Posts Tagged → Australia

Your Kitchen Sucks

Your Kitchen Sucks

“I’ve seen enough people not cook well. I don’t want to watch people very pleased with what they’re doing but doing everything wrong…What I found on MasterChef when I was on it, some of the basic things the contestants were trying to do – they didn’t know the basic things, such as pastry making,” she said.

Margaret Fulton on her time on Masterchef. My bet: she won’t be back in 2011

I can’t watch amateurs cook competitively for the purposes of entertainment. I’ve tried and I fail.

The chaotic race against the clock to serve up plate after plate of congealed food to pregnantly pausing celebrity judges is not pleasurable. I cringe every time someone cooks “Asian” or “Thai-style”. Amateur knife skills make me feel like throwing a shoe at the flatscreen or inventing a witless hashtag to hurl into the collective Twitter void.

I dipped into Masterchef, Australia’s most popular supermarket advertising platform. I watched My Kitchen Rules until I ran short of shoes, enough to discover out that two sisters beat a guy with a beard. I’m still not sure if either television show is about food or why Australia is altogether transfixed in numbers that are not shy of phenomenal.

The aim of modern Australian competitive food television is for above-average home cooks to create “restaurant food” which is the new shorthand to describe the decorative arrangement of morsels on a plate in the style of an imaginary transcontinental degustation. It is more of a form of food styling than cooking because the viewer can only judge the meal on how it looks.

It is the food that restaurants would cook if they were limited to shopping at a duopoly supermarket or trapped on a desert island and a mystery box washed ashore, filled with ingredients from nowhere in particular. 10,000 shipping containers go missing overboard each year, so it is not beyond the realm of possibility that one contains chilli, besan flour, a bottle of muscat, lentils and gorgonzola. There are no seasons in the supermarket’s fluorescent glare, nor real ethical objection to eating endangered species.

For contestants, the skill most valued is the ability to cook from everywhere and if possible, serve it up at the same meal. Competitors seem to be mocked if they stick to any one food tradition. A real impediment for a contestant is depth of knowledge of a single cuisine or technique.

People with actual experience in a commercial kitchen seem to never make the cut on the shows as contestants and there must be thousands of talented kitchen hands who apply. There is a need to uphold the myth of the home prodigy and that fine food is the result of an innate talent rather than endless repetition and incremental improvement on recipes.

So what keeps Australia feeding the reality food TV maw?

The strained drama and the forced chaos, the characterisation of good guys and bad guys, the perverse delight of watching fat guys eat on our behalf. Predictable schadenfreude at destroyed recipes. There are boxes filled with arbitrary surprises. The promise of fire. Watercooler conversation.

My fear is that competitive food television dissuades people from learning about food. It reinforces that meals must be fast and picked from the supermarket shelves. Every moment in the kitchen is a stressful race against time rather than hours that can be savoured and enjoyed. Gay Bilson takes this up over at the Monthly in her dissection of My Kitchen Rules

Cookery is manipulated towards competition and tortured plating. This kind of television is turning cooking – something we do to survive as pleasurably as might be possible, some better than others – into a contest. Make a sport of it, turn it into harmless, competitive fun, and more people will become interested in food? Surely, the subliminal connection to hierarchy, to competitive jubilation or shame, taints any spark of interest. The insistence on “restaurant” food, the profoundly conservative idea of it being different to home-cooking, does little to further the undeniable satisfaction of something like a large bowl of beans.

The joy of home cooking is that it can be profoundly social. You can inflict recipes on others that aren’t at all feasible in a restaurant due to ingredient cost, time or your insane personal whims.

This year’s season of Masterchef starts next week. If you skip it this year, there are three more years of it in the pipeline. My tip for this season of Masterchef is to spend the entire time that the show is being aired in the kitchen. Work your way through a classic cookbook. Find out if you can cook four of Jamie Oliver’s fifteen minute meals in consecutive order. Learn some knife skills. Enrol in TAFE: there will always be a shortage of real, trained chefs because it’s an awful way to make a living. Spending that hour in front of Masterchef will leave you with nothing.

Trolling as the food writing

Terry Durack over at the Age manages to both pit Sydney against Melbourne and suburb versus suburb by attempting to pick the worst suburb for eating in each city. There is good food to be found everywhere in Australia – it may be behind closed doors or in people’s backyards rather than in restaurants or takeaway joints, but I have no doubt that it can be found in every postcode.

You just need to care enough about finding it.

This is the sort of food article that you should probably expect to be coming more often from The Age and finding its way onto the front page of the website: the article that trolls for comment in the guise of “engagement”. As it becomes incumbent on journalists to generate both website page views and comment, it is a much more lucrative path to chase the cheap arguments that generate knee-jerk reactions than it is to write challenging or thoughtful content.

Sensory Lab, Melbourne

Sensory Lab 1, Melbourne

I don’t take coffee too seriously. I’m aware that there are more aromatic compounds in your java than in a glass of wine but I don’t personally seek them out even though I draw a good part of my income from describing tastes to other people. Call it a cognitive dissonance reduction strategy wherein I pretend not to care just in case I’m wrong.

Sensory Lab (1) is another coffee vendor in the “third wave” of Melbourne coffee; the wave where people started riding fixed gear bicycles and eschewing milk and sugar in favour of flavour alone, thus swapping calories for the ability to fit into ever tightening jeans. It’s owned by Melbourne coffee god, Salvatore Malatesta, a man whom I used to see on the days when I could afford a coffee at university at his first(?) cafe, Plush Fish. In the mean time, he’s gone on to own at least 30 cafes. I’ve gone on to start a string of poorly-paying food blogs. Maybe I should have started taking coffee seriously earlier in my life.

Apart from the caffeinated beverages, the most entertaining part of Sensory Lab is watching people approach the counter trying to work out what the hell is going on. Is it art or commerce? What senses do they test? The high school science lab schtick seems to be a psychological barrier to the average punter ordering a coffee.

Sensory Lab 1, siphonSiphon coffee (S2 blend)

As for the brew, I’m starting to develop an appreciation for siphon filter coffee (above). Compared to their other methods of production (espresso, pour over and cold drip), the flavours in the coffee come out clean and bright, and intensify as you get to the bottom of the cup. There’s acidity rather than straight bitterness. And there is nowhere for it to hide.

It doesn’t tempt me to forgo my morning latte habit but it does draw me that one step closer to seriousness and a tighter pair of pants.

Location: At the back of David Jones department store (ground floor), 297 Little Collins Street
Melbourne VIC 3000.

Maybe people aren’t drinking it because it tastes like shit

There’s a short article over at The Age mapping the decline of the big Australian beers as a failure of their marketing. Their reason for the fall from grace of VB and Carlton:

Image is also one of the reasons why there has been strong growth in mainstream craft beers such as James Squire, Little Creatures and Matilda Bay.

”Boutique beers tend to be more expensive because it reflects the cost of production, and that tends to be associated with people with higher disposable income. So it’s a badge of wealth, status,” says Kirkegaard. ”But like a niche wine, it also shows a higher level of discernment.”

For The Age, how a beer tastes doesn’t seem to come into it. The failure of big beers in Australia may have less to do with them presenting a credible image of themselves than them presenting a product which does not taste good. Substituting in a faux import like Carlsberg or Heineken for a local trash pilsener because the former has a more positive image does not seem like a long term marketing strategy.

Matt Kirkegaard (quoted above) also blogs over at BeerMatt and even the most cursory read of his work will point out that he knows that there is more to beer than image alone.

Sapa Hills, Footscray

There are two generations of Vietnamese restaurants in Footscray, . The first emulates the tile-and-mirror-walled, cheap metal table joints of the streets of Saigon. The architecture sends a message that hosing down the walls could be a priority, the hall of mirrors effect suggests that the appearance of being busy is as important as really being busy. The second generation is identical to upmarket phở chain, Phở 24 with dark timber panelling, dark timber seats, white plates, the appearance that they’re one frappucino short of a Starbucks.

In , both tend to serve the same menu; interior design is not a handy marker of a great or terrible meal.

bo la lot, Sapa Hills, Footscray

Sapa Hills opened in November 2009 and falls into the second generation with the added bonus of shots of the actual terraced hills of Sapa on the wall. The menu isn’t from northern Vietnam – it’s much the same as every other Melbourne pho joint – but there is the occasional plate from the north, like the above bo la lot: fatty and peppery beef mince wrapped in a betel nut leaf (although here, vine leaves substitute(?)), topped with peanuts.

Bun Cha, Sapa Hills, Footscray

The argot of Northern Vietnamese food is meat and the above is at it’s blunt meaty best. Grilled thin slices of pork and well charred meatballs with a thin vinegary, green papaya-topped stock. Greens are varied and bun noodle serve are generous.

Location: 112 Hopkins St, Footscray VIC 3011

“It’s a minefield even for Asians”

I had dinner on Saturday at Poon’s Chinese Restaurant in Barkly Street, Footscray. It was the worst Cantonese meal that I’ve eaten in Melbourne. The service was gracious and friendly considering that they were packed and it was dirt cheap. The meal was a mistake but not an expensive one and it filled me with regret but not salmonella. The food was uniformly tasteless like some non-toxic, starchy glue.

Poon’s however, is popular enough to be ranked a local institution much of which seems to revolve around the ritual of regular dining in the same place over a period of decades. The result of a family decision where Friday night is fish and chips, Saturday night is Poon’s. Single sex groupings dining together, having the Boy’s Night Out with a table filled with Crownies; women on other tables sharing a bottle of Jacob’s Creek Chardonnay and splitting Poon’s gigantic (and suspiciously Chiko Roll-like) spring rolls. There were no chopsticks on offer, anywhere.

At a guess, it has been doing the same food in the same place for half a century and the punters love it. Here’s a review from Menulog:

i have been a ‘patron’ of ‘Poons’ for at least 40 years, and would not go anywhere else. The food is fresh, nutritional and very easy to eat. The variations on the Menu are wonderful.

The staff and Management have ALWAYS been good to me and i feel part of their family after all these years, at being treated as part of their family.

i only wish they could deliver to Carlton to where i live, but at least i get a chance to mix with some of the ‘cream of the crop people in our Society when i visit them regularly.

Thank you for allowing me to tell you this wonderful news about ‘Poons’. ( i tell everyone i go there and love it and the staff too )

Who in Australia cares about “Asian food” in a world where Poon’s is rating as well as Flower Drum or Lau’s on user-generated review sites?

When it comes to food from Asia, most Australians are happy with average food. “Chinese food” means a regionless choice of meat stir fried in your choice of bland starchy sauce. Most Australians are content with the local Thai joint doing the traffic light curries (red, green, yellow) straight from the bucket of Mae Ploy. Vietnamese means pho alone. Japanese is aseasonal and what rich people eat (except for sushi, which is no longer associated with Japan). The rest of Asia is a vague unknown, summarised in the thinner chapters of cookbooks with the word Oriental in the title. Above all, the food must be “very easy to eat”. No bones, no heads, no need to even chew.

So Necia Wilden’s article in The Australian newspaper regarding her inability to find or discern premium Asian ingredients was no great surprise to me. Boneless and free from the shackles of mastication. I’m only bringing it up because of the interesting discussion it has spawned over at Progressive Dinner Party. Like Zoe, I read it in the physical newspaper. I paid good money for it in the hope that food journalism in The Australian (and coverage of food from Asia) would be better in 2009 under Lethlean and Wilden’s gaze. I haven’t bought an edition of The Australian since. If it’s been a bumper year for food writing in The Australian, apologies for not supporting it.

I’m not going to tackle the racism behind grouping food from Asia together into an undifferentiated and monolithic bloc, skipping between cuisines as if there was no need for specialist knowledge in any of them. Provincial food for The Australian, it seems, only comes from refined palates in Europe.

It’s the Chicken Tonight approach to food that also concerns me: if only I had the right stir-through sauce recommended to me as authentic, the curry would taste the same as at my hotel in Phuket. So how to come by this knowledge? Getting a recommendation from the person that owns the store is just not good enough, as Wilden puts it:

“How do I know this soy sauce is organic?” I ask the young woman in the Japanese grocery store near my home. “Because it says so on the label,” she says, pointing to the Japanese characters on the bottle’s posh paper wrapping. Ah, right.

The key, according to the article, is to get a chef to tell you what is good, preferably one with an Asian last name or a cookbook the size of a family sedan. Actually going out, buying a few things and then tasting them is not mentioned. You only learn to cook through your own experiences and your sense of taste is subtly different to everyone else and above all, should be trusted. If David Thompson recommends Megachef brand fish sauce but you enjoy $3 a bottle Tiparos, go with your own tastes. At most, experimenting with different brands will be less than $5 a hit.

Buying ingredients is no minefield as Tony Tan mentions in the article, at least in comparison to the minefields that I’ve seen built for Cambodians and by Cambodians. Ask the shopkeeper. Try different things. You won’t step on anything that will turn you, your children or your livestock into a fine pink mist. So who is this article meant to service? What is to gain from making cooking certain cuisines at home look more difficult and less satisfying?

Just to put on a particularly Bolshie hat, newspapers have so little to gain from pimping out fresh food – it is the Simon Johnson’s of the world that buy ads in the food sections of newspapers and not your local Vietnamese grocer. There is a need for newspapers to prop up a system that recommends branded goods over raw ingredients. If word got out that fresh ingredients make much more of a difference in cooking than processed ones, all hell would break loose. People would be smashing in the Lean Cuisine fridges in your local duopolist supermarket in a fit of rage.

Just to bring things back to the world of Poon’s rather than some parallel universe where people care about what they eat, The Australian’s food section is aimed squarely at the Poon’s market and not at me. It’s aimed at people who buy the best fish sauce as a display to others that they buy the best fish sauce rather than as a pungent condiment whose value is in its consumption. This is the food journalism for the people who have been eating the same Chinese food for decades and are unwilling or unable to try somewhere new without someone else validating and translating the experience for them.

Cycling the Red Hill Rail Trail

Just to expand my repertoire from writing about food, an article that I wrote back in early June is up at Wall Street Journal on my bike ride across the Mornington Peninsula and the Red Hill Rail Trail, south east of . I, of course, ate and drank my fill as I went – beers from Red Hill Brewery, various pinots and shiraz, wild mushrooms from Merrick’s General Store, local bread and cheese. No pics from me, just words.

As a bit of bonus content for Last Appetite readers, here’s the Google Map of the journey that was originally supplied to the illustrator, Poul Lange (who also blogs).

Phở Chu The, Footscray

Pho Chu The, Footscray

I had grand plans to work my way through the phở of the Melbourne suburb of , bucket-sized bowls of beef soup every weekend, but never quite got there. There are no less than 20 phở establishments within easy walking distance but every time that I kick things off, I get the nagging feeling that it is just not worth the effort. Phở in Melbourne is above average. Terrible phở is the exception (but not impossible to find). Brilliant phở only exists in people’s homes.

I’d love to be proven wrong.

You’ll never find a rich, herbal phở on the streets of Melbourne. The herbage that accompanies usually will only stretch to basil with the occasional appearance of mint. Sawtooth coriander, ngo om (rice paddy herb), or any other miscellaneous herb that could differentiate an outstanding bowl of phở, while widely available across Melbourne, never make it into a phở restaurant. The broths are beefy but the spice is toned down. The meat in each bowl is great – a big step above the Saigon street corner – but it can’t carry the dish.

Chu The has two outlets: one in Richmond, the other in the dead centre of Footscray, opposite the market. The Footscray joint is packed, all the time. Their phở bo dac biet (beef special), above, is sweet and umami. A few glassy fingers of tendon are glassy and cooked to rubbery perfection but it is otherwise much of the same.

The damage: small bowl of phở bo dac biet: A$7.50

Location: 92 Hopkins St, Footscray