Food & Wine

Pea ravioli or soup balls

/ Gareth

There I was, stumbling around the food blogs of the world, looking for people who might appreciate the book, when I tripped over a ball of pea soup at Hungry in Hogtown. I had a “ball” of intensely flavoured consommée served in a spoon at Manairo in Barcelona before Christmas, but Rob at HinH has deconstructed the orginal El Bulli technique, and then reconstructed it in his own kitchen. A most impressive dedication to molecular gastronomy, beatifully described.

Now, where did I leave that food grade sodium alginate?

Winosandfoodies like truffles…

/ Gareth

Good reviews are always welcome, especially when they’re by someone who knows whereof they write. So thanks, Barbara at winosandfoodies.com for taking the time to read the book and post so nicely about it. She ploughed through the PDF edition in about a day, which shows great determination!

Don’t open the tin, Barbara…

Use more truffle: LA Times gets it right

/ Gareth

I usually whinge about mainstream journalists getting truffles “wrong”, but here’s a chance to applaud someone for getting it right. S Irene Virbila in the LA Times has certainly done her research:

“Just for the record, though, when French three-star chef Paul Bocuse makes his scrambled eggs with truffle, he uses an astonishing 7 ounces of truffle for eight eggs, or just about one of the truffles we received for each egg! No butter for the maestro either, as he tells it in his 1992 cookbook, “Regional French Cooking” — just a mere dollop of crème fraîche. And once he whisks the eggs with the truffles, he leaves the bowl to sit for an hour to further infuse the eggs with the taste of truffles before he cooks them.”

Her point is that it makes sense to use truffles generously, to get a real hit of the flavour, not to try and stretch them to the point that they are all but undetectable. It’s a good point, well made.

Another good article on the truffle business appeared in the New York Times (registration required) recently. The author even manages to sneak in a quote from me (she was at the dinner in Barcelona I blogged before Christmas). The person most pleased, however, is Ian Hall. The NYT used one of his pictures. Fame and photographic fortune beckons. Or not.

Things to do with porcini #2

/ Gareth

First, take 500g of fresh porcini. In my case, the Boletus edulis presented itself as one large fruitbody growing a metre or two to the side of one of the busiest paths in Christchurch’s Hagley Park. A few years ago, porcini of that size were not unusual, but picking pressure — particularly by one selfish git who commits fungal infanticide on a regular basis and then hawks the results round local restaurants — means that big mushrooms are now as rare as hen’s teeth. It’s the tragedy of the commons: if you don’t pick them when you find them, someone else will, so the little porcini never get the chance to mature. We all lose, and the potential harvest is drastically reduced: my 500g porcini was only 50g a few days ago. B edulis production in Christchurch was estimated to be several tonnes per annum when they were first identified about ten years ago, but I would suggest that it’s a fraction of that now, thanks to picking pressure. If it weren’t for one or two spots I know…

Clean and slice your porcini. Don’t wash the mushroom – it could absorb water and become mushy. Just wipe it free of dust and earth with a damp cloth. Trim the stalk, and remove sections that have been badly eaten by maggots. In the case of last night’s porcini, the little buggers were chewing through the base of the stalk, but the cap was untouched. The pores were beginning to turn greenish yellow (from white), the sign that the fruitbody’s spore production is maturing. That’s another reason why picking small is a bad idea. The baby mushrooms get no chance to dump spores into the environment, to produce fresh mycelium to infect the roots of the trees around. This gives other fungi an advantage in the war for root space, especially those that don’t get picked, or don’t rely on fruitbodies to reproduce.

Go to your butcher and buy 500g of his best bacon. It should be dry cure, or at least not stuffed full of water in the curing, and have a reasonable amount of fat — neither lean nor streaky. Pop into the cheese shop and buy some parmesan (reggiano, of course). Avail yourself of some fresh flat leaf parsley and good garlic. We have flat leaf parsley growing wild round the farm, thanks to a previous owner who diligently scattered seeds everywhere, and my father’s kitchen garden produces excellent garlic. If you have time, make some fresh pasta, and slice it into tagliatelle. I didn’t have time, so used some very high quality dried linguine.

Fill your largest pot  with water and put it on the fire (shades of de Pomiane there — a deliberate homage: thanks for the introduction all those years ago Paul), and put in more salt than you could possibly believe necessary — not enough for a 10% brine, but enough that the water tastes distinctly salty. When it’s boiling, take it off the heat, and start preparing the sugo (sauce). Chop the bacon into bite sized pieces and fry it in some extra virgin olive oil in your largest pan until it sizzles and is beginning to brown. The time this takes will depend on the amount of water in the bacon. Put the water back on the heat and bring it back to the boil. Add enough pasta to feed two, three or four people: I used 300g for three. My pasta was supposed to take 10-12 minutes to cook — it took longer, it always does. Add the porcini to the bacon and carry on frying, stirring regularly. Add some salt (lovingly hand evaporated from the sea of your choice) and pepper (freshly ground). Peel/smash three cloves of garlic and chop them up, then add them to the bacon and mushrooms. Wash and chop a large handful of parsley, and grate enough parmesan for your purposes.

After ten minutes, start testing the pasta for doneness. Keep stirring the frying pan. Just before you drain the pasta, add the parsley to the frying pan and stir it in well. Add the strained pasta to the frying pan and thoroughly toss it in the sugo. Serve on to large plates, offer the parmesan and some red wine. My choice was Te Mata Woodthorpe Cabernet Merlot (a snip at about NZ$19 at the moment), but my good lady wife – whose favourite this dish is – preferred the Chardonnay. There’s no pleasing some people.

A strange thing to do with a chicken

/ Gareth

There is a traditional French truffled chicken dish called Poularde en demi-deuil, or chicken in half-mourning, in which a chicken has slices of black truffle inserted under its skin. You then leave the chicken for a few hours to infuse with the truffle flavour, and then poach it in a stock. When it comes out, the black slices shine through the white skin. There is a picture of a chicken roasted in half mourning in The Truffle Book…

In the Spanish Pyrenees, however, a few hours infusing is not enough. This thread on eGullet (wonderful name!) describes — with graphic and sometimes beautiful pictures — the preparation of a traditional Christmas dish. Chickens are stuffed (with foie gras, milk, breadcrumbs and black truffle) then wrapped in linen and buried in the ground for up to two weeks. The precise time depends on how cold the ground is — at that time of year it’s close to freezing, which it would have to be to stop the chickens rotting. When nicely done, the chickens are slow roasted, and almost certainly delicious. I’d like to conduct some confirming research, of course… [Link via Boing Boing]

The first porcini of summer

/ Gareth

porcini.jpg
One of the good things about taking the amazingly charming Peg for a lunchtime walk, apart from the exercise, is that we walk various routes through Hagley Park – the park at the centre of Christchurch. And today we found the first porcini (Boletus edulis) of the year.

They were smaller than I normally like to pick, but this was one of the best known porcini spots in the park, and if I didn’t get them they’d either be picked by another fungophile or booted into bits by some philistine. I fancy a little salad of raw porcini as a starter tonight: thinly slice the mushrooms, scrape thin wafers of the best parmesan (reggiano, of course), a little pepper, and mix carefully with some good olive oil from Waipara.

Two meals

/ Gareth

Two very contrasting meals in two successive nights: one, a truffle dinner in a French home, the other a modern Spanish meal with the chef playing Fat Duck or El Bulli-style tricks.

The truffle dinner was spectacular, both for the quantity of truffle involved and the quality of the food, but the most important factor was – as it should always be at dinner — the warmth of the welcome. As we stood around the kitchen chatting over the Louis Roederer champagne, the canapes of pate de foie gras de canard truffé (hand-made for our hosts with not less than 10% truffle, and generously garnished with same) were being constructed. Meanwhile, thin truffle toasts were heating in the oven: simple, and wonderful. Two thin slices of sourdough pain de campagne sandwiching slices of truffle, buttered and seasoned and slightly crispy from the oven. The most truffly thing I’ve eaten in a long time, and I’ve eaten a lot of truffle recently. Then I helped to stir the truffle into the mashed potatoes: great big, almost crunchy lumps of truffle stirred into potatoes cooked in milk and butter, served with a saucisse de Toulouse, specially prepared for the family with large chunks of truffle inside. Put the two together, and you have an obviously simple but also incredibly luxurious dish. Magnificent. A few bottles of good Cahors red, and a good time was guaranteed for all. My thanks to P-J and B. A meal that will live in the memory for a long time.

The second meal (Manairo Restaurant, Barcelona) was also good: inventive, even exciting food, but it couldn’t help but suffer in comparison. There were moments of surprise, like the little parcel served in a spoon containing a creamy soup, or the squid bits spooned steaming with dry ice into little shot glasses of intensely pea-green soup, and there were moments of pleasure, but I struggled to really get into it all. Perhaps the fact that much of the dishes were reinventions of Catalan classics that I had no reference for made it difficult, or perhaps the waiter’s introductions were losing something because we forced him to do them in English. Either way, fun, expensive and worth eating, but the food will be forgotten long before the previous night’s. Thanks, Heidi, for the meal.

And the really sad thing about both meals? On the last days of the Spanish tour, I picked up the cold doing the rounds of the bus. I spent much of the weekend in France exploding with cold, and I still haven’t recovered my nose or tastebuds. So much to taste, so little to taste it with. Bugger.

Markets, truffles and food

/ Gareth

I haven’t got time to post any of the pictures from the last week, or to really do justice to events or meals – not tonight, at least – but I would like to mention vultures. In two truffle expeditions in Spain last week, in the Alto Tajo national park and in the hills not far from Pamplona, vultures were wheeling over head while we watched men and dogs find truffles. I was ready for the truffles, but the birds were something of a shock.

In the latter truffiere, in the unpronounceable but charming village of Ollogoyen, the lead truffle dog was called Lycos – “because she’s a search engine”. Perhaps Peg’s successor will be called Google. Sponsorship possibilities…

Some food highlights: the Spanish take on black pudding – a sort of blood sausage without the skin; the mushroom lunch which finished with a “coffee” made from Trompettes de mort macerated with sweet coffee, with a cappuccino foam made from porcini cream (and the chef looked like Peter Sellers); and a truffle omelette in a modest auberge in Cahors that had more good truffle in it than most five course truffle dinners. It helps when France’s leading truffle wholesaler is sitting at the same table and picking up the tab.

In France, we’ve seen the new truffieres of the Richelieu region just south of the Loire, the famous truffle market of Lalbenque, the Pebeyre truffle operation in Cahors, and been shepherded around local truffieres by top French truffle expert Pierre Sourzat and his dog Bou-Bou. I also have 80gm of truffle in the minibar in my hotel room, by way of a present for my kind hosts in London.

Tonight we dine chez Pebeyre, and I suspect truffle may be involved. Tomorrow we drive to Barcelona, and dinner with an American truffle importer on her yacht in the harbour. Then London and NZ. I have to say that I’m looking forward to getting back to my family and my trees. And losing some weight.

Truffles and windmills

/ Gareth

Three days in, and the relentless and exemplary hospitality is beginning to show signs of expanding my waistline. Found our first truffles on Saturday, and ate them for lunch.

Trufflesandwindmills.jpg

Alejandro and Jefa (the dog) get stuck in to truffle number three.
We were at the Nacimiento del Rio Mundo in the Sierra de Alcaraz, a huge and torrential waterfall issuing from massive limestone cliffs, with natural truffieres on the stony slopes below the cliffs. Jefa found three truffles, not perfectly ripe – still brownish inside rather than black, but with good aroma. The lunch which featured the truffles was both huge and delicious, an ominous sign of things to come.

The last couple of days we’ve been touring Don Quixote country, all ancient towns and windmills (and food). Tomorrow it’s back to the truffles, this time in the Alto Tajo national park. From a slightly overfed blogger in a hotel in Cuenca, buenos noches…

The truth about truffles

/ Gareth

Murcia,Thursday, a few hours before the conference “gala dinner”: In typical Spanish fashion, tonight’s meal – which will be excellent, I’m sure – starts at 9-30pm. This is late for a stomach accustomed to dinner at 7, and I haven’t fully acclimatised to the Iberian lifestyle. In fact, I’ve sloped off early from the last session of the day in order to post this and have a nap before the festivities begin. Given that one of the world’s leading truffle scientists is threatening to dance all-comers under the table, and that she ran a 100km ultra-marathon earlier this year, stamina is clearly going to be of the essence.

I’m not going to post about the science being done at this workshop, except to say that it raises as many questions about truffles and their cultivation as it answers, but I have learned a hell of a lot: about the truffles of Hungary, the new truffieres of Chile, the truffles of Spain and the mushrooms of the Spanish regions, and the formation of a truffle association in British Columbia where keen growers have already planted their first trees. I have also met a scientist from Finland who is convinced that he’s got a good shot at growing the Périgord black up in that frigid corner of the world. Plenty of material to fed into the NZTA research programme, and into the next edition of The Truffle Book — if it ever gets that far.

But it’s the networking that’s most useful. Putting names to faces, seeing people again, reinforcing links and forging more. I’ve even sold virtually all the copies of The Truffle Book that I shipped over from NZ. (Thanks Pilar and Asun). So far, nobody’s grabbed me by the arm and pointed out any terrible mistakes, for which I am deeply grateful.

Tomorrow afternoon the great truffle tour really begins. If I can get some decent internet connections, I’ll try and blog the highlights…