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!

Spanner Crab Salad, King Crab Fingers, Avocado Tile, Piquillos Wafer

...and so finally spring is upon us. The evenings begin to grow lighter and so to, after the cold months of winter, does the food. I always look forward to spring, the promise of warm weather and the day when I lock away my shoes and bring out the thongs draws nearer. We've started with the spring changes on the entre menu and this is the first dish to arrive. It started when I read a post over at "IDEAS IN FOOD . After reading it I set about coming up with the dish. The flavours are nothing new (crab,avocado, tomato) but I wanted to create some new textures while retaining the integrity of the ingredients. I started with the crab. I'd heard about this great fresh spanner crab meat that's been coming down from Queensland. The company is called Ceas and the spanner crabs the produce was the first to become a sustainable catch in Australia.http://www.ceascrabpak.com/page/about_us.html. I got a few samples in from my supplier and the product was very good with great flavour. To bind the meat I decided an a yuzu/mandarin mayonnaise to balance out the richness of the crab meat. Next I thought we'd have a bit of fun with the 'crab fingers'. Really the idea came from a childhood favourite of mine, fish fingers but instead of regular breadcrumbs I used squid ink bread crumbs. The contrast in colour looks great.
Next the avocado was chopped and seasoned with some Espellete pepper and again yuzu juice to connect it with the crab salad. A quick freeze and I had a workable sheet to cut to the shape I wanted. Eventually I decided on a strip after trying a few different shapes. We had some beautiful piquillos peppers that i made into a puree and dehydrated to get the wafers.
The plate is dressed with a beautiful gel made from tomato syrup and another gel made from coriander. The fingers are pan fried and served warm and the salad cold for a contrast in temperatures as well as textures. We finished the dish with some micro coriander. The dish looks very bright and cheerful and the colours just shine out spring, spring, spring.

Say "Cheese!"

This is a shot of our cheese trolley before it went out to the floor. I'm very lucky to be at a restaurant were cheese is an important part of the dinning experience. As you can see we usually run with 15 to 20 varieties. These will be a mix of both Australian and European cheeses. I particularly like the Australian goats cheese's but we have some fantastic imports. I buy a lot of my cheese from http://www.smellycheese.com.au. Mel looks after me there and she's always got lots of special lesser known cheeses to brighten up the board and filthy joke to make me laugh. Cheese is very expensive in Australia, especially the imported stuff, so I feel very lucky to be able to offer such a fine range. It's great watching the trolley go out full and then coming back with not much left, that means we might actually make some money on it. I just hope there's a little bit of runny Brillat Savarin for me to dip my warm bread in. Mmm..

1st & 3rd Courses of the Truffle Menu '08

Sorry I haven't managed to get the whole menu in 1 post but we seem to sell the menu in the middle of the busiest part of the service and I don't always have time to get the camera. However I'll try for the main and dessert this week. With the menu we've kept it very simple so that it's all about the truffle. The dishes are merely vehicles for these fabulous fungi. The first coarse is a truffle'd leek and potato veloute. We serve it with a little truffle'd pissaladiere on the side. The third coarse as you can see is an adaptation of the current scallop dish and again the simple flavours of a classic barigoule marry classically with the truffles. Three down, two to go.

Rib of Milk Fed Veal, Artickokes: Stuffed Globes and Smoked Jerusalem, Caper & Raisin Puree.

With the new Veal dish we've decided to bring back a bit of the old fashioned theatre to the dinning room. We cook the ribs sous-vide and colour them to order. The waiter then carves the rib from the bone table side and plates it for the guest. I think its important to keep some of the traditional techniques alive as they can so easily be forgotten in today's modern society.
The picture above is of the garnish which we plate in the kitchen. We smoke the Jerusalem artichokes, over vines and wine casks, after they are cooked and then puree them. The caper and raisin puree is a favourite of mine and the sweet, salty, sour flavours are necessary to cut through the richness of the meat and the puree. The stuffing for the globes is made from sweat breads, bone marrow, almonds, lemon zest, shallot and a little garlic and is well balanced against the sharp artichokes. The sauce is brought to life with a little jerez vinegar and brings everything together nicely.