Abstract Gourmet

That’s right Melbourne. Stay Amazed. Naysayers might try to convince you that the toilet doors of squalid public bathrooms are not the place to get valuable life messages from, but they just haven’t seen the light of grimey self discovery that waits on the other side of cubicle door.

So this post is a little update while the other updates prepare themselves. The morning we arrived in Melbourne, we picked up the car kindly borrowed from Sharon’s friend Michelle and proceeded to drive it into oncoming traffic. Of course I didn’t think I was driving into oncoming traffic, but the inner road that runs down the middle of St Kilda road is confusing. We pulled up alongside a tram facing the wrong direction, and then made a quick u-turn to get the hell out of there. Melbourne roads (1) - Matt (0).

We eventually made it to St Ali without further injury, and then when we were sufficiently sated there, ventured our way into the city. Of course driving into the city is not the best or most efficient way to get there. Unless of course paying $45 for a couple of hours parking is your idea of efficient. At the time though I figured that wasn’t much to pay for the convenience of being able to get where we wanted to go quickly… albeit risking being killed by a horde of screaming taxi drivers.

            

So we park on Flinders Lane, and begin to wander up and down streets and laneways. Sharon stopping at more clothes shops than I can name, while I trundled slowly from cafe to cafe, stopping to check out the ones that looked interesting, and pondering how many coffees would constitute too many.

Now I just realised I said this would be a short post, so I’ll wrap up with a few impressions of the places I did stop at.

Journal
253 Flinders La, Melbourne

Great looking place, very cool concrete bar and dark lighting, even in the day time. I ordered an espresso and a portugese tart. The espresso was not so hot, the tart was cold but tasty. I’d go back for drinks sometime, or food upstairs at the Journal Canteen, which looks good.

San Churro at QV building
Shop LTL 255, QV Centre, Swanston St

Why do people rave about San Churro ? I guess the same people also rave about Max Brenner or Koko Black. I’m perhaps one of those few people who does not turn into a raving lunatic when describing or thinking about chocolate. I wasn’t in the mood for a mountain of deep fried stuff, so I ordered the kids meal… which was surprisingly rewarding if only for the look on the girls face. It came with two churros and a bowl of dark chocolate and hundred and thousands. The churros were quite hard and dry, and the chocolate didn’t transport me to a mystical place, the sprinkled made me feel like I was 5 years old at a birthday party… which was nice :)

The rest of the city is hard to describe, and a little overwhelming at times. So many lane way and alleys to go down, so many places holding so much potential. If we had another few weeks I’m sure I’d be able to cover most of it, but a few days will not do it justice.

On the way out I did manage to perform not one, but two (!) successful hook turns, and not get hit by a taxi or a tram. Melbourne roads (1) - Matt (2) !!

  cafe, chocolate, melbourne, Travel

Filed by Matt at 12:26 pm under Coffee, Eating Out, Photography, Travel 6 Comments (983 views)

Just a quickie thats been kicking around in my head for a while now. I liked the idea of bitter chocolate tarts ever since having one at Divido in Mt Hawthorn a while back. I’m not a huge fan of really sweet desserts, so the idea of the bitter chocolate appealed to my savoury sensibilities quite strongly.

I’d been sitting on a block of dark (80%) Spanish cooking chocolate for a while, waiting for the next outbreak of the war on terror to hit and send my stocks through the roof. Fortunately that hasn’t happened yet (although the current one is bad enough), and so my resource speculation will have to take a back seat to my baking.

I picked the chocolate up while visiting the lovely lady at Spanish Flavours in Wembley (who i’ll call Maria for the sake of cultural stereotypes), it’s a great store full of all sorts of Spanish and Latin flavoured products. Anyone familiar with “Steve Don’t Eat It” (go there, its good) will be glad to know there is a place where you can find your very own can of Cuitlacoche to play with.

So Maria pointed me in the direction of this chocolate and said it was just the stuff for baking all kinds of delicious desserts “But not for drinking !” She said… “I got a nice one for you to try for drinking”. So after being softened up by a mug of free hot chocolate, that looked more like chocolate yoghurt in consistency, I made the purchase and was on my merry way.

Now with my recent tart making success during the Moroccan dinner under my belt, it was time to roll onto the next tart based challenge. So here we have…

Bitter Chocolate Tarts

Pastry Crust:

Bitter Chocolate Filling:

How I Made Mine

For the crust, combine the flour, sugar, and salt together in a food processor. Mix it all around and then add the butter by cutting it up into small pieces and dropped in a piece at a time until the mixture turns into a rough mixture. Add the egg and cream while the processor is still going at which point it should all come together and turn into a big ball that sticks together quite well.

Take the ball out of the processor and onto a floured surface. Knead it a little and when it seems to be a good consistency that is both soft and a little crumbly, but doesn’t completely fall apart, work it into the shape you’re after and press it into your baking dish. In this case I made a bunch of little tarts. So I broke off small balls of dough and pressed them into discs before lining them into a texas muffin tin. Then prick the bottom of the tarts all over with a fork and put them into the freezer for about 20 minutes before cooking.

When they’re mostly solid and have a good shape after being in the freezer, pop them into a preheated oven at 180C and bake for 15-20 minutes until they’re golden brown. Take them out and let them cool.

For the filling I heated the cream until just below boiling point and then transferred it into a bowl along with the chocolate that had been shaved finely so it would melt quickly. Then let that sit for a minute before stirring in the butter and bringing it all together with the baileys and butterscotch schnapps (which you can quite happily omit if you don’t like cowboys). At this point please taste the mixture… I was going along happily and then I had a taste and realised it was too bitter even for my espresso loving palate (although don’t get me started on the bitterness in espresso debate). So i added a half a cup or so of caster sugar to the mixture and stirred it through to lighten the soul destroying bitterness that was currently lurking in the bowl.

Once it’s cooled, pour it into the waiting tart shells and pop it into the freezer or fridge for a good few hours until solid.

Take them out and serve with a good dollop of cream or ice cream to add in the digestive process. Incidentally, mine were still really bitter when I took them out of the fridge the night I made them, but after a couple of days they seem to have mellowed. Don’t ask me how… perhaps all the sugar and alcohol settled at the bottom of the bowl and all got poured into one of the tarts, but either way they tasted great.

The best thing is that if no-one else likes them you can just criticise them for having woefully unsophisticated palates and still come out looking good :) Tasty.

  bitter, chocolate, cream, dessert, recipe, tart

Filed by Matt at 4:07 pm under Eating In, Recipes 12 Comments (200 views)

I’ve put off making soufflé for a long. I would look at recipes and photos of them, and think they looked lovely, but were just too hard to make myself. One of those kind of dishes that takes a lot of skill and brings you crashing down to the reality of your culinary mediocrity when it doesn’t work out. If you hadn’t worked it out already, this blog is pretty much powered by my ego. So making dishes that have the potential to become fantastic faillures (whilst fun and a good way to learn) does not entice me to try.

But then along came Michel Roux. Who I’m sure anyone who reads this blog regularly is sick of hearing about. But really, the man is a genius. His recipes are simple, yet beautifully constructed. Refined, but not pretentious, and classic but not old fashioned.

So when I got to the soufflé section of his Eggs book, I knew it was time to bite the bullet and have a go.

So a quiet Wednesday night to myself, and what does any red blooded Aussie guy do… Makes soufflé !

So… a list of ingredients and a rambling set of instructions. If you don’t want to make so much, then just halve all the ingredients quantities (which is what I did, and still had enough to make two quite large soufflés).

How I made it

Heat the milk and two thirds of the sugar in a small pan and slowly bring to the boil. Put the egg yolks and the rest of the sugar together in a bowl and whisk them into a ribbon consistency (which I assumed to mean nice and smooth and wavey), then slowly incorporate the flour. Then pour the milk mixture into this egg yolk mixture return it to a low heat, and whisk it til its nicely smooth and a bit thick.

Well that was what I supposed to do. What I did in actual fact was not read the recipe properly… Forget to add the flour entirely, and then have to add it later, after I had already melted the chocolate down in a double boiler, and poured that into the egg yolk mixture… which still kinda worked.

So basically now you have thick chocolatey pastry cream, which can be used for lots of stuff, including fillings for choux pastry (ala Beard Papa’s).

To this I added my egg whites which were whipped into soft peaks with the rest of the sugar. I whisked in about a third of the egg whites, and then gently folded the rest in until it was nicely incorporated.

Then let it all cool down, and pour the mixture into the dishes.

The mixture ended up looking like this:

Which I then put into the oven (preheated to 200 C), for roughly 15 minutes…

And then put it for a bit longer when I could see it was all rather molten inside… Can someone tell me how it’s supposed to be ?

And thats how it came out… I was pretty happy with the result, although seeing as it was a complete experiment I wasn’t equipt with ice cream, double cream, icing sugar, or any other tasty little accompaniments to add to it… So what we had was nude souffle on a plate. The upside being, that it was lovely and airy and light, and made me feel happy with its magical mushroom shaped risingness. So much so that I intend to make a few more in the near future.

Also, thanks to Sue for the great title, and her ongoing committment to bad puns.

  chocolate, dessert, recipe, soufflé

Filed by Matt at 6:14 pm under Eating In, Recipes 11 Comments (153 views)

I stole this recipe from Nigella Lawson. I just happened to be flicking channels on TV one day and there she was, looking all nice and summery, out at the seaside (albeit a horribly English looking seaside), cooking up all sorts of tasty little treats.

This one appealed to me because i had previously made a chocolate mousse that went completely wrong… So i thought it about time to make amends for it.

Ingredients and Basic directions from Nigella:

Ingredients::

* 300g white chocolate
* 6 eggs, separated
* 10 passionfruit
* 300g - 500g raspberries

Instructions:

Break the chocolate into pieces and melt in the microwave for about 3 minutes, or in a bowl over a pan of simmering water then set the bowl aside, and let the chocolate cool a little.
Beat the egg whites until stiff but not dry. Mix the egg yolks into the cooled chocolate, though be gentle to ensure it doesn�t seize. Cut the passionfruit in half and scoop them, juice, pulp, seeds, into the yolk and chocolate mixture, then fold into the egg whites until completely incorporated.

Then just pop them in the freezer or fridge for a while and serve with some more fresh berries on top.

I took this dish down to T’Anne’s place for dinner last night, and despite the fact that everyone was completely stuffed, they went down a treat.

It’s with much regret that i didnt take a photo, but trust me when i saw they looked great too :)

  berry, chocolate, dessert, mousse, passionfruit, recipe, white

Filed by Matt at 1:33 pm under Eating In, Recipes | Add a comment (210 views)