Tom Sarafian is chef at Melbourne’s Bar Saracen and a fellow hummus obsessive. He’s kindly shared the Bar Saracen signature hummus with prawn and crab - it’s one of Melbourne’s best dishes so it’s beyond exciting to have the recipe! To coincide with Australia Day, I asked him to muse on what Australian food means to him.
There is always so much to learn when it comes to food, so I was grateful for the opportunity to dive into Korean food at a cooking class and lecture in Melbourne last week. The guest of honour was Buddhist monk Seonjae, who is also a chef and the President of the Korean Food Promotion Institute.
Collaborating with Curtis Stone on a cooking class and degustation dinner at his restaurant Gwen in LA was always going to be fun...but when we decided to theme our event around unique Australian ingredients, things got even more interesting!
When I travel, I always head straight for the produce markets. It's because I love seeing what's growing, what people are eating, and I also love the buzz and bustle of market life. Mexican markets are so incredibly energetic: noisy, busy, fragrant, intense!
There's a contradiction at the heart of Bros', the two-year-old restaurant that Isabella Poti, 22, owns with her boyfriend Floriano Pellegrino, 28. On the one hand, its mission is to preserve the culinary traditions of Lecce, the restaurant's home in the southern Italian province of Puglia. But on the other hand, there's scarcely a dish served in the 25-seater that any Lecce local would recognise. "We keep our traditions, but we make them new," Poti says.
The process of turning cocoa beans into delicious chocolate is a process that's rarely seen so I was thrilled to take a tour at Ratio Cocoa Roasters to uncover the whole process
I try to appreciate nature's bounty with every mouthful but I am especially in awe of peaches: I find it so amazing that this fuzzy fruit's seed is protected by flesh that's so evocative, sweet and juicy. Practical propagation probably doesn't need to be this delicious but YES. Enjoy my stonefruit primer and recipe suggestions.
A good salad is superb. A sad salad is soul-destroying. Listen in to hear about the salad good and the salad bad.
This week's radio chat was all about pasta, prompted by a couple of memories that snuck in when thinking about my last trip to Italy.
Chris Lucas, the entrepreneur behind some of Melbourne’s hottest laneway restaurants is moving to Sydney and luring one of the harbour city’s best chef south. Will his sizzle translate, or will he have egg on his face?
