Christina Tosi from Momofuku in Sydney

I was very lucky last week to get to meet Christina Tosi from Momofuku New York. She is here for the Crave food festival in Sydney and also visited us at Breville to give us a bit of an insight into her little success story. She is a pastry chef and runs a quite unique and highly successful bakery in New York called milk.

I found her story most inspiring and despite the success she seems to be very grounded. She told us that she always enjoyed baking, even as a kid and naturally would chose a path in the hospitality industry. She did a degree as pastry chef and worked in kitchens in the US, one of them was WD40 in NY.
Even though baking was her thing she wasn't too happy in restaurants kitchens and started an office job, at Momofuku. Missing her home baking though she would bake when at home to feed her colleagues and they were all in awe of her creations. Her boss (David Chang) took notice as well and when he got offered a small property spot in NY to run a bakery he came to Christina Tosi.

She now runs several Milk bakeries across NY and has gone from strength to strength in her endeavor to challenge the pastry world with unusual adaptations of old time classics.

Take her compost cookie for instance. That's what I heard first off. A very tasty cookie , so American in shape but with a list of, at first, weird ingredients, but it so works! And so it goes on... Milk also invented the cereal milk - toasted cereal steeped in cold milk, then strained and bottled up. She uses different types of cereal milk for her cookies and cakes but reckons that cornflakes gives the broadest spectrum of yummyness.

Instead of shortcrust she uses a range of crunches to cover the base and one of her most popular pie is the crack pie, which I yet have to try myself thanks to her cookbook. So far I have tried a few different cookie recipes and my family was most grateful. Home baking, but a little bit more fancy without the queues, that's quite something.

 

  

 

Ragamuffin in Leichhardt

There is a fairly new cafe in Leichhardt where you can not only get a damn good coffee from a lever and piston espresso machine but also gluten free muffins, they have a different flavour each week.
Ragamuffin on Norton Street, check it out.
Couldn't help but hear Gentlemen music in my ears...

Jesse knows how to make good coffee.

Danii, owner and chef.

Haylea and Jesse, always a smile for their customers.

Kylie Kwong in Vital magazine

A feature I wrote a while ago about Australian super chef Kylie Kwong got published recently in the German Vital magazine. The food editor had the great idea to publish a series of women who are passionate about food and also business women. I think Kylie with her undeniable passion for sharing the pleasures of food and provenance whilst supporting sustainable thinking is a perfect match. Kylie Kwong is still selling her famous Chinese pancakes and dumplings at the Eveleigh Market on Saturday to a growing number of fans. If you don't feel like getting up early (although I think it's the perfect start into the weekend), Kylie also now has a new Yum Cha menu on the weekend.

Yummy Japanese in Orange

Just by chance we bumped into Sam the chef from the modern Japanese Restaurant Sweet Sour Salt when we were tasting wine at the Union Bank wine store  in Orange.
Turned out he used to work at Tetsuya's in Sydney and we were lucky to get a table for an early dinner that night.

We had a fantastic meal consisting of deep-fried chilli salt zucchini chips as a compliment from the kitchen. As a starter we had free range son in law eggs and they were beautiful, the yolk still soft and gooey with a crisp skin. The dressing was sweet with lots of cashews and spring onions for a bit of a crunch. As a main, we ordered kung po chicken and Japanese pork belly salad with daikon and mint and especially the pork belly salad was divine. The fatty and tender pork belly featuring a crispy cruckling skin countered with the sweet and sour salad was a combination made in heaven. The dessert was very special too. Three different flavours of ice cream: ginger, cassia bark and cardamom, mmmh.

Waiheke Island / New Zealand

If you ever going to do one thing while on New Zealand's North island you have to visit Waiheke Island. Waiheke is famous for its wine, olives and art and marketing talk aside a very beautiful island only a short ferry ride away from Auckland. It definitely helps to have a car there as the island is quite large and the vineyards are scattered all over Waiheke.  

Te Whau vineyard and restaurant won "Auckland's Best Rural Restaurant" in 2008/09/10 and I am sure they up for 2011 as well. The food is outstanding and so is the wine, not to mention the view.
You can actually see Auckland from that tip of the island but you'll probably don't care as you are too busy enjoying the food and getting a bit tipsy drinking all that wonderful wine from the island's own vineyards.

Head chef Marco and one of the beautiful dishes we enjoyed for lunch at Te Whau Vineyard on Waiheke - snapper with dukkah crust, zucchini salad and tomato jus.

More delicious food: Goat's cheese and wild mushroom tart with beetroot relish; beef medallion with semi-dried tomatoes in jus.

There should always be room for dessert: sticky date pudding with caramel sauce and vanilla ice cream; cheese platter with blue cheese, washed rind and goat's cheese brie accompanied by home-made lavosh, apricot thyme compote and cherry relish - to die for!

Lunch and wine tasting at Wild On Waiheke - cafe, vineyard and brewery.

Really good coffee in the morning at Spice Cafe in Oneroa.

Kylie Kwong - simply Chinese

Among my latest research here in Sydney I met with Kylie Kwong from BillieKwong fame in Surry Hills. While she is of course quiet famous in the English speaking world, German readers wouldn't know much about her. Unfortunately, the links to podcast and video ABC Australia has put up seem to be out of order...

Jamie heads Down Under

Jamie Oliver will start a spin-off of his famous "Fifteen" restaurant in Melbourne pretty soon. But first the TV-team is looking for disadvantaged youngsters who´ll participate and run the place.
Well, I must admit that eating at "Fifteen" London was quite a dissapointing experience. The staff was a tad starrish and not really interested in my opionion on their food. I think that even in happening London and even at a place invented and named by a famous media star chef, the service should be attentive and treat every guest nicely. May be it´s just a problem of Jamie not spending too much time at the restaurants - because he really is a genuinely nice person!
During his busy promotion tour for "Tefal" I got the opportunity to interview Jamie after a show cooking at Karstadt Frankfurt's opening of his own shop. Here is the interview where we talked about his latest project "Feed me Better" , improving school dinners in England. Having spent the previous evening at Frankfurt's culinary/clubbing hotspot "Cocoon", he was still a bit knackered but a total pleasure to talk to; he is truly as vivid as you see him on TV. He even remembered to inquire about his old mate Tim Maelzer, who with his restaurant "Das weisse Haus" and all other activities is now on a similar ascending curve to cooking stardom in Germany.