|
choff
|
read my profile
sign my guestbook
Name: Rob
Country: Australia
Metro: Sydney
Birthday: 10/23/1983
Gender: Male
Interests: bcom/llb(hons), usyd. facebook. people and things to do with people. phone calls at any time of day. writing and reading letters. walking and talking with friends. saying 'oh really?' speaking in a foreign language with an authentic accent. travelling and walking in foreign cities. reading fitzgerald short stories. reading murakami novels. going to restaurants and writing reviews. sipping a macchiato. playing pinball and beating an old score. playing solitaire showdown with matt. playing texas, water big 2, or cleopatra. finding really obscure music that i enjoy. creating incriminating lingo. posting on xanga like there is no tomorrow. triumphing over a good food challenge. hearing about your day and what you had for dinner. etc.
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
MSN: robert_p_chiu@hotmail.com
Member Since:
12/9/2003
|
|
| http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/good-living/preston-rates-the-worlds-best-restaurants/2009/09/28/1253989856254.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2
Matt Preston, Good Weekend
September 28, 2009 - 9:55AM
The plan was so simple. in rapid succession I would eat at the world's five best restaurants, as named by Restaurant magazine, in order to reach some ringing conclusions about the nature of modern cuisine. I would decide which establishment was "the best", whether the list - compiled from the votes of hundreds of leading foodies, critics and chefs each year - was totally bogus, and whether these gastro temples were really worth the money.
Ah, yes, the money. Can I advise you that losing all your credit cards the day before you set off on the world's most expensive dining trip is not recommended. There is, however, a certain sense of abandon about getting on the plane with just a pocketful of coins and blind faith in the global banking system (just don't think about how it has performed in the past 12 months).
EL BULLI
El Bulli (pronounced "L Boo-Yee") has held top spot in the Restaurant list for the past four years. Even in the strangely self-obsessed world of elite chefs, this ranking is seldom railed against; a tacit agreement, perhaps, that Ferran Adrià is that rare thing - someone who has inspired a paradigm shift in fine dining, a sort of Mozart of the kitchen. His importance is underlined by the fact that two of the other restaurants in the Top Five are run by disciples who once worked at El Bulli. The other two share Adrià's principles of innovation. The question is whether Adrià's brilliance at thinking up new techniques and dishes to express familiar flavours in unfamiliar ways makes for a good dinner.
Adrià's restaurant is a nondescript three-hour drive north-east along the coast from Barcelona. There is a strange sense of anticipation clattering round in my gut as we drive into the fading seaside resort of Roses, its esplanade lined with cheap cafes that smell of fried food and stale beer.
I have wanted to eat at El Bulli since I started writing about restaurants, but with bookings only taken over three days in October and the restaurant vastly oversubscribed, a table here is the hardest in the world to snare. (I booked via the usual email route last October.)
My wife, Emma, and I squeeze into a little taxi to wend our way 20 minutes up and over the headlands towards a far sleepier tourist cove, once best known for its scuba-diving. Our anticipation builds with every hairpin turn until we see, clinging to one side of the bay, the low-rise adobe home that houses El Bulli.
A disarmingly warm welcome calms our initial trepidation. When in Australia last October at the culmination of his world book tour, Ferran Adrià was tired and distracted. Here, he is animated and relaxed, and his tan face wrinkles in a smile as we walk into his kitchen. (He insists on photos in front of his army of 45 young chefs and the giant bronze bull's head that has fooled some - yup, that's my hand sneaking up - into thinking that the restaurant is named after the bull, rather than the previous owner's obsession with bulldogs.)
A meal at El Bulli starts with snacks on the small terrace that overlooks the bay of Cala Montjoi and the path that leads around it. Every so often, families in bikinis, boardies and sarongs traipse past on their way back from the beach and look in. This, and the wood-beamed dining rooms full of bulldog figurines and what could pass as dodgy community-hall art, make El Bulli seem like a surprisingly un-elitist spot.
"Snacks" is such a prosaic term for the 39 creations with which we are, one by one, presented. They start sweet, with sugar cane soaked in different Latin cocktails, tall sheets of gossamer-thin pineapple wafer studded with black olive, and "virtual" peanuts or olives, which look and taste like the real thing, but whose liquid centres explode when you bite into them, sending flavours splattering across your mouth.
It's a relentless assault of tastes, with Adrià's culinary obsession with Japan - the soybean, sesame seeds and anything associated with the pine tree - becoming increasingly clear. The repetition of these passions, however, makes for a slightly unbalanced meal.
It's also weird to start with so many sweet flavours and slowly progress through a selection of amazingly delicious dishes to end with iodine-like flavours of sliced, almost raw-tasting kidney, or a mix of green tea, caviar and rather wibbly-wobbly heat-wilted tendrils of sea anemone that look like phaser-frazzled aliens from an early Star Trek episode. Both are interesting but distinctly un-yummy compared with such delectable middle dishes as parmesan gel ravioli that burst with flavour and turn your tongue inside out with unexpected textures, or a strange raw little leaf that looks like spinach but tastes uncannily like oysters. "Here, nothing is as it seems," says the waiter who clears the plates, as if quoting an El Bulli motto.
This is El Bulli's first season after the departure of Ferran's brother Albert from the long-held role of pastry guru. I found the desserts lacked the breathless excitement of the savoury stuff.
In the end, though, El Bulli comes across as the culinary equivalent of the Paris catwalks. It's cool seeing what's new and trendsetting, but it's also not what you'd wear every day to go to the shops. You might also feel that some of the more outlandish creations should have stayed in the atelier.
EL CELLER DE CAN ROCA
El Celler de Can Roca is an hour back towards Barcelona in a quiet residential suburb of Girona. It's an unlikely place to find the fifth-best restaurant in the world. Run by the three Roca brothers, it is in a fine contemporary triangular space of light, glass and wood with a wide light well, filled with a small grove of trees, as its centre. It is the smartest dining space of the Top Five, which isn't saying much given the cramped English cottage of The Fat Duck, the kitsch of El Bulli and the rugged warehouse feel of Copenhagen's Noma.
Can Roca has, however, always struck me as whiffing slightly of pretension, with little brother Jordi famed for desserts modelled on famous perfumes and big brother Joan distilling the flavour of autumnal earth to use in dishes. Strangely, once there, I find it the most conventional of the five, and the most conventionally delicious.
After snacks such as black sesame crackers or candied black olives made using - shock, horror - real olives, the 11-course menu at Can Roca delivers the most compelling "lick the plate" moments of the trip for the woman I love, whether it's sole partnered by five gel-like splotches of green olive, fennel, orange, bergamot and pine-nut purée, or an amazingly lifelike apricot that turns out to be a thin-skinned sugar ball filled with apricot ice-cream. She also remarks that visiting the kitchens here you see real food: bread coming out of the oven, sausages of goose meat being sliced. Neither of us recalls seeing such "true food" in El Bulli.
Can Roca is also home to the most consistently impressive wine and food matches, thanks to middle brother Josep's encyclopedic cellar. Highlights include a 2005 Fleurie, paired with a similarly cherry-stained almond gazpacho featuring delicate flanks of salmon-pink eel, and a lean red from Priorat, matched with a lamb dish that delivers the trip's biggest OMG moment - crisp and slightly fatty lamb skin sandwiching cubes of bread soaked with the sweet tang of super-ripe tomato. Wow!
MUGARITZ
We now fly north to Spain's Basque country and to the converted farmhouse that is home to Mugaritz, ranked fourth in the Top Five. Mugaritz is lionised as this great rustic restaurant where chefs tend the gardens, using tweezers to pick the herbs and edible flowers that adorn almost every dish, so it's a surprise to find it surrounded by a car park many times bigger than the restaurant's vegetable plot.
Arriving at 9pm, we find the restaurant empty: Spanish diners eat late. Then they arrive, an eclectic mix of foodie tourists, genuflecting young chefs from across Europe and far fewer of the posh perma-tanned, blazer-wearing types seen at Can Roca and El Bulli.
While Andoni Aduriz might have started as a modernist disciple of Ferran Adrià, he now more closely follows the land and the sea that surround him. Local fish abound and flowers, wild greens and herbs seem to be everywhere in the 11-course meal. A minuscule dice of squid and carrots in a squid broth comes strewn with delicate white carrot blossoms. A bowl of herbs and veg is loaded with different basils and the surprisingly sweet petals of lily and marigold.
The guys at Mugaritz also love a culinary gag, whether it's potatoes covered in a grey edible clay so they feel and look like stones, or blackened veal that appears to have spent three hours too long on the barbecue. (It's been dyed to look burnt and is a perfect pink when cut.) "We are a terrible restaurant. We serve our guests stones and burnt meat," riffs maître d' Jose Ramón Calvo.
The funniest joke of all is the two envelopes every diner finds at their place asking them to choose whether they want to "rebel" or "submit" with their choice of menu. I ask Calvo how the two menus differ. "They don't!" he laughs, suggesting they are just playing with diners' minds.
NOMA
Judging by the global column inches, Denmark is famous for three things - design, Princess Mary and its thriving restaurant scene, which likes to boast of having as many Michelin stars as Rome or Madrid. As Arne Jacobsen is to Danish design, so Danish-Macedonian chef René Redzepi is to a re-emerging Scandinavian culinary culture.
His stark but fast-rising restaurant, Noma, is No 3 in the list. It sits in an old maritime warehouse in Copenhagen, an unadorned space of beams, bare boards and distressed wooden pillars. Some of the wooden chairs are draped with animal pelts, but a meal here is as fresh as the spring breeze off the Køge Bugt. Pickling, icing and just using ingredients fresh ensures a light dining experience, as does Redzepi's strong focus on acidity, whether provided by green strawberries, lemony wood sorrel, tangy berries or vinegars. The ingredients are always king: dishes are less complicated than at the Spanish places, but taste no less complex.
Here, too, there are jokes and theatre. The opening bars of the meal are the presentation of a battered old biscuit tin. What's inside is a million miles from a traditional Danish konditori - a creamy foie gras biscuit topped with a dehydrated berry powder of tart intensity. Yet another OMG moment, of which there are many in this meal.
Lunch starts with that biscuit tin and a selection of more rustic flavours. There's a soft quail's egg smoked with hay, a homage to Danish crispbread with baked chicken skin and equally thin crisp rye bread sandwiching a broad-bean paste, and a little pot of lard crusted with a crumble of potato and pork crackling to spread on your bread. Damn, it's good, in a "rolling in the trough" sort of a way.
Like Aduriz, Redzepi cherishes local flowers or foraged hedgerow and foreshore ingredients. Beet slices are paired with the sourness of gooseberry and some little white flowers that have a heat similar to Sichuan pepper; sweet raw shrimps come under a seaweed veil with beets and wild beachside rhubarb.
There's meat, too: scraped raw beef you scoop up with sprigs of mouth-puckering wood sorrel and a smear of a tarragon emulsion. Pulling a hunting knife from its tight leather scabbard feels like a Jomsviking-like thing to do before falling on a chunk of musk ox (somewhere between gamy venison and roo in texture and taste) garlanded with garlic flowers, sweet mellow roasted garlic purée, milk skin and little bobbly seed clusters that provide acidity. I ask if these are traditional accompaniments to musk ox and the waiter laughs. "I have been here five years and I am still trying to work that out. It could be traditional or a 'René' tradition. He does like to twist tradition!"
There are misses here, too, such as a nondescript crab ball served with a sort of loose head-cold of jellied stock and a peppery foraged green called "sea mustard".
THE FAT DUCK
The quaint little English village of Bray on the upper reaches of the Thames is only a 15-minute drive up the motorway from Heathrow. Here lives The Fat Duck, which has often been Robin to El Bulli's Batman. It headed Restaurant's list in 2005 but, for the past four years, chef Heston Blumenthal has had to be content with second place.
If Ferran Adrià is the technician and visionary of culinary modernism, then Blumenthal is the showman. This is my third meal here and the cooking and plating have never been better. Blumenthal and his team have also amped up the theatricality of the dishes. Looking around the dining room, you'll see staff "poaching" lime-and-green-tea-flavoured meringues in liquid nitrogen and dishes billowing with dry-ice fumes. (It's like being at a heavy metal concert without the bleeding eardrums.)
Much of the food is bamboozling. There's a cup of tea served with egg-and-bacon ice-cream that is both hot and cold. Or a dessert in a bowl upholstered in red leather, like the wing back in some baronial library, that comes with wafting dry ice, laden with the aromas of that library - smoke from the fire, leather, etc. Then a barley ice-cream sitting on a compote of fig, apple and dried fruit that is flambéed with whisky. It takes a second to realise what is happening; that those are flames licking the ice-cream, yet it isn't melting. Magically, the ice-cream remains cold but the pot and compote are hot. It's freaky but delicious, and The Fat Duck is almost as much conjuror's parlour as restaurant.
There are more trad dishes as well, many of which are recent additions to the menu and reflect Blumenthal's research into old English recipes. Pigeon is matched with umbles (as offal used to be called by the Brits) and a perfectly chosen 2002 Le Dôme Saint-Emilion. There's also a sort of slushie made from chocolate and wine and a very pretty taffety tart that pairs the flavours of rose and fennel with caramelised apple and crisp pastry. Both take their inspiration from circa-17th-century recipes.
However, even classics aren't safe from Blumenthal's showmanship. A dish called mock turtle soup might leap up from an 1850 recipe, but the realisation is pure Fat Duck meets Alice in Wonderland. A gold-plated bouillon cube in the shape of a pocket watch arrives in a teacup. Hot water is poured over it from a teapot as a second reference to the Mad Hatter's tea party. The resulting mushroom, Madeira and beef consommé is wonderfully intense, exact in flavour and flecked beautifully with gold. This is then poured over a little stack of compressed slices of ox tongue and lardo (pork fat), small cubes of pickled cucumber, truffle and turnip, plus a faux poached egg (which is actually made of turnip and swede).
This all combines to ensure recollections of this meal linger long, even if the memories of the flavours aren't quite as vivid. A week after we get back to Australia, my wife declares she is promoting The Fat Duck to her equal favourite of the five, alongside the deliciousness of Can Roca, thanks to the theatre of the dishes.
THE VERDICT
All these meals are expensive by Australian standards, but I can still clearly remember, name and taste most of the 39 tiny courses I had at El Bulli, which was the most expensive. This goes a long way to justifying the $550-a-head cost of our meal.
It cost us about $2300 to eat exceptionally well at these five restaurants - plus $5000 for frugal travel and accommodation. Over the years, I have frittered away much more money on unmemorable meals, but that's the thing about great places. They may seem expensive, but when they deliver like these five do, they are more than worth it.
So, what are the themes echoing through these five amazing kitchens? Perhaps most important is the love of "the flavour of green". This expresses itself in a dried chervil powder whisked with water into broth like Japanese matcha green tea in the simplest of palate cleansers at El Bulli, or in a complex dessert such as Jordi Roca's "green chromatism" at Can Roca. At Mugaritz and Noma, it manifests as a love of wild greens and the continued interest in fresh herbs and edible flowers.
There also seems to be decreasing focus on red meat dishes in favour of local seafood and vegetables. Together, all this builds on notions of "terroir" - reflecting the restaurants' sense of place.
But is this Top Five the right top five? Should Thomas Keller's Per Se or The French Laundry still be in there? Yes, for sure. Should Pierre Gagnaire's idiosyncratic eponymous Parisian gastrodome have retained a spot in the Top Five? Almost undoubtedly. And what of those great Japanese and French restaurants that have already achieved the three Michelin stars that still elude Can Roca, Noma and Mugaritz? Possibly.
The trouble it is that you can't fit 20 places into a Top Five list. For me, after eating at these five restaurants, as well as many of the other contenders, my feeling is that the order is about right, give or take a Thomas Keller restaurant. Especially as this list appears to favour what Michelin calls innovative restaurants (but then chefs and food writers are often overly excited by the new).
Restaurants are like cravats - your favourite depends on your mood and needs at that time. For me, thanks to its reckless pursuit of the new, El Bulli has to be the leader of the pack. You careen from dishes that plunge you into paroxysms of pleasure to those that might confound or even disgust you - undercooked kidney, anyone? Never boring, it will always leave you asking why, how and whether this is the future of food.
Ask me where I'd like to eat every week for a year, though, and I'll tell you Noma or Mugaritz. Theirs is the sort of clean, pretty, produce-driven soul food that's easy to digest, served in a relaxed interior free from any pomposity. Ask me where I'd like to have my birthday each year, and I'll tell you The Fat Duck, given the theatrical wows, intricate experimentation and relentless yumminess - even if, when every dish is put down, you expect the waiters to sing out, "Ta-daaah!"
But if you ask my wife where she'd like to go, you'll get a very different order with El Bulli at the bottom (she wants to eat her dinner, not have a dialogue with it). Therein lies the heart of why eating at five of the world's top restaurants in close succession was so fascinating.
It is not the fact they are all so different; it is how they connect with different people in very different ways. This exposes the major flaw in any attempt to stratify restaurants. It's always going to be a case of comparing apples with oranges or, in this case, flaming sorbets with exploding olives.
Cravat-a-licious, by Matt Preston, will be published by Ebury Australia on Thursday, rrp $35.
Celebrity MasterChef starts on Wednesday at 7.30pm on Channel 10.
ADDRESS BOOK
El Bulli, Apartado 30, 17480 Roses en Cala Montjoi, Spain; +34 972 150 457 (after 3pm during the season); bulli@elbulli.com. Bookings taken only in October and only by email. Menu (wine not included): €250 ($422).
El Celler de Can Roca, Can Sunyer 48 E-17007 Girona, Spain; + 34 972 222 157; restaurant@cellercanroca.com. Set menus: €80/€100/€125 ($135/$169/$210).
Mugaritz, Aldura Aldea 20, Otzazulueta Baserria, 20100 Errenteria, Spain; +34 943 518 343/943 522 455; info@mugaritz.com. Average cost: €150-€200 ($253-$338).
Noma, Strandgade 93, 1401 Copenhagen K, Denmark; +45 3296 3297; booking@noma.dk. Dinner menus: 995DKK/1295DKK ($226/$294).
The Fat Duck, High Street, Bray, Berkshire, England; +44 1628 580 333 sally@thefatduck.co.uk (bokings by phone only). Tasting menu: £130 ($251).
| | |
|
MARCUS PADLEYAugust 29, 2009THE INSIDER
I GOT an email this week. I ask for ''stupid questions'' in my newsletter and I get them. "I have $10,000 and want to turn it into $1 million. How do I do it?" You're thinking "how stupid" but it's actually a really good question. So let's try to answer it. First thing to do is to accept that you will not achieve this goal without being prepared to lose all your money. You will not achieve it in the bank, in cash, in property or in managed funds. There is no "average" return in any asset class that will suit you. You need to win Lotto or place and win some long-odds bets at the bookies. Outside that you have two options. Build a business, the most sensible option and the real answer to the question, or the sharemarket. The sharemarket appears to be less effort so let's look at that. If you try to achieve this goal with shares you will not do it through diversification. A "portfolio" is not for you. You will achieve it through only two techniques. The first is to find one stock, one fantastic "rocket under a rock" and ride it to a million. Or, technique two, get a lot of stocks right consistently over a long time; in other words you need to develop a trading system and build the capital by consistently successful trading over time. If you are going to build a trading system you have a lot of work to do. You'll have to get your head in the trading game. That means getting an education in how to trade and buying the software to do it. If you are going to do it in one stock then here are a few numbers. To turn $10,000 into $1 million you need a stock that goes up 100-fold. That's a 10,000 per cent return. In the All Ords at this very moment (about 500 stocks) there are exactly 60 stocks that have in their trading histories, if you timed it perfectly from all time low to all time high, returned more than 10,000 per cent. That's a lot better odds than you might imagine. That's 12 per cent of stocks. Here are some of the highlights. Biggest and fastest rises in history:Fortescue Metals:Turned $10,000 into $73,166,166 in 17.8 years between September 1990 and June 2008. This is the biggest single return of any stock over any period in the All Ords. UXC Limited: The fastest of all. In 1.8 years turned $10,000 into $6 million between June 1998 and March 2000 in the tech boom (it was called Davnet at the time). Paladin: In four years turned $10,000 into $13.5 million between April 2003 and April 2007. Third-biggest return and the third-fastest. Other stocks to have done remarkable things with $10,000 include News Corp, which turned it into $26,692,393 in 25.4 years, BHP into $2,543,468 in 42.2 years, QBE $12,165,775 in 32.7 years. Others that have achieved it include ANZ, RIO, Woodside, Origin, Santos, Leighton Holdings. Coca-Cola Amatil, Lend Lease. The list goes on. Bottom line, it is possible. But it will not be easy and it could take 42 years. And I ask, how on earth are you going to stop yourself selling when you have doubled your money to $20,000? And what are you going to do when it falls on day one? And the big one … which stock do I start with? I have written before about how pitiful the real average return from the market actually is after tax, inflation, transaction costs, management costs and the index fudge. Because of that the sharemarket is not about averages and diversification, it is about timing and buying stocks that go up. The pursuit of $1 million with $10,000, as unrealistic as it is, is the essence of what this game is all about. It's not about pretending to be fund manager, hiding in the average and relying on the long term. There are no free lunches. It's about finding stocks that go up and avoiding one that go down. It's about thinking it's possible and applying yourself to the task. Even if you come up 9900 per cent short, you've still doubled your money. Marcus Padley is a stockbroker with Patersons Securities and the author of the daily sharemarket newsletter Marcus Today. | | |
|
Authentic food in a beachside setting earns plenty of salutes.
Life - and work - is busy these days for Giovanni Pilu after his eponymous restaurant scored the best new restaurant award and two hats in The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide 2006. The achievement was all the more satisfying for Pilu and his wife, Marilyn, because "we don't have million-dollar backing or corporate interests. It's just us and lots of help from family, friends and a dedicated staff team." Plenty of regulars have patronised Pilu at Freshwater since it opened last year and now word of mouth and the recent award have bought new customers through the beachfront restaurant's doors. Pilu admits the move from Cala Luna at The Spit, which the couple owned for seven years, involved some risk and a substantial investment of time and money. "It was always my dream to own a beachside restaurant," he says. "I loved Cala Luna but we were given the opportunity to move to Freshwater beach [and] so far so good." Pilu describes his menu as authentic Italian with a focus on the region of Sardinia. "The food of Sardinia is historically of a poor nature," he says. "It is largely the cooking of farmers and shepherds who have never been wealthy people ... it may be poor in some ways [but] it is rich in others. It has flavour, versatility and an exotic nature." Sardinia also played a part in Pilu's decision to leave Italy - he met Marilyn when she was holidaying in the area. His love of soccer helped Pilu establish friendships in Australia but learning English was a challenge that, in turn, made completing an apprenticeship difficult. "I was 21 at the time and spoke not a word of English," Pilu says. "My wife had to contact my teacher every night after class to have assignments explained so she could then translate into Italian for me." He also had to familiarise himself with Australian produce before he could reproduce authentic regional recipes. One of his favourite ingredients is bottarga - dry and salted roe (Pilu uses mullet). "It's versatile [and can be] used in pastas, salads and sauces," he says. He also leans to fresh herbs, "especially basil and rosemary". The secret to Italian cooking is using fresh ingredients. The biggest mistake people make when cooking Italian, he says, is "believing it's easier to prepare dinner by opening a jar of tomato sauce and preserved garlic when it actually doesn't take much longer to chop a fresh garlic clove, fresh ripe tomatoes and basil for a great pasta dish". And it seems the 35-year-old's passion for food has passed on to his children. Four-year-old daughter Sofia enjoys preparing scrambled eggs while son Martino, seven, is more adventurous in the kitchen. "He has a great palate and will try almost anything," Pilu says. "His favourite dish that we cook together is zuppa del pescatore, seafood soup. He loves getting stuck into the crab claws." Between working in the restaurant and spending time with his young family, Pilu finds time for other interests. There are the early Sunday morning soccer games, the recent purchase of a Ducati Monster motorbike - and his growing love affair with the sea. "I'm learning to surf ... there are no waves in Sardinia," he says. If the lessons learnt on the way from Sardinia to Sydney are followed, it won't be long before Pilu has mastered the waves. "Determination pays off," he says. "Dreams can become reality." Prawns with fregola, tomato and chilli
Fregola is Sardinian toasted semolina pasta, similar to large couscous.
1 cup fregola*
2 tbsp olive oil
1 garlic clove, thinly sliced
1 small bird's-eye chilli, thinly sliced
16 medium green prawns, peeled and deveined
20 ripe grape tomatoes, halved
1 cup prawn stock
Salt and pepper
1 tbsp flat leaf parsley, chopped
Cook fregola in plenty of boiling water for 10-12 minutes. Drain and set aside. Heat oil in heavy base pan, add garlic and chilli. Add prawns when garlic becomes soft and saute on medium heat for about 2 min. Add tomatoes, fregola and toss together. Add stock (make from simmering heads and shells), reduce heat and allow to thicken slightly. Season to taste and finish with chopped parsley. * Available at Simon Johnson, Pyrmont, and Accoutrement, Mosman. Serves 4. | | |
|
Catharine Munro August 18, 2009MODERN technology is dramatically changing the restaurant kitchen. Traditional stovetop cooking is no longer an indispensable tool for chefs as they embrace other methods. The most significant and widely used is known as sous vide, which involves plastic bags and water baths. Unbeknown to most diners, it's been used in Sydney's top restaurants for some time. The method allows ingredients to ''taste unnaturally like themselves'', according to Mark Best of the three-hatted Marque restaurant, quoting one of his French heroes, chef Pierre Gagnaire. ''It's not an easy concept to get your head around. Many chefs don't get it but once you do get it, you never go back,'' Best says. In the process, the protein cells of the most delicate fish barely change, leaving its flesh cooked even though it looks raw. The cartilage of the toughest brisket can be melted so it reaches a state of tenderness usually associated with fillet. Even a watermelon can be prepared sous vide to hype its flavour. Food prepared sous vide (under vacuum, in French) is sealed in plastic. The absence of air lowers its boiling point, allowing proteins to be coagulated at a much lower temperature. Often, the portion will be cooked in a bain marie, where a thermostat maintains the water temperature at levels precise to 0.1 of a degree. Alternatively, a steam, or combi, oven is used. Sometimes, it's just the act of vacuuming that achieves the desired result of infusing flavour. Just one mint leaf can flavour a dish of vegetables. It is one part of a huge arsenal of techniques embraced by the chef-scientists who are dominating international restaurant rankings. Spanish chefs, led by Ferran Adria of El Bulli restaurant, have created a market for kitchen instruments that would look at home in a laboratory: blast freezers, chrome griddles, water circulators. There's no need for a naked gas flame these days. ''I have used the technology but I haven't made it so removed that [diners] don't know what's going in [their] mouths,'' says Universal restaurant's Christine Manfield, who believes most patrons are unaware fine restaurants are cooking sous vide. Beyond the city's adventurous top chefs, cooking in a plastic bag is still regarded with suspicion, according to Robert Erskine, who sells high-tech gadgets and equipment for Spanish company International Cooking. Erskine says they are not yet snapping up the thermostat, vacuum sealer and water circulator needed to cook sous vide. ''Chefs are still looking at it. They don't buy it,'' Erskine says. ''It's a coming thing.'' But Sydney's three-hatted chefs have been doing it for years. Tetsuya Wakuda of Tetsuya's says reading about the method inspired his renowned confit of ocean trout in 1987. At first, he used oil to create the air vacuum. It wasn't until the early 1990s that he had success with the new equipment. Fish expert and chef Greg Doyle says even bananas get the treatment in one of the desserts in his restaurant, Pier. At Marque, strawberries are cooked sous vide with sugar at 65 degrees for 40 minutes. Their grey carcasses are discarded and the remaining syrup is put back in a plastic bag with fresh strawberries and then vacuum sealed. The process forces the syrup into the fresh strawberry, creating hyper-real, translucent flesh. Similarly, Best says, watermelons and cucumbers are given an exaggerated flavour so a diner might think: ''This is like the watermelon I used to know.'' The new technology has allowed food to be developed without pricey ingredients. Best says high-end restaurants are no longer distinguished by a menu of overtly luxurious ingredients such as truffle, foie gras and caviar. ''It's the intrinsic quality of every ingredient we focus on. Caviar is [just] slightly fishy eggs. It's the same with meat. If you look at the fillet, its only qualities are [its tenderness] but, really, it's not flavoursome and the texture can be a little mundane.'' Best uses tough cuts like brisket and short rib, cooks them for 18 hours at 65 degrees, chills them in an ice bath, returns them to a water bath for 40 minutes at 55 degrees and then sears the portion before it is put on the plate and served. The end product looks like a medium-rare steak but with much more flavour. ''This is a third-class braising cut turned into a first-class product through this technology,'' Best says. ''Traditionally, fillet was the cut that was only at the best restaurants … Now there's been a complete [reversal]. Why would we bother with fillet?'' At Quay, Peter Gilmore does similar things to a shoulder of lamb, traditionally another cheap cut, cooking it for 24 hours. Another beloved instrument is the Pacojet, which creates instant sorbets and ice-creams. There is no need to add sugar to stop the ice-crystalisation process, Best says. It enables him to put the humble pea at centre stage in a sorbet, with no other ingredients besides a little salt and pepper. Best calls it the ''peasant mentality'' of using everything. The same goes for fish. ''There's no waste from our kitchen.'' Apart from those plastic bags. Erskine estimates each of the top kitchens goes through 1000 bags a week. Chef Shannon Bennett of Melbourne's Vue de monde says the wastage is a problem: ''You feel there's a real trend that will start with this. It's so convenient and so healthy … The only area I would like to see improved is the vacuum-pack bags.'' There is something about this laboratory-like cooking that is a bit, well, frigid. Fans of Anthony Bourdain'sKitchen Confidential account, with all its heat, both allegorical and real, will not love what sous vide heralds: the cold kitchen. There are no aromas with sous vide. Everything is sealed into the food and saved for the plate. It is now possible to set up without any exposed flame, thanks to the development of induction stoves, steam ovens, blenders that cook while they mix and water thermostats. Bennett does it at his new outlet, Cafe Vue at 401, Melbourne. The advent of sous vide has allowed chefs to prepare more before service starts, taking the stress out of the kitchen environment. In a traditional kitchen, ''people are trying to time things, putting them into the oven, tasting, saucing'', Best says. ''That's a super-heated and stressful environment and that's not conducive to quality.'' Manfield agrees: ''For me it's about efficient, calm cooking.'' For something so apparently cutting edge, sous vide has been around a long time. The method was developed in the 1970s in France for Pierre Troisgros, one of the fathers of nouvelle cuisine, to stop foie gras shrinking under heat. It has been applied heavily in industrial food preparation, thanks to the work of food scientist Bruno Goussault. After initially working with hotel chains and airlines on low-heat cooking, Goussault's methods caught on with chefs such as Thomas Keller, who were becoming increasingly interested in the science of food. The Roux brothers, who revived French cuisine in England and mentored hundreds of chefs, are also credited with spreading the word. Dietmar Sawyere of Berowra Waters Inn has been using the technique since he worked as executive sous chef for Regent International Hotels in Hong Kong in the mid-1980s. ''Sous vide cooking started with a reheating method, then a lot of chefs around the world played around with it,'' he says. Sawyere sees no reason to broadcast the method. ''One of the things I have noticed is chefs will put on the menu 'cooked sous vide' … I see it as an irrelevance. I wouldn't put 'cooked in a roasting pan' or 'baked in a baking tray'. It's a cooking method.'' By contrast, Quay restaurant's Peter Gilmore wears the method loud and proud because customers are curious, he says. ''There's no doubt, the face of cooking through sous vide has changed,'' Gilmore says. | | |
| http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/work-four-hours-then-rest-20090803-e770.html?page=-1 - Caroline West
- August 4, 2009
‘Whoever has not two thirds of his day for him self is a slave,’’ declared Friedrich Nietzsche, part of a long tradition of thinkers who thought our lives should contain work, leisure, and sleep in equal balance. Ancient Greek philosophers, such as Aristotle, considered leisure to be constitutive of the good life, in fact, its primary purpose. Having to work was an unfortunate but sometimes necessary diversion from the important activities and experiences that make for a flourishing human existence. From this perspective, modern Western society has got its work-life priorities topsy-turvy. Technology now enables us to produce goods and services necessary for a materially comfortable existence with comparatively little manpower and labour time. We live in an age offering unprecedented opportunity for us all to lead the kind of flourishing, leisurely existence of which the ancients could only dream. Yet many work harder and longer than ever before. Australians work among the longest average weekly hours of any country in the developed world. Despite our laidback facade, as a culture we have somehow managed to create a work ethic that turns thousands of years of pre-modern wisdom on its head. Working hard has come to be seen as a moral virtue; and prioritising leisure is regarded variously as lazy, selfish, frivolous or irresponsible – unless, of course, the leisure is ‘‘well-earned’’. It seems timely to ask: what for? Is our obsession with work at the price of leisure justified? Is it preventing us from leading happier and more meaningful lives? Studies show that as Western societies have become richer on the back of technological advances and longer working hours, their citizens, in general, have become no happier and no more satisfied with their lives. Some studies even suggest that happiness and satisfaction have declined. Work itself is not necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, paid work brings income, self-esteem and social ties. However, for most people, working beyond a certain threshold (generally estimated to be between four to six hours a day), brings comparatively small real additional benefits; yet has substantial opportunity costs, including loss of leisure. Why, then, are so many of us tempted to work ever longer and harder? One reason is that we tend to attach status to high incomes. There is a tendency to envy people who earn more than we do, but not those who have more leisure than we do. The result is that we frequently trade off our leisure time for increased income. However, the benefits of extra income don’t translate efficiently into increased feelings of well-being. One reason is our deeply psychologically ingrained habit of comparison. How good we feel about our own life depends not simply on its intrinsic quality, but how it compares to the lives of others who we identify with, or are surrounded by. A person who shares your qualifications but earns double your income will leave you feeling like you’re underachieving. Reverse the situation and you feel pretty good about yourself. Unsavoury though it may be, it makes us feel good when we are doing better than others in our reference group, and bad to be doing less – even when ‘‘less’’ is objectively pretty good. This creates a strong psychological incentive to work harder, and longer, in order to get more income than your compatriots, in order to feel good about your life and achievements. When everyone else is doing the same, this then becomes self-defeating: everyone has to work harder and harder just to maintain their position relative to others, and those who get left behind feel considerably worse. The result is that everyone is a lot more exhausted, and most are no happier. A second reason extra income generally buys little extra happiness is because we quickly adapt to increased affluence – we soon get used to our new car or bigger house, and revise our expectations. Psychologists refer to this as the ‘‘hedonic treadmill’’ because, once we’re on it, we have to keep running faster to stay in the same place. Importantly, however, the psychological evidence suggests we don’t adapt to everything in this way. Close convivial relations with friends and family, and the pursuit of projects or hobbies that absorb us, are among the things that bring us lasting pleasure. Long working hours may certainly increase overall gross domestic product, but the evidence suggests that it does not increase productivity per hour, and it generally makes us, and those around us, quite a bit less happy than we would otherwise be. Many of the hours in a long working day are frequently less than enjoyable, and leave us tired, residually anxious and grumpy. These points were well appreciated by the economist John Maynard Keynes and the novelist William Thackeray, both of whom were exceptionally productive but who worked for less than four hours a day. "Three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us," wrote Keynes, who preferred to spend the rest of his day in long contemplative walks and conversation with friends. Bertrand Russell argued this principle should be extended to society. In a lovely little 1932 essay, In Praise of Idleness, he wrote: "If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day there would be enough for everybody, and no unemployment – assuming a very moderate amount of sensible organisation." At the time this suggestion met with ridicule, but as the toll of long working hours on individuals, families and communities becomes increasingly apparent, the time for taking Russell’s idea seriously may slowly but surely be arriving. Caroline West is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sydney. | | |
|
