Prick With A Fork

It is hardly the greatest sin in journalism, but when the issue is restaurants in France serving up factory food and calling it their own, it is to say the least ironic to report it by serving up a story prepared earlier by a big industrial wire service.

Today’s Fairfax weekenders purport to dish on “the dirty secret of many French ‘restaurants‘”:

Daniel Fasquelle wants the world to know the dirty secret in the kitchens of many French restaurants: they don’t cook their own food.

The French parliamentarian is pushing a law to restrict the use of the label “restaurant” to establishments that prepare their food from scratch. He reckons many of France’s eateries wouldn’t cut it because they reheat industrially prepared foods.

If you’ve ever wondered why French classics such as a “moelleux au chocolat” or a “tarte tatin” tastes suspiciously the same in Paris restaurants, it’s probably because it is. About a third of French restaurants say they use industrial food, and Fasquelle and other officials fear declining standards at the nation’s 150,000 restaurants threaten a tourism industry that represents 7 percent of France’s $2.8 trillion economy.

Shock, horror (and as good an explanation as any as to why the Prick has generally found French cuisine – be it bourgeoisie, bistro, or haute – to be often far superior outside France).

Readers who get to the bottom of the story however will note the word “Bloomberg”: the story hit the wires two or three days ago. Not exactly reporting a la minute, as it were, but then Fairfax has long been sliding towards becoming an aggregator service rather than a home for real journalism.

Nor is it a particularly new story; the Wall Street Journal covered the issue better and with more depth way back in March. Harrumph.

The other day the Prick heard it remarked that Australia was fast becoming “the coup capital of the Western world” given the enthusiasm with which our political class cycles through leaders. The old reminder whispered into the ears of Roman emperors – remember, thou art mortal ­– seems almost quaint.

“Remember, thou hath the political lifespan of a carnival prize goldfish” would be more accurate.

What does this have to do with food? Well, it underlines that favourites can change and change quickly and when it’s on, it’s on. For months now the Prick’s favourite Sydney ramen had been found over at Ippudo (as much because it’s right next door to the office as because it’s generally very good indeed). But ever since a couple of disappointing meals, capped off by a frankly pellucid and limp soup on a day when something far heartier was needed, the mood for change has been in the air.

And thus it was the day after Kevin “Programmatic Specificity” Rudd’s revanchist return to the Lodge the Prick joined a happily increasingly-regular group of taste testers to Gumshara, a little ramen shop tucked in the back of Haymarket’s Eating World food court. The quest? A new favourite ramen: A Prime Ramenster, as it were.

No MSG. Got that?

Gumshara’s ramen is at heart a pure beast, classically made with the sort of obsessiveness seen in any Tokyo ramen shop where customers queue for an hour to get their fix. The stock is just pork bones and water – the chef goes through 120kg of bones every day – boiled for twelve hours so that every last bit of cartilage and marrow and fat makes it into the broth. This guy is, as the PM said in his cringe-making return speech, “cooking with gas”.

Ordering looks complex but isn’t. A few bases (including the magnificently-named $25 Super Mega Ramen, which sounds like a character in some Japanese trading card game) can be complemented with any number of toppings, in my case eggs and further grilled pork.

Souped up…

 All in all, it’s a great bowl of soup. The eggs alone are a thing of genius and much discussion and debate was had about their superiority to the sort of scientific, 62-degree eggs increasingly seen around town (we food types are a fascinating bunch). The condiments add zing, particularly the pickled cabbage and chili oil. In the mouth the stock starts out mild but builds in intensity to become overwhelmingly unctuous and rich, almost numbing.

But that’s not entirely a good thing. For while a tonkotsu broth runs counter to everything they might teach at Le Cordon Bleu, making it subversively attractive, there’s also the danger that something else is lost along the way. Classical French stocks are all about purity and clarity, yes, but they also gain a degree of depth with aromatics. With this sort of tonkotsu stock, there’s no thought of getting rid of the fat – that’s what makes it so great – but it can verge towards monomania.

The Prick’s verdict? The Gumshara ramen was good, deep, thick – but ultimately pretty one-note. Sure, that note may have been lovely, more Jacqueline DuPre dragging her bow across a cello than Emergency Broadcast System warning tone, but many of us were left looking for more. RamenQuest continues!

France may be a wonderful country but Australia is not the most Franco-philic of nations. Sure, there haven’t been any “freedom fries”-type incidents of the sort that in decades past marred Washington’s relations with the Quai D’Orsay.

Nor have the French ever blown up a hippy-ship in an Australian harbour (though if they did, the Prick’d probably buy ‘em a Pastis).

Still, when it comes to the French, Australians are a little bit suspicious and our connections are a little less secure than they are with other European nations. Parliamentary democracy comes from England, Italian is our most-spoken at-home second language and, hey, spag bol is practically our national dish.

But France? Well, don’t go singing a French song on a Melbourne bus if you know what’s good for you.

La Grande Pork…

Thus even in the cultured inner-west of Sydney it’s a bit of a gamble giving a French restaurant a name like La Grande Bouffe. To the un-trained Australian ear the name sounds a little too much like a poorly-named North Shore knock shop, or a highlight of your grandfather’s telling of the tale of the time he liberated Paris – but don’t tell your grandmother!

Yet the name is also a great joke, because – according to a well-cultured workmate of the Prick – La Grande Bouffe really means something along the lines of “the big feed”, or, “strap on the feedbag”, making it sort of like an American roadside eating-barn by way of Google Translator and the French countryside.

While on one level a bit of a laugh – everything sounds classier in French, Darl’! – on another it is deadly serious. Tucked into what must have once been a corner shop down (ironically) the non-Paris end of Darling Street, Rozelle, and seating maybe three dozen people at a stretch, La Grande Bouffe is always convivially full as its little kitchen turns out plates of slightly-fancy, really comforting French bistro fare: There will be no siccing of the ACCC on La Grande Bouffe as it really is a grande bouffe. The Prick can safely report that when one sits down to a meal that includes charcuterie, a hare-and-duck terrine, a twice-baked chevre soufflé, veal shank and risotto, crème brûlée, a good half (maybe two-thirds) of a bottle of Bordeaux, and two or three Calvados, one doesn’t need much in the way of dinner.

Et la grande veau…

And if that sounds like a spoiler for the rest of this review, it’s not. Because our little Sunday lunch party also tucked into fried lambs’ brains – crunchy, creamy little croquettes a brave Nick With a Fork enjoyed but which an offal-loving friend suggested were perhaps a bit too heavily crumbed. (Playing it safe, he had demolished a steak frites like a champion, and was pleased that his medium-rare order came medium-rare and not, as too often happens, medium).

Mrs Prick was disconsolate when a fish pie special topped with puff pastry was sold out, but was thrilled by a giant pot of salmon, cream, and mash which she pronounced “even better”.  The Little Pricks also enjoyed a slab of pork belly as big as  a paving brick and a perhaps-too-potatoey salmon cake, but who’s counting, because their dessert was an assiette of chocolate fondants, ice cream, and some lovely little pastry thing. Were there off-notes? Perhaps, if one went looking for more than what the place puts on offer, i.e., really nice, slightly homey but in a very good way, French bistro food – the sort of stuff one often wishes one could find in France, but which the Gallic diaspora seems to do better overseas. Lucky us.

That the stunning knives Mrs Prick and the Little Pricks gave me for my birthday are Damascus steel should in no way be taken as a commentary on the Syria thing, but I will note they are far preferable to any kitchenware the Muslim Brotherhood is turning out.

Lots of stuff on deck, including the best little Italian restaurant on Parramatta Road and, if you’re lucky, a full-on rant or two.

“Fish don’t fry in the kitchen,

Beans don’t burn on the grill,

Took a whole lotta t-ry-in’,

Just to get up that hill!”

              — “Movin’ on Up”, theme from The Jeffersons

The Jeffersons was one of those wonderful American sit-coms from the late 1970s that could never be made in today’s era of “national conversations” and perpetual furrowed-brow outrage about racism, sexism, and any other -ism to come down the pike. For Australians who never had the privilege, the show centred around an African-American family, the eponymous Jeffersons, whose paterfamilias George made a small fortune building a chain of drycleaners and thus was able to get his family out of the ghetto and “move on up” to Manhattan’s Upper East Side – to, as the classic gospel theme song put it, “a de-luxe apartment in the sky.”

The show dealt with upward mobility, class, and race relations (George hated whitey and called the mixed-race couple who lived upstairs “Zebra!” to their face) with more texture, yet more honesty, than a year’s worth of “beer summits.” As a further indication of their status as new bourgeoisie the Jeffersons also had a live-in maid, Florence, who cooked for the family and whose sparring matches with George made for a constant B-story.

Why do I bring up this little gem of TV history? Because here at Stately Prick Manor we’ve been doing a bit of moving on up … from a set-up that could be pretty accurately described as “ghetto sous-vide” to something a bit more “de-luxe”.

Regular readers will know of the Prick’s old sous-vide set-up which was constructed out of a slow cooker, a thermocouple, an electronic temperature controller, and a few other bits and bobs and which looked like a benchtop IED. (Note to any fans of the site in the National Security Agency: That’s looked like, not was. But better stay away from the pressure cooker posts just to be safe, eh?). Very “ghetto”. And for a variety of esoteric reasons known only to the Prick, we held on to it for ages despite its pokey capacity, imprecision, and margin of error wider than a Neilsen poll.

To everything there is a season, and with a birthday coming up, well, here we are:

Say hello to ‘Florence’

Naturally, the new machine – a Breville Sous-Vide Supreme – has been christened Florence. For she’s what cooks your food once you’ve moved on up from the ghetto.

But how does it work? Far better than the old set-up. It gets up to temperature quick-smart but doesn’t overshoot the mark (the old set-up would fly three or four degrees over the set temperature, then drop several more once food was added, and then take a while to get back up to heat, and so on, often necessitating a bit of goosing one way or the other with a kettle or glass of ice water). Indeed it is ridiculously precise, measures the temperature to a tenth of a degree, and can be set Its 10-litre capacity is double the effective space previously. And it looks better on the bench as well, with plenty of room should a proper chamber sealer ever find its way to our door.

For Monday dinner we picked up a little Australian sea bass (allegedly sustainable and assuredly picked up in our own territorial waters) and popped it in the bath at 48C for about 30 mins before searing off the skin in a pan:

If global warming means the oceans get up to 48C, fish in the future will be delicious

The whole dish was a bit of an ad hoc invention around the protein with a bit of fennel confit, roasted baby tomatoes, basil oil, beurre blanc, and some quick-pickled oyster mushrooms put together for a nice balance of sweetness, richness, and tang:

The key is the tang.

All in all pretty tasty and the perfect way to treat a buttery, oily fish like sea bass.

Indeed, along with long-and-slow-cooked off-cuts like short ribs (we did some for 48 hours the other day in the old machine with pretty good results) it would seem seafood, which demands precision, is perfect for this sort of cooking.

Which of course is why I think the next thing I’ll cook in it is wild boar.

Because being able to draw a milk-kitten in the froth of a macchiato is no longer sufficient to signal one’s manliness:

Yes, our darling baristas have been growing out their facial hair and parading big, bushy bushranger beards (offset with check shirts) that one blogger calls the ”I don’t trim my beard because I’ve been too busy driving my Volvo into the jungles of Costa Rica” beard. ”It’s a symbiotic relationship, baristas and beards,” says Patrick Casey, gentleman barber of Cleveland’s Salon & Cafe. ”It’s important to keep a beard washed and in shape, especially if you’re working with coffee and food.” On the shelves at Cleveland’s is a range of Wild Man organic and vegan beard shampoos and conditioners bearing the slogan: ”Feel Rugged. Look Smooth.” 

One of the great things about wine shows is that they invert the normal order of things. Like being on holiday, at a wine show it is not only perfectly acceptable but actually encouraged to get onto it before noon: That’s when the people who know and love their wine show up to taste and talk to winemakers and stock their cellars. After lunch, it’s all neck tattoos and tire-kickers looking for a cheap skinful.

Such was the case at Sunday’s excellent inaugural (and hopefully not last) Eveleigh Uncorked wine-cheese-and-food truck festival. A great event in the old railshed, it was mostly (exclusively?) NSW and ACT wines, and we Pricks were glad to see old favourites (hi, Mrs Marsh!) and make some new discoveries including Helm Wine‘s great Cabernets and Long Rail Gully‘s silky, St Emilion-like 2007 Merlot.

Also ran into plenty of mates, like local gastro-political power couple Shayne Mallard and Jesper Hansen (most recently seen on Maeve O’Meara’s Food Safari):

Skål!

After the festivities, and with the Prick’s birthday coming up next week, we made a surprise detour to pick up a bit of an unexpected gift:

The Prick been berry, berry good this year…

More on adventures with this beauty, which replaces a long-loved but ultimately unstable ghetto sous-vide rig, over the days and weeks to come. Thanks, Mrs Prick!

A couple of readers have asked for more details on how we Pricks achieved briskety goodness on the weekend. Well, here you go:

1. First, you’re going to need a few kilos of brisket. Ask for it boneless, and with the fat cap still on. Ours was sliced into two hunks, the better to fit in the smoker.
2. Next, give it a good dry rub (not to be confused with a zipless … nevermind). The recipe we started with called for 2 tablespoons each of onion and garlic powders, 500g of brown sugar and the same again of salt, 3 tablespoons each yellow and black mustard seeds, a lot of paprika, and some dried chili, ancho if possible. Mix it all together and spread all over the meat a good day before you cook.

   

3. Here’s where things get tricky: You need a smoker of some sort. We have a Hark electric number that we picked up from Chef and the Cook in Camperdown; you can also use a Weber kettle grill or any number of other contraptions, but it may not be as precise. We started smoking with applewood chips at about 6:30 am for a mid-afternoon feast, and set the machine to about 115C. After breaking through a “barbeque stall” at around 72C, the meat cruised happily up to 95C and was ready to rest for about half an hour in foil.

All in all, it worked a treat, though the rub was too salty, and next time I think I’ll wind it back to a 2:1 sugar-to-salt ratio. Also, I put the piece of meat with the fattier “cap” up the top, the better for it to melt onto its drier downstairs neighbour. Fairly amazingly, there was a hunk leftover, which was even better the next day warmed in the oven and sliced onto sandwiches with a bit of home-made barbeque sauce.

Also, a mustard sauce — three thinly-sliced onion and a bunch of crushed garlic cloves sweated until golden brown followed by a litre (!) of apple cider vinegar and a half-litre (!) of decent mustard, a shot of paprika, onion powder, garlic powder, and a squeeze of ketchup was ridiculously popular.

Much is being made over the menu that at first was allegedly distributed at a Liberal party fundraiser several months ago and which now looks to have been an inside kitchen joke that somehow made its way into the drawer of a staffer in the Prime Minister’s Office where it sat for several months until it was deemed just the thing to get the boss out of a jam.

Some are still clinging (bitterly, perhaps?) to the hope the menu was the real deal, but it would seem reasonable to ask whether the sort of food the bill of fare suggests is even the sort of stuff the restaurant in question, Brisbane’s Richards and Richards, might be able to turn out.

Without debating the jokes, the supposedly scandalous menu indicates foie gras, quail, butter-poached crayfish, jamon Iberico bacon-and-eggs with caviar, and so on were  served up on the night – in other words, it would have been a helluva degustation:

Yet the regular menu at Richards and Richards, where the whole thing started and whose boss denies the thing was anything more than an in-house gag, suggests otherwise.

With all due respect to the crew, this sort of night might be a bit ambitious for this kitchen: I’m sure they serve nice stuff, veal cutlets and steaks and pizzas and the like, but hardly anything that flash. Hell, half the place is a menswear shop.

And anyway, who goes to a political fundraiser for the food?