Waste not and want not is the chef's kitchen motto

For One Fine-Dining Chef, Cutting Food Waste Saves The Planet And The Bottom Line : The Salt : NPR:

Tim Ma prepares a duck confit salad at his restaurant, Kyirisan, in Washington, D.C. Ma says being mindful about reducing food waste is an integral part of his philosophy in the kitchen — not just for environmental reasons but also for profitability.
Becky Harlan/NPR
"In Ma's kitchen at his popular Washington, D.C., restaurant, Kyirisan, sea bass filets are served to diners, the bones becoming the basis for stocks while the heads might be deep fried and served as an off-menu item. Carrot tops aren't tossed out — they're blended with sautéed garlic, oil, water, basil, parsley, pistachios and scallions to make a creamy pesto. Carrot peels are recycled, too — fried into thin strips that become a crunchy garnish. Tough kale stalks might be braised, then fried for more texture and tossed into a salad with pickled shallots, radishes and duck confit."

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The great vanilla shortage

Crisis in Madagascar as price of vanilla nears that of gold - France 24:


Vanilla is one of the world’s most popular seasonings and an important ingredient in products ranging from perfume to ice-cream; but it is no longer the staple it was around the world. Madagascar, the world's main producer, is facing a crisis.

The great chefs are now turning their backs on vanilla. Famed French chef Gilles Marchal, whose restaurant is in Montmartre, Paris, declared with regret that he now works much less with the black and bean-shaped pod.

The reason being that the price is now equivalent to that of gold per kilo, and is eight times the price it was just a few years ago. The price per kilo has jumped from $50 (€42) in 2012-2013 to $400 (€340) in 2016-17, according to a 2017 Cyclope report (the bible of commodities traded internationally).

Several factors explain this price spike including uncontrolled market speculation and a vanilla crop failure in Madagascar, which produces 80% of the global supply. The island was also hit by Cyclone Enawo in March 2017, which destroyed many of the vanilla orchids which produce the seed pods, and this was followed by a major drought.

"Vanilla today costs $600 per kilo (€485 euros), it's huge," says Georges Geeraerts, president of the group of vanilla exporters from Madagascar (GEVM).
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Like a cocktail? How about a dried octopus sour?

Singapore mixes unique cocktail culture https://t.co/6i9m0f8zIA

— Nikkei Asian Review (@NAR) April 14, 2018

When Elex Ng was developing the menu for his new cocktail bar, Nanyang Club, he sought inspiration in a nearby Chinese medicine store. His early experiments with dried mushrooms and herbs were underwhelming. "Then I saw this whole dried-out octopus. I was like: 'Okay, why not?'" he said.

The result is the Fisherman's Wife, a very local twist on the classic whisky sour that cuts the flavors of dried octopus and oysters with ginger and citrus. It is the kind of idiosyncratic drink that Ng, who fell into bartending after leaving the army, thinks may come to define the cocktail scene in Singapore, which remains heavily influenced by western and Japanese bar culture.

Silent restaurant service

There are times when I wish there were more restaurants with a code of silence.

Staff at this restaurant never speak to their customers, but locals who've been here all give it a thumbs up. Find out why pic.twitter.com/sO8gR5AsCJ

— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) April 14, 2018

New type of bubbles for beer

World’s largest brewer develops greener way to put bubbles in beer https://t.co/ckHtJJqYR2

— Guardian Australia (@GuardianAus) April 11, 2018

The myth of the Indian vegetarian nation

The myth of the Indian vegetarian nation - BBC News:

"What are the most common myths and stereotypes about what Indians eat?

The biggest myth, of course, is that India is a largely vegetarian country.

But that's not the case at all. Past "non-serious" estimates have suggested that more than a third of Indians ate vegetarian food.

If you go by three large-scale government surveys, 23%-37% of Indians are estimated to be vegetarian. By itself this is nothing remarkably revelatory.

But new research by US-based anthropologist Balmurli Natrajan and India-based economist Suraj Jacob, points to a heap of evidence that even these are inflated estimations because of "cultural and political pressures". So people under-report eating meat - particularly beef - and over-report eating vegetarian food.

Taking all this into account, say the researchers, only about 20% of Indians are actually vegetarian - much lower than common claims and stereotypes suggest.

"



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The persuasive stereotype of the rude French waiter

Is Your Waiter Rude, or Merely French? A Debate Is Revived - The New York Times

Few cultural stereotypes are more pervasive than the surly French waiter.
In the 1985 movie “European Vacation,” Chevy Chase and his family meet a Parisian garçon who, after insulting the brood, offers them dishwater to drink.

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Well, in Canada recently, Guillaume Rey, a waiter at Milestones Bar + Grill in Vancouver, British Columbia, filed a complaint against the restaurant’s parent company, Cara Operations, after he was fired for being combative, aggressive and something of a bully. His defense? He’s not rude, he contends. Instead, he’s French and his former bosses are discriminating against his culture and heritage.
The argument is a novel one, but with enough traction that one member of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal who reviewed the complaint agreed that Mr. Rey deserves a hearing.

A Tasmanian makes one of the world's best whiskies

The world's best whisky awards announced in London this week include the Tasmanian produced Sullivan's Cove American Oak Single Cask as the World's Best Single Cask Single Malt.
The other award winners:

World's Best Rye - 291 Colorado Rye Aspen Stave Finish

World's Best Grain - Bain's Cape Mountain Whisky

World's Best Bourbon - 1792 Full Proof Kentucky Straight Bourbon

World's Best Blended Malt - Taketsuru 17 Year-Old

World's Best Blended Limited Release - Ichiro's Malt & Grain Limited Edition

World's Best Blended - Johnnie Walker Gold Reserve

World's Best Single Malt - Hakushu 25 Year-Old

The fine Japanese art of mixing drinks

This is a "should read" for cocktail lovers.And how about that recipe for the Line Cocktail!

Good libations: Examining the evolution of Japan's rich cocktail culture | The Japan Times:

The Japanese way of bartending is like “a time-capsule of 1930s international bartending,” [ cocktail historian David] Wondrich says. But given its foreign origins, how on earth did Japanese bartenders gain such outsized influence in worldwide mixology? And are they really keepers of the flame for some long-forgotten school of cocktail arts?
To answer those questions, let’s first turn back the clock to 1860. This marks the appearance of Japan’s very first Western-style bar, inside the Yokohama Hotel, also known as the Hotel Hufnagel after its Dutch owner. It was a hastily constructed affair surrounded by a tall fence designed to keep locals out. Perhaps this was for the best: The Hufnagel’s guests were a crusty lot of seamen, merchants and adventurers whose drinking games included firing their revolvers at a clock on the bar’s wall.
“There wasn’t much to do, other than drink,” says Kazuo Ishikura, a writer specializing in the history of Japan’s cocktail culture. “Foreign residents were told by the authorities to stay inside at night. If they ventured out, there was a high chance they’d be surrounded by samurai with a grudge against foreigners.”
A recipe for needing a stiff drink, to be sure. But the Hufnagel offered only beers, wines and liquor — straight up.

“The first bar to serve actual cocktails opened in Yokohama’s International Hotel in 1874,” Ishikura says. “The bartender, Mr. Purvis, was so popular that he was caricatured in the English-language humor magazine Japan Punch.”

Line Cocktail (1924)
All but forgotten today, this represents one of the very earliest cocktails known to have been created locally, by a Japanese bartender named Yonekichi Maeda.

⅓ oz dry gin
⅓ oz Benedictine
⅓ oz Italian vermouth
Two dashes of bitters

Shake over ice, strain and serve. And here’s the trick: Garnish with a small portion of pickled rakkyo onion, slightly crushed. It’s a — how to put this kindly — uniquely local touch.

 

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The racket of third party endorsements - gold medals to influence the gullible

There's a nice little racket going on in the wine industry these days. It's called giving quality endorsements for money.
Let me explain. Those wonderfully pretty gold medal stamps you see on wine labels and in advertisements from retailers: most of them are near enough to worthless as a guide to quality.

The game is played this way. Establish a wine show and charge producers an entry fee. Make sure that everybody wins a prize. Hey presto and yours will be a show that wine companies want to enter. Lots of wonderful revenue for organisers and attractive stamps to mislead consumers into thinking the products displaying them must be worthy.
This a con trick being performed on a massive scale with drinkers being the ones conned.
Now of course there are some legitimate shows but even medals from them are worth being sceptical about. Just look at the different judgements delivered by the various shows around Australia. A gold in one place can be a mere bronze or unrewarded somewhere else.

Memories of great grandfather in a new heritage blend red from the Barossa

Memories of great grandfather in a new heritage blend red from the Barossa:

Bagot Station Captains Table Barossa Valley Red Blend 2012. How could I resist it? Our Farmer family history has it that great grandfather John was brought out from England by Edward Meade (Ned) Bagot in the 1860s to look after his horse Cowra which won the Adelaide Cup in 1866 and 1867. This wine just had to be a winner.

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Hoppy tasting beer without hops

Every pint of that craft beer you drink requires 50 pints of water just to grow the hops that give it flavour. Hence the search for an ecologically sustainable, and cheaper, alternative. And scientists from the University of California Berkeley believe theynhave found one. They have used used DNA-editing software to manipulate the genome of brewer’s yeast, splicing in genes from mint and basil plants as well as two from normal yeast in a way that boosted the production of flavors normally provided by adding hops during the brewing process. Details of their research were published this week in the journal Nature Communications under the title Industrial brewing yeast engineered for the production of primary flavor determinants in hopped beer.
Here's the Abstract of the article:

Flowers of the hop plant provide both bitterness and “hoppy” flavor to beer. Hops are, however, both a water and energy intensive crop and vary considerably in essential oil content, making it challenging to achieve a consistent hoppy taste in beer. Here, we report that brewer’s yeast can be engineered to biosynthesize aromatic monoterpene molecules that impart hoppy flavor to beer by incorporating recombinant DNA derived from yeast, mint, and basil. Whereas metabolic engineering of biosynthetic pathways is commonly enlisted to maximize product titers, tuning expression of pathway enzymes to affect target production levels of multiple commercially important metabolites without major collateral metabolic changes represents a unique challenge. By applying state-of-the-art engineering techniques and a framework to guide iterative improvement, strains are generated with target performance characteristics. Beers produced using these strains are perceived as hoppier than traditionally hopped beers by a sensory panel in a double-blind tasting.

The Glug Quartet - a mixed dozen reds from the Barossa and there's not a shiraz in the box

The Glug wine maker Ben Parker has been experimenting and used his skills to make this intriguing limited edition collection of:
Glug 'The Italian Job' Barossa Valley Montepulciano 2017 x 2 bottles; 
Glug 'The Wayward Child' Barossa Valley Pinot Noir 2017 x 3 bottles; 
Glug 'The Heartbreaker' Barossa Valley Grenache 2016 x 3 bottles; and 
Glug 'The Outsider' Barossa Valley Cinsault 2017 x 4 bottles.

Order at http://www.glug.com.au/index.php…
Personally I'm a Grenache man but the Cinsault really took my fancy

Queuing for a taste of Singapore's cheap Michelin starred meal

The Straits Times reports how hundreds waited patiently in line as Singapore’s Hawker Chan dished up his signature soya sauce chicken rice at British pop-up food market Kerb. Mr Chan Hon Meng was in London as part of a collaboration with Singapore Airlines and the Singapore Tourism Board. From 11.30am each day, only 200 portions of his soya sauce chicken rice box were served, priced at £6 (S$11) each.

A snaking queue had formed even before 10am, with some people waiting for up to two hours, according to posts on social media.
Many had to be turned away, but those lucky enough to sink their teeth into the dish said they had no regrets waiting so long.

The Hawker Chan brand is a spin-off of Singapore hawker stall Liao Fan Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice and Noodle, which was started by Mr Chan at Chinatown Complex in Smith Street. In 2016, he was awarded a Michelin star and his $2 chicken rice was touted as the world’s cheapest Michelin-starred meal.

After signing a deal with Hersing Culinary, he went on to open outlets around the world – three in Taipei, two in Bangkok and one in Melbourne. More branches are planned for Perth and Manila.

A new major French wine deception scandal - the Côtes du Rhône that wasn't

France's consumer fraud body the Direction Générale de la Concurrence, de la Consommation et de la Répression des Fraudes (DGCDRF) this week confirmed that almost half a million hectolitres of wine - about 66.5million bottles - was falsely sold under the Côtes du Rhône AOC label. This latest scandal affecting the French wine industry represents about 15% of annual production of the area.
The inquiry into the 2017 case found “a massive misuse of the Côtes du Rhône AOC by a significant business”, the DGCCRF said. Some of the falsely sold wine - some 10,000 litres - was passed of as the prestigious Châteauneuf-du-Pape AOC.

The consumer body did not name the company involved but said the CEO was being investigated for “deception and fraud”. He had been placed under legal supervision after a bail payment of €1m, and had also been “banned from operating” in his own business, the report said. Further information given to television channel France 3 said that he was a négociant from Vaucluse.

The Revue du Vin de France reports a source close to the investigation saying that, the merchant is Raphael Michel , one of the main traders of Vaucluse , who specializes in bulk wine.

It describes itself as:

“We advise our clients during vinification, cuvee production and blend creation, in order to meet consumer expectations and to deliver first-class quality. Our range encompasses wines from the Rhone Valley, Languedoc, Provence and the South West which we supply to bottlers, wholesalers, winemakers and importers.”

Jump-Starting the Aquavit Renaissance

Jump-Starting the Aquavit Renaissance - The New York Times:

"Aquavit, or akvavit (literally “water of life”), is produced from a distilled grain or potato spirit and must be flavored predominantly with caraway or dill. There are usually other ingredients in the mix — like anise, fennel seed, cumin, cardamom and citrus peels — but the caraway or dill must be the lead botanical. (Aquavit is often referred to casually as “snaps,” but not all snaps can legally be aquavit; snaps is a more general term that includes spirits with flavors like berries, nuts, peppers or horseradish.)

 Aquavit is one of the few spirits in the world that’s traditionally paired with food. In Denmark, Aalborg’s red-label taffel (or “table”) bottling is classically served at lunch, chilled and neat alongside smorrebrod and pickled herring, backed by a Tuborg or Carlsberg beer. In Norway, there are special bottlings to pair with specific dishes such as herring, lutefisk and the epically stinky rakefisk.

In essence, aquavit is like a gin flavored with caraway or dill rather than juniper.

Given the current popularity of craft gins, it’s surprising that aquavit has not quite found a wider audience. In Denmark, a number of smaller, craft distillers are experimenting with aquavits that ratchet up the juniper flavor, while keeping the necessary caraway character."



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Flippy the robot is off and cooking burgers

Flippy is now cooking burgers in Pasadena, California. The Caliburger chain unveiled its kitchen assistant this month which flips burger patties and removes them from the grill when cooked to order.

Miso Robotics, a leading robotics and artificial intelligence solutions company, aimed to augment commercial kitchen operations with advanced technology and developed Miso AI, a cloud-connected learning platform that powers industrial robotic arms.

The company says Miso AI combines 3D, thermal and regular vision to automatically detect when raw burger patties are placed on the grill and monitors each one in real-time throughout the cooking process. As the patties cook, Miso AI displays the cooking time on a screen that also alerts kitchen staff when to place cheese on top or when to dress a burger. It also enables Flippy to switch from using a spatula for raw meat and one for cooked meat. In addition, Flippy has the ability to clean spatulas while cooking and to wipe the surface of the grill with a scraper.

According to John Miller, chairman of Cali Group, “The deployment of Flippy in CaliBurger restaurants represents a major milestone in helping our staff produce mouthwatering burgers more consistently and in a timely manner. The ease of integration into our existing kitchen lines will also allow us to quickly install Flippy in more locations nationwide.”

An Ode To Leftover Curry: The Next-Day Treasure Of Coastal India

An Ode To Leftover Curry: The Next-Day Treasure Of Coastal India : The Salt : NPR:

"Fish curry inflected with coconut is a staple dish in the coastal Indian state of Goa. It's usually eaten accompanied by unpolished rice, fried fish and a dab of pickle. Once all the fish has been eaten up, the leftover curry is reheated over a low flame until it condenses and thickens. At that point, it is reborn as Kalchi koddi, which literally translates to "yesterday's curry.""



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How Japan fell in love with salmon sushi

The Norwegian campaign behind Japan's love of salmon sushi | The Japan Times:

"Look at the menu of any sushi shop in Japan and you will almost certainly see salmon: fatty, tender and bright orange. And for good reason, in a 2017 survey by the seafood company Maruha Nichiro, the fish was found to be the most popular neta (topping) for the sixth year in a row, ranked far higher than the more traditional tuna and halibut.

 But salmon is a relatively new addition to the sushi menu making its rise to popularity remarkable, a story that is both an allegory of shifting taste trends across Japanese demographics and the opening of one of Japan’s most iconic cuisines, sushi, to the world.

 So swift has been salmon’s success that there is a stark generational divide when it comes to which neta is preferred. Many older Japanese start with lean white fish and work their way up to tuna, while younger generations prefer salmon.

 “20 years ago was when everything changed,” says Hideki Koike, the head chef at Masukomi Sushi Bar in Yurakucho, Tokyo. “There are still some restaurants without salmon,” he says. “But the demand is too great. You just have to serve it.”

 Behind salmon’s rise to popularity is the lesser-known story of a carefully executed Norwegian marketing campaign: Project Japan.

"



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A culinary furore in Naples, the birthplace of the margherita

London's Daily Telegraph reports that a Michelin-starred chef in Italy has triggered a storm of protest from pizza purists loyal to the original Neapolitan dish for daring to produce a “healthy” version of the humble margherita to which he has audaciously added wholemeal grains and cereals.

Ogni volta che Cracco sforna una pizza così, un Napoletano si suicida! pic.twitter.com/8qw112qPYy

— Avv. Ermetico ⚖️ (@AvvErmetico) March 11, 2018

Translated from Italian by Microsoft Every time Cracco bakes a pizza like this, a Neapolitan commits suicide!

The bearded Carlo Cracco put his alternative “crunchy” recipe, featuring petal shapes of mozzarella and a heavy tomato sauce, on the menu of his restaurant in the smart Victor Emanuel Gallery in the Italian business capital of Milan, charging as much as €16 (£12.50).

But his modifications of the original recipe was met with disdain in the proud southern city of Naples, the birthplace of the margherita.
Angelo Forgione, the Neapolitan writer, spearheaded the criticism, quipping that the new gastronomic creation was nothing more than “a cracked pizza”.
Another purist noted that Cracco, a former judge in the Italian Masterchef, recently lost a Michelin star at one of his restaurants. “After making his own ‘pizza,’ they took away not only his other Michelin stars but also his Italian citizenship and his driving licence,” the commentator said