I have it on good authority, a Russian guy I worked with once, that Бефстроганов is something of a made up word but it sounds kinda like the word for “cut” which makes sense for a dish which is cut strips of beef sautéed in a sour cream sauce.  That’s somewhat stuffed up by the fact that what is widely accepted to be the first mention of it, Elena Molokhovets Russian cookbook from 1861 has “Govjadina po-strogonovski, s gorchitseju” as having cubes of beef instead of cut strips (and incidentally uses a mustard based sauce).  Larousse Gastronomique (the cooking Bible) describes it as strips and with tomato paste so I’m deferring to that, even though I wonder if the definitive source of French cooking can be relied on to cast the deciding vote on a Russian dish.

Whichever way history chose to make it, here’s how my stroganoff went.  Serves 4.

Ingredients

• 500g topside cut into strips as wide as your finger and half as deep
• 1 brown onion cut to a fine dice
• 8 large brown mushrooms, stalks cut flush with the caps and sliced half a centimeter thick on the vertical
• 2 cloves of garlic, finely diced
• A tub of tomato paste
• 230ml of sour cream
• 2 tsp of cornflour
• Half a cup of beef stock
• 2 tbsp of chopped continental parsely
• Pasta of your choice

Method

1. Brown the beef strips in a large pot, in batches and set aside.  Start the pasta cooking if it’s dried.
2. Turn the heat down and sauté the onions and garlic until the onions lose their colour (about five minutes), add the mushrooms and sauté until soft.
3. Mix the sour cream, tomato paste and cornflour in a bowl and then add to the vegetables.  Once the consistency has settled down, return the beef and simmer for five to ten minutes until it’s all warm.  Stir half the parsley through.
4. Plate the pasta and serve the stroganoff on top.  Garnish with the remaining parsley.

None of this meal was produced with the input of large chain supermarkets which have a sole priority of driving down prices by purchasing the largest available quantities from factory farms and large scale producers.  It was good not just because it was delicious, but because it wasn’t tangled up in a situation that I don’t really like.

I’m reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” at the moment.  It’s a book which is horrifying in many ways, describing how the food we eat gets to us and why.  To an extent, a mitigating factor is the fact that it’s US-centric.  This normally aggravating-to-Australians trait means that the expose of such foreign concepts as high fructose corn syrup (an artificially derived sugar which has replaced cane or beet sugar in almost 100% of American food) is only an amusement rather than an actual source of terror.  That doesn’t mean there’s not plenty to frighten though; descriptions of how grain-fed cattle needs to be drugged so they will eat grain (cows, unsurprisingly, normally eat grass and can’t naturally tolerate grain) and how “free range” chickens are able to be called that if they have “access to the outdoors” – by which is meant a doorway to a run outside the enormous shed that they are too terrified to go out into, given it’s only available for one week of their lives (for fear of outside contagions getting in to young chickens).

I’ve long been critical of bits and pieces of the “I’m doing the right thing” pantomime around eating and cooking.  ”Organic” is a term which means a lot of things that you wouldn’t expect (as I’ve previously written) and for the longest time I was critical of the idea of avoiding genetically modified food – not being able to see why one would avoid food which has been made better (I now realise “better” means able to be more cheaply produced, not more nutritious or tastier).  But the Urban Food Market ingredients I picked up today are fantastic.  I’m going to write the recipe for specifically the ingredients I used because if you drop by my blog every so often, you do so to see what I’m cooking and eating, not my opinions on sustainable food ecology.  If you want, although it’d be cool if you had a look at the advantages of sustainable food, substitute plastic supermarket food for the ingredients I’ve used.

Ingredients

• 300g of Kialla South organic, biodynamic beef mince. This was a  cow grazing in a pasture not long ago.  The meat is rich and delicious.
• 1 medium sized carrot, very finely shredded (I actually used a lemon zester)
• 1/2 a brown onion, grated coarsely
• 2tbs of chopped mixed, fresh herbs from a small, local green grocer.  Mostly parsley
• 300g of Australian durum wheat pasta
• 1 jar of Lario organic arrabiata pasta sauce
• Shredded hard Parmesan style cheese

Method

Combine the mince, carrot, herbs and onions and roll tablespoons of the mixture into balls.  Cook the pasta.  Meanwhile pan fry the balls in a large pan with a tablespoon of olive oil until almost browned through then add the pasta sauce and reduce to a simmer for ten minutes until the sauce has thickened.

Plate the pasta, then spoon the meatballs and sauce on top and garnish with cheese.

That’s not to say I had all the time and ability in the world to enjoy Joël Robuchon’s Vegas restaurant, I was still feeling the effects of the IBM boys’ festivities from the previous night even at 8:15pm when we were seated (I don’t recover like I used to), but if anything has the ability to set you straight after a big night, it’s truly incredible food ending with a take-home gift for my wife of the sweets you see here – macarons, nougats etc.

When you enter Joël Robuchon the first thing you notice is that Australian fine dining restaurants all seem to be in a race to the bottom to understate themselves. I can see why you’d try to do that, I can see why ostentatiousness (is that a word?) is not something desirable in any sort of Australian business because in Australia we have a habit of being hostile towards people who wear their success or their intent to be successful on their sleeve. Joël Robuchon is decorated in black and deep purple marbles and satins, and where we sat an entire wall was planted in ivy with airbrushed wall art around it designed to create the impression that past the wall was some sort of farm or vineyard – all this decorated with marble reliefs around the walls of women holding wine jugs.

The degaustation menu is sixteen courses. That’s more than I could possibly fit in at the time and certainly in excess of what I was likely to enjoy. We ordered a entrée, soup, main and desert.

Amuse Bouche

The amuse bouche that rocked up first set the pace for the evening. Throughout the meal, my wife and I usually had two waiters and where there was only one they would never carry two things at once. Placed in front of me, and placed in front of my wife by another waiter simultaneously, was a small tin set into a brochure sized (three inches wide, twelve high) sheet of glass. After a brief pause both to ensure they would both reveal at the exact same time, the waiters removed the lids to reveal a caviar amuse bouche on a flaky crab layer with spices.

Entrée

My entrée was incredible but probably not ideal if you are hungover. A cheese soufflé (according to the waiter a “mostly soufflé but somewhat custard”) with a swirling garnish of shaved black truffle, all ankle deep in a truffle coulis. Sweet, heady and rich.

Soup

My wife had the same so again a bit of acting. Waiters bought small bowls of chestnut foam to our table, then poured the soup of chestnut a foie gras through the foam. It’s amazing how well chestnut and foie go together.

Main

My main was more duck (I was in a French restaurant, if they serve duck that’s what you order). Three of the most incredible slices of duck flesh, cooked to perfection, with a slice of seared foie gras and a small compote of cooked fruit. A slice of roasted pear with cinnamonish spice as well as some grape touched with its own reduction, and a slice of what seemed like sautéed grapefruit were the accompaniment.

Desert

Desert was again the same for the two of us. A tall glass presented in a silver picture frame (the frame on the table with the glass coming up from it as if it were a photo coming to life) filled with layers of chilled lemon sorbet with chilled shaved aloe, passion fruit sauces and lemon cheesecake. Absolutely incredible. I don’t think I’d ever eaten aloe before, and the slightly cucumbery flavour offset everything else so, so well.

If you go to Vegas, go to Joël Robuchon mostly to experience incredible French cuisine from one of the world’s better (and certainly better decorated with Michelin stars everywhere), but also to experience a haven of refinement in the midst of all the clutter and kitch of Vegas. I’d love to get back there sometime.

Thai food is actually, at least for me, really difficult to cook.  I don’t know why, but it really does seem as if it’s made out to be much easier than it actually is.

If forced to guess, maybe I think the reason behind this is Thai (and surrounding area),  food is very much about combining very subtle flavours with very pronounced ones. For example coconut milk which is fairly bland (though unique) a flavour, gets mixed with chilli and galangal which are respectively so flavoured it’s painful and the sweet version of already powerful ginger.  Stuff up this interplay between buffer and highly powerful flavours and you’ll either get paint stripper or milk.

I made green curry a while back and it was an utter disaster, it tasted like chicken poached in coconut milk.  I was a bit apprehensive giving rendang beef a shot tonight which is silly because I’ve cooked similar but “not southeast Asian” curries before that are prepared similarly and not had the faintest problem.  It worked great and here’s what I did.

Rendang Curry Paste

This can be made beforehand and frozen.

Ingredients (this makes more than you’ll need for one serving)

• 15g of shrimp paste
• 1 spanish onion
• 12 long red chillies, gutted so the inner white pith (which is where most of the heat comes from) and the seeds are removed.  If you want to bring the pain, leave some seeds in but try it without the seeds first.  Rendang is not meant to be a very hot curry
• 2 teaspoons of powdered tumeric
• 3 inch piece of galangal
• 3 inch piece of ginger
• grated zest of a black lime (regular limes work just fine)
• a whole head of garlic
• the tender white part of a lemongrass stem

Method

Preheat the oven to 200.  Put the shrimp paste on a piece of foil and fold it up so that it’s at the bottom of a sort of foil sock.  Roast it in the oven for about ten minutes, it’ll start to stink and go a darker colour.  Add this to a blender and then chuck everything else in and blend until smooth.  It’ll be a pain to blend, you’ll frequently have to scrape the bits off the side of the blender jug but be patient and you’ll get there.

Making the Curry

Ingredients

• A 900g-1kg of topside beef, it’ll come from the supermarket or butcher as a giant cube.  Cut it into a 4cm dice.
• peanut oil
• 200g of the curry paste
• 1 1/2 tablespoons of tamarind paste
• 6 kaffir lime leaves (pro tip: if you can’t find this at your crappy local Coles or Woolies who just retail processed junk, your local Thai restaurant / takeaway can be coaxed to sell them to you)

Method

Put a pretty serious dash of peanut oil in a large non-stick pot.  Fry the paste for about four minutes, it’ll seriously smell like chilli.

Add the beef, coconut milk, tamarind paste and then crush the lime leaves and add those too.  Now here’s the tricky bit.  Reduce the heat to a medium simmer, and simmer it for ages.  A lot of recipes will tell you 1 – 1 1/2 hours.  This is nonsense, it takes about 2 hours or more.  Don’t be alarmed when the meat goes tough, it will seriously go like rocks for the vast majority of the cooking time, it’ll start to soften when it’s about 20 minutes away from being done by which time most of the sauce will actually be entirely gone and you’ll be left with a very thick gravy-style sauce.  By the time it’s done, the meat will be tender again, some bits of it will even break down when you dig at it with a fork.

The best way to serve rendang, and this’ll likely upset someone, is with a side salad of iceberg lettuce, cherry tomatoes and cucumber.  It’s an utter slap in the face to tradition no doubt, but screw rice.  The crispness of the lettuce and how refreshing it is offsets the bowl of thick rich curry beautifully.

This Neil Perry’s “Good Food” has two I wouldn’t be willing to cook at all, and one that makes me totally screw my face up. It’s absolutely great.

Last night was valentine’s day, and while we don’t usually make that much of a fuss on the day I thought it’d be nice to cook something a bit special.  My wife had been leafing through the book and appeared to particularly like her lips at orecchiette with braised cauliflower, broccoli and pumpkin so I gave it a whirl.  It was nice, as was the wine, but whether it needs a “something else” to kick it up I’m not sure.  It could just be that I didn’t adjust the recipe from four servings to two very well.  Anyway, here’s what I did which is almost to the Perry recipe, it produces a delicious meal even if it’s not what you’d expect at Rockpool.

Ingredients

• 200g of Orecchiette
• 80g cauliflower cut into florettes
• 200g of butternut pumpkin cut to a 1cm dice
• 120g of broccoli cut into florettes
• 3 cloves of garlic, diced finely
• 1cm cube of shallot, diced finely
• 3 anchovies (don’t panic, the usual flavour of anchovies will not be in the end product)
• a handful of shaved parmesan
• pinch of salt
• plenty of olive oil
• pinch of chilli flakes

Method

Bring two pots of water to the boil, throwing in the pumpkin first into one.  Once the pumpkin is almost done, strain it and keep it off to the side.

Into a very large, hot frying pan put about 20ml of olive oil, then the chilli flakes, anchovies, salt, shallot and garlic.  Fry until the garlic browns (a few minutes).  When you notice that the anchovies are basically starting to melt and break down, toss in the broccoli and cauliflower, cover and saute.

Put the orecchiette in the second pot and cook it while the vegetables saute, both things should take a little over ten minutes.  Add the pumpkin to the other vegetables then drain the orecchiette and add it to the frypan, stirring through with a wooden spoon.  Add half the parmesan and a fair whack of black pepper.  Garnish with the rest of the cheese.

She has some great points in her article, and it feels a tiny bit silly to participate in discourse about a national identity through food (not that that’ll stop me).  I really encourage you to read the article, because it’s incredibly well written and raises a couple of highly important points.  That said, I challenge anyone anywhere to deny lamb a place in Australian cuisine and (if such a thing exists) our national food identity.  I had a great meal tonight and here’s what I did.

Lamb Backstrap with Lemon Zest, Rosemary, Thyme and Garlic served with a Rocket, Black Olive, Char Grilled Mushroom and Parmigiano Salad
Backstrap is the best bit of lamb.  If it’s not in the window at the butcher press them to cut some up for you.  Expect to pay, similarly to being the best bit of lamb it’s the most expensive.

Serves 2.

Ingredients

• A  350g piece of lamb backstrap
• A thick pinch of dried rosemary
• A thick pinch of dried thyme, thicker than the rosemary
• One very finely (but not minced) chopped clove of garlic
• The zest of one lemon
• Sufficient rocket to make a salad for two
• 60g (about 20) black olives
• 60g (about 20) char grilled button mushrooms, these can increasingly be bought from a deli or providore but if you can’t find them there’s nothing stopping you using shopped brown mushrooms.
• Some shaved parmigiano cheese

Method

Prepare the salad directly on the plates, if you have a pear it can also work to slice it finely and incorporate it with the rocket, olives, mushrooms and parmigiano.  Put the plates in the fridge.

Sprinkle the backstrap with olive oil then rub the rosemary, thyme, zest, garlic and a couple of serious grinds of black pepper into the top of it.  Once the backstrap is up to room temperature (this aids in how evenly it cooks) heat a frying pan until it’s as hot as it’ll go and drop the cut into the pan with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil.  Watch the edge of the cut and once the colour has changed a third of the way up, flip the meat and sear it on the top.  After a minute or so flip it back to it’s original bottom-down side and drop the heat of the pan until it’s pan frying normally.  Poke it with tongs until it gives “a bit” (you should be able to judge this from steak).  Err on the side of rare rather than well.

Rest the lamb on a chopping board.  Once five minutes have elapsed, slice the cut into 1cm thick slices on the vertical and plate with the salad.

The truth is, you don’t even need one of those bamboo mats.  I made the sushi in the picture using baking paper.

The only hard thing about sushi is the rice, it’s easily the most important thing.  Selecting good quality fish to go inside, or opting to get some nice tuna to put in, is another task to be completed successfully.  Thinking about it, the only easy bit is rolling the sushi!

This is how you make sushi for dinner, a hot weather dish that can be prepared in advance and then just taken out of the fridge.

Ingredients

To cook three cups of rice (easy enough sushi for four people)

• 3C short grain rice, supermarkets stock “sushi rice” which is this and works well
• little more than 3C of water
• 1/3C of rice vinegar
• 3 tbsp of sugar
• 1 tsp of salt
• Nori seaweed sheets
• Fillings.  I most often use tinned tuna or very fresh salmon, cucumber, avocado and carrot.

Method

Cook the rice according to the packet instructions and while it cooks, mix the rice vinegar, sugar and salt together into a solution in a saucepan so it can dissolve.  Once the rice is cooked, let it cool on tray(s) (biscuit trays work well) on top of baking paper.  Sprinkle the vinegar solution on the rice evenly.  Cooling the rice in the pot can make it gluggy and the vinegar may react with the metal, this is also the reason why you don’t cool the rice straight on a metal biscuit tray.

Once the rice is room temperature, take some in your fingers and gently press it onto a nori sheet that is on top of a sushi mat or sheet of baking paper, until it’s about a centimeter thick all over but for the far edge which has a 2cm gap where there is no rice.  Place the fillings across the sheet on top of the rice about 4 – 5cm from the bottom edge, then carefully picking up the close edge, roll it by the paper.  When you have rolled all but the last (riceless) couple of centimeters, dip your finger in a water bowl and wet the riceless flap and close it to complete the roll.

Cut the roll into slices by repeatedly cutting it in half.

The best way to get your head around how to roll sushi is to have a look at youtube videos.  Watch two or three and then give it a hit.  Grab some pickled vinegar, soy and wasabi and serve in small dishes with the rolls.  It’s a great dinner.

PS:

No post on this blog is properly complete without an interesting fact.  Today’s is about wasabi, which is insanely expensive in a similar vein to saffron.   Wasabi paste that you buy from the supermarket is almost always horseradish with green food colouring and spices (but still delicious).

As a side note, stop buying bad pasta.  You shouldn’t do it.  The standard 500g dried pastas that you get from Coles and Woolworths (in particular their generic brands) are tasteless rubbish.  The best results but most effort is your own fresh pasta made from type 00 flour and eggs, but if you are going to buy dried pasta get something produced on a smaller scale from an independent producer.  The stuff in the picture is “Aussie Gold Premium Wheat Linguine” and has a very wheaty flavour to it, it’s $3.85 for 300g as opposed to the $1.60 – $2.00 / 500g pastas in supermarkets.  It’s really worth it.

Carbonara is derived from the Italian word for charcoal but that’s about all we know for sure.  Things like this are absolutely drenched in urban myths from some saying that the it was made for the charcoal men (a secret society that helped unify Italy) through to it originally containing squid ink (making it the colour of charcoal).  There are also fights over what it should contain, but my recipe gives it the basics and it’s delicious.

Ingredients

• Enough pasta for two people, about 300g
• 3 egg yolks
• cream
• 8 button mushrooms
• a clove of garlic
• 7 – 8 slices of pancetta
• heaps of shaved parmesan chass

Method

Two-thirds fill a large pot with water, several large pinches of salt (DO IT, DON’T ARGUE, YES YOU SALT THE WATER).  Once it’s boiling fiercely, add the pasta.  If the water isn’t boiling hard the pasta runs the risk of sticking together.

While the pasta is cooking, slice the pancetta into strips and the mushrooms into slices, cutting the stalks flush with the cup.  Dice the garlic and add it to a hot frypan, adding the pancetta and mushrooms.  As that browns, put the egg yolks into a medium sized coffee mug, top the cup up to 3/4 full with cream and crack plenty of black pepper into it.  Beat it lightly so you get a fairly smooth mixture and it’s not still seperated.

Once the pasta is cooked (about 7 or 8 minutes), strain it of all but a couple of tablespoons of the water.  Return it to the pot and turn the heat down to its lowest, and then add the egg mixture, pancetta, garlic and mushrooms and stir through for a couple of minutes while the egg and cream turns into a thicker sauce (it may break up slightly as you do this, that’s normal).

Add half a fistful of the parmesan and use the other half to garnish.  Nom.

Kangaroos are animals of the family Macropodidae meaning “large foot”.   Theoretically all kangaroo-like creatures are kangaroos but when the word is used it usually refers to the largest of the creatures, with words like wallaby used to describe the smaller ones.  There are four main species of large kangaroo; the red, the eastern and western grey and the antilopine, and there are forty species of kangaroo over all.  The four large main species, in particular the red, are the ones that go well with pepper sauce or rubbed with lemon myrtle olive oil and chopped thyme.

I have no idea why kangaroo meat isn’t eaten more often in Australia, it was legalised for consumption only as late as 1993 but that’s no excuse.  It’s incredibly cheap, very high quality in that it is has tender flesh that is almost fat free, and is absolutely delicious.  I think part of it is that people just don’t know how, so I’d like to clear some of that up.  Here’s how to select, cook, serve and eat roo.

Before I begin

The answers to your emails from another country are below;

1. Yes we actually do eat them
2. Yeah I know about drop bears, but this is not a hoax, believe me, we eat them
3. Sure but cows are cute too and we eat those, presumably you do too
4. Well if you’re a vegetarian why did you email me about meat expecting not to start a fight
5. That’s fine, I’d actually prefer if you didn’t visit my site anymore

Selection

Roo’s available from just about every butcher and every supermarket in Australia, they are either farmed or “cull” kangaroos with farmed roos obviously coming from a farm and cull roos producing meat as an after-effect of being killed as a pest. When selecting kangaroo as a replacement for steaks, it’s a good idea to get loin.  It’s usually quite small compared to beef steaks so be aware of the fact that six may feed four or if you are feeding two it may be the case that you use three steaks.  When I cook most steaks I slice it on the vertical so three roo loins between two people is fine.  Select roo that is a little fatty, the steaks themselves have very little fat in them so any obvious veining is a great bonus.  When buying mince, opt for something that looks light.  Roo mince that is so red it’s purple will be dry and/or burn.

Cooking

Kangaroo meat is incredibly dense and most of the time has next to no fat.  This means that if you cook the crap out of it like your bogan grandmother cooks minute steak, you will wind up with something INCREDIBLY tough.

Select what you are going to grease the pan with.  I cook most meat in butter or olive oil, favouring butter, but cooking roo in butter is tricky.  The best way to cook roo is to rapidly sear it and then cook for a couple of minutes each side, serving medium rare.  If you try to do this in butter you may well wind up burning the butter because the pan needs to be hotter than you’d usually cook meat with butter in.  Go with olive oil or canola oil, and apply it to the pan as opposed to rubbing the meat in oil.  While rubbing a beef steak in oil is a great way to ensure that you don’t stew the steak, there is not enough fat in kangaroo to be that stingy with the oil.  Don’t drown it by any means, but don’t use less than you normally would in pursuit of some particular effect because it won’t work.

If you don’t normally rest beef steak then I think you’re doing it wrong but we can leave it there.  You must however rest kangaroo.  Once you’ve panfried it for three or four minutes each side, leave it on a plate for about five minutes to allow the muscle tissue to relax.  If you don’t, it’ll be a leathery.  Do not use a meat tenderiser on kangaroo.  Don’t use it on any meat, but do NOT use it on kangaroo, you’ll compress already dense flesh and it’ll be a disaster.  Don’t stir fry it.

Serving

You can serve roo steak with most of what you’d serve beef steak with, and most of what you’d serve venison or lamb with.  It doesn’t seem to accompany fruit well, so if you have an orange sauce for venison it’s best to leave it with the deer.  Mushroom, pepper and most caramelised-stuff sauces go incredibly well.  Mashed root vegetables work perfectly as do any usual salad combos for beef steak or lamb.

As a mince it can replace beef mince in most dishes but because it has a slightly more gamey flavour than beef, it doesn’t suit Mexican-style dishes well.  Kangaroo lasagne however, is impeccable.

Eating

There’s no reason to eat roo less often than on a standard rotation.  I eat it at least fortnightly with occasional bursts a couple of nights in one week.  It is almost fat free compared to other meats, and if you care about environmental impact it’s interesting to note that roo (although a pest in some areas) eat considerably less feed than cows.  On top of that, cows are a major contribution to greenhouse gasses and kangaroos simply aren’t due to their digestive tracts working differently and producing different gasses.  They are good for the environment and good for you.

Best of luck! go get some roo this week and serve it up for the family, they’ll love it.  You’d be unaustralian not to.

It took my five minutes to calm down enough to be flabbergasted.  I have some strong opinions about national dishes, and I want yours.

My criteria for national dishes are, I think, unsurprising and wholly supportable. I consider a national dish to be something which is;

• Pervasive:  Strawberry chilli sauce is popular in Tasmania, banana bread is popular in New South Wales.  Neither food is nationally popular enough to be considered a national dish.
• Substantial:  The sole excluding factor for Vegemite is that it’s not a dish, it’s a foodstuff.
• Historical:  National food identity is not what we eat a lot of now, there has to be  a sense of nostalgia to this.  You draw a line somewhere of course, Australia has a much longer history of bush tomatoes and lemon myrtle than it does meat pies but I can’t accept something my grandparents never heard of as a national dish.
• Uniquely identifiable as national:  This is important to me too.  A friend asserts the national dish of the UK is chicken tikka masala.  This is nonsense.  I don’t care that it was invented by an Indian chef in the UK, that makes it Indian, not from the UK.  If a Scot came to Australia and stuffed a stomach full of offal we wouldn’t consider haggis to be Aussie tucker.

So with those criteria asserted, I feel the national dish of Australia cannot possibly be salt and pepper squid because it’s something that is popular in a handful of states, is an Asian-style dish that has tenuous connections to the country’s history,  and we’ve eaten it only over the past few years.  But what IS our national dish?  I have some contenders, what do you think?

If you vote other, please comment underneath what you think is the dish, otherwise only I can see what the “other” is.