in a secluded bay on the Costa Brava in northern Spain, and opens its doors for dinner for only six months a year. The rest of the time Ferran spends secreted away in a laboratory with his dedicated team, inventing new ways to prepare and serve food, and creating a fresh, innovative menu for the coming year.

The restaurant receives over two million reservation requests each year, and accepts only 8,000 placements. Needless to say, elBulli is a tough nut to crack, and hence the reason for the book.

For the rest of us who will probably never live long enough to enjoy the elBulli experience or even be able to garner a reservation, we are treated instead to a voyeuristic peek inside the restaurant's machinations. The 600-page tome covers just one day, from daybreak at 6:05am to curtains at 2am, and walks the reader through an average elBulli morning (creative food sessions), afternoon (menu and dish preparations) and evening (dinner). It is a visual feast of beautiful imagery, menus and concepts as Ferran, who has been referred to as 'the Salvador Dali of the kitchen', shares a slice of his life.

Much has been made of whether art, cooking or science is at the heart of the elBulli kitchen, and readers can make up their own minds about what it might be. The frigid temperatures of liquid nitrogen in conjunction with traditional heat-cooking methods are used to squeeze every conceivable permutation out of the most humble ingredients. Forget poached, roasted or coddled: there are also the creative methods of deconstruction, minimalism and symbiosis to consider that take cooking as we know it into a whole new stratosphere.

Of course, it is the dishes themselves that will have this book flying off the shelves. Ferran is the godfather of foam, and began his foray into all things molecular by famously blowing up a tomato with a bicycle pump to try and capture its essence (the tomato, not the bicycle pump). Parmesan marshmallow, hibiscus infusions and edible paper are all part of the madness that is elBulli, as is chocolate air, monkfish liver fondue and hazelnut foam.

Willy Wonka would have been so proud.

Cravings Magazine, Autumn 2009: Bangers & More

Australians like sausages a lot. At least 70% of households eat them for dinner each week. We enjoy them fried in a pan or on the barbie grilled, in hotpots, at charity sausage sizzles and when visiting hardware superstores. We like them for breakfast, lunch or dinner and most of all, we like them nestled in a soft white roll with optional onions and an obligatory dollop of sauce.

The word 'sausage' is derived from the Latin word salsus, meaning salted. The sausage was originally invented as an efficient means for butchers to sell the parts of an animal that were high in nutritional content, but low in visual appeal. Organs, blood, fat and meat scraps were salted, minced and stuffed into casings, then either cooked or, in the case of salamis, hung up to cure and dry.

This is one of the oldest known methods of preserving food, and is a practice that has been replicated around the world for centuries. The practice of sausage making is believed to have originated in the region that is now home to Iraq, in around 3000BC. Sausages were a predominant dish on the menu throughout the Greek and Roman empires, and the Chinese version, la chang, consisted of goat and lamb meat.

Historical literature has also been instrumental in guiding us along the sausage's journey. During 500BC, Greek dramatist Epicharmus wrote a comedy titled 'The Sausage', while in 8th century BC, the Greek poet Homer mentioned blood sausages in his epic poem 'The Odyssey'.

Over the years, Australian tastes have gentrified and diversified, thanks in part to multiculturalism. No longer does the traditional beef sausage reign supreme; joining it is a dazzling array of gourmet sausages. Now the local butcher stocks varieties such as lamb and rosemary, bush tomato, spicy Italian, chicken, pork and fennel, chilli, chipolatas, chorizo, bratwurst and the list goes on.

What's in a sausage?

We've all heard the urban myths about what goes into sausages: lots of fat, gristle and nasty bits. The 'snag has always had a bit of a reputation for being a 'non-food' that the kids enjoy, with very little nutritional content.

Nowadays, however, sausages have come of age and any good butcher would be aghast at the very idea of using inferior products.

David Torres, from Torres Butchers in Northbridge, is one such butcher.

"We don't compromise with our ingredients," says David. "We only use new season baby beef and veal in our shop, so all the secondary cuts are taken out and trimmed of all gristle and fat. Even with our pork sausages, we only use baby female porkers. We don't just buy male pork trim in," he says.

"Our barbecue sausages are 90% lean. When you put them on the barbecue, they don't start doing backstroke. There are a lot of barbecues and sausage sizzles where there is just too much oil and fat. It's up to each and every retailer to specify to their customers exactly what is in their sausages".

Preserving Tradition

In these fast-paced days, there are not too many among us who have the time to shop for food on a daily basis. Preservatives have received a bad rap over the years, yet they are vital to extend the life of some produce.

"We try to stay as natural as we can with our preservatives," says David.

"We use Vitamin C extract to control the life of our sausages. Preservatives will generally give them seven days of life. In all honesty, it's a very small amount. It retains the integrity of the product.

"The only option for making sausages without preservatives is to freeze them as soon as they are bought, then thaw them and use them immediately.

It's advisable to ask your butcher what ingredients and preservatives are in their sausages. Many sausages contain traces of soy, wheat, bread or gluten extract, so it's always best to check.

"If kids are a little bit intolerant, we suggest parents go for the Italian-style sausages, because they don't contain any gluten, wheat or bread", says David.

The Seamless Snag

Joe Princi, from Princi Butchers in Beaconsfield, believes there is an art to cooking the perfect sausage. This starts with giving them top priority on the barbecue.

"Its quite a fine line. But, if you get it right, the sausages should be very juicy on the inside," says Joe.

1. Always put sausages on first. Cook them over a very low heat, or the outside will burn without any heat penetrating inside. Steaks, chops and other meats can then be added to the hot plate so that everything is ready to eat at the same time.

2. Keep the turning to a minimum. Don't be tempted to prick them or the juice and flavour will run out. To check if they are cooked, break one in half to see that it's cooked through to the centre. If it isn't, leave the remainder to cook. When sausages are ready, the skin will start to shrivel a little on the outside, forming a slight crust.