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From our Spring 2011 newsletter The Tin Shed:

I was at a second hand book store last week and bought some old lifestyle magazines. Why? Because I like to see how we saw ourselves in the past and how we have changed, or not as the case may be.

These magazines were about 10 to 12 years old, and I have to say food wise we haven’t changed much at all. Baby fennel, goats cheese, chorizo, bags of mixed lettuce are just as fashionable now as they were then.

One tag line on a front cover made me scoff – “Why Pre-mixed Drinks Have Had Their Day” What a bold statement. Pity it hasn’t come to pass.  I’ll put that up there with “Child Poverty will be a Thing of the Past”.

What I did find interesting was the changes in wine. In an article on the top wines under $20 (even better value now) headings included Riesling, Chardonnay and Miscellaneous Whites and Reds. And guess what was under Miscellaneous Whites – Sauvignon Blanc! Not miscellaneous anymore as last year it became the top selling white in Australia, making up 30% of white wine sales. Pinot Noir was a Miscellaneous Red – again a surprise for only 10-12 years ago.

FW

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The Tin Shed

From the Archives

2011

Food and Wine

From our 2014 Newsletter The Tin Shed.  We held several sourdough demonstrations, and I like to think there’s a few still at it out there!

While on a road trip in the US last year, we visited the Russian River wine region of California and while browsing a bookshop in Healdsburg (as you do) picked up a CD copy of Michael Pollan’s “Cooked – A Natural History of Transformation”.  It was great listening on long car trips - an exhaustive history on why we cook our food the way we do.  We were, of course, immediately attracted to his section on fermentation in all its various guises.

The discussion on bread, and sourdough bread in particular, caught our attention.  We’ve been making our own bread for ages but we had not taken the next step of “wild fermentation” breads, as we have with our red wines.  Michael introduced us to Chad Robertson and his life’s mission to make bread with soul - the perfect country loaf.  I love the painting (opposite) by Emile Friant (1888) that inspired Chad’s mission.

Similarly inspired, I’ve been mucking around with Chad’s instructions for making a basic country loaf in his book “Tartine Bread”.  After many tasty but somewhat dense test loaves, we’ve hit on an approach that works well with our local flours, and even includes a secret ingredient!  A few other important points:

steam is critical to baking good bread

managing the fermentation well is the most important skill to develop

sourdough doesn’t have to be that sour (in fact “sourdough” is a bit of a misnomer)

sourdough starters are simple to manage

small changes in approach can make a big difference to the results

you need to develop a feel for your dough and be flexible

It’s been fun, and we’d love to share some of our bread recipes with you – Fiona makes a great ciabatta too.  Learn how to make basic sourdough bread (or bring along your own bread and share your secrets!) at our winter solstice celebration – bookings required!

NM

We enjoy growing our own food.   Living and working in the same place (and having plenty of space) makes it somewhat easier for us than for most, but it still takes a concerted effort to make it worthwhile.  This year we grew tomatoes (five months of fresh tomatoes!), cucumbers, zucchini, beans, potatoes, figs, garlic, chillies, spring onions, artichokes, radish, silver beet, lettuce, kohlrabi.

Herbs, too – parsley, mint, basil (fresh pesto!), tarragon, dill, Vietnamese mint, lemon grass, oregano, thyme, sage, bay, rosemary.  What a treat it is to go grab some fresh herbs when cooking, and what a difference it makes to your dishes.  In fact, if you could grow nothing else, herbs are where you get the most bang for your buck.

And finally, chickens.  We’ve kept about four Isa Browns for many years now and the eggs are fantastic.  Not only do chickens recycle your kitchen scraps (can be hard to properly manage in a composting system) into more food, but also produce excellent manure for the veggie patch.

Growing your own food has benefits beyond flavour and freshness:

• You get some good exercise!
• Your more mindful of what is seasonal and cook/eat in a more seasonal fashion
• Your respect for farmers increases, knowing what it takes to grow good food
• You’re more thankful for the range of fruit and veg you can get at your local market/supermarket
• Your ability to pick good produce from bad/ordinary/old/decaying produce increases
• You get closer to the season – you pay much more attention to what’s going on around you – mindfulness…
• You realise how difficult it must have been to live in a truly self-sufficient way, and how hard it would have been to get through winter/spring with a full belly

With the wine, vegetables, herbs, eggs, our own lamb and beef (thanks neighbour Dave!), and olive oil on the way, we’re truly appreciative of the benefits of growing your own.  Now for the orchard….

NM and FW

If you think about wine as just another form of sustenance (albeit a pretty special one) it’s interesting to consider that the skills of the fine food maker (chef) and the fine winemaker (vigneron) are remarkably similar.

In the winery and kitchen, a similar use of senses, skill and creativity comes into play.  Crushing the fruit is like chopping, slicing, dicing, deboning – beginning the transformation of form and shape.  Fermentation is like a cooking process, where questions of marination, extraction, temperature, duration, mixing/turning, settling/resting are all vital to achieving the desired outcome.  The maturation, fining and filtering (or not) carried out by the winemaker are like the final adjustments, seasoning and plating up of the chef, balancing visual and taste impact to maximise enjoyment.  Some of this is following the recipe and being disciplined, but a lot of this, with really exceptional wine and food, comes down to the creativity and imagination of the chef/vigneron.

And really good kitchens care about what happens BEFORE the raw ingredients enter the kitchen and the provenance of their food, a concept intrinsic to winemaking and encapsulated in the term “terroir”.  Traditionally, great chefs have always been close to their suppliers, often going past distributors and wholesalers straight to the grower.  Neil Perry and Kylie Kwong have strong and enduring relationships with their suppliers of meat/seafood/vegetables.   A recent (very enjoyable) trip to Biota in Bowral confirmed their own extensive kitchen garden.  It seems that this trend continues to grow – maybe it’s the “River Cottage Effect”!

With wine making, you can’t always tell the quality of a wine grape just by assessing it as it rolls (forgive the pun) into the winery.  You really need to have seen it grow up – the state of the vines, the season, the canopy, the fruit load, the way the fruit ripened and developed, are all markers of the potential of the fruit.  This very close relationship between the vineyard and the winery, the grower and the maker, the season and the wine, are fundamental hallmarks of a great wine label.  Even if you don’t grow your own fruit, really good winemakers spend a lot of time in the vineyards of their growers.

In fact the term vigneron describes both a fine winemaker and someone who grows grapes for high quality wine production, emphasising the critical role of the vineyard.  Maybe there should be a similar term for a chef who really gets involved in the production of their raw ingredients?

Regardless, the parallels between great winemaking and great cooking are there, from farm to table.

NM

From our newsletter The Tine Shed in 2015.  In the last few years, the combo of Riesling and Thai food seems to have become widely accepted:

It’s sometimes difficult to find a match to more fiery foods, but Riesling seems to know no bounds as a delicious accompaniment to Asian food, including the hot stuff.  From sweet and rich Peking Duck pancakes to fiery Thai dishes, it just seems to keep working.

Last night we made some Indonesian style chicken sates, and my favourite peanut sauce.  The marinade for the chicken included a hefty dose of fresh red chillies and the sauce another hefty dose of crushed, dried chillies.  The Riesling saw through all that and picked up the lemon grass beautifully, cutting through the richness of the peanut sauce and mellowing the heat.  That was with the 2011 Riesling, which has quite a bit of body and deep lemon/lime fruit.

It even stands up well to Thai heat.  Recently we rediscovered one of David Thompson’s earlier works on Thai cuisine – “Thai Food”, and have been busily working our way through it.  He reminds us that Thais often turn things on their head – a sauce like nahm prik is the centre of the meal, then everything else (including meat dishes) become an accompaniment to the sauce.  It’s subtle, but makes you think differently about how to put a meal together.

It’s hard to think of a hotter sauce than nahm prik.  Its basic form of garlic, salt, shrimp paste, chillies, palm sugar, lime juice and fish sauce has endless variations, but almost always the flavours are very strong and very hot, with balance (“hot, salty, slightly sour and slightly sweet”) critical, and the shrimp paste central.  Accompanied by seasonal raw or steamed vegetables, or pickled vegetables, it’s a refreshing delight.  Accompany it with grilled fish or pork and it becomes a more substantial part of a meal, or a meal in itself.

Nahm prik is exactly the sort of food that has traditionally been avoided at all costs by wine buffs, believing that ingredients like chillies and shrimp paste kill the wine.  Certainly, you can lose some of the subtle notes of the wine, but I think this is more than made up for by the way a wine like Riesling finds friends in the complexities of the sauce, adding citrus notes and cleansing the palate.  We’ve recently tried several versions of nahm prik with the current release 2015 Riesling and found the match sensational, particularly with well grilled or pan fried fish.

But the really great thing about Riesling?  If you can’t be bothered cooking anything, or even heading out to let someone else cook for you, Riesling is wonderful just by itself!  Otherwise, see if the recipes at the end of this newsletter inspire you to a Riesling vs heat cook off.

It’s fascinating that an area so rich in seafoods, such as the Mediterranean, has a love affair with dried, salted cod, an import from the North Sea and northern European cuisines.  But love it they do, and have done for centuries, no doubt traded for local goods.  It would have been a good over-wintering source of protein.  It seems to have gone out of favour in many local delicatessens, but can still be found around the place.

We served this at our recent Spring lunch – a Languedoc inspired lunch.  As anticipated, it enticed a few aficionados out of the woodwork, and got a very good reception.

500g salt cod

200 ml good olive oil

200 ml milk, boiled then cooled

Salt, pepper

Salt cod, takes A LOT of rinsing to remove salt and soften it up.  If you don’t have a fresh water stream handy, put it in a large plastic container with a lid and cover with water.  Rinse and repeat, at least half a dozen times over 12-18 hours, holding it in the fridge.  If it hasn’t softened up by then, keep going.

Poach in simmering water for 5-6 minutes, then drain.

Shred the cod, removing any bones, fins, hardened edges, etc.  Mash the cod in a mortar and pestle or food processor (pulse it).  Gradually add half the oil, then half the milk, mashing/pulsing as you go.  Continue adding the oil/milk combo until the mixture is snow white, thick and shiny, and will take no more oil or milk.  Season well, but be careful with the salt.

It can be served as is, or shaped into quenelles, and put under the grill for a few minutes.  It will brown slightly, and the flavours will intensify.  Serve with toast triangles and cornichons or a simple salad.