Category Archives: eating

The act of eating. Dining, products, flavours.

eating, restaurants, travel

Do you queue for food?

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Holidaying in San Francisco recently, it struck me how often the discourse about obtaining or finding good food is about how long you might have to wait to be served (or seated). The catalyst for this article was when we walked past an ice-cream parlour with a loooong queue down the street, and then a bakery which was packed to bursting point. For me, it was the opposite of what enjoying food should be about.

We had visited the Bi-Rite Creamery the night before and were – luckily – spared any queue. The young, hip staff were helpful and enthusiastic, while the flavours (of which we were permitted many tastes) were variable, from mundane to outstanding. Good, but we would never have queued around a neighbourhood block for it.

When we came to Tartine Bakery & Café, a block or two further on, the outdoor queue was more modest, but inside it seemed like a bazillion people were waiting to be served. The din escaping through the entrance was impressive. Why would you sit in a deafening space, cheek by jowl and buttock, for a Sunday lunch?

A few days earlier we had joined the lunchtime queues at the San Francisco Ferry Building Farmers Market. Long, long queues had formed in front of the pork-roll stand, the organic fried rice stand, the taco stand, etc etc. We weren’t sure if the food justified the queuing: the tacos were fresh and interesting, the fried rice distinctly dull. Maybe the pork rolls were truly deliciously long-queue-worthy. Maybe.

In Berlin (yes, change of country), on a cold and rainy evening we saw a queue of fifty people for a vegetarian kebab stand (Mustafas Gemüse Kebap, Mehringdamm), yet online reviews generally describe it as severely overrated and taking a bloody long time.

For me, a food experience should be enjoyable not just because of the food. There’s little joy in queuing twenty, thirty, forty-five minutes for a meal, when few meals are so delicious as to outweigh another more comfortable choice. I’d rather go to Chat Thai or Mamak in Sydney at 4.30pm than queue at conventional lunch or dinner time! I walked past a queue of fifteen people out the front of Shanghai Village in Melbourne last week. Maybe they’d all been reading Urbanspoon (rather than Eatability). Are cheap, cheap dumplings reason enough to queue for a while?

Last Sunday I lunched at Chef Lagenda in Newmarket, where there is often a wait, as with its neighbour Laksa King. I very much enjoy the food at both places, though the noise and wait can often be off-putting enough to push me round the corner to Chilli Padi.

There are only a few things I’ll consider queuing for more than about 10 minutes for: (1) superb patisserie from Pierre Hermé, Gérard Mulot, Pain de Sucre, or (2) macarons from Pierre Hermé or Ladurée, (3) fresh pasteís de nata from the Antíga Confeitaria de Belém, (4) some tourist trap I’ve been misled into believing is awwwwwesome, and (5) the last best hope for acceptable nourishment in a wasteland of fast food chains.

Now I know that many people do like to queue (or pack themselves in) for the newest or most novel or prettiest or most hyped, and sometimes even something outstandingly tasty, but if you are a happy queuer why does that inconvenience not deter you? How many times has the eating been so wonderful as to justify the wait, the noise or the squeeze-me-in experience?

cooking, eating, food, macarons

OMG I can still make macarons!

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Ten months after I last donned my patissier gear and squeezed out a few hundred macarons, I returned to the piping bags for a brief baking blitz.

The six months in 2010 spent making macarons during almost every spare moment was exciting, stimulating and backbreaking. It took a month to get rid of the aches from all that piping!

Most people who turn a passion into a business find the enjoyment wanes massively. Thankfully this didn’t happen for me – the creative expression outweighed the burden of production, but I was approaching complete exhaustion by the end of those six months. Unable to transition rapidly from small-scale to medium-scale production, hanging up the piping bags was the only viable outcome, but I hadn’t anticipated a baking hiatus of ten months even for personal consumption.

Most of 2011 has been incredibly busy for other reasons (and in fact there’s been much less exciting cooking this year in general for me), so macarons just didn’t get a look-in until my co-eater Mittens’s cousin announced it was time for a baby shower.

Resuscitating my macaronic neurons was a lot slower than I thought it would be, and it took easily twice as long as it should have to make a small batch. I felt a bit like a pudgy former Olympian reentering the pool! Much to my relief, everything did come together smoothly, including two of my favourite ganaches, known as DARCY and DAVID: vanilla and cocoa nib, and dark chocolate and raspberry. Yum.

My back hurt for two weeks.

I still love macarons, though they haven’t had much of a mention this year… And of course my baking passion doesn’t stop there. Here’s a derivative of Belinda Jeffery’s one-pan mocha cake (from her fantastic book Mix & Bake), reworked with cinnamon dark chocolate ganache and rose geranium flowers (edible). Beautiful.

eating, food, hl, local, recipes

Vanilla slices – glorious, perhaps mundane, quite mysterious

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the good old vanilla slice recently. It’s one of those standard, humble Australian bakery items that qualifies as “good old” for its longevity and as “humble” because of its modest level of finesse. But there are mysteries in all this (and questions for readers at the end).

A little journey

I grew up eating vanilla slices as my preferred after-school snack, albeit constrained somewhat by the disappointing options opposite my high school. I could choose between the milkbar’s revolting, rubbery Four’n’Twenty vanilla slices (truly deserving of the colloquial name “snot block”), or the hot bread shop’s Greekified version, filled with a semi-translucent lightly lemony paste. Whenever possible, I’d find my way to the Ferguson Plarre bakery, as their vanilla slices were the childhood paragon of gooeyness.

What has brought me to this little discourse was a rare daytrip to the countryside: Woodend, a small town an hour’s drive from Melbourne, has somehow become famous for its vanilla slices. Two bakeries vie for attention. The smaller of the two, Woodend Bakery Café, supplied a not-quite-fresh slice (the pastry was too close to cardboard, despite its very promising appearance) with a creamy sweet custard and clear vanilla notes. A bit tall (perhaps aspiring to life as a millefeuille), it was a greater-than-usual challenge to eat this vanilla slice gracefully (perhaps a mutually incompatible concept anyway).


The second bakery, Bourkies Bakehouse, offers tray upon tray of slices, some with icing flavoured with passionfruit or raspberry. These were fresh (the turnover is enormous), with a custard of similar characteristics to their competitor and stodgy pastry, but of slightly more jaw-friendly dimensions.

While I preferred the texture and dimensions of the latter vanilla slice, both co-eater Mittens and I found the custard of the former slightly tastier. It was a very close call, though, and likely to change depending on freshness and minor variations in formulation. The review on the apparently now dormant Vanilla Slice Blog was scathing of the Bourkie’s slice and praising of the Woodend Bakery Café, but on our visit the differences simply weren’t that marked.

Back home in Melbourne, we tried my childhood favourite from a Ferguson Plarre outlet. This a no-nonsense affair: (1) thick, stiff but airy custard, (2) moderately thick, unimpressive pale pastry, (3) moderately thick, sticky icing. Texturally, I think the custard is great (for a vanilla slice) – my preference is definitely for custards that are less creamy than those in Woodend. The flavour, however, was that of cream and just the faintest hint of vanilla. I like eating them, but on closer inspection, there’s not a lot that’s truly impressive. Somehow, it just all comes together to be something innocuously pleasant. Maybe life just has to be that way sometimes!

This article was originally going to include some baking in my kitchen, but I got sidetracked by some interesting observations, started by the fact that the Wikipedia entry for Millefeuilles dumps a whole pile of things together rather clumsily and imprecisely. (For a beautiful homemade millefeuille, see Sarah’s post.)

So where are the vanilla slices at home?

Although most of the people I know take the vanilla slice for granted as an Australian great, most are unaware that it not only has other names around Australia, but actually occurs in some form in other countries. I’m not talking about the French millefeuille, the distinctly classier relative, nor the Australian “French vanilla slice” which is more of a nod to the millefeuille, sometimes a mix of layers of custard and whipped cream, perhaps with coffee icing. I read once that New Zealanders and USAmericans call vanilla slices “napoleons”, but internet searches favour either clumsy millefeuilles or a layered slice of cake, custard and puff pastry under that name. Sometimes there’s even jam involved! It seems that “custard slice” or “custard square” might be a much closer relative of our target.

The state of Victoria seems to be disproportionately represented in online searches for vanilla slices. Even taking into account other names (it seems (some) Queenslanders prefer “custard square”), Victoria seems to be in the lead. There’s some bias because of the annual competition in the Victorian town of Ouyen.

Of further interest, there are remarkably few recipes for vanilla slices in common older Australian cookbooks, which makes me wonder if the popularity is less national than regional. Cooking queen Margaret Fulton, for instance, has no recipe in her main book or encyclopedia. Some Australian Women’s Weekly books do feature a recipe. The recent NSW Country Women’s Association Cookbook doesn’t. It’s not unusual for there to be no common recipes for baked goods that were only produced commercially, but it does make it harder to trace the history of the thing!

The majority of (more recent) recipes combine custard powder with milk or cream and egg. Most overseas recipes seem to omit cream. (You also have to ignore the “blinged up” recipes that have aspirations to be a millefeuille, so leave the recipes of Bill Granger and Maggie Beer and countless others out of the equation.)

And what should a vanilla slice be?

For me, the prototype of a vanilla slice is a square about 7cm (?2.5″) wide and about 4cm (?1.5″) high, with soft (not runny) white icing. The stiff custard is not a rich crème pâtissière and has a slightly aerated character (see pics). It is not lightened with whipped cream. The pastry is never particularly crisp (alas).

For my elderly neighbours, the size they remember from their childhood (the 1950s) is as above, as is the icing, but they remember the custard as being very pale and not as rich (perhaps a lean milk custard set with flour or gelatine?)

And my mother remembers a firm, pale yellow custard in Sydney’s vanilla slices. Her opinion of vanilla slices in Brisbane in the late 1960s is not flattering: “… the custard was nasty in that it was thick and solid but didn’t taste right for a custard and seemed to be mostly cornflour. In retrospect, maybe they used a lot of water rather than all milk to make the filling.”

Neither my neighbours or my mother can find a recipe from the time, so vanilla slices might well have been the preserve of the commercial baker. (I can find an English recipe for “vanilla slices” from the 1950s, which features white icing on top, and consisting of three rectangular layers of puff pastry, sandwiching two modest layers of both jam and either whipped cream or “confectioner’s custard”.)

I think the culinary world needs clarity, so tell me, dear readers (especially Gen X and older), did you grow up with the Victorian-style vanilla slice in your neck of the woods. Or was there something with a heavier custard? What was it called? And how long ago? Or was there nothing? And what about overseasy people?

My apologies in advance for any rumbling stomachs these questions may cause.

cooking, eating, equipment, food, hl, recipes, reviews

Mint ice-cream, and ice-cream machines

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Have you ever met one of those people who looks ascance at you when you suggest having an ice-cream in winter? “But it’s 8 degrees and raining!” they exclaim. So bloody what? Ice-cream is can be the stuff that dreams are made of, so of courrrrrrrrrrse you should eat it all year round.

When I first visited Germany it was mid-winter and verrrrrrry blllloody ccccolllld. Didn’t stop me buying a Cornetto, but! (The shop owner almost did, as I learned abruptly that customers d o  n o t get to open the ice-cream cabinet for themselves.)

So here we are at the winter solstice (in the southern hemisphere). As I haven’t tried enough recipes from the ice-cream book I reviewed a few months back (Ice Creams, Sorbets and Gelati: The Definitive Guide), and because KitchenwareDirect were nice enough to send me a new ice-cream maker to try out when they saw that I’d lost the paddle for my old one, I decided to do a flavour that straddles ideas of cold and wishes for warmer weather: mint.

Mint in any dessert can range from sophisticated and warming to sickeningly sweet and cloying. Anybody who pairs milk chocolate with mint, for instance, probably deserves very painful punishment, especially if the mint is communicated through little flavoured pieces of candy in the chocolate. Blurk. Ick. Pfahhg.

A dark chocolate is the way to go, but I don’t think you need to prefer the darkest on the spectrum – a good dark chocolate in the 50-70% range is appropriate for most applications. If you use fresh or dried mint, things get especially interesting and complex. One of the most surprising macaron flavours I did last year for Café Liaison used dried peppermint in a dark chocolate ganache. In the ice-cream here, I used fresh common mint straight from the garden.

The machine I’m now using (on the left) is a Cuisinart Ice Cream, Yoghurt & Sorbet Maker, 2-litre capacity. It’s stylish stainless steel looks aren’t quite matched by performance, as I found a full 2-litre batch didn’t freeze well enough on a warm autumn day, but it did well for a 1-litre batch in winter. (And let’s face it, probably all ice-cream maker ice-cream still kicks store-bought ice-cream out of the water!)

The mint ice-cream from the abovementioned book combines a fairly standard French-style egg custard with some sprigs of mint. The mint steeps in the cooling custard for an extended period, after which the mint is squeezed and the custard strained, the cream added, and the mixture churned. The authors’ recipe for 800ml of ice-cream used four 10cm sprigs. I upped that to five and it could possibly have been taken further.

The Cuisinart uses a rotating frozen bowl with a fixed paddle, rather than a rotating paddle inserted in a frozen bowl (as in my older Krups model, also pictured). The Cuisinart design – now quite common in ice-cream machines – seems to make for a noisier experience. I wouldn’t have wanted to be stuck in the kitchen while it churned a full mixture! Alas, the quite clever paddle (you can see it directing the flow in, out and up) is an absolute bugger when it’s time to decant the ice-cream into a container – too much surface area picking up the fresh ice-cream as you withdraw the paddle from the container, and many angled and bumpy surfaces to try to get that ice-cream off. I also found that it didn’t scrape the sides and base effectively enough while churning, leaving a 2mm layer of hard-frozen butterfat and custard (and no hard spatula is supplied to scrape it off).


The outcome was a smooth, wonderfully delicate mint ice-cream, lacking any giveaway green tinge. I had intended serving it with a chocolate sauce, but it would have been overpowering. A dusting of powdered cocoa might have done the job instead!

The next mint escapade will be with peppermint (once I’ve grown some!).

Notes about choosing an ice-cream maker: how well a machine performs is impossible to tell just by looking at it. I strongly recommend reading reviews or asking among your friends – even fancy, expensive models with their own compressor aren’t always reliable. As long as you don’t expect to make ice-cream without forethought, the common and fairly affordable machines with bowls that need to be frozen for 24 hours before making the ice-cream are a good way to go, but I do recommend making less-than-maximum sized batches in order to reduce unhappy sloppies. It’s also advisable to chill the mixture in the fridge for many hours beforehand.

In the case of the Cuisinart, the customer reviews at KitchenwareDirect are strongly positive (aside from the machine noise), but I am less positive – it does the job, but could be better. Both my now-paddleless Krups model (GVS2: highly rated on Amazon Germany) and my Mum’s 1985 Phillip’s machine (still going strong) are more effective at cleaning the sides and slightly quieter, but as Krups appliances are no longer readily available in Australia… Sniff.

My thanks to Brad at KitchenwareDirect for providing me with a new ice-cream machine.

eating, food, hl, travel

Corsica: not the easiest foodie destination

Five days in Corsica, surrounded by the azure waters of the Mediterranean, dwarfed by mountains and cliffs, eating myself full with sausage and cheese. That was the plan. The food part of it didn’t quite come together.

A common problem for holiday-destination islands (and many warm, sunny coastal areas, of course) is the tacky tourist-oriented commerce that easily overwhelms the towns and villages where tourists stay. Although Corsica isn’t the Costa Brava or the more blighted areas of the Algarve, the coastal towns clearly live off the waves of sun-seeking tourists from April to September. The culinary outcome isn’t good.

Searching eGullet for tips about food in Corsica wasn’t encouraging (it barely seems to be on the map for most eGullet members, so there wasn’t a lot to go on in the way of tips) and, unsurprisingly, Corsican cuisine is mostly about the “rustic” end of the spectrum – cheese, sausage, stews, etc. That’s more my direction of interest anyway, so I didn’t feel deterred… I just learned the names of many traditional dishes and ingredients so I could recognise them on menus.

Disappointment came, however, in the effect of masses of sun-tourists on how much real local food was easily available. In the northwest of the island there was some pitching at tourists interested in cuisine typique corse, though easily overshadowed by pizza and pasta, but as soon as we headed across the island to the southeast (lots of resorts and beaches), pizza, pizza, pizza and pasta was almost all that was left.

Starting in the north, our first lunch involved a large salad with the local fresh ewe’s/goat’s milk brocciu (similar to a smooth ricotta or Portuguese queijo fresco) and pieces of figatellu, a smoked pork and liver sausage. Dinner was civolle pienu – onions stuffed with… brocciu and prizuttu (like prosciutto), roasted, then a dish of roasted Corsican lamb (overcooked). Breakfast was a lemony cheesecake called fiadone, made with… brocciu.

We headed through the centre of the island, stopping in the major crossroad town of Corte for lunch. A central square in the old town featured numerous restaurants squarely aimed at tourists. It was a little disheartening, and despite many promoting Corsican “menus”, many of these were little more than salads (see above), omelettes with brocciu and mint, or dollops of brocciu in otherwise broadly French dishes. We were lucky to choose a restaurant with a passable “assiette Corse” or Corsican cheese and charcuterie plate. A great find, because it delivered four tasty local types of sausage (lonzu, coppa, prizuttu and one more), a terrine and a tomme-like cheese, plus a lovely fig jam. Whether any of these really displayed a Corsican “signature” flavour, however, was hard to divine. A boar stew with gnocchi was also delicious.


By the time we reached the southeast and were looking for dinner, we sensed disappointments ahead. The simple promotional slogan of cuisine typique corse was almost gone. Menus claiming Corsican dishes offered, again, salads or some pasta dishes with hints of Corsica but little more. Grilled meats and fish, or ravioli stuffed with brocciu and silverbeet are traditional dishes, but where were the various prepared meats, the boar, the stews, the chickpeas, anything using any other local cheese? Even the fancier restaurants, claiming again to be in Corsican style, displayed menus of modern French cuisine with little remarkably local input other than chestnuts and locally sourced fish and meat. For most tourists, the closest they’ll come to a diverse range of Corsican foods is the recipe postcards on sale everywhere, or the sausage stands in the supermarkets.

No doubt, the story would have been very different if we had been able to spend more time in the north and in small inland towns or villages, or visit local producers. As can be seen from these two excellent articles (Corsica Isula, NYT), there’s more to Corsica than can be readily discovered by tourists without local recommendations, staying just a few days. As a starting point, it might be easier to try this excellent book, Recipes from Corsica by Rolli Lucarotti! (BookDepository, Fishpond)

It must be said that the physical beauty of Corsica is enough to recommend the place in a flash, food or no food. I’ve written a bit more about Corsica on Duncan’s Miscellany.

degustation, eating, food, hl, reviews, supermarkets

Duncan’s Degustations – Dr Oetker frozen pizzas

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Like a gift from the heavens, a PR person offered me frozen pizzas to sample. I’m really not the ideal candidate, but with my Duncan’s Degustations series underway, how could I resist the opportunity to add to my spectrum of likely-ick experiences?

Offered a sample from the range of four flavours of Dr Oetker Pizza Ristorante pizzas, I asked for one. To my dismay, I was sent eight (8, acht!) of Herr Doktor Oetker’s frozen creations. It was already a hard ask for me to contemplate one, let alone multiple frozen pizzas.

I can’t recall when I last (pre-Oetker) ate a frozen dough disc with topping. I mean, I don’t even buy takeaway pizza. I make my own pizza. Often. Bottom to top. Sometimes it even has pineapple on it.

Dr Oetker, well established German ingredient company (nowadays prominent in preprepared foods, basic cookbooks including one classic translated into English, plus shipping and finance), has for some reason decided to expand into the Australian market with, of all things, imported pizzas. That’s right. Your supermarket freezer cabinet contains pizzas imported from Europe. How’s that for pointless food-miles? At least the origin isn’t fudged (in fact, the packaging is distinctly international), unlike the bread and pastries at Woolworths which are no longer clearly marked.

Back to the food-tasting side of this. You remove the very flat pizza from its shrink-wrap plastic cover (tasty touch that) and pop it in the oven at 220C for 11-13mins. And out comes…

Having eight of these buggers, I had to share them around. My parents were more than a little resistant, but bravely agreed to try Mozzarella. My nice neighbours are more open to preprepared foods, so I thought they might offer a different perspective on all flavours. And Mittens and I ate the Spinaci and the Funghi. (Curiously, perhaps for quarantine reasons, there are no meat pizzas (except tuna) being imported into Australia, despite the German range being about 50% meaty.)

Surprisingly, the tasters’ opinions were very similar:

  • Assertive but not stale herb/garlic aromas.
  • A fairly pleasant but bland taste for all varieties tested.
  • A thin, crumbly pastry base (parcooked) with an unpleasant, pasty-doughy mouthfeel.

The underside before baking (parcooked base).

This is one of those rare food products which is entirely edible, but left the tasters cold. In an emergency, I would willingly eat these pizzas. Given a choice, I’d choose a chunk of cheese or an apple or a slice of toast with Vegemite instead. Surely any food should evoke a stronger preference than this, whether positive or negative? What a strange achievement by Dr Oetker’s food technologists.

chocolate, eating, food, hl

Easter goes creme-free, heathen and beany-filled

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A gorgeous Easter in Melbourne came, lasted a little longer than usual (extra public holiday), and went, leaving us full of bready and chocolatey goodness. For me, this Easter brought memories of childhood joy and contemporary disappointment, alongside my special Hot Heathen Buns.

While supermarkets tout “fruitless” hot cross buns for Easter (indeed aptly named rubbish!) and food mags feel the need to bling up the buns – what was it in Epicure this year? Apricot and cardamom, for god’s sake – I prefer big puffy peely curranty joys of Hot Heathen Buns:

For reasons unknown, this year’s buns were free of marauding devil-chicks.

Now onwards to childhood memories… I have had a long-standing addiction to Cadbury Creme Eggs. Back in the days before they were available in Australia, I had the dubious advantage of spending part of my primary school years in the UK, where Creme Eggs were available all year round (if memory serves me correctly). Heaven. I’ve always liked food with (pleasant) surprises inside, so a chocolate egg with white and yellow fondant is quite the thing for me. In fact, this love of things with innards probably explains why I find Easter eggs so disappointing nowadays. The opportunity to crack open an egg to get at the yummies/yumminess inside is pretty limited nowadays, as this kind of product barely exists anymore except at the most stylish end of the market.

When Cadbury Creme Eggs appeared in Australia in the early 1980s it was like a gift from a higher being, albeit only once a year for a limited Easter season. This particular food-fanatic-to-be was more than a little choccy-joyful. Although I can’t remember the exact year of introduction, I clearly recall even more joy at discovering in my final year of high school that Target had discounted their Creme Eggs by more than 50% after Easter. I bought sixteen of them, consuming them in three days whilst huddled over a column heater (my parents’ house was an icebox) studying for mid-year exams.

In stark contrast, recent years have brought a waning of my enthusiasm for my treasured Creme Eggs. As my consumption of good chocolate has increased, I’ve found Cadbury Dairy Milk less and less pleasant. And so, it might be the case that 2011 marked my last Cadbury Creme Egg.

(As a side note, the southern hemisphere Cadbury Creme Eggs (they were made in New Zealand at first, not sure about now) are bit different from the Mother Egg. In the UK, the fondant in the eggs is smooth and somewhat runnier, but the chocolate is the foul British Cadbury Dairy Milk, even further removed from “chocolate” in my opinion.)

Perhaps as an attempt to find a surrogate comfort egg, this year I also returned to Red Tulip Humpty Dumpty. Never the best egg, it nonetheless always had the charm of containing chocolate beanies. I might be mistaken, but I think at one point that charm was spolit when the beanies were put in a plastic bag inside the egg… whether or not that’s a false memory, I can tell you they are now free-rattling beanies. The chocolate isn’t great, but it’s more pleasant than much other cheap Easter egg chocolate.

I wonder what I should turn to next year…