Riding the food wave
Chefs are the new rock stars and cooking is ‘having a moment’. Think you’ve read it all before? Kim Knight puts some headline hitters under the grill.
1. THE TALKING POINT
Josh Emett, MasterChef judge and restaurateur, puts seaweed in his butter. At Masu, the country’s newest and flashest Japanese eatery, Nic Watt gets his ice deoxygenated so it’s glass-clear and slow to melt.
The French Cafe´ , that Auckland doyenne of fine and innovative dining, was recently re-wallpapered (see photo above) using a pattern created from digital manipulations of actual pressed and dried plants from the kitchen’s garden. (That same kitchen is currently excited about the coastal succulent samphire and elephant garlic flowers).
And when Sean Connolly’s new Italian restaurant Gusto opens in the Auckland’s SkyCity precinct this Saturday, it will feature fish cooked in seawater couriered daily from the Coromandel.
Is all this kitchen gimmickry really necessary? Or does it just make for a nice press release and a guaranteed headline?
2. THE SUPERFOOD
Getting your five-plus has never been so competitive. Now we can all say quinoa, freekeh and dukkah (not a superfood, but didn’t it make that sentence read pretty?), stand by for the pichuberry. Look familiar? Gardening guru Lynda Hallinan laughs at the reinvention of the humble cape gooseberry, pictured above. ‘‘I’ve never heard them called that. I’ve heard them described as a bloody weed! And if I was going to rebrand them, that’s what I would call them.’’
Mensfitness.com lists pichu berries as its No 1 new food trend of 2014, quoting Peruvian Power Foods author Manuel Villacorta: ‘‘They’re amazing because three-quarters of a cup provides 39 per cent of your vitamin D requirement, which is unheard of for a fruit. They’re all over California, Arizona and Nevada already.’’
That rapid spread may not surprise New Zealand gardeners. ‘‘I’ve been to commercial nurseries where they literally sprout like dandelions through the asphalt,’’ says Hallinan. ‘‘I’ve got a bed of probably about two dozen plants. I grew them because they’re interesting to look at . . . but taste? Not
‘‘Aqua pazza [‘crazy water’] is a traditional Italian dish that reaches back centuries when fishermen were cooking their fish in seawater,’’ says Connolly. ‘‘My fish comes from the Coromandel, so I thought I’d better get cooking the fish in the water it was caught in. I think it’s respectful.’’
Sometimes, he says, his fish will come from Leigh, north of Auckland – and so will the cooking water.
‘‘The water will move with the fish. I’m having a litre of water come in the box with the fish – it becomes part of the sauce. It’s tossed in with tomatoes and olive oil and you don’t have to add any more salt.’’
The French Cafe´ ’s Simon Wright says his herbal wallpaper is ‘‘peaceful’’. It’s not gimmicky, he says. ‘‘The whole food wave has changed. It’s about making things relevant to you. It makes everything more whole, it means that everything has a purpose otherwise it’s just all these robotic restaurants, all doing the same style of food. There’s no soul.’’
so much. I think they’re quite bitter. To me, they taste like the bad cousin of an unripe tomato.’’
Like the best-eaten-green-as-a-salsa tomatillo? No, says Hallinan. ‘‘To me, that would be the plant to grow. That’s like a cape gooseberry you could eat with corn chips.’’
Therein lies the problem of the superfood, says Hallinan.
‘‘Things like kale, I would consider ideal for pigs. Real pigs, not hungry people,’’ she says. "It tastes terrible. It’s good if you live in a frosty climate and it’s the middle of winter, but people who eat kale in summer are mad. There are millions of other things that taste better than kale.’’
How to spot a superfood? Hallinan has a theory. ‘‘Take an old plant and make it sound like something we like to eat – like sugar. You can grow your own sugar beets and I’m surprised they haven’t come back into fashion because they tick all the boxes for a food trend. The cheaper and tastier a food we already have is, the more likely it is that someone will come up with some far flung alternative that will cost 15 times as much.’’
3. THE COOKING COUPLE
One day in a television production office . . .
‘‘Cooking’s hot. Let’s do a cooking show.’’
‘‘I’m bored with watching icing dry.’’
‘‘Double the recipe! The Block with eggbeaters! The Amazing Race with mezzalunas!’’
Did food television just jump the pan-seared shark? New Zealand will be the judge.
TVNZ and Mediaworks are currently going head to head with, respectively, a reformatted
MasterChef featuring teams of two, and The Great Food Race, where couples tear about the country burning things.
Later this year, TVNZ will put the first home-grown My Kitchen Rules on screen. Previous incarnations have come from Australia, though season three, which screened in 2012, featured engaged Kiwi couple Simon Yandall and Meg Dangen, pictured right. The pair are still together and these days they cook for money, offering master classes, demonstrations and catering.
Cooking is hard. Relationships are hard. Why combine the two in front of a television audience?
‘‘One of the cons,’’ says Yandall, ‘‘is it takes a while to find your place. When you first start, it’s quite stressful because you’re both trying to be the head chef. It took us a while to understand there can only be one head chef. Firstly, because otherwise it can end in tears. Secondly, you can end up with two meals on the plate. There’s a lot of pain before you get it right.’’
Dangen says it’s rare to find a couple who can work well together in the kitchen. ‘‘When it does happen, it’s amazing. And when it doesn’t, it’s brilliant television.’’
Her advice to would-be reality television duos? ‘‘It’s a piece of advice we got from Pete Evans who was one of the judges on our show. He said just remember who you are; that your relationship is important because that’s the only thing you can come home to, so you’ve got to make sure that stays intact.’’
4. THE OLD AS NEW ‘‘Six years ago,’’ says chef Sean Connolly, pictured above, (see: The Talking Point), ‘‘I was cooking molecular food, $1000 menus and 25 moves on the plate. More moves than John Travolta.’’
All chefs do it, he says. When you’re young, you want flash and tricky and wow. But then you get older. ‘‘You realise the most important thing is bringing people together round the table, eating simple food . . . mums, dads, millionaires . . . they all love simple food.’’
So when his aforementioned Italian venture Gusto opens next week, there’ll be a less-is-more philosophy. No degustation dinners. And no dishes that require the waiter to spend so much explanatory time at the table that they may as well take a seat. It’s a philosophy that matches the worldwide restaurant trend for simple done well.
Lynda Hallinan: ‘‘I think with food, people seem to forget the whole point is to make you feel good. The whole paleo thing, for example . . . it doesn’t make any sense to me. I’ve been to places where people have tried to palm off cheese made from macadamia nuts. That is not cheese.
‘‘I’m well known for being selfsufficient and growing my own food and all those things but I like food to taste good. Cheese tastes good. A courgette tastes good, but it tastes even better if it’s cooked with garlic and butter.’’
(In case you’ve been, er, living in a cave for the past year, the Paleo Diet is a recent fad that relies on eating from the same food groups as our Neanderthal ancestors. It has manifested, in Auckland at least, in the appearance of cauliflower ‘‘rice’’ and courgette ‘‘noodles’’ on one restaurant menu.)
‘‘I’m sure these things are good for you,’’ says Hallinan. ‘‘But so is going to bed early, and not having any fun, and these things are not a trend, are they?’’
5. THE JUST DESSERT
On Friday, Statistics New Zealand announced the cost of food rose 1.2 per cent in January – up 0.9 per cent on a year earlier.
In between commentary about apples (more expensive), cheese (less expensive), a startling fact: chocolate had hit its highest price levels since June 2012. What?! Chris Pike, Statistics New Zealand price manager, was reassuring, predicting a likely drop again this month when Valentines Day discounting starts showing up in the numbers.
Assuming you’ve already scoffed that box of Roses, what next for pudding lovers? Doughnuts and their mutant croissant-crossed cousin the cronut never really took off. Macarons are a ridiculously expensive way to eat air. And when you think about it, Cake Pops (bake cake, mush cake, reform cake into bite-sized balls) are kind of the chicken nugget of the dessert world.
This year’s cupcake? While multiple food trend commentators are going for icecream sandwiches, the other main contender is a little closer to Kiwi hearts. This year, some say, will be all about the scone. Presumably with cream and pichuberry jam.