Sourdough update

I finally managed to get a day off, so I gave my baby sourdough starter a run.



Using a recipe I got from one of many very useful sourdough websites, I set about mixing, proving, folding and shaping the mix then scoring and baking the result, fingernails chewed down to stubs as I awaited the outcome from the edge of my seat.



It came out looking all the world like the real thing, although when it was cut open it turns out the loaf was a bit too dense. Other than this, it tasted great, with that slight sour tinge evident and a nice crunchy crust.




According to those more expert at the process than I, the dough probably needed a longer proving time, so I'm having another bash at it tomorrow. But in the meantime, here are some photos of how it all went...

Yeasty Tales

I don’t know if it’s the change of season, a change in attitude brought on by impending fatherhood, or just something that’ll need to be treated with a course of anti-fungals, but I’ve found many of my recent kitchen exploits have involved the manipulation of yeast. From brewing beer, to kneading dough for pizza bases, to growing my own sourdough culture from scratch, these beneficial little bacteria have been weaving their magic on much of the food coming out of my kitchen.


The sourdough is the most exciting thing I’m doing at the moment. I got the recipe from a great cookbook called Moro, which has fantastic dishes from around the Mediteranean coastline, with a particular focus on Moorish Spain and Morocco. It involves combining a bunch of organically grown grapes with a certain amount of unbleached flour and rain water, then allowing it ferment in an air-tight container over a couple of weeks. The naturally occurring yeasts that live on the grapes’ skins start to feed on the flour and, with careful nurturing, they’ll eventually grow into a population (your yeast “culture”) large enough to make bread rise.

Although the first stages of the process demand continuous attention, with the culture needing to be fed twice a day, every day for up to six weeks, it’s worth the slog. Once you’ve established a healthy, thriving culture, it only needs topping up (feeding) once a week and has the potential to last generations and even centuries if treated well. I’ve heard stories of women in some cultures being gifted with a portion of their mother-in-law’s family sourdough culture on their wedding day. What better way to say “welcome to the family” than incorporating the newcomer into a tradition spanning back centuries?

There’s also a sense of smug satisfaction to be derived from creating a whole new organism that has such a practical application in the workings of a household. Actually, the yeast is a particular species of bacterium, so the sourdough culture is made up of billions of individual organisms, all working in concert to a common end. It’s a real symbiotic relationship between culture and host, and as long as they’re regularly fed with a bit of flour and water, they’ll happily continue to do their thing long after I’m gone from this earth.

This cultivation of a sourdough culture ties in closely to my… I guess you could call it a “mission statement”, of aiming to instill as much ‘integrity’ into my cooking as possible. That is, the origins of all the ingredients are traceable, and as much as possible can be proven to have been produced using ethical and ecologically sound methods. To this end, I try to use Lauke’s Wallaby Flour, as it is produced nearby in the Barossa Valley, along with my own sourdough culture grown from local organic grapes and rain water collected in my own tanks (if only it would rain again). In this way, I can ensure my contribution to harmful farming practices that employ unsustainable irrigation methods or destructive chemical fertilisers or pesticides is minimised. Not only can I sleep better at nights, my health and that of my family’s is to some extent protected, while local ethical industries are supported.

OK, I’ll climb down off my high horse now. The most convincing argument I can make in support of raising a sourdough culture is the quality of the bread it produces. Although my efforts are still in their infancy and I still have to master the intricacies of my wood-fired oven, the bread has a unique and truly satisfying characteristic and lasts much longer than its shop-bought counterpart. It’s also far cheaper than buying a loaf of bread at your local mega-market, as well as far more satisfying at a really basic level. You’re producing a staple of the household diet, rather than relying on said conglomeratefor your basic needs.

For more information, check out this great website, dedicated to all things sourdough . I'll try to photograph the process as it evolves and will post the photos as they come.
Watch this space...

Summer Holidays

This article was written upon returning from a coastal odyssey with my wife last Christmas, while we were on our honeymoon.

The first question on everyone’s lips when they heard that I was moving from Byron Bay to Adelaide was inevitably “why?” Well, it’s a long story and not one that I’ll go into here, but suffice it to say that, with taunts about great white sharks and serial killers still ringing in my ears, I chucked the dog in the car, strapped the surfboard to the roof and headed inland and South towards a strange land where people annunciate properly and the sun sets into the ocean.

And I must say that after a full year I’ve yet to find cause to regret my decision. Why? As someone for whom the last fifteen years have revolved around the discovery, production and appreciation of food and drink, moving to Adelaide has been like a spiritual homecoming for me. I mean, you make Cooper’s here; need I say more?

My lovely wife and I, with a surfboard, two fishing rods and a tent, set off on our honeymoon about two weeks before Christmas, just before the onset of the school holidays. We followed the coast from Adelaide all the way round to the North Coast of NSW then cut straight back through the middle, a journey of over 6000km all told, that took us just under a month to complete.

We only broke down once, fought properly once and caught one lonely legal fish the whole time we were away; not a bad record really (except for the lack of fish; that was disappointing). As well as that, we managed to skirt around the edges of a startling variety of natural disasters including; bushfires then snow on Christmas day in Gippsland, king tides on the south coast of SA, gale force winds that blew us north out of Victoria then floods in Broken Hill just days after we’d passed through. Either it’s climate change in action or I’ve done something that really pissed the weather gods off.

Anyway, summer holiday food… hmmm. Well, I did catch one fish, so I’ll tell you how I cooked and ate that. For a start, it was a bream…


Pan-fried Bream on Saffron Rice – feeds 2








Ingredients

Fish Stuffing
- 1 brown Onion
- 3 cloves Garlic
- 1 bunch Coriander
- 1 small knob Ginger
- 1/2 teaspoon each of…
* Paprika
* ground Coriander
* ground Cumin seed


Saffron Rice
- 1 cup Basmati rice
- 1 small pinch Saffron strands
- 1 generous pinch of salt

Flour Mix
- 1 cup Plain Flour
- 3 teaspoons Paprika
- 2 teaspoons ground Coriander
- Salt & Pepper

After gutting and scaling the fish, finely chop the onion, garlic, ginger, coriander stems and chilli, then sautée (‘fry in a pan’ in French) all that with the paprika, ground coriander and cumin seeds. Once this softens and the aromatic spices had blended together nicely take it off the heat and stuff it into the fish’s cavity (where the guts had been until five minutes before).

At this point put the fish to one side and put the rice on to boil. That done, make up the flour blend. Dip the fish into this mix, being careful to not spill any of the stuffing, so that it is evenly coated all over; this helps to stop the fish from sticking to the pan when you cook it and creates a delicious crispy layer on its skin. Once this is all done, heat olive oil over a medium flame in the same pan you used before and, once it‘s hot, place the whole fish in the pan, cooking it on each side for about 7-8 minutes.

When the rice is about 30 seconds away from ready, drop in the pinch of saffron and stir it in gently. Strain it off without mixing it around too much, so the saffron strands only bleed a little into the rice. This is a bit of chefly showing off and totally unnecessary to the final meal but sometimes I can’t help myself. It means that as you’re eating it you come upon patches of brilliant yellow in the rice and get a hit of the distinctive saffron flavour that goes quite well, incidentally, with freshly caught bream.

We ate the fish plonked on top of a pile of the saffron rice, stripping it back to bare bones in a matter of minutes. It wasn’t a huge fish but it was easily enough for two, in combination with the rice.

Some Past Articles

Only two posts in and I've already slipped into a pattern of complacency and procrastination. I must snap out of it.

Instead of writing something new this time, I've decided to include some articles I wrote last year for my university magazine. Adelaide's currently in the grips of an extended heatwave and drought, which is not conducive to creativity, particularly after a bottle or two of my homebrew have begun to exert their influence over things.

The first is a blasphemous allusion to two of my favourite cookbooks...

I’m not a religious man by any stretch of the imagination and although I’m no Richard Dawkins (The God Myth), I do have some fundamental issues with the way religion has made a mess of so many things in our world (I won’t go into them here though, this is a cooking column). Having said this, however, there are some elements to our society’s attitude towards food that border on the religious. The ritual of food preparation, the gathering of family and friends around the dinner table, the elaborate uniforms and fancy hats worn by professionals (not to mention the secret languages and alleged deviant sexual behaviour).

Continuing with the religious metaphor, I’ve found during my own career in the kitchen two books have been indispensable, which I refer to as my Old and New Testaments. The Old is the enduring classic, Larousse Gastronomique. First published in 1938, this tome is the first and last stop for many chefs and home cooks if they want to reference anything French or generally European. It’s the Encyclopaedia Brittanica of Euro food, from Abalone to Zuppa Inglese, and one of my most valued personal possessions. It is, however, somewhat mired in tradition and the pompous superiority of French cuisine, and falls short on other, more exotic cuisines. The wide and diverse Asian cuisines, for example, are definitely under-represented.

This is where the New Testament comes into play. My esteemed colleague, P Chi, referred in the last edition to the compendium of culinary wisdom that is Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion. Alexander dispenses with all the fire and brimstone of the gourmet tradition, producing a guide that’s far more accessible to the average domestic cook, written in plain, no nonsense language that successfully conveys the author’s love and lifelong commitment to all things culinary. The caption on the Back of the book says it all; The book for a lifetime of cooking. I can picture myself teaching my children, when they eventually arrive, from the pages of the Prophet Stephanie. The last time I opened the book was just after I’d harvested my in-laws’ Satsuma Plum tree. Two days and a quick flick through the pages of The Cook’s Companion later, two dozen jars of plum jam were cooling happily on the kitchen bench (not to mention 25 litres of plum wine aging in the cellar, but that’s another book for another review).

To sum it up, if I was looking for the definition of an obscure French culinary term, or the name of a three Michelin-starred chef from Lombardy, it’d be Larousse Gastronomique all the way. If, however, I wanted to cook a meal with readily accessible and recognisable ingredients, that I knew would have people drooling the minute they walked in the door, I’d go every time to The Cook’s Companion. For one, it’s Australian, and we should all support Australian businesses and industries, but also because it’s unpretentious, amazingly comprehensive and (I say this without a hint of exaggeration) one of the most important works of culinary literature ever produced, in this country or any other.

Rice Around the World

Christmas doesn’t usually involve much to excite my interest. It’s tacky, gaudy and over-commercialised; a materialistic frenzy coated with an increasingly brittle religious veneer. But this year I had some small cause to get into the spirit of the thing when I and my lovely other were presented with a Christmas hamper by the in-laws. Although it contained many a lip-smacking morsel, which I soon ruthlessly plundered, it was the bundle’s container that really caught my attention. No mere basket was this, no! The whole bundle was neatly contained inside a paella pan. My pulse skipped a beat.

The pan itself is an unassuming enamel dish, about 30cm wide and five deep, with angled sides slanting in to a flat base. The trick to using it is in careful temperature regulation, correct proportions of rice to water and just the right amount of Moorish spices to enhance, but not dominate the natural flavours of the rice. Your traditional paella is most often associated with chicken, rabbit, seafood and/or chorizo but really, who needs to stand on tradition? Imagination is the only real limit to the contents of this dish - and possibly the volume of the pan itself.

So I’ll share with you a couple of dishes I’ve whipped up since acquiring this wonderful piece of equipment, because you’re not only limited to paella. A number of cultures have a rice dish prepared using similar, if not identical methods. Think risotto or the Indian biryani. The only real difference is a couple of ingredients here and one spice substituted for another there.

I must include a disclaimer at this point. I am in no way claiming this to be the traditional method for preparing any of the dishes included. As I have had no formal training in any of the cuisines I’m about to pilfer from, it’d be worse than dishonest to make any claims of authenticity. What I do know, however, is that these recipes work and they taste good, and that’s enough for me.

So anyway, first off there are the ingredients common to both dishes. This should feed three people easily, or only two if you’re starving. For a pan the size of mine use…

- One cup of your chosen rice; I use Basmati for both paella and biryani, although I can hear the purists screaming already. I’ve read that Arborio’s a suitable substitute for the traditional Spanish medium-grain rices, but I find the paella comes out too gluggy.
- One medium onion, diced to a medium size.
- Three cloves of garlic (at least, I love the stuff).
- Three cups of water or stock.
- A pinch of Saffron soaked in about three tablespoons of warm water.
- Three chicken thigh fillets, cut into 2cm cubes.
- Salt & Pepper.

Now the recipes diverge…

Paella
- On a medium gas flame (you can use electric but it really isn’t as effective. I use our little gas camping stove) fry the onions and garlic in a tablespoon of good olive oil until they’re about three-quarters cooked. Transfer this into a small bowl at set to one side.
- Turn up the flame slightly and start frying your chicken pieces. Don’t throw them all in at once, because the temperature in the pan will drop too much and they’ll start to stew (bad). I like to start with a third of the meat and allowing it to brown off before adding the next third, and so on. Once all of the meat is sizzling away nicely, but not quite cooked all the way through, transfer it to another bowl and, once again, set to one side.
- Return the onions and garlic to the pan and wait until it’s all sizzling nicely, then pour in your rice and stir it all around so it’s all mixed through. Let this sizzle away for a minute or two, stirring constantly so it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan, then pour in the saffron water, strands and all.
- Pour in your water or stock and stir to combine everything.
- Bring the liquid to the boil, stirring every couple of minutes to stop anything sticking to the pan. Once it’s boiling, add your chicken pieces and about half a cup of broad beans (if they’re in season, we still have some of last season’s crop in the freezer) and turn the flame down to low. Allow it to sit for 10 minutes, then give the pan a little shake to dislodge any bits sticking. Leave it for another 10-15 minutes then turn off the flame and cover the pan with a lid, leaving it once again for seven minutes.
- Serve with a nice Clare valley Riesling or an Adelaide Hills Pinot Gris.

Biryani
- Repeat the steps above until you’re ready to put the onions and garlic into the pan for the second time.
- Once it’s sizzling again, add half a teaspoon of Turmeric, a teaspoon each of ground Cumin seed, ground Coriander seed, Garam Masala, two finely chopped fresh chillies (medium strength, if you’re into that kind of thing) and five Cardamom pods. Stir vigorously so it doesn’t stick to the pan and burn.
- After a minute or so, add the rice and Saffron, as for the paella.
- Repeat the paella cooking instructions from this point on, but serve with a tall glass of Coopers Pale Ale.
- Yum!

Opening Comments

So this is my blog,
welcome!
As the title suggests, I was once a chef. I spent 10+ long years toiling in commercial kitchens all up and down the east coast of Australia, as well as a short stint in la concina of a Spanish mountain cantina. I fell into the trade more by accident than design, although I'd always had an interest in food, stemming from a parental interest ahead of its time in exotic ingredients, as well as an innate propensity for gluttony. My intension was always to become a journalist or some other form of professional writer, but this was not to be...
Having enrolled in the University of Queensland's journalism school, I needed a job to pay for the roof over my head and an increasing dependence on beer. So I answered a job ad for a kitchenhand position in the appallingly named Fasta Pasta franchise opening up the street and was soon up to my elbows in fresh spaghetti and pre-cooked pizza bases, rising from dish-pig to second chef in just under two years. The uni degree only lasted three more semesters, but it wasn't until 12 years later that I managed to fool someone into giving me a job that didnt involve the back-breaking labour, stupid hours and stress-induced substance abuse integral to the cooking game.
But despite all this, I've somehow managed to develop and hone a profound interest in the production, preparation and consumption of food. It's a diverse and fascinating realm of the senses, which not only provides us with basic sustenance and fuel for a day's work, but forms the very basis of cultures and evokes the highest passions; the best and worse in people.
So read on, I hope that I can somehow communicate my love of food in all its facets, but also my belief in the need for people to recognise and adopt a heightened level of integrity to their patterns of consumption. By supporting local industries, encouraging sustainable farming practices and ecologically-sound production methods, people can change the world for the better. All it takes is for people to think about the food they're eating and what happened to it before it appeared on the supermarket shelf in front of them.