Skip to 19:30 if you’re lazy, although I think the entire hour long talk is completely worth the watch.
How do you eat M&Ms? What’s your favorite flava? Mine’s peanut. Reason being I think peanut has got the highest salt content of any of the other flavors and this draws out the chocolate a whole lot more, plus you get a lot of crunch and aroma.
There’s just something about these candy coated treats that I’ve been mowing down relentlessly. Normal choc coated peanuts just aren’t the same. With M&Ms, you can chew into them or let them coalesce into these soft shelled beings if you allow your saliva the time to dissolve the shell. At one point, you get sort of paper-esque wafers of candy shell, peeling away into dobs of chocolate and finally, that golden roasted peanut. It is the holy trinity of mass market candydom.
Lately, I’ve taken to munching on a whole pack of peanut M&Ms trying to bite them in half, such that the peanut is split perfectly, along the seam, like in the photo below. This takes a tremendous amount of skill and knowledge to perform. You need to consider the M&M, its form, its shape, the balance. The nut is inside, awaiting discovery and/or disaster. The shell and the chocolate conspire to hide it, away from prying teeth intent on destruction. You need to feel its heartbeat, like a jeweller appraising a diamond. There are only 4 possible positions out of an infinite pool of positions. Then you need to think about the amount of force plus the alignment of your teeth and if your teeth have any imperfections, too bad sucker. Splitting an M&M perfectly in half takes patience. It takes morals and courage. It takes a certain dedication to finding out the truth in things. You need to be delicate but firm. You need finesse and power. It is not simple. It takes a lot of M&Ms.
Or maybe just a whole lotta luck.
Every morning this past week, I got up at 4. I showered, got dressed, glanced at some pleasing footie scores before rushing off to catch the 4.42 train to Springwood. I go to the same place, right by the escalator, where the door to the cabin always is when the train stops. I hop in and get off 2 stops later. In the cabin, perched at the same handle/support thing near the doors is this old guy in the same hat, wearing the same pants and the same boots and the same l/s tee under the same polo. He stinks. I’m always in the same jeans wearing the same cap and some random tee.
We get off at the same stop, St. Leonards, and right where the door opens is the escalator. It seems we have the same idea about efficiency. We go up and the same sequence keeps playing out. First up is the Indian dude on the opposite side. Then, there’s this girl that works at Coles walking up the steps, 15 metres behind him. Then the old man exits the station and pauses. I walk past the gantry and behind me are this couple that kiss goodbye and say hello/how are you to the old man. The woman then leaves left whilst the man converses with the old man, who is now braying the same sigh I’ve heard a zillion times.
Repetition is the process that has served humanity well. Particularly in the realm of food, where its basically kept us alive through the reproduction of successfully edible foods. Those of us unfortunate enough to consume inedible foods, would have died off anyway. Natural selection through cooking.
Yet, we cannot stand the routine. Eating the same food everyday. It tastes the same, it nourishes the same. It smells the same. It looks the same. I once thought I could survive entirely on chicken rice for all eternity. Then I realized that’s not entirely true or possible. Whilst I love the dish and in itself, it purports a particular amount of choice and variety, I realize that I will never do the same thing over and over forever. I would change something small here and there. Resulting in 100 different chicken rices over 100 days. Yet this experimentation would be useless if I were unable to repeat any one of the 100 methods successfully.
What repetition does is allow us time. To observe and notice the infinite minutiae that make up a simple dish. Like the scrambled eggs I make every morning. What are scrambled eggs anyway? I had this idea that its pretty much an awful mistake where some dude haphazardly threw some eggs and made an overcooked custard but broke it up instead and like the semi-cooked smell and texture enough. It just seems so proletarian, so arbitrary, so casual, so accidental. I prefer intention and knowledge to blind darts.
The way I was shown to cook eggs, I had a pot of simmering water and a bowl over it. The eggs cooked because of the steam below. Its essentially a bain marie and you stir the eggs with a whisk constantly, so that you scrape the sides off since that’s the bit touching the hot bowl. The proteins coagulate and with enough time and whisking, you get a mass of coagulated egg protein, mixed with cream in a 4:1 ratio. Depending on the frequency of your whisking, you get a different globule size. If you leave the eggs alone entirely, you’d probably get really dried out sides and a thick skin on top. with a liquid centre. You’d then have to break that all up and redistribute everything but texturally, you get some slightly rubbery, gritty bits and some uncooked liquid. The eggs cook best when you whisk more frequently, resulting in a finer, more even globule size and also distributing the heat evenly through convection since the egg/cream mixture doesn’t move much otherwise due to its viscosity/lowish heat.size of bowl. At the end, I remove the bowl from the pot, add some salt and a bit of grated nutmeg and taste it before adjusting to finish. Hopefully, I end up with this pile of yellow slop that looks wobbly and creamy and doesn’t smell too raw.
If I cook scramble for one/two or three people, I use a pan/pot and direct heat from a stove instead, stirring quicker than I would in the bowl which serves 40 people. This method runs the risk of overcooking bits of the egg and undercooking other bits and the need to scrub a pot. But the result can be more precise if you whisk/stir it well since the quantity is smaller. It always feels like its properly cooked this way. Not slightly soggy and raw with the en masse method. Yet, there’s always a over-arching rubberiness that is what my head chef doesn’t want.
Either method feels like pissing in the wind, trying to augment the situation till you hopefully get a satisfactory result.
I then wonder what I want my scrambled eggs to taste like/be. Cooked through but moist and mushy. Looking at the methods above, I deduce that the basic idea of the dish is a dissipated mass of egg white and yolk proteins that is created through the application of heat and stirring/whisking.
What if I could break down the recipe into 2 parts? The cooking and the breaking up of eggs. What if I steamed the eggs chawanmushi style? What if I cooked them sousvide at the temperature at which the proteins are known to firm up? Then I’d take it out of the bag and scramble it later. With a potato masher or a mallet or a wild bear on ice skates? I would get tofu level scramble without those bits that seem too bouncy because they were stuck on the sides of a pot/bowl and all the liquid content was forced out by the proteins constricting. Yet, I would get a mass of eggs that is perfectly cooked, especially if I used the right size and shape of the bag. Would I still need the cream?
Plus, I could also introduce some interaction for a customer, who would have the option to scramble or not to whilst reducing my workload immensely. The drawback? Time and quantity. I need a massive water bath to make sousvide scramble for a 100 and it might take a few hours to complete. But I’ll never overcook it/dry it out.
Filed under: Australia, Drink, Food, Sydney, Thoughts | Tags: cedar/pine, mark e. smith
I just thought I’d share a bit about the suburb where my workplace is, a place called Manly. This is where real Sydneysiders go surfing, not Bondi. (Even realer Sydneysiders go anywhere along the Northern beaches, Dee Why and up.) The southernmost of the Northern beaches, its still quite touriste, especially if you’re walking along the main street, called the Corso. At some point, you’ll be confronted by 2 sidewalk cafes fighting for business. Figuratively and literally. There’s also plenty of crappy fish and chips shops and every single Aussie “surf” label, and shops selling tees that say Bondi. Haha.
Just so you know, the best fish and chips is to be found at Benbry burger, which I mentioned previously. The best food at Chat Thai, an offshoot (I think!) of the Haymarket one which I’ve also mentioned before. The best coffee at a joint called Barefoot and there’s even a microbrewery here, 4 Pines. There’s also a Max Brenner for the chocolate plus a decent patisserie cafe in Laurent. Movenpick also has a nice little shop where they used a weighing scale to make sure I got my money’s worth in ice cream. My friend’s workplace, Hugo’s, affords the best views of Manly harbor with some nice cushy seats, if you can afford it. There’s also Garfish which was like one my earliest posts on this blog. I’ve somehow managed to come full circle sorta.
Another name for Manly is little Brazil, given the swarthe of Brazilians that live and work there. According to my Brazilian friends, they chose Manly on account of the fact that the weather is just like back home. Amazonian rainforest wut? Well the beachside bits of Brazil at least. Like Porto Alegre. And I meant caucasoid Brazil-ians. They aren’t the only ones who’ve made Manly home. Japanese, Brits, Swedes, French and Germans are also plentiful in supply.
The following are paragraph shaped recollections of things that fluttered through my mind as I’ve traipsed around the beach side locale that I have come to love and loathe.
- I swear Mark E. Smith works in Manly. I see him like every other day on the bus home. Straggly, unkempt hair framing a wrinkled, pasty face, he’s always drawing out a fag real long right before we step on. That or some Fall track just always seem to be playing when he’s around. I swear its Mark E. Smith. I want his autograph but I’m shy and afraid of commiting hipster faux pas.
- Today, a fat man was walking down the hill. He appeared at the very top, dressed in a white shirt that postively glimmered against the dark of the dawn. It was all seemingly normal until he went past me. His deodorant came alive and smacked me in the face. I keeled over and gasped, only to inhale more toxin and sputter endlessly. It smelt like mace and musk, artificial and metallic and also in excess. Like a rusting nail drilled into a piece of rotting wood pulverised into a fine smoke and piped into my nostrils without prior consent. Sounds like a scent that would be awesome with a CdG logo plastered on a solid bronze bottle called “Rusting nail drilled into rotting wood”. $345 at select stores from the soon-to-be defunct, ultra rare, one-time release only Haiku series.
- I hate the physical labor and the sheer amount of time wasted in walking up a hill to work. I do enjoy the quiet solitude, the dark, the cuddly creatures and most of all, the amazing smell of pine as I walk past this school. There’s some trees that smell absolutely incredible in the early morning, before the sun smokes the ground and the vapors get lost in a pile of sweat and grass. These are Norfolk Island Pines that are a symbol of Manly. I wonder what pine smoked bacon would taste like? Or maybe smoke some bacon with pine and serve that with the edible seeds and a jus made of pine oil and searing juices. With a slice of caramelised apple.
- There’s a busker that always breaks out a ukelele and chugs along some Beatles choons or something. He wears these short shorts that are so in vogue amongst local kids. He’s like a skinnier Morrissey with naff hair and suspenders. And short shorts. I have never placed a coin into that ukelele case of his. Because of the short shorts. It’s quite simply too offensive for me.
- This dude takes the same bus with me. He happens to wear the same nudies as me. Only he’s skinny and they fit him better. I am insanely jealous. Plus he has a cool beard. Thankfully, he spoils his fit with some ugly ass Asics. There is a god.
- A hospitality school is on the way to work. It is crammed with fobby Koreans and Chinese. They are hella noisy. At least I have something to look at. They are hella noisy. The engrish is cringe worthy. They are hella noisy.
- Shitty fish & chips + crashing waves + ugly ass women + crying babies = nightmare gastronomic experience. Go to Benbry’s people, it costs less, you get barramundi, the chips are gud and you don’t have to pay $0.50 for a tiny tub of Masterfoods tartare. You get fresh robotcoupe enabled dill tartare or aioli instead. For free. You just walk another ten steps to get to the beach.
- Why is the best food in Manly Chat Thai? Its Thai! And its a takeaway joint! I think its because a couple of the girls look cute. Until they speak. I’m not partial to the high pitch. The guys sound worse though. Why do all Thai guys speak like sopranos? Its shrill godamit! Pad See Ew is sweet Beef Hor Fun. Also, Chat Thai, you owe me money for describing your Pad Gra Pao as arrabiata basilico to a coupla I-talian ladies.
- Girls wearing tees at Manly beach should be outlawed. This behaviour should not be condoned. It is utterly despicable and uncalled for. Whatever happened to decorum? Please undress yourselves ladies.
- I wish I could look like Hiroshi Fujiwara with a wild long mane tamed into a ponytail with a beard halfway between scraggly and neat, and be decked out in beesbeems. Then I could steez on all the J-dudes at the beach and pull all the J-beezies, like that super cute one with the glasses and short hair.
For the first time in 7 months or so, I woke up late. Real late. Which is bad if you’re the breakfast chef. Which I am. So it was bad. Stuff is supposed to go out at 7am. I woke up and took a cursory glance at the window, slightly beaming with the morning light. Strange, since I’m accustomed to the darkness that is 4am. I throw myself up and check the phone. 6.50.
7. I’m entering a cab and telling the driver in a mangled voice that I’m heading to Manly on the double. I keep trying to ring work but no luck.
7.15. I get a missed call from my head chef.
7.25. I manage to get through to work and let them know what’s up.
7.30 I call the head chef back and receive a free aural cleaning.
7.35 Breakfast is already out, thanks to my “apprentice”. Thank god. No one got their food late. I’m still in the shit.
This lengthy, blow by blow rant is purely to tell you not to rely too much on technology or at least on a single source. What happened was my phone didn’t ring more or less. Bless the cab driver, who kept me feeling cool thanks to a conversation that ranged from Singapore (he picked up from my accent) to Thai food, Kings of Leon, soccer and the gem that I should get 2 alarms. Just in case.
So I did. The best that I could at least and I’ve just tested it out. Its not a physical one although I plan to kop one of those with the annoying bells. This one is the iTunes Alarm Clock. Still relying on tech that failed me perhaps but I also got a couple people to ring me just in case.
Hopefully, I should be waking up to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Hysteric off their latest LP, It’s Blitz at the right time tomorrow.
Also, don’t stay up late making blog posts or doing random shit like flipping through cookbooks. You get tired like that. Oh crap. I think I just did it again.
Franz Kafka’s The Trial is the story of a man, Josef K., who wakes up one morning to find two dudes in his room who put him under arrest. Only, he is never told what his crime is and he maintains his innocence whilst he fights against a court that is nigh unreachable. He starts losing grip on his former life as a successful banker and everything descends into a downward spiral from thereon.
Its bleak and depressing, much like the multiple vignettes of the smoke shrouded city Kafka writes about in the book. There seems to be no respite, no pause, only endless questioning and never really getting anywhere. Corridors and airless passageways. Choked stairwells and dark gravel streets. Tasteless, black and white. At one point, I did wonder, what was the point. Why this perpetual, relentless race against an unknown. Then, I found myself fighting against the same such at work and it all seemed to click.
I not really whinging as such and I don’t think the book itself means to say that life’s a bitch necessarily. Still, the intensity of the atmosphere, the caricature of the bureaucracy, the many side characters that seem so removed from K., it almost sickening at times. Its intriguing. Like watching something fall off the edge of a cliff, it moves and accelerates and at one point seems almost endless but you just know its going to hit the bottom hard. Yet, we still persist, we watch, we act, we live. Why? Why not? Some of us actually feel just like K. and wonder. Some of us don’t. Does it matter? Probably not but we still do anyway. For some, it is enough to simply exist and never need to know. For others, it is a fly chasing you in the heat of an Australian summer. That last bit is a little whinge in case you were wondering.
I read from wikipedia, that the book is actually unfinished and that Kafka asked his mate to burn the manuscript. Thankfully, his clever mate acted against that interest and edited into what he thinks is a novel. Some bright sparks consider that The Trial might perhaps be based on Crime & Punishment. Hmm… I wonder what I’m going to read next?
I was at work the other day when, hounded by a certain Hitler, I harried to move this fridge around the place for maintenance. All I really needed to do was lift the damn thing up marginally, like a couple of cm or 5 cos the damn wheels were too small. Unfortunately, it came down a little too quick for whatever reason and before I knew it, pain and bright crimson starting lining the edge of my right thumb. A split second later, my left hand clutches and squeezes to try to stop the bleeding.
Whether it was my awkward positioning or simply the sheer bulk and size of the massive fridge being difficult to handle, I can’t say for sure. All I know is, I’d gotten hurt and it was pretty bad. It was a pretty deep cut and how it happened exactly, I have scant idea. After a barrage of expletives, I could see that the top part of my thumb with the nail had split apart from the bottom half, but only at the top end. So it was probably like 1.5 to 2 cm deep. I would later learn from a doctor (who “just can’t resist hand injuries”) that I avulsed my thumb.
So I get help bandaging the thumb up, and ride down to the hospital, which was nearby. I register at the desk and wait, having to fill in a form with a slight bit of disdain peppered with politeness and humor. I just seemed to want to laugh it off and get on with things. The hospital made me wait for something like half an hour before an intern came over to check out the bleeding. I needed an x-ray before they could proceed. At this point, more waiting for an hour or so. In between, the hand fetish doctor came over and checked me out, before dishing out some calm advice to the very luscious intern who was in charge of me. I get the x-ray done and bam, the very tip of my thumb had fractured. Which meant I needed antibiotics but because it was so small, I didn’t really require surgery.
Instead, I got stuffed with a numbing agent (after another hour or so) and stared at my thumb as said hot intern/doctor threaded some blue sutures into my flesh which I barely felt. Blood oozed everywhere, staining this absorbent sheet below and then I got bandaged up with a thumb guard and given 2 weeks off work. I swear I bled more because I had some boobage dangling at me. That and the not wanting to hurt me but wincing as she pulled a needle through my flesh kind of innocence.
Hurting my thumb made ordinary life fucking painful. I mean, the thumb didn’t hurt much if at all, even right after the injury but the number of things that now became so troublesome was immense. I never realized how much I used my thumbs until now. Opening doors, twisting caps off drink bottles, pressing the side buttons on my mighty mouse, holding utensils and cutlery… The list seemed endless. Try wiping your nose with your non dominant hand. Or using one hand to shampoo your hair. Or soaping the left armpit with the right forearm. And keys, motherfucking keys. Opening doors is like horrible.
Without thumbs, we wouldn’t have been able to use and invent tools. Without thumbs, we’d be resigned to pawing and biting at food, probably raw and I don’t mean Charlie Trotter or Japanese. Without thumbs, we wouldn’t be able to show our approval, or hitchhike, or suck. This shit is precious man. Treasure your thumbs ladies and gents. I swear you’ll feel like you devolved without them. I certainly did.
Ferran Adria’s first ever book in English has finally been released to some fanfare here in Sydney, when the man himself came down to give a bit of a talk. I couldn’t go, due to situation and hesitation, two good friends of mine, along with procrastination.
A fat, balding, Spanish waiter with some fat, balding, Jap tourist.
Anyway, the book is entitled: A Day At elBulli, and it really follows the master through a single day of operations at the restaurant itself. From the moment he walks into work till the moment the guests arrive and until the place finally closes, you get to see everything that happens. Throughout the pages, there are heaps of full colour, super detailed photographs which really go a long way to assisting the reader in understanding what is being conveyed.
The book itself is pretty massive and hefty, both in terms of size and in content. Whilst it is just one day of operations in the best restaurant in the world, the book goes rather in depth into accounting for each situation, at times casting side glances to Adria’s history or the methodology of the cooking or the “stages” that elBulli conducts to bring in young chefs from around the world.
Lauded by Bocuse, fawned over by Time and causing the normally caustic and chatty Bourdain to be reduced into a stumbling and awestruck mess, Adria is the man. The man who changed the way the game is being played and the man who has completely changed the gastronomic landscape across the world. The amount of detail in explaining ideas, idea generation, experimentation and actually making it reality is incredible. It is a feast for the mind. Trust Phaidon to do an amazing job. A Day At elBulli is a fitting tribute, a textbook and an inspirational piece of food history about a legend of the art of gastronomy.
For whatever money, this book is a must for any foodie, chef, intellectual or creative person looking for pure inspiration. At $80, I thought it was a steal considering how much a volume of works from the restaurant normally goes for. This is about as close I can get at the moment to getting just a whiff or a glance or an inkling of something amazing that is happening right now, in my lifetime.
For me, to simply see the kitchen itself, or the workshop in Barcelona, both in fact, would be rather high up on my bucket list. To eat there, would be second. To work there, right on top. Costa Brava, here I come.
A couple weeks ago, I ran across an article on a guy named Shai Agassi, who has absolutely no relation to the tennis legend. Instead, this is a guy that WIRED thinks might just change the world. Agassi’s idea is to replace existing petrol driven motor vehicles with electric ones, which isn’t fundamentally new at all. The difference is he’s coming up with the whole infrastructure to make it happen and how it is to be marketed. He wants to manage and control the demand for energy. His company, Better Place, is working together with Renault and Nissan to make the ubiquity of the electric vehicle a reality rather than some poncey celebrity environmental consciousness fad.
So electric cars. Are they all that much better? Whilst they produce zero emissions, won’t the fuel burnt to create said electricity still be an issue? Some argue that the pollution would at least be concentrated to power plants whilst others also look into the fact that alternative energy sources are becoming increasingly viable. I’m leaning a lot more to the latter these days, being the eternal optimist.
Agassi’s plan is radical in that he intends to fuck over the petroleum companies as well as major car manufacturers. He intends to convince whole cities and nations to build an infrastructure system to accommodate electric cars, including recharge stations and a grid network that can move the electricity freely from point to point, to account for changes in demand and supply. You pay for the electricity and lease the car instead, possibly even borrowing it for free. Its a bit like using a car like a mobile phone, where you have a monthly subscription or some such. Recharging can be done faster than at present, by changing battery packs at recharge stations or recharging at home overnight.
The point is, we all know burning fossil fuels is bad for the environment. That and just as important, it doesn’t last forever. So we need to be looking at a solution and they’re all around. The question is why aren’t things happening? One reason is the pace of technological advancement and the other is simply politics. Agassi’s plan, detailed more on the Better Place website, simply throws such problems aside and sounds pretty darn convincing in talking about how to really get the wheels rolling. It already is in fact.
I am awaiting the Jonathan Ive designed iCar sometime circa 2015 that can accommodate my 2015 version iMac (which is actually the iDSLR + iPod + iCamcorder + iWallet + iPhone + iKeys + iMac) whilst I dream about some iArabica to go with some iSourdough with iRoastPork, iceburgLettuce, iDJon and an Apple chutney.
One day, a friend asked me to do one of those personality games. It involved expanding on a simple set of pictograms by drawing more of it. You start with a circle, a triangle, an X, a square etc. Each symbol represents something, like the circle is your view of yourself. I drew a football cos I’m sexy and fun. The triangle represented how other people viewed you. For that, I drew a pyramid, which makes me sexy and mysterious.
Anyway, I’m rather fascinated by pyramids. The history and all that is one thing, but the sheer physical, mathematical beauty of it all is another. Here comes the pyramid flood. Pictures stolen from everywhere, and this list is not intended to be complete.
The one at Giza.
The mathematical one.
The I.M Pei masterpiece.
The Toothpick Pyramid in El Topo.
The Chronicles of Never pendant.
The world record 7 meter high champagne pyramid.
