Monthly Archives: March 2012

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UPDATE: Fringe Food Festival Event – Beer & Cheese 17 April 2012

Blogging friend and Fringe Food Festival co-founder, SJ, fresh(?) from last night’s Four x Four (by 4) Nebbiolo & Beef Dinner has kindly released further information on Beer & Cheese, which is less than three weeks away.

Here’s the high-level stuff…

What: Tutored Beer and Cheese tasting, Dinner with drinks.
When: Tuesday 17th April 2012; 6pm start for Beer and Cheese Tutorial, 8pm start for dinner.
Where: Union Dining Terrace. 270-272 Swan Street, Richmond (enter via Brighton Street, head straight up the stairs)
How much:   $107  a person plus $0.30 booking fee
Booking:  ONLY VIA TRYBOOKING
Note: Please do not contact the venue about this event.  All enquiries are to be emailed to fringefoodfestival@gmail.com.

Some extremely passionate experts in their respective fields of cheese, beer and cheese with beer have generously given their time on the night, which will guarantee you an evening of fun, learning and absolute deliciousness.

Here’s the roll call…

Anthony Femia is the cheese guy. Anthony was recently inducted into the Guilde Internationale des Fromagers as a Garde et Juré and is an internationally recognised Cheesemonger who is passionately dedicated to the promotion and education of the wonderful array of farmhouse & artisan cheeses available from Australia and the world.

Dave from Mountain Goat Beer is the beer guy. ‘nuf said.

Scott Thomas is from the The Courthouse in North Melbourne, which is famous for its eclectic selection of craft beers and pioneer of the ‘gastro’ pub’ in Melbourne. It therefore stands to reason that Scott knows lots and lots about good beer and good food, so he will educate us with what works and what doesn’t and more importantly why.

The night will be hosted on the al fresco Terrace at Union Dining in Richmond, tasting and enjoying your way through nine specially selected cheeses that have been aptly matched with some craft brews. There may be things you’ve seen or tried before… Most likely things you haven’t seen or tried before and most definitely not at the same time (unless you’re Anthony. Probably.)

Once you’re all cheesed and beered out, the remaining room in your partially full tummies will be filled with a share-plate provincial European meal, served upstairs at Union Dining.

Yummo! Can you wait? I can’t. So, buy your tickets NOW… otherwise I might not be allowed to help with future events and that would make me sad. You don’t want me sad.

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Fringe Food Festival Event – Beer & Cheese 17 April 2012

Next to loaves and fishes, beer and cheese are two of the great staples of life and the similarities between beer and cheese go way, way back. We can actually go as far back as the discovery of preserving food… in this case by transforming surplus grain into beer and very fragile milk into the longer-lasting form of cheese.

A second and pretty important similarity is the key process to their respective creation, which of course is through fermentation.

For the uninitiated, to brew beer, simple sugars from grain are converted by yeast into alcohol and carbon dioxide. In cheese, it’s the conversion of milk by a bacterial culture that makes it acidic, turning the milk sugar lactose into lactic acid, blah, blah, blah and so on.

However, the similarities do not end there. The most important similarity is the not the process, but arguably the art of their creation; how grains or milk are chosen and handled, plus the selection and addition of other flavours and of course, their conditioning to create something that from it’s initial and humble origins can become the most wondrous culinary experience.

So it begs the question; with so many similarities, why do we not pair cheese with beer more often?

As someone that probably drinks far too much beer and has a tendency to over indulge when a cheeseboard is placed on the table, I’d like to know a little more beyond unwrapping a Kraft Single to compliment my Carlton Draught.

With the great support and effort of the Fringe Food Festival, we’ve gathered some of Melbourne’s (and possibly, Australia’s) top aficionados and experts on beer, cheese and food matching, who will guide you through the whys and wherefores of matching, as well as take some time to appreciate the care, effort and passion that has gone into the products that we will be sampling on the night.

As a blogger, I am passionate about Melbourne and Victoria’s food culture, particularly at a grass roots level and I am a great supporter of the events that the Fringe Food Festival organise.

I am honoured to be involved in helping to organise this event that will again showcase some of our best local produce and its providores. And I can guarantee that there will be no Kraft Singles involved.

Advance tickets for April 17 are available here and stay tuned either via farfromfamished or via the most excellent Fringe Food Festival website for more details in the lead up to the event.

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When Life Gives You Lemons…

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that my eldest daughter (a soon-to-be 5 year old) has a particular fondness for strong flavours. Dill pickles are one of her favourite foods and she opts for a very mature cheddar over a Kraft Single any day of the week.

Then there’s her love of lemons. This is a kid that will flat out refuse to drink soft drink (which, as a parent is awesome) because she hates the sensation of the bubbles, yet she’ll gladly consume something… anything that contains the sharpness of lemon. Bitter, salty, sour… strange, but hey, all kids are.

We live in an established suburb where neighbours’ yards yield an abundance of various fruits… primarily figs and of course, a profusion of lemon trees. I do have a lemon tree of my own, but it’s stubborn and unfortunately the neighbour’s trees are not yet ready for undertaking covert night operations to satiate my daughter’s tastebuds. So for now we are compelled to fork out 75 cents per lemon at Coles (hey, at least she doesn’t have an obsession with limes), which is what we had to do on the weekend because I promised I’d whip up a batch of lemon curd to make some lemon curd ice cream.

Lemon curd is a bit old school. These days, you’re likely to find it as part of a lemon meringue pie, but back in the late 19th and early 20th century in ye olde England, home-made lemon curd (or lemon butter, as it is also known) was traditionally served with bread or scones at afternoon tea as an alternative to jam, and as a filling for cakes, small pastries and tarts. Of course, the ingredients in curd (namely the eggs and butter, if used) meant that shelf life was limited, so it wasn’t ideal or indeed all that economical to make curd in the same volumes that jams were made. Obviously in more modern times, with ample refrigeration (and freezers), you can make a shitload if you have the time and inclination.

As for taking lemon curd and making it into ice cream, this has got to be the easiest of ice cream recipes. More so if you cheat and buy and / or use curd made by someone else, only it won’t taste anywhere near as good as if you’d made it… that is unless you curdle it, which means it could taste a bit eggy any awful. In any case, if you’re careful, it will be fine. Honest.

Firstly, to the curd. I used a recipe I found on the SBS website. I don’t know why. I think because it had a higher ratio of lemon to the other ingredients and I wanted a lemon curd with some zip. There was also some booze listed in the ingredients, which I forgot about. However this unintentional hindsight might have been a good thing, given I was actually making this for my daughter. The SBS recipe called for 40ml of Cointreau, but I reckon you could substitute this for Limoncello for extra lemony goodness. For the sake of detailing the quantities, here they are:

Lemon Curd

100g butter
350g sugar
2 tsp lemon zest
7 lemons, juiced
4 fresh eggs
40ml Cointreau

I made a number of changes, to both the ingredients and also the method. Firstly, the SBS recipe said “Melt the butter in a bain marie along with the sugar, lemon zest and lemon juice, then beat the eggs and add them gradually to the mixture.”

Other recipes I had read instructed that I should cream the eggs and sugar first, then heat that mixture until it becomes rich and voluminous (a bit like making a zabaglione), then add the butter, lemon juice and zest. Maybe it doesn’t matter, but I did the latter and kept whisking for around the recommended 20 minutes. At around the 15 minute mark, I went into a bit of a panic because the mixture was still quite watery and didn’t resemble a rich, thick and glossy curd.

Why was it all going wrong? Taking it off the heat a couple of times probably didn’t help. But my daughter was doing her best to assist me – namely by using the kitchen scales to weigh things, like her fist, then her head and subsequently the sugar container which of course fell onto its side and went everywhere. So I had a hot bowl of sweet, eggy lemon water and it made me think; the specified quantity of seven lemons was a little ambiguous. Are my seven lemons bigger or smaller than the SBS lemons? Were my lemons yielding lots of juice or not as much? For the record, my seven lemons equated to exactly 250 mls of juice when I added the zest of two lemons to the measuring jug.

Anyway, as a precaution, I added a little cornflour mixed with some water as a stabiliser and to assist with the thickening. In the end it probably wasn’t necessary, because only a few minutes after recommended 20 minutes, my mixture began to thicken and resemble a smooth, shiny curd. So before it got too hot and curdled or too thick (as it would continue to thicken as it cooled), I took it off the heat and transferred it to a jug.

My 250 mls of lemon juice, 4 eggs, 350 grams of sugar and 150 grams of butter (I added an extra 50 grams for no reason) made exactly 1 litre of lemon curd.

Converting the lemon curd into ice cream isn’t exactly a recipe as much as it’s an extra step. When the lemon curd was chilled to fridge temperature, I took half of the curd and stored it in the freezer for later (which will probably be turned into more ice cream when the first batch is polished off). To the other half of lemon curd, I (or more accurately, my daughter) whisked in 600 ml of thickened cream until the curd and cream were incorporated. This mixture was placed back in the fridge to get as cold as possible before churning in my trusty Kitchen Aid Ice Cream Maker attachment.

And that was it. I guess if you wanted to, you could play around with the sweetness or substitute some or all of the cream with a thick, Greek-style yoghurt to cut back on the fat content. Or add some booze.

So, give it a go – for starters it’s cheap… eggs, butter and sugar are staples in most households and of course, if you owned your own cow, you’d practically be making this for free. Or at the very least, it will set you back a couple of bucks for some shop-bought cream. As long as you’re not paying 75 cents for lemons at Coles. Perhaps next time, I’ll wait until the neighbours’ fruit ripens. In the meantime, I wonder what I’ll do with their figs…

[Footnote: I took pics for this blog, but thanks to a work-related IT thing, my pics were inadvertantly deleted from my phone]