Food & Wine

Time of the season

/ Gareth

I ride the farm bike (four wheels, a buggered exhaust so it roars rather than purrs) round the vineyard several times a day at the moment, in the hope that this will deter voracious avian thieves from feasting on my crop. Last year, they reduced a tonne to 300kg, but this year (fingers duly crossed) a number of large vineyards down the valley seem to be intent on providing fodder, and so the flocks of starlings and waxeyes haven’t yet come this far upstream. And if they do, I have a shotgun waiting. To scare them, of course, though four and twenty blackbirds might very well make a nice pie. A lot of feathers to pluck, though. We have also acquired a pheasant in the vineyard to go with the quail that parade across our lawn. I haven’t got the heart to shoot either…

Grape news: We plan to bottle The Faultline’s first vintage this weekend, and harvest the next the following week. The pinot will be first, with the syrah a week or ten days later. Meanwhile, Peg’s nose is going to start hunting for Burgundy truffles, and I will be checking for saffron milk caps at regular intervals (none yet – but we have had some very nice birch boletes from my father-in-law’s lawn and a giant puffball from a grassy bank in Rangiora).

Book news: Hot Topic has made the shortlist for the Royal Society of New Zealand’s first Science Book Prize. Richard Dawkins will announce the winner at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival on May 15th. I have many minor appendages crossed.

Guilt, and Google

/ Gareth

The guilt part is that the other place has been taking up all my blogging, and OTF has suffered. So here’s a quick update, stimulated by yesterday’s gadget acquisition. I was fiddling around in Google Maps, and there — lo and behold — it appears that Google’s Street View is already available for Ram Paddock Road. It’s not that long since Street View was announced over here, and I had assumed it was mainly a thing of the cities and towns, but it appears they’ve been thorough. You can look over the garden fence and see the pond, admire the big gum, and — here’s a surprise — see nets on the vines. The Google bus must have driven past about a year ago, because we haven’t got the nets on yet (it’ll be a couple of weeks, at least). Feel free to be nosey.

Meanwhile, we’ve been having another hot La Niña summer. Our unheated pool has been up to 30C, and the air a good deal warmer. Irrigation is being used to the full. The grapes are looking good, the truffière’s being watered, and once again I bless the decision (made a decade ago) to buy a large fridge that dispenses ice and chilled water out of the freezer door.

And finally, because new gadgets are fun, if you visit OTF from an iPhone, you will be greeted by a special phone-friendly theme, courtesy of the excellent wptouch plugin.

First wine: The Faultline Pinot Noir in the barrel

/ Gareth / 1 Comment

Friday was a big day. I took some friends of ours up to the Daniel Schuster winery (well worth a visit by anyone passing through Waipara), and we were able to taste a barrel sample of Limestone Hills’ first wine (thanks Tom and Marie). A big moment. Nervous, moi? A little, perhaps, so don’t expect analytical tasting notes. After six months in the barrel (there’s only one), it’s a very pleasing tipple. Elegant, I’d say, with a good complex nose. Delicate, not a big, dark blockbuster. I’m biased, of course, but it’s a wine I’ll be very happy to drink on a regular basis. Should be bottled before next year’s harvest, and we’ll have 11 or 12 cases to put in the shed that passes for a cellar. I don’t plan to sell any, but bottles will be available for friends and anyone dining with us will probably get more of it than they really want. I’ll have more detailed tasting notes after bottling.

The name’s based on the geology of the vineyard. A large active fault cuts across it, dividing the solid limestone that underlies the farmhouse and cottage from the more rubbly, but still lime-rich subsoil beneath the main truffiere. I have all summer to design a label…

Tasmanian times

/ Gareth / 1 Comment

I’ve just received copies of the issue of Food & Wine that includes my article about Tasmania. Looks good on the page, I have to say. I could do with a few more gigs like that, but my waistline might disagree. Web version of the article is here. Meanwhile, on the farm, I’m struggling to catch up with pruning and mowing because spring has sprung with a real vengeance. A roundup of the truffle season will follow fairly soon.

(If paradise is) half as nice

/ Gareth

One down, one to go. The southern hemisphere’s first successful commercial grower of bianchetto (Tuber borchii) truffles, Jeff Weston* of the Borchii Park truffiere outside Christchurch, was kind enough to send me a couple of lovely truffles (see last post), and this evening we ate the first of them. It was a simple risotto milanese, with the addition of a few peas, and a scrape of nutmeg. And a whole truffle (about 15g). Truffle burps? We got ’em.

I’d hate to have to compare the bianchetto to a good magnatum – it’s been too long since I tasted a really good example – but I was forcefully reminded of the best of the Oregon whites I tasted last year. The aroma is penetrating. Despite being in a box inside a plastic envelope, Peg knew something was up as I walked past on the way back from the post box. Her nose was twitching… As indeed was mine.

Number two is with some eggs. Meanwhile there’s a ripe Camembert infusing with some black truffle.

Will I be able to grow more than I can eat? I’m hoping for a good crop, or the belt tightening will be metaphorical rather than actual…

* A scholar and a gentleman

Tasmanian truffle grower’s breakfast

/ Gareth

TTGB.jpg

Breakfast last Thursday, courtesy of Tim and Adele Terry at their home near Deloraine in Tasmania. It was followed by a tour of the extensive (and I mean extensive) truffiere, discussion of Tim’s new “11 herbs and spices” treatments designed to enhance fruiting, and a demonstration of his new truffle washing machine.

[Picture of truffle washer removed at Mr Terry’s request]

Designed, scavenged and built by Mr T Terry. Every home should have one…

Five things to eat before you die

/ Gareth

I‘ve been tagged for a food blog meme, which is a first (thanks Bron). Not being a proper food blog, but a blog that does food from time, I’m probably a bit of an interloper — and I’m certainly going to find it hard to “tag” five more food blogs (one of the rules). I’ll do my best.

The meme comes from The Traveller’s Lunchbox, and the idea is to come up with five “things you’ve eaten and think that everyone should eat at least once before they die”. It’s an interesting challenge, and over the last couple of days I’ve been remembering all sorts of meals in all sorts of places. And therein lies one of the challenges. I have especially fond memories of a plateau de fruits de mer, eaten in a restaurant on the inner harbour at La Rochelle, but do I remember it because of the excellence of the plateau, or the happy combination of circumstances surrounding that meal? Same thing with a bottle of white vin de savoie that was elevenses at a little restaurant on the slopes at Serre Chevalier. A magic moment to be sure, but worth inflicting that wine on everyone? Probably not. So I have settled on five things that I have eaten and enjoyed and remembered and loved, not simply because of time and place, but on culinary merit (though you may choose to differ). And whakapapa plays a part too.

  1. Andouillete
    Offal sausage, or awful sausage? A specialty of Troyes, and found in every Relais Routiers in France, this is a working man’s saucisse, a sausage of strong flavour and challenging appearance. Cut it open and admire the strips of pork tripe and large intestine, flavoured with onion and parsley. I’ve seen grown women turn away in horror… but with good mustard and some fine pommes frites, the andouillette is something I have to eat at least once when visiting la belle France.
  2. Bara lawr
    Welsh seaweed dish, known to the Sais as laver bread, traditionally eaten fried in oatmeal with bacon for breakfast. The seaweed is quite common around the world (I’ve eaten it in NZ) — there is a Japanese name, but I can’t recall it — and in Wales it’s washed and then boiled for four hours or more until it’s a green glutinous mass, still redolent of the sea. And if the bacon you eat with it is farm-cured and bought in the market at Carmarthen or Cardigan, then you have something simple but wonderful.
  3. Germknodel
    This is pretty close to a time and place thing, because I have only eaten it in restaurants on the slopes at St Anton or Lech, although it is a speciality throughout the Tirol. Consider a dumpling the size of a baby’s head stuffed with stewed plums, topped with poppy seeds and icing sugar and dressed with melted butter, and reflect on the challenge this presents to post-prandial skiing. Delicious, but difficult.
  4. A sun-ripened apricot, warm from the tree
    Looking through other bloggers’ lists of five, there are plenty of exhortations to take freshly picked, sun-ripened or just landed things and apply them to the palate. So I am not being original, but I include my apricot because I planted apricots (and other fruit trees) at Limestone Hills because this was an experience I’d read about (Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book, I think) and wanted to try. Every summer I watch the apricots, willing them to ripen, so that I can revel in the sheer apricotness of the fresh, sun-warmed article. This isn’t just worth doing, it’s worth moving to a place where it’s possible in order to do it.
  5. Tuber magnatum, on anything
    No surprises here. The first meal of this truffle set in train a sequence of events that led me to Limestone Hills, and it is one of the tragedies of modern science that no-one has yet worked out how to successfully cultivate this fungus (though there are tantalising hints that it might soon be possible). Not oil — never oil — just the fresh article, shaved thinly on a buttery tagliatelle, or plain risotto, or stirred into and shaved onto an emperor amongst omelettes. So good I wrote a book about it.
    So who to “tag” with this: I can’t do five, but I will suggest that Mark Bernstein — another occasional foodie like me — might like to have a go.

Tragedy of the commons

/ Gareth

A long time ago, on the edges of a city far, far away, I used to spend a lot of time in late summer and autumn hunting for wild mushrooms. I got quite good at it – good enough to seldom return home empy handed. This was the early 90s, and most of my competition for the fungi of West London came from expat Europeans, especially Poles with sticks. A few chefs — most notably Antonio Carluccio — were popularising what Russians call the “quiet hunt” and using the harvest in their cooking, but the supermarkets hadn’t caught up with fashion.

One morning at the height of the season, not long before we left for New Zealand, I arrived at one of my favoured sites — Esher Common [map] (a remarkable place, where Brian Spooner from Kew has recorded over 3,000 species of fungi, making it the most fungally diverse spot ever studied) — to find the car park nearly full. There must have a dozen or more people unloading bags full of mushrooms into boxes. It was my first encounter with commercial picking, and they must have systematically hoovered their way through the woodland, because I could find nothing at all.

The legality of commercial picking is however open to question, as this piece by Peter Marren in The Guardian explores…

“Can we have open access and yet ban mushroom picking? In theory, we can. Any landowner can apply to the local authority for an order against blackberry pickers, moss gatherers or butterfly collectors. In this land of the free, any of Mother Nature’s bounties, even the meanest, sourest berry or nut, is deemed to be private property. In the case of the New Forest, which is managed by the Forestry Commission, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) decided that it owned the mushrooms. In the 1990s, it banned commercial picking over the entire forest, and banned foraging for mushrooms altogether in certain woods.”

Marren then goes on to describe how Defra then tried to prosecute a little old lady for picking mushrooms in the New Forest, only to find the judge throwing the case out as waste of his time. Good on His Honour…

Sometimes blogging can pay

/ Gareth

Let it never be said that blogging doesn’t pay. A couple of months ago, I got an email from the team at Food & Wine magazine in New York, asking me if I’d be interested in interviewing NZ food writer Annabel Langbein for their September issue. Interested I most certainly was, and I popped up to Auckland for an enjoyable day with Annabel. I might even have persuaded her to plant some truffles. Writing the piece was a challenge, but now the final version’s appeared on the F&W website I find I recognise most of the words, and some of them are even in the order in which I put them… Thanks for the job, Salma.

All commissions gratefully received: farm and truffle hound to support.

Not perfect, but not bad

/ Gareth

So, the proud possessor of a 26g truffle from Ashburton, found by Peg last week when she was having a mid-career refresher course, and as the good lady wife demanded it, I set about making a midwinter truffle pizza. Off to Canterbury Cheesemongers, where they were fresh out of buffalo mozzarella, but were happy to supply good flour and some fresh yeast, and then a rummage round the supermarket for some of the more ordinary mozarella (from Kapiti Cheese).

Back to the farm to get the oven going. It’s been a fair few months since it was last fired up, and it was getting to late afternoon. In summer, it takes three to four hours to get up to pizza hot, which is fearsome (I had to buy a long sleeved oven glove because putting my arm in to the oven was singing the hairs). So I got the fire going, and made the dough. I used the recipe from Nikko Amandonico’s book again It’s very straightforward: make the dough, divide into pizza balls, and leave to rise. Then roll them flat, stretch them a bit, and cook. Easy — and good.

The oven was being notably slow in heating up. By 8pm, our stomachs were suggesting that dinner should not be further delayed, but the oven was a fair way short of full heat. When it’s ready for pizzas, the interior stops being black with soot, and becomes white. A pizza cooks in a minute or so. All I could see in the light of my new headlamp LED torch was a little white patch. It would have to do.

The pizzas were simple to prepare. I shaved some thin truffle slices on to the bases, and covered them with thinly sliced mozarella. Some good olive oil brushed on top, and out into the oven. They did not cook very fast by wood-fired oven standards – perhaps four minutes before the crust was browning. This is what mine looked like…

Trufflepizza.jpg

Two criticisms. The length of cooking had reduced the truffle impact – probably evaporating more aroma than a short, sharp burst of heat. The good lady wife took issue with the crust, preferring an all white flour base, rather than the mix of white and wholemeal I’d used. But they were still rather good. I also made a simple cherry tomato and mozarella pizza for second helpings.

The counsel of perfection: leave more time for oven to heat up. Use buffalo mozarella and white flour. Experiment with thinly sliced cooked potatoes as additional topping to help seal in truffle flavour. Be generous with the truffle. And do it more often.