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.

 

  

 

Crave Festival - Francis Mallmann

On Sunday morning I had to make an exception from my German cooking and went to the World Chef Showcase as part of the Crave Food Festival here in Sydney. Neil Perry (Australia) was there to show us how to cook the perfect steak. Diana Kennedy from Mexico to tell us all about the Mexican way of cooking and Francis Mallmann, who is a culinary superstar in Argentina, showed us the Argentinian way of grilling. It was marvelous and so interesting. There are seven different styles of how Argentinians like to grill and and we all got a pretty good picture and delicious samples of those grilling techniques. I can still smell the smoke emanating from my skin while I am writing this.

In his cookbook seven fires he explains the seven ways of fire, there is the parilla (BBQ), chapa (cast-iron griddle), infiernillo (little hell - sounds almost cosy ;-), horno de barro (clay oven), rescoldo (embers and ashes), asador (the iron cross - that's how they do it at Porteno) and caldero (cauldron).
It reminded me a little of Smilla's Sense of Snow, yet the opposite a sense of fire, it means he really knows fire inside out.
In Australia it is more likely to have a gas BBQ with low, medium and high heat. That's about as technical as it gets. It still taste nice but since barbecuing in Germany also means to grill over coals
I quite enjoy the revival of the fire.

Francis Mallmann cooked/grilled a whole butternut pumpkin in hot ashes. He halved it, scraped out the seeds and fibre and used this for a salad (the pumpkin itself was used as a bowl) with goat's cheese, rocket and mint. It was delicious!
On the BBQ he grilled a whole boneless rib eye and served it with chimichurri sauce, so simple yet yummy. However, I especially loved his potato dominoes, which I never had before and they were soft inside but golden brown and crunchy outside. I definitely will try that when my German food month is over.
For dessert he stuffed orange slices with rosemary leaves and caramelized them on a very hot griddle until smoke was everywhere. The oranges were served with mint and yoghurt.

The showroom with two cooking benches and the wood-fired grill in the middle.

The rib gets slapped on.

Smoking away.

Turning point!

Aww!

Grilling Gaucho-style.

Francis Mallmann on stage.

Grilled pumpkin salad a la Mallmann.

Flying dishes.

Caramelized oranges with rosemary, mint and yoghurt.

Crave Food Festival in Sydney

The October is one of my favourite months in the year and not only because of my daughter's birthday and the Jacaranda tree starting to blossom. It is also the month of the annual Crave Food festival and this year it's going to be huge. South America and Mexico bringing us the new food trends and the festival organisers have invited a broad array of interesting chefs and cookbook authors from that area. I can't wait to see and meet them all in action. Hurray Sydney!

Just to mention a few there will be Diana Kennedy from Mexico, Francis Mallmann from Argentinia, Gaston Acurio from Peru and Alex Atala from Brazil.

This is what the festival site writes about them:

Diana Kennedy

No one has done more to introduce the world to the authentic cuisines of Mexico than Diana Kennedy. Acclaimed as the Julia Child of Mexican cooking, Kennedy has been an intrepid, indefatigable student of Mexican foodways for more than 50 years and has published several classics on the subject, including The Essential Cuisines of Mexico, a compilation of her first three books, The Art of Mexican Cooking and the latest, James Beard Cookbook of the Year winner, Oaxaca al Gusto. Her uncompromising insistence on proper local ingredients and preparation techniques has taught generations of cooks to appreciate the richness of Mexican cooking.

Here is what a fellow blogger "The Wednesday Chef" wrote about one of her recipes:
Last night, I triumphantly held aloft a long-clipped recipe from the LA Times for Diana Kennedy's meatballs that I'd been hoarding all by its lonesome, since it's one of the only Mexican recipes I've clipped over the years. The meatballs are made from a flavorful mix of pork and beef and stuffed to the gills with chopped zucchini and onion more

I've done a bit of research myself and was surprised I hadn't heard of Diana Kennedy before. Her cookbook "The art of Mexican cooking" are amongst the 50 best cookbook of all times, compiled by the Guardian. Her latest cookbook "Oaxaca al Gusto" gets mentioned by the NY Times and she talks about the book which took her 18 years to put together and her busy life in Mexico. Watch it here.

Francis Mallmann

Francis Mallmann is a Argentinian culinary superstar who started as a home cook in Bariloche, Patagonia, Francis worked in eight three-Michelin starred restaurants in France in the 1980s, including stints with nouvelle cuisine godfathers Alain Senderens and Roger Vergé. He has since rediscovered traditional food and cooking - at the centre of his high-heat and short cooking time approach is fire. A recipient of the French Grand Prixe de l’Art de la Cuisine, Francis has owned restaurants in South America, Spain and New York, appeared on TV since the early 80s and has played host to presidents and world leaders. Has written four books, the most recent being Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way.

Gaston Acurio

South America’s most celebrated chef/restaurateur shakes, rattles and rolls out 500 years of food fusion in his 28 restaurants around the world. Gaston’s plan is to seat Peru at the international culinary table — with his signature, warm Amazonian ceviche as the entree. His fellow countrymen want him for president. His haute cuisine restaurant Astrid Y Gaston in Lima, debuted at No. 42 on the S. Pellegrino list this year.

Alex Atala

Brazilian food was turned on its head when Alex Atala opened D.O.M. in 1999. Using indigenous and Amazonian produce, such as açaí, pupunha and cupuaçu, Alex set out to create food that captured the essence of Brazil. His daring creations have seen him awarded every contemporary culinary award in Brazil and ranked at No. 7 on the S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants list; the first Brazilian restaurant to break into the top 10 since 2002.

Barbecue Madness

Am Samstag, den 03. Oktober war der Auftakt des SydneyInternational Food Festivals und die Organisatoren haben einen ganz besonderen Ort gewählt, den legendären Good Living Growers Market in Pyrmont. Dieser Lebensmittel Markt ist unter Foodies eine Institution, dort kann man einmal im Monat die leckersten Kartoffeln und Gemüse kaufen. Pastabillities, eine kleine Pasta-Manufaktur aus Sydney verkauft dort handgemachte Pasta. Die Ravioli mit Pilzfüllung kann ich sehr empfehlen.

Diesen Samstag war aber noch viel mehr los, ein 'Barbie' der besonderen Art, bekannte Köche aus Sydney und London sind angetreten und haben nicht nur Shrimbs gegrillt (okay, dass ist was für Insider, aber dazu mehr). Wir saßen an Tisch 12 und haben uns von Sean Connolly (Chefkoch im Astral) ein Frühstück servieren lassen. Etwas ungewöhnlich, aber köstlich: 'bruschetta mit ham, eggs and parsley-sea salt sprinkle'. Es sieht vielleicht nicht so ganz lecker aus auf dem Foto aber der twist zu dem klassisch australischen bacon and egg roll ist gut gelungen. Die Eier waren wachsweich, aber zerliefen nicht und die Petersilie war mit dem Meersalz kurz im Mixer zu feinem Staub zermahlen. Traumhaft. Das Ganze hat $15 gekostet und war wirklich ein tolles Frühstück. Zu dem Spanferkel sind wir allerdings nicht mehr geblieben, wir waren einfach zu satt!

Sydney International Food Festival und Night Noodle Market im Hyde park

Nächsten Monat geht es endlich los, im Oktober startet das International Food Festival in Sydney mit einem riesigen und sehr vielfältigem Programm. Ich weiss nicht, wieviele Menschen daran arbeiten um dieses Event auf die Beine zu stellen, aber das Programm liest sich wunderbar. Der 'Night Noodle Market' im Hyde Park ist eine der Attraktionen, die es auch die Jahre vorher schon gab und sich besonderer Beliebtheit erfreut. Ich kann es kaum erwarten dorthin zu gehen, die Fotos die ich dazu gefunden habe, machen mich schon sehr hungrig.

Der 'Night Noodle Market' ist aber nur einer der vielen Attraktionen des Festivals. Das Programm ist so umfassend, dass ich mir kaum merken kann, was wann statt findet; es klingt einfach alles toll. Eine Programmidee ist, dass die vielen teilnehmenden Restaurants einen international anerkannten Koch an die Seite gestellt bekommen. Zusammen laden sie zu besonderen lunches oder dinners ein, sogenannten World Chef Showcases. Da sich dadurch soviele internationalen Köche von Rang und Namen in Sydney einfinden, ist es eine einmalige Gelegenheit deren Künste bei einem Kochkurs etwas besser kennenzulernen.

Der einzige deutschen Koch, den ich bisher ausmachen konnte, ist Rainer Becker, Gründer der sehr erfolgreichen Restaurants Zuma und Roka in London. Hoffentlich kann ich ihn bei dem 'Chef's World Showcase' event dann auch treffen.