Prick With A Fork

So while the Prick breaks through a bit of writer’s block borne of trying to shove more ideas and tangents into a simple restaurant post than a David Foster Wallace novel, how about a little more home cooking? On the menu: Sockeye Salmon, 20-20-20-50 Style.

And already I hear you ask, “What’s up with all the numbers, Prick? I was led to believe there’d be no maths here.”

The simple answer is, it’s just a useful heuristic by which to remember the key points of the recipe: The salmon is brined for 20 minutes in a 20 per cent salt solution and then cooked for 20 minutes in a water bath at 50 degrees C.

Thus 20-20-20-50.

Why brining? It tightens up the flesh, gets rid of any slimy albumin that might otherwise mess up the dish or make it flabby, and pre-seasons the fish as well.

Ticket to brine

Brining is the first step, and an easy way to get this done is to boil 500ml, or 500 grams, of water (remembering that one millilitre = one gram) with 200 grams of salt, and then add another half-kilo of ice. This gives you a quickly-chilled brine (500 grams + 500 grams = 1 kilo, and the 200 grams of salt = the 20 per cent solution) that can be knocked up after work without having had to think this all through in the morning. Pop your salmon in – I’m using some beautiful wild Canadian sockeye salmon that is flown in and utterly different from the farmed stuff. The flesh is denser, orange, and not flaccid at all: these fish spent their lives swimming upstream, not lounging in a pool in the Bass Strait. The result is something almost steak-ey.

When the salmon has had its twenty minute salt-bath, take it out, rinse, pat dry, and place filets into sous-vide sacks with a good grind of pepper and a glug of good olive oil. Put these aside until you’re ready to go.

Meanwhile, get your accompaniment going. Here we’re doing a classic petit-pois a la Francaise. Everyone has their own way of doing this, but at Stately Prick Manor we do a pretty rich and creamy take which might annoy some purists but nonetheless goes like this:

Heat a good whack – 40 or 50 grams – of butter in a pan, and slowly soften some eschallots (shallots, for North American readers) and garlic. Add a good slug, half a cup or so, of white wine and cook down by three-quarters. Then, a cup or so of stock – brown chicken stock if you have some, the collagen in good home-made stuff makes for a much richer final product – and cook it down again. Then, add some cream, another cup or so, and bring to the boil, then simmer for a bit with a lot of frozen peas, depending on how many you’re serving.

(This recipe works for two hungry Pricks, but add 50 per cent and one could easily serve four).

(And yes, frozen peas. Along with tinned tomatoes this is one of the few “processed” foods that’s worthwhile keeping around. As a wise chef once said, Wait until peas are at the peak of their season, and then buy frozen.)

Oh, and don’t forget the bacon. Crisp up some lardons (use speck or pancetta or anything smoky you have to hand) in another pan and drop in to infuse the cream. Take off heat until you’re ready to serve.

What’s left? Just drop the sacked salmon into the water bath for twenty minutes at 50C (it’s all in the name!) and then finish off with a quick sear in a pan with a bit of oil and butter. Plate up, and garnish with a bit of chervil – it looks nice and adds a pleasing tang. You could pan-roast the fish, but that’s not as much fun, nor does it let you justify the capital expense on cool kitchen gadgetry.

And there you go. Sockeye Salmon, 20-20-20-50 Style, a la Prick.

This isn’t much of a home-cooking site, but here’s a little something I prepared earlier that rates a mention:

Inspiration and initial recipe via Katie at Local Sprouts, this is a fun dish to play with because it involves a few fast cooking techniques including a quick pickling of red onions which can be trotted out on a weeknight so long as one doesn’t mind eating at 8:30. The only thing that really needs to be organised earlier is the duck confit which in a pinch can be purchased or, if one has a sous-vide set-up, can or should always be found sacked up in pairs in a corner of the fridge. I am also not sure I would have bothered blanching the radishes; next time I’ll preserve their crunch and shave them into oh-so-fashionable discs.

We also turned the original recipe, which was more of a duck salad, into of a duck dinner by knocking up a quick Jerusalem artichoke puree (pro tip: lemon juice and the tiniest hint of curry powder really brings up the flavour).

A friend the other day, commenting on her misery having picked the wrong outfit Sydney’s hot today, cold tomorrow weather, noted philosophically that there is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing. We played with this idea a bit and decided that the same goes for food: food tastes different depending on the weather, and on a cold day a lamb shoulder will do what a gazpacho can’t. An elementary point, but when the mercury is swinging 15 degrees C from lunchtime to dinner, it can make planning the evening meal a bit tough. This dish fit our present winter-into-spring climate perfectly.

Who says Canberra is boring? Down in the ACT, one poor gent has taken the “prick with a fork” concept a little too far:

Canberra doctors removed a 10-centimetre fork from inside an elderly man’s  penis after a bizarre sexual mishap.

The 70-year-old arrived at the Canberra Hospital emergency department with a  bleeding sexual organ.

He told doctors he had inserted the 10cm dining fork into his urethra almost  12 hours earlier in an attempt to achieve sexual gratification.

But the utensil became stuck.

Forking hell.

Yesterday the Prick went and got in all sorts of trouble because he went and, in the middle of an otherwise perfectly innocuous restaurant post, hanged shit on The Smiths, a band whose many fans apparently form a very tight Venn diagram with the somewhat less legion readers of this site. Honestly, it was just a throw-away line to set up an animal-titty joke, but the Prick has learnt that there are certain third rails not to be touched.

So while the man may have said never apologise, never explain, today’s target shall nonetheless be a safer one. Vegetarians, to be precise, and a Melbourne-based fast-food chain called “Lord of the Fries” to be more so.

Now in all honesty the Prick has nothing against vegetarians and even married one first time around (laugh if you must, but then you’ll never find out the secret to getting the best flavour out of a mushroom).

As the business’s name suggests their fries are said to be lovely, despite not being triple-fried in duck fat. Even dedicated carnivores seem to vouch for them. Well, great. Half your luck, but that’s not the issue.

The issue the Prick has is with the whole ersatz-meat thing and their menu being full of things like “chick’n” patties and “veg bacon” and alleged “hot dogs” (the fillings of which are admittedly mysterious at the best of times).

Mrs Prick generally does the law-talkin’ around here but the whole concept seems to sail close to the winds of Section 52 of the Trade Practices Act – the bit which deals with misleading or deceptive conduct. While not accusing anyone of misconduct, it does feel as though plastering signs up all over one’s shop advertising the best burgers in the universe or words to that effect (when burgers are popularly understood to be made of meat) and then not letting the uninitiated in on the joke until they’ve reached the front of the queue isn’t completely kosher.

The Prick walked by the new LOTF on George Street today – they’ve just made their first inroad into Sydney from their Melbourne base – and there was a helluva crowd of people trying to get a feed. It looked like a scene out of Moscow circa 1982, or the Bourke Street Bakery in 2013 (and really, we won the Cold War so we could line up for bread!?).

How many of these punters were lured in by signs promising fantastic burgers, only to be told their only option was hippy food?

Or worse, went away with a “chick’n” burger thinking the spelling was just sort of cutesy-poo illiterate, a la America’s infamous Chick-fil-A, only to realise they’d become the victims of gastronomic evangelists?

It is a debate the Prick has had a few times, but the crux of the issue comes down to this: If you like a burger, have a damn burger. Don’t try and make a pale imitation of a burger, tell us all how great it is, and climb up on a high horse about it. This is why the Prick won’t be visiting, even just for fries, anytime soon.

And if you don’t want to eat meat for whatever reason, fine. The Prick can respect that. But if that is your thing, own it: After all, what about all these wonderful, diverse, flavourful and nutritious vegetarian and vegan recipes we keep hearing about? The best meatless dishes in town make no apologies for themselves.

Because while we regularly see people trying to come up with imitation meat products, it is pretty rare that – outside the labs of clever clogs like Heston Blumenthal – we ever see anyone trying to do an imitation vegetable. There is apparently a vegan “butcher” in Newtown which again works on the same imitation-meat principles as Lord of the Fries and which even sells imitation egg yolks like something of a chow-line joke on M*A*S*H but this time as a status symbol and signalling device.

Yet you’ll never see a carnivorous fruit-and-veg stand with apples that are really bacon (dear God there’s an idea) or potatoes that are really veal.

This suggests which direction the tide is really running on this issue and who really wants more of what the other has got. Without mixing metaphors too atrociously, it would seem that the grass is greener on the grass-fed side of the fence.

If there are any readers left by the end of this, maybe I can promise a nice, innocuous polenta recipe on the weekend? Maybe even with that little mushroom trick.

You know that scene in The Simpsons where Principal Skinner yells way too loudly in a cafeteria argument with Mrs Krabappel, “Oh come on, Edna! We both know these children have no future!”, only to have to walk it back with an enthusiastic, “Prove me wrong, kids! Prove me wrong!”

That is a bit how the Prick has been feeling lately about the state of Sydney dining. And while Skinner was right, the kids from Springfield really did have no future – in fact they were never much fun after about the fifth season – there are, despite the relentless march of burgers, bistros, and burritos, signs that Sydney’s top-order kitchens still have some life in them yet.

Take Oscillate Wildly, tucked in a little Newtown shopfront over the road from the cop shop on Australia Street, where chef Karl Firla is serving up some of the best food in town – if not Australia – to a lucky couple of dozen diners a night including, on a recent Wednesday, us lucky Pricks.

I’ve got one word for you: Plastics. Wait, it’s not plastic?

Early courses are tactile. Perhaps in a nod to a new generation of diners (O tempora! O mores! the Prick hears you sarcastically sigh) who look at silverware with all the shrieking incomprehension of the apes in the opening sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the first few dishes need nothing but fingers.

The first plate comes out bearing something purple and crinkly, like the sort of material you stick on the top of a gift bag when you’re too lazy to wrap a present, and which turns out to be this sticky, sweet, tart blueberry gelatin that crinkles and cracks like cellophane, sticks to the fingers and lips in all the best ways, and finishes off with a little bite of cassis. Not your average amuse, surely. But nor is it “innovation” simply for its own showy, because-we-can sake either.

There’s bread, too, with lardo – cured pork fatback, amazing, melting, salty, savoury, sclerosis-inducing stuff – standing in for butter. Apparently we Pricks are not the first to ask if there’s bacon fat or something else wonderful in the sourdough; no, apparently this is what happens when a starter reaches five or six years old. (Memo to self: Get a sourdough starter on the go now).

And we get to suck on some sugarcane that’s been infused, or compressed, with gin and tonic for a boozy little sweet treat. Makes those spheres we made the other week look like chopped liver.

Fish, fingers. Fingers, fish.

Fingers are again deployed on the first of the formal courses. Tuna, but not like you’ve had it before, and like nothing you’ll find at the fish markets: gorgeous, fatty, fleshy, raw sashimi from the belly of a Bluefin, atop what can only be described as simple rice crackling and a bit of smoked butter – a more refined version of the mackerel and smoked crème fraiche we enjoyed at Moon Under Water, perhaps. There is a week’s worth of brain-building, cholesterol-busting Omega-3 in every bite (I felt smarter, wittier, and better looking almost immediately, or maybe it was the wine talking) and if word gets around aspirational suburbanites will be booking their kids in for dinner in time for next year’s NAPLAN.

Then, a foie gras custard with Jerusalem artichoke chips – lovely, if not foie-ey enough for this foie-natic – and paired with a Japanese Gris de Koshu from the foothills of Mount Fuji. (The wines, too, are stunning, and unique, and a joy). A vegetarian course turns up a winner with “Job’s Tears” (a type of pearl barley), mushrooms, and garlic. There’s foam on top, as much for function as for form, and as with the enigmatic tale of Job, we feel our fortunes restored many fold. Murray cod is next, sympathetically perfect with a bit of oyster cream and licorice sand which, with a slug of Le Cigare Blanc from Bonny Doon in California, is remembered as dish of the night.

Oh cod, you devil!

Then pork, and a fantastic piece of wagyu, let down only slightly by an egg yolk designed to serve as a sauce but which, allegedly done at 63 degrees, either should have been done at 62.5, or be taken as a sign the immersion circulator needs a check. Never mind. This is followed by “cheese on toast”, which turns out to be parmesan ice cream atop breadcrumbs. Further desserts slowly walk us towards the sweeter and richer, and the meal is crowned by a chocolate and eucalyptus number paired with a 10-year-old Madeira had us calling, sadly, for the bill.

And cognacs.

By the end we have been on a journey and experienced a lovely tale guided by lovely people who know their food, their service, and their wine. Plates are perfectly sized to prevent that awful sensation (“Oh Christ, two more savouries and then three desserts!?”) that sets in when a degustation becomes a slog. While not a cheap night out, it is also nice eating in a room that does not have a banker standing in the background, ready to call in the liquidators on the $2 million note used to pay for fit-out and PR: The money is going to pay for what’s on the plate, not what’s on the walls.

Our night may have been the site of a one-off flash of genius, but a random and fully unscientific survey that has included co-workers, fellow bloggers, reviewers, and young Nick With a Fork’s Year 6 teacher has failed to turn up a single soul who has not had a great night at Oscillate Wildly. A veteran of Mark Best’s pseudo-eponymous Marque (a name that cannot be read without thinking of Hyacinth Bucket), Firla has far surpassed his old master and indeed could teach the man a thing or two about hospitality, food, and attitude.

Word is Oscillate Wildly is named after the Smiths’ number of the same name, though this does not really compute. The Smiths’ song is repetitive, muzak for Goth kids, and the liner notes to anything Morrissey has ever been involved with end with the phone numbers to Lifeline and Beyond Blue. Oscillate Wildly the restaurant is anything but repetitive or downbeat.

The Prick likes to imagine instead that it is a sneaky homage to the great old joke, “How do you titillate an ocelot?” Answer: “Oscillate its tit a lot!”

Remember the case of the Melbourne vegans who almost killed their kitten by inflicting their beliefs on the poor thing? They’re not the only ones:

A CAN of Whiskas and a cuddle aren’t all that’s expected of the new-age pet owner these days. A growing number of cat and dog owners are extending their ideological food preferences to their pets and raising their four-legged friends as vegans.

Founder and owner of Australia’s first vegan pet-food company, Sandy Anderson, said her customer base had grown by at least 30 per cent a year since she started Veganpet in 2007, despite never having advertised.

“These are people who really care about the environment and their own wellbeing and their cats’ wellbeing too and they are willing to try alternatives,” she said.

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, insane. As the article points out, cats and dogs are “obligate carnivores” who, much like The Prick, need meat to survive. That’s certainly the case with Maggie the Iron Terrier, who subsists on a varied diet of pensioner’s pate, ruinously expensive gourmet doggy treats from the growers’ markets, and all the trimmings and off-cuts she can cadge when we’re cooking.

Yet despite the science, vegan pet owners won’t be swayed:

Filmmaker, spiritual teacher and author of Secret Animal Business Billie Dean feeds the product to her 14 cats and seven dogs on her property in the NSW Southern Tablelands.

“Sandy’s done her research; I feed Veganpet to my cats like a vitamin pill.”

Ms Dean believed commercial pet food was the source of a range of animal illnesses and domestic animals were becoming “intolerant” to meat products.

“I do animal telepathy and I actually tune in and I’ve had cats say to me ‘I’m addicted to this stuff and it’s bad for me and I feel sick’,” she said.

I suspect what the cats are actually saying is, “Give me some damn chicken or I’ll shred more endangered birds than a Hebrides wind farm.”

Queensland MP Peter Dowling could have saved himself a lot of trouble if he’d just read this site.

As anyone who drops by knows, the red wine goes in The Prick — not the other way around!

The Sydney Morning Herald‘s “Good Food” section, 4 May 2013:

The next time you feel the urge for fresh Mexican food, just look up. A taco-toting drone may be circling.

Researchers at the Darwin Aerospace laboratory in San Francisco have designed the Burrito Bomber, the world’s first airborne Mexican food delivery system, which would allow customers to have food parachuted right to their doorstep.

The Sydney Morning Herald‘s website front page, today, 7 August 2013:

The drones are coming! The drones are coming! But this time they’re not armed with hellfire missiles. These drones are packing a new kind of heat: steaming pizzas, fresh tacos and cold beer.

Sydneysiders, back me up here: Surry Hills, for all its glories, is also just ever-so-slightly ridiculous. You know what I mean. The blow-in hipsters. The Saturday afternoon Crown Street kaftan parade. It’s all a bit of a scene.

Scene and be seen

Add to the mix Chur Burger. Set on the site of the former fine diner Assiette, which later became the “more accessible” (but not accessible enough, apparently) Albion Street Kitchen or ASK, owner Warren Turnbull has, after a fire, managed to dumb things down sufficiently to really find the market. With some industrial stools and plywood communal tables he has created the perfect environment for people who think their McDeath t-shirt is really quite clever to get in, shove a burger down their gob, and be on their way in fifteen minutes.

Not surprisingly he is making a small fortune in the process.

Look, Chur’s burgers are in and of themselves pretty good for ten bucks. But they are nothing out of this world. A reasonably fat but not overly-filling patty that, thankfully, is not charred all the way through is let down by a lack of seasoning. A bit of extra bacon goes unnoticed and the biggest flavour comes from the pleasant umami of a rich tomato jam. It is, and may remain, a decent pit-stop for the Prick to lay in a foundation before meeting journo cronies for a session at the Clock Hotel. But “Burger of the Year”? Please.

Chur Burger, in situ

Those who know can find far better burgers in this town: While Leichhardt isn’t quite as hip as the Slurry, nor do its restaurateurs play as hard in the public relations game, it is home to the wonderful little Bonarche Burgers. Lovers of the form should do themselves a favour and make the trip: an “All-American” with extra bacon is (no surprise here) the Prick’s go-to order.

If all this sounds a bit, well, chur-lish, my apologies. The Prick is very conflicted on this whole subject: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,” the great philosopher and pioneer of classical economics Adam Smith famously wrote back in 1776, “but from their regard to their own self-interest.”

And on one level, if Warren Turnbull can make more of a buck turning out by some accounts three thousand or more burgers a week, more power to him. At $10 or more a throw, plus sides and snacks plus beers that cost almost as much again, that’s a helluva gross. Especially as the wages bill must be far lower at Chur than at either Assiette or ASK.

But the other half of Smith’s equation is the “we” and what, collectively, we Sydney diners expect for our dinner. That is the worrying bit.

Dude, we went to culinary school and did that etage at Joël Robuchon for this?

Judging by the success of Chur and legion other joints serving what are essentially gussied-up children’s menus, as well as the slow shuttering of Sydney’s fine dining rooms (Claude’s last week, who will pull the pin next week?), what “we” seem to want is to not have to sit still through a meal that lasts more than twenty minutes and, if possible, never touch a piece of silverware. Hence the present bonfire of the gastronomic vanities where table linen and silver and what were once the trappings of adult dining are tossed on the pyre to be replaced by kidult menus of sit-down street food, barbeque, and burgers.

For as lovely as tacos are, even the greatest chef can only take them so far (by no coincidence Turnbull has also opened a Mexican eatery in the Hills).

And while pulled pork is glorious, its sudden ubiquity as an every-day food – especially in places catering to the under-30 set – suggests an ironically geriatric preference for stuff that doesn’t require too much work in the way of chewing.

The danger now is that restaurateurs, having discovered a way to beat the brutal one-two punch of slow table turnover and high wage bills (the latter being a unique feature of Australia’s bizarrely-regulated IR sector), are being further pushed in that direction by publicists and newspapers who feed off the churn of mindless change. And when the tide goes out on all these trends, as it inevitably will, we will have lost a lot of knowledge, tradition, and enjoyable nights out in the process.

You’ve heard of Children of the Corn? Sydney’s restaurants are being destroyed by the children of the corndog.

In his marvellous Momofuku cookbook – treasured even more for the stories than the recipes – David Chang talks about his youthful obsession with ramen and how at one stage it led him from a respectable middle-class life in America as a second-generation Korean immigrant with a theology degree from Connecticut’s Trinity College to bunking in a men’s hostel in a dodgy part of Tokyo as he pursued the Holy Grail of noodles.

While in no way thinking about upping sticks from Stately Prick Manor for the wilds of Japan, the Prick has lately and over the past few months had something of a revelation on the subject: Ramen, done right, can be transcendently good. And with a motley and assorted crew of mates, the Prick has been touring various Sydney ramen joints in a vague quest to find the best of the bunch.

Given investigations thus far that best may very well exist in a little corner of a Chinatown food court in the form of Ramen Ikkyu – a tiny little shop which itself may or may not itself be named after Ikkyu, the iconoclastic, boozy Buddhist monk of Japanese folklore known as both a heretic and saint. In other words, a pretty good role model.

Ikkyu’s business plan is simple and a bit iconoclastic in and of itself: Chef Harunobu Inukai, formerly of Blancharu, makes enough soup to turn out 150 serves a day. When it’s done, it’s done. His paitan broth, which is like a typical pork tonkotsu stock but tempered with chicken, would seem to reflect Inukai’s classical experience. The chief advantage of this style is that it adds back some of the aromatics and lightness of touch the collagen-rich broths of other favourites, such as Gumshara (amazing as it is), miss.

Note perfect pork, but disappointing eggs

Other critics have made the point and it is indeed true: Ikkyu’s hand-made noodles are alive in a way that other ramen joints’ are not. There’s a bounciness to them, an energy and movement on the palate. And if you’ve got extra broth, you can go back for another helping of the things.

The accompanying pork cha–shu is likewise perhaps the best in the city, with a perfect ratio of meat to fat to maillard-ey char (45:45:10, for those keeping score at home). It is available as an extra by the plate of three or six morsels; one would be a fool not to go the six.

Thus Ikkyu’s ramen is a great bowl of soup – go the shoyu version kicked up with soy sauce is the Prick’s advice – and is right up there with the best in town.

But still it is still not perfect.

In his cookbook Chang makes the observation that everyone in Japan loves the ramen shop they grew up with, no matter its faults. When the Prick first read this observation, it was taken as a simple observation on human nature. But having dipped a toe down the rabbit hole it is more properly taken as a warning. The perfect ramen actually does not exist, at least not in this world, so don’t go looking for it.

And thus despite its delights the Ikkyu ramen has its failings, most notably the all-important tamago, or egg: On two separate visits the egg was first cold, then overcooked (and still cold), where it should be velvety and unctuous (here Gumshara laps the field).

Nevermind, the quest continues.

By way of background and perhaps fairness it should also be noted that the Prick’s interest in ramen first developed last year when the international Ippudo chain opened near the office, and at the time it was (naively) treated as something of a find – even if this site’s write-up at the time did note the hard and fast rule to “never eat at chains”.

To be honest, while early visits to Ippudo were all serenity and Miles Davis, the place has since changed. These days it is broths that range from rich to pellucid depending on the day. Serves of tamago forgotten in the bowl but never on the bill. Thudding music. And endless, manic yelling from the kitchen, the hostess stand, and throughout the restaurant: Arigatogozaymash-RAMENEEMAS!-Hooooooyu?-HOYUUUU!

Ippudo in Sydney now feels more like an American suburban restaurant chain’s interpretation of Japanese food culture – “Sumo Charlie’s”, perhaps? “TGI Noodles”? – than a proper ramen-ya.

When Ippudo opened it made quite a splash around town, but at the time Sydney Morning Herald critic Terry Durack refused to buy in, writing that the ramen was inconsistent and that he found the whole thing rather so-so … but he also added that the one ramen that made him a convert to the dish was that turned out by Inukai back when he was at Blancharu.

The Prick has often been critical of the Shaggy One’s style, but in this case, the man was right.