I'm back...

So I don't know where to start really. It's been over 2 years since I posted anything and so much has happened in that time. I've ran 2 different restaurants (1 Steakhouse & Tapas bar, 1 casual produce driven Australian restaurant), I had a great gastro trip around Europe and now I find myself without a restaurant to worry about.I'm about to start 2 new projects that are a bit out of the norm for me, though still food related and I am really excited about the chance to finally be able to cook what the hell I like. So welcome aboard and I hope you enjoy the journey.
I've included a few pics of the food I was doing in my last restaurant just to get everybody up to speed and I will probably try to catch up with what I've been up too, in the past 2 yrs, between the new posts.
So what are the new projects? Well firstly I'll be opening a market stall around the local growers markets that will specialize in classic sarnies, especially Reuben's and its sister Rachel. For those of you who are not familiar with these two sarnies let me quickly explain. Both are classic NY deli sandwiches. The Reuben is corned beef on rye with Swiss cheese, sauerkraut and Russian dressing. While the Rachel is Pastrami on rye with slaw, Swiss cheese and Russian dressing. These 2 will be the bulk of the business with guest sarnies every week. The only criterion for me to make the sarnies is that they must be delicious. Easy and simple. The project will be called 'Ruby & Rach'.
So once 'Ruby & Rach' is up and running I'm going to embark on a series of pop up dinners, guerrilla dinning stylee. The name of this project will be called 'Restaurant Ko'Kein' (from the Land of Corkaigne - see blog header) SO more about that later.
So that's whats happening. I going to document both projects as they happen and will space it with some cool food pics and recipes. Let the fun begin!

"It's not a Tuna", Day 2, Part1

...and so indeed it was 4.30a.m. on a Wednesday morning. Nothing strange about that, however the fact that I was up and dressed and standing outside waiting for a coach to take me fishing was very strange. Also the fact that I was feeling a little dusty after the previous nights frivolities didn't help. I'm glad we were staying with my fish supplier as he kind of became the human alarm for the trip and I doubt that I would've been up without him. Good on ya Wayne. Anyway it was a short trip to the harbour were the boat was waiting to take us Tuna Fishing.

I say fishing but what we were going to see was tuna harvesting. The fish are kept in pen's out at sea and harvested as needed. The trip took about an hour to get there and we spent most of the time below deck drinking coffee and eating toast. As we went out the crew got ready the production area and made sure everything was super clean.

It was still dark when we left harbour but as we neared the pens the sun began to rise on a beautiful day off the Eyre Peninsula. The hang over had gone and I was really looking forward to the harvesting. We'd all been talking about getting in with the fish the night before but now that we were out in the middle of the ocean I'm not sure that it was such a good idea. As chance would have it though it was only going to be a small harvest for our benefit so only two people would be able to get in. Marty and Shannon put there hand up first so that was that.

As we got closer the divers we're already there and had begun to set up the nets, There were three divers and it didn't take them long to get the nets in place. Our boat pulled alongside the penn and tied up.

Once the nets were set and they had the correct amount of tuna inside they begin to close the net towards the boat and herd the tuna towards the surface. The boat lowers a kind of conveyor belt into the water and the divers then get in the water and get ready to chase and catch the tuna. As this is all going on the crew on the ship stand ready for the first tuna to make its way up the conveyor belt to the deck....

Semolina Gnocchi, Autumn Roots, Shoots and Leaves

This is our current vegetarian main. The gnocchi are pan fried until golden and then garnished with roots, shoots and leaves. At the moment we have roots; confit swede, baby turnips and carrots, shoots; pea shoots, baby leeks and cultivated mushrooms(kind of shoots)-sauteed chestnut mushrooms, poached enoki and raw sliced Swiss browns and leaves; cavolo nero. The dish comes to the table dry and is then sauced with a cepe consomme. Great autumn flavours and textures. The raw Swiss browns are fantastic at the moment, nutty and sweet. We clarify the consomme with gelatin and are able to keep a really strong flavour and colour. Looks great and eats better.

Eyre Peninsula, Day 1- Mussels

Two weeks ago I was luck enough to be invited to attend this years Seafood Mission in Port Lincoln, SA. The Seafood Mission has been running for the last 4 years and is organised by the Eyre Regional Development Board. The idea behind it is to get a group of suppliers, from around Australia, and their clients down to the Eyre Peninsula for 3 days to showcase the local produce. Its a solid 3 days of early mornings, fantastic fresh seafood and a few late nights with a group of chefs, suppliers and fishermen.

I met Wayne my supplier from Christies Seafood at 5.45 a.m. at Sydney airport. We were joined by Massimo Mele (Hugo's Lounge) and Carl Middleton (Four Seasons). After a swift coffee we boarded the plane to Adelaide were me met up with the guys from Melbourne; Shannon Bennett(Vue de Monde), Frank Camorra (Movida), Andrew McConnell (Cutler & Co) and Marty Boetz (Longrain). We then transferred to a rather smaller charter plane and made the journey across the peninsula to Port Lincoln. Luckily it was a beautifully calm and sunny morning so the small plane didn't sway about too much. I think its safe to say that I wasn't the only one who was a bit weary of a plane with little electrics and the captain sitting right in front of you. I was still tired and managed to get a little bit of a snooze on the plane. Once on the ground we met up with the rest of the guys from around the country and then hopped straight on to a coach. First stop Kinkawooka Shellfish and a chance to see the mussel processing plant. The guys there pack the mussels live in sea water and ship them all over the world in 1 kg pot ready bags. At the moment I probably order over 150kg of this a product a week so it was really good to see how the process such a high quality product. I've always wondered how they get the beard's off (I had visions of a room full of old women pulling them out with pliers- how wrong I was). After a tour there we popped round the corner to see the guys at Boston Bay Mussels. These guys had a very similair set up and at the end the treat us to a big bowl of freshly cooked mussels. Beautifully steamed in there own juices and fresh from the sea that morning. It has to be the best way to eat mussels. I learned the difference between the male and female and also the very distinct difference in flavour of each.

After the mussel processing we stopped of for lunch at the newly refurbished Port Lincoln hotel. Here we were introduced to the chef Davin Pedro and a local wine producer (Lincoln Estate Wines)and was then treat to a fantastic BBQ using all local seafood. Again a lot of the fish had been caught that morning and were all in amazing condition.

After lunch it was back on the coach and a short ride down to the harbour to catch a boat out to the mussel beds in the bay. As I said before it was a beautiful day and the sea was pretty calm. It took about an hour to get out to the beds and we saw the guys harvesting the mussels and seeding new ropes. It wasn't until we got out on the boat that you realise how clear and clean the waters are in Boston Bay. Its the positioning of Port Lincoln that makes it such a fantastic place for seafood. There are no rivers in the area so they don't have any issues with pollution. Also the continental shelf drops of not to far out to sea so they get a fantastic amount of nutrients carried up from the currents. These two factors make for some of the healthiest, nutrient rich stretch of waters in Australia.. It was getting really late in the afternoon by the time we got back to shore but we still had one more visit to make.

The last place we visited on day one was the Spencer Gulf and West Prawn Fishermen's Association. The association is one of the industries world class fishery management programs and is used by countries all over the world as a model. Here we tasted the newly branded Lincoln Wild Kings.

After the prawns it was back on the coach to be dropped of at our accommodation. We had a quick freshen up and then back on to the coach to be taken to the venue for the evening dinner. Dinner was held at the Boston Bay Winery. We were all pretty tired by this point in the proceedings but after a few glasses of Riesling everybody seemed to get a second wind.The format for the night was this. "Welcome to the winery and the Eyre Peninsula, there's a boat, on the table full of the finest local seafood, the kitchens open and there's a large BBQ over in the corner, help yourself"

...and that was it. With in minute you had everybody scrambling to get there hand on there favourite products and then straight into the kitchen to cook and prepare it. It was great fun and really helped everybody to get to know each other. The food was great and the wine was great too. Some interesting things on the night, Shannon cooked up the 'tuna collars'. This is the meat just behind the gills and below the side fins. Really good, really fatty and so tasty. Also there were more of the beautiful 1/2 shell queen scallops from Coffin Bay with the purple roes. We'd had these earlier in the day for lunch and they were phenomenal. No dressing just straight from the shell sashimi style. Beautiful and sweet. I opted to cook a whole kingfish and stuffed it with Asian mushrooms and greens and a little pickled ginger. Its actually my wife's recipe that she cooks when we go camping.

Back on the bus again and straight to bed. Another early one tomorrow 5.a.m. on the tuna boat.

Long Time Coming

Indeed it has. I seem to have missed a complete season in the culinary landscape. Summer is always a pretty manic time for me and hence I haven't been posting as much as I would have liked. So much has happened since my last post that I'm not going to even try to catch up. Any way here's a few shots of a few of the dishes Ive bee doing over the ozzie summer. We're just into autumn here now and the temperature has started to drop recently. Looking forward to some beautiful slow cooked meat and all things autumnal. Stay tuned!

This was a variation of my last post. I used the same lamb elements but changed a few of the garnishes. compressed apricots, toasted almond spheres and Jerez liquid gel and baby kos hearts.

Banoffe pie was the inspiration for this dish. Pain Perdu, Banana Ice cream, Toffee sauce, Caramelized Banana Crunch.

Peach Melba 2008. This was a fun dish with loads of different textures and tastes.Compressed yellow peaches, blood peach sorbet white peach paper, fresh raspberry croquants and crisp raspberry rocks, Aamond soil and vanilla rice puree. Also not on the photo a white peach fluff (with versawhip)

and finally... Summer berries and fresh lychees, lychee parfait, elderflower jelly and coconut nitro-popcorn. Finished at the table with a berry consomme. Fresh and clean for summer with a little liquid nitrogen fun. Later

Lamb Salad; Liquorice Cured Saddle, Pickled Tongue, Globe Artichokes, Mozzarella and Apricot

When I'm looking for ideas for a new menu I find they come from all sorts of areas. I've noticed recently on certain menus around town that the good old duck ham is making a comeback. I can remember the first time I came across this technique and being thoroughly impressed at the effect salt can have on a piece of meat. I guess this was the beginning of a fondness for curing and all other fantastic things you can achieve by just adding salt to things. So I began to think of other meats I could cure. Spring is in the air and the first thing that came to mind was lamb. I ordered in a few saddles and set about salting them. 24hours later and they were hanging in muslin in the cool room. As I waited I started to think about what to match with my saddles. I was doing a bit of research on the Internet and came back across the Food Pairing site. I was browsing through the different food items and came across the pairing tree for mozzarella. I flicked over it and then the dish started to unfold before me. I'd been playing with mozzarella Spheres for a while and had eventually come up with a solid recipe for reverse spherification. I wasn't really sure what I was going to do with them but putting them with the cured lamb saddles made good sense now. The next flavour that caught my attention was liquorice. It's always been a combination I'd wanted to try for myself after reading about a dish the Roca Brothers we're doing at El Cellar de Can Roca, but hadn't really got to it. I had some liquorice powder in the store ( Bras style; almond, dried olive, brown sugar and anise) So I un-wrapped the saddles and rolled them in the liquorice powder before wrapping them again. 2 days later they were ready.
I added some beautiful tongues which had been cooked sous-vide for 27.5 hours at 70 degrees C in a fragrant pickling liquor. To add a crunch to the dish some beautiful baby globes we're added. I dresses the plate with some spots of dried apricot puree and a little lamb jus/jerez vinaigrette. A few leaves of celery cress finish the dish. The liquid mozzarella brings all the elements together. I find it a nice light meat entree for the spring season.

Beetroot 'Fregola', Basil Infused Snails, Baby Squid, Glazed Radishes and Beets

As anyone who's been following this blog will know, I love beetroot. Whether it be in a sweet or a savoury medium. This week was the turn of the savoury side and a new dish for the spring menu. I wanted to use fresh snails on the menu again and was looking for a garnish that would make the dish a little more accessible to our customers. After all theres no point having beautiful local products if the diners aren't going to taste them. So I set about thinking of the dish. At first I thought we would serve the snails with a potato risotto, (a technique I first saw ten years ago while I was working at Aureole in New York. For one of the lunch specials we would serve sauteed halibut cheeks with potato risotto and red wind sauce. There was no rice in the risotto, this was replaced with a brunoise of a waxy potato cooked in the same manner).I was going to add jamon into the dish to add a bit of richness. We tried a few takes on the dish but it wasn't what I was looking for...back to the drawing board. Then, as sometimes happened I stumbled across a bag of fregola that I had left from another dish. The pasta is made from 100% durum wheat and has a fantastic nuttiness to it. So the dish was kind of on the same lines but instead of potato replacing the rice I now had this fantastic pasta. Now I began to think of the flavours I wanted to add to the pasta.
A few days earlier I had been reading an article on flavour compounds and at the end of the article there was a short list of unusual ingredients that went together because they shared some of the same flavour compounds. One of these matches was snails and beetroot. So that was the start snails and beetroot and an added bonus was the fact that here in Australia they luv beetroot. So I began to expand the idea happy that the fact there was beetroot on the plate would mean that people would maybe get to try fresh snails.

It was immediately clear that to get the most beetroot flavour into the dish I would cook the pasta in beetroot juice. After a few trials we decided that a mix of 50% juice and 50% vegetable stock would be better as 100% juice turned out a little too earthy once the pasta was cooked. Once this was locked in we began on the rest of the garnish. Its beetroot season here and we've been getting beautiful baby beets, golden and red, and they we're and instant addition. Once they we're cooked and peeled we glazed them in a little butter and aged white and normal balsamic. I find the earthiness of beets means you need something sharp to cut through it and the sweet vinegar did just that. To accompany the beets we added some tiny red radishes which we glazed in a little verjus.
So that was the garnish, now lets get back to the star of the dish the fresh snail. I buy my snails from a company called Snails Bon Apetite. Its owned by Rob and Helen Dyball and is based in the beautiful Hunter Valley Wine region here in New South Wales. Its so good to have such a great product on our doorstep. Helen does a great job of purgeing the snails for us and couriers them down to us the next day. I think snails go well with most herbs, especially parsley, but I chose to coat them in a fragrant basil puree once we sauteed them nice and crisp. I like squid with snails I think its a nice contrast in texture and they complement each other well in this dish of bold flavours. As I said before to really get the most out of beetroot you need some type of acid, bef0re we used vinegar, which is quite usual, However for the fregola element I used a different type of acid for this job, Passion fruit. A few dots of passion puree dotted around the dish do the job of the vinegar but with a great new flavour. I think this idea must have come from a squid dish I used to do with a passion fruit dressing a few years ago. So that was the dish all that was needed was a few discs of raw radish and some fantastic Hearts ease flowers form my balcony garden. Enjoy!