poached – Abstract Gourmet

Truffle season

Yes that’s right folks. Whilst it may also be duck season, and rabbit season. It is now most importantly truffle season ! As the weather cools and the rain falls, you can take some comfort in the fact that those little nuggets of earthy goodness have been slowly growing in their special funghi like way for the past year (or 6 or 7 years perhaps) and are now ready to be harvested and savoured.

W.A is fast becoming a truffle haven it would seem. With the Mundaring Truffle Festival going from strength to strength each year, and Manjimup truffles being joined by Pemberton (The Stone Barn has just harvested it’s first truffles), and others in the works. It’s a boutique industry success story.

I picked up a little truffle at the Perth edition of the Good Food & Wine Show last weekend. It was from the Manjimup Wine & Truffle company who currently supply most (if not all) the black truffles you find in restaurants and gourmet stores across the country. Apparently the little 15gram piece I bought had been harvested the day before, and was vacuum sealed with a little padding for maximum freshness so it would still taste as strong as it did when it came out of the ground.

I like to do as little as possible to truffles. I think their uniquely pungent flavour should be the star of any dish they’re added to, and my lack of finesse when deal with fancy ingredients tends to lend itself to simple classics.

As such, the two dishes I made with this truffle were: Asparagus / Poached Egg / Black truffle, and a very simple truffle risotto with scallops.

My egg poaching method these days involves boiling water, white wine vinegar, and then just dropping the egg directly into the water without swirling or wrapping anything in cling film. The secret to the beauty of this is using really nice fresh eggs. The eggs I had this time were sourced from a stall at the Subi Farmers Market, and based on shape and consistency alone were obviously far superior to the supermarket eggs I’ve dealt with in the past.

The risotto was made using a chicken / rabbit stock as the base, and a little milk added along the way. I got the idea for the milk from Vince Velletri who used a similar method to cook the risotto for the Slow Food Perth lunch at the Mundaring Truffle festival last year. I was responsible for stirring about 10kg of rice that went into one massive pot and the memory still sticks in my head. The idea behind the milk is really just to mellow the flavours of the onion etc in the base so that the truffle has more poignancy in the dish.

The rest was simply frying some scallops in butter for 20 seconds or so on each side, and then shaving what was left of the fresh truffle over the top.

Served with a Bellarmine 2004 Riesling, it wasn’t a bad meal at all.

Really looking foward to the upcoming Truffle Festival at the end of this month, and you should all get up there and check it out.

Newsworthy

So on a lazy Sunday morning, waking up at the crack of noon, making my lady and I some poached eggs and easing ourselves into the day the way only we can… It was a nice surprise to find this little blog mentioned in an article in The Australian. I’m not sure why I get a buzz out of seeing myself in print, it’s happened a few times now, but I guess it’s nice to get a little recognition, or at least to know that I’m not the only person reading it… which would be sad.

So I had a call from Steve the day before to let me know that he’d come across it, and so we headed out and bought a copy to see just exactly what was there. The article is an interesting piece based on an article in the New York Times, about how food bloggers are having an impact on how restaurants and other establishments market themselves, and under what level of scrutiny they fall. It was critical in particular of US bloggers who interrogate staff on the opening night for all the information they can get, so they get their review out first.

The article then went on to talk about Melbourne food blogger Ed of Tomatom, and how he’s had positive experiences with people finding reviews of restaurants on his site, that have been largely ignored by traditional media reviewers.

So… in short, US bad, Australia good… bloggers, keep your opinions to yourselves. The bit involving me was a link at the end of the article (I tried to click it, but it went nowhere), to a page I put together that lists the top Australian food blogs by querying technorati for rankings. So a nice little spot of publicity, and a bit of excitement on an otherwise yawn worthy weekend… Still, that’s just the way we like them around here.

The excitement over, I went and made myself a coffee and in my rush to drink it, managed to spill it over the paper… from fame to coffee stain in 2 seconds… still, the coffee was great, and my latte art is reaching a stage of sloppy consistency that will no doubt have the real baristas quaking in their boots in no time, as they prepare themselves for the W.A Barista Competition.

Some days are good like that.

Port Poached Pears

(Or how to use up half a bottle of port you are highly unlikely to drink)

Poached Pears are a dish I’ve been meaning to make for a long time now.
A rare foray into dessert making as I generally tend to pay so much attention to the main meal that I forget about dessert entirely. Either that, or after consuming a massive portion of pasta/meat/potato etc, I have neither the desire nor the physical capacity to fit anything else into my already considerably growing girth :|

So this was a bit of a novelty and happened to turn out quite nicely. I searched the web for a recipe that both sounded nice and contained most of my available ingredients, didn’t find one, and ended up once again combining a bunch of them together into something that looked about right.

So two whole pears, peeled, and with the cores removed. I left the sticks on to make it easier to move them around while they were poaching, and because they looked kinda cute like that. Now to a poaching pan (or a regular pan/pot if you are unlucky enough not to have one solely dedicated to poaching), add half a bottle (roughly 250 ml or so) of port, a vanilla bean pod, a little lemon zest, and one clove.

Get it simmering away on a mild heat (so it’s not bubbling and boiling furiously), and drop in the pears. Let them simmer away for about 10 – 15 minutes, depending how quickly they are cooking, and how soft they were to start with. Turning every now and them to make sure the port poaching liquid is persistently pervading all possible parts of the pear (beat that Peter Piper).

Once the pears are almost done to your desired level of softness (which you can easily test by poking them with a fork), take them out… halve them, and then put them back into the poaching liquid for a minute or so to get the inside nicely coloured.

Then out of the pan and onto a plate. Turn the heat up in the pan and start reducing the port til it turns into a nice thick syrupy sauce. Serve the pears with a scoop (or two) of icecream of your choice, perhaps a few slivered almonds, and the port reduction drizzled haphazardly (in my case) over the top.

There you go… instant class with little to no effort at all.

Egg Week – Poached Eggs on Sweet Potato Mash

Well egg week continues here at Abstract Gourmet. Lazing around last night, wallowing in my own little world of ennui, and too lazy to cook a “proper” meal. I once again turned to my new favourite book of the moment, Eggs, by Michel Roux.

This recipe was supposed to be called “Herby Poached Eggs in Mousseline Potato Nests”. Problem was I was running low on potato, and so I made the executive decision to give sweet potato a run. This was easy as pi (3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510…). Boil some sweet potato in salted water until its soft. Drain, mash, add butter, mash again, add a little milk, some baby spinach, and some parmesan, mash again. Stop.

Cook two poached eggs to perfection, make a little mound of mash on your plate and put a hole in the middle, drop the eggs in and top with a sauce or stock reduction of your choice. I choice to reduce a little of my home made chicken stock with a stick of butter and a touch of corn flour. Then a little cracked pepper and we’re done.

Eggs Benedict

My first successful attempt at making hollandaise sauce. This one came from Michel Roux’s Sauces (actually its in both his Egg’s book, and his Sauce’s book), but the recipes are identical. Basically white wine vinegar, water, and white peppercorns into a pan, reduce volume by a third. Let it cool. Stir in 4 egg yolks… put it back over a low low heat until it starts to thicken up. Now when its got a nice thick creamy consistency, take it back off the heat and gradually add clarified butter until you’ve got the taste and consistency you want. Season with salt to taste, and add some lemon juice just before serving.

The poached eggs are getting better by the day… the method keeps on getting perfected every time and I’ve got a kind of cross between the whirlpool method and the simmer over bubbles method that has been giving me great shape and perfect consistency inside.

So… toast some turkish bread loaves, cook some bacon… Layer the bacon on the loaves, put the eggs on top, wilt some baby spinach in a pan with a little butter, and then put that on top. Smother the whole thing with freshly made hollandaise.

Yum.