Paparazzo

Snaps and casual photos around interesting cuisine tourism venues.

This month - Industrial Zen, Dollop puddings, Kiwi-Italian flair, A passion for fruit and vege, Pipi Cafe, Organic merlot, Premium game, Old Church Restaurant and Coffee desk job.

Pure crab taste

Crab meat, delicate and sweet, is not a common household or even a common restaurant menu item in New Zealand, and recipes are few and far between. Foodstyle got hold of some delicious Aussie spanner crab meat now available at selected outlets and designed a few recipes to bring out the sweet natural flavour.

Buying pure crab meat, rather than bashing some crustacean into bits for its flesh, is the easiest and least messy way to go. For these recipes we use spanner crab meat from Australia that is available in retail outlets through Nosh, Moana and numerous distributors for the hospitality industry. We say – if you can buy crab meat without all that work of extraction – go for it.

Nancye's whanau

You probably wouldn’t pick mother of five Nancye Pirini out of the shopping crowds in downtown Otara, South Auckland, unless she was wearing her executive chef uniform. 

Nancye Pirini has a stubborn side, and is happy to admit it. It’s a tenacity that has taken her on a career journey from an 18-year-old mother from South Auckland to the prestigious job of sous chef at Dine, the posh signature restaurant with Peter Gordon’s name on it at the SkyCity complex in Auckland, and, recently, to the top job of executive chef at a 170-room hotel near Auckland Airport. 

Paua perfection

Despite the 1001 paua fritter recipes you can find on the internet, cooking paua is not easy. The intriguing thing about Kiwi blackfoot abalone, or paua, is its status and commercial value in our seafood-cuisine hierarchy, yet many New Zealanders have never eaten it, or know how to cook it, and most of the commercial harvest is exported to Asia, or sold through New Zealand Chinese restaurants and Asian grocery outlets.

With help from OceaNZ Blue, a paua farm located in Bream Bay, north of Auckland, we experimented with numerous cooking techniques to come up with three recipes using this expensive Kiwi delicacy.  

Cold brewed coffee jungle style

To prepare this trendy cold-coffee recipe that has swept the US in recent years, Foodstyle Review visits Coffee Systems in Onehunga, Auckland, makers of Jungle Coffee, to follow green coffee beans from sack to roaster, to blender and grinder, and into our recipe.

Hot, dark-brown beans tumble out of the roasting train at Coffee Systems in a thunderous cascade of steam and smoke.
The beans fall noisily into a round, wide, shallow vat with rotating, spidery arms that sweep through the hot beans – air-cooling and mixing the chocolate-coloured mass.

Our roast is made up of organic, fair-trade beans from Papua New Guinea, which will be blended with roasted beans from Guatemala and Kenya to produce Jungle’s most popular blend – the appropriately jungle-branded ‘Voodoo’.

 
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Nature's winemaker

Helen Masters, Louisa Rose and Clare Halloran share something in common; they are award-winning chief winemakers at top Australasian wineries..

Helen is the senior winemaker at Ata Rangi in Martinborough; Louisa Rose is the chief winemaker at Yalumba, Australia’s oldest family-owned winery, located in the Barossa, South Australia; and Clare Halloran is the chief winemaker at TarraWarra Estate in the Yarra Valley, NSW.

Cuisine & travel 

with Michael Caines

 
Foodstyle Review talks global cuisine with UK celebrity chef and food philosopher Michael Caines on his first trip to Australasia.

Chef Michael Caines was a star guest chef at the Hilton Masterclass Weekend held in Brisbane this year. His first trip to Australasia, a heavy dose of jetlag and a day of cooking demos didn’t dampen his opinions and reflections on the revival of regional cuisine, food exporting and the obesity epidemic sweeping the West.

Like Rick Stein, also from the South West of England, Caines is a champion of regional produce and cooking, and detests what he calls, “the homogenous crap” produced by global cuisine fashions and imported, out-of-season, produce.

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Interesting cookbooks 

'Peta Mathias, Culinary Adventures in Marrakech’ 

‘Kiwi Favourites Cookbook – Celebrating 75 Years’

‘Dining Out, a History of the Restaurant in New Zealand’, by Perrin Rowland

‘The Zealand Cook’s Bible’, by Lesley Christensen-Yule and Hamish McRae

‘Above and Beyond’
Published by Singapore Airlines