⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 4 min readThis one was a genuine test of nerve – three ingredients, no room to hide, and a very particular Italian technique one of our Italian friends swear by: rest the dough overnight before you touch it. I made these, using egg whites left over after the yolks went into honey crème brûlée for dessert that…
⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 5 min readI made these brioche rolls as a double batch just to play with colour – turmeric folded through one half, activated charcoal through the other. The base is Richard Bertinet’s brioche formula from Crumb, one of the lightest enriched doughs I use – not sweet, so it sits well next to savoury fillings. I mix…
⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 4 min readThe fish arrived at the table finished with orange, not lemon. We were in La Spezia, at the southern end of Cinque Terre, deep in lemon country – the streets, the shops, the souvenir stalls all say lemon. The sauce had Taggiasca olives, pine nuts, fresh thyme, and that orange, and the combination is what…
⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 7 min readIt was May 2024 in La Spezia, at a trattoria on the waterfront where the tables spilled out toward the water, I ordered Ligurian Sea bass dish. What arrived sat in a pan sauce of Taggiasca olives, pine nuts, thyme, and orange – not lemon, which I hadn’t expected. That detail stopped me as all…
⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 5 min readWe ate vongole in La Spezia in 2024 – a simple bowl, white wine broth, bread on the side. I came home thinking about it for weeks. The version I cook now uses Coffin Bay vongole from Myers Seafood in Port Lincoln, hand-raked and supplied through Fair Seafood. They come in a cryovac bag and…
⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 4 min readNormandy-style fish – cider, shallots, cream- is one of the oldest poaching techniques I know, and it translates well to South Australian ingredients. The bearded rock cod came from Cape Jaffa. The cider is Adelaide Hills apple. The Goolwa Pipis are the twist – usually their own dish, steamed hard and fast, but folded in…
⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 4 min readNormandy-style fish – apple cider, spring onions, cream – is one of the oldest ways I know to poach something gently, and it sits at the comfort-food end of what I cook. This is an autumn or winter dish for me: the cream and butter want cooler weather, and a slow stovetop poach suits the…
⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 5 min readAt a Miele masterclass, I watched Ōra King salmon cooked at 55°C for forty-five minutes and came out the other side with something I’d never produced in a pan. The texture was silky in a way that high heat doesn’t permit – almost custard-like, the natural oils coating the palate rather than being driven out….
⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 5 min readIt was a cool evening and the freezer has Fair Seafood tiger prawns in it – that was enough of a reason. I sautéed the shallots and garlic first, then steeped the saffron threads in warm homemade fish stock until the liquid turned a deep amber before it went near the rice. I use Ferron…
⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 5 min readI use steam when I want to control texture – it’s a method, like sous vide, where the environment does the work and the result is precise rather than incidental. My steam oven sets temperature only – the steam is simply how the appliance works. That single variable, temperature, is what changes the texture of…
