Paparazzo

Snaps and casual photos around  interesting cuisine tourism venues.

This issue - Tender as, Family baking, On the frontline, Remarkable heritage, A 50th vintage, Charitable pinot, Vidal golds, Pinot trophy winner, Sandrigham Farmers' Market.

Sure to rise again

Cuisine tourism has always been a feature of the city of Christchurch and on a recent visit Suzanne Middleton pays homage to a heritage funded by an iconic and philanthropic 20th century food company as the earthquake smashed city recovers.

“Food and Wine has always been a strong focus of the tourism industry in Christchurch and Canterbury,” says the chief executive of Christchurch & Canterbury Tourism, Tim Hunter.

“Bars, restaurants and cafes have been some of the first businesses to re-emerge, driven by a very determined hospitality sector giving life back to the city. Much of this new hospitality is occurring in the heart of the city which is a major confidence boost to other investors....

Seafood cocktail supreme

Hard to believe that crayfish used to be such a commonplace item amongst our cuisine heritage. These days, it is a luxury export item and the most expensive Kiwi seafood you can buy.

Which means you don’t want to waste one on a dull recipe, or one that smothers the delicate flavour. We have created this simple, but delicious salad recipe for those lucky enough to indulge in a crayfish this summer, plus provide a recipe for the leftover shell.

For this seafood salad, we used a 500g crayfish, which was selling at $99 a kilo at the time. The flesh from the body and larger legs came to 22g, which meant the final price of our meat was over $200 a kilo, or twice as much as whitebait.

Crayfish – enjoy me two times

Hold on to those crayfish remains – and use this luxurious recipe to indulge a second time.

Get those shells, legs and soft insides of that demolished crayfish back into the fridge and, next day, have a go at this traditional French recipe that will turn those throw-away remains into the most delectable soup or sauce.

Known around the culinary world as ‘lobster bisque’ (and Kiwi crayfish are a species of spiny rock lobster) our recipe is a ‘consensus’ of many such recipes.

Venison so tender 

Sous vide (sue-veed) cooking is simply cooking food in a sealed, air-tight bag that is immersed in a water bath and cooked at constant, low temperatures (between 50-60 deg C for meats, higher for vegetables) for various lengths of time.

The result is a very evenly cooked and tender cut of meat, which is then usually seared in a hot pan to caramelise and crisp the surface. Some may find the result too rare.

Food engineers in the 1960s developed this method for industrial food preservation and French chefs picked it up with the 1970s to cook expensive proteins in a way that kept their original colour and shape. While the low temperature technique didn’t catch on here until the last decade, I recall Sydney chef Tony Bilson at the Sydney InterContinental in the mid 1990s doing a confit of salmon immersed in duck fat and cooked at low temperature that was succulent pink with a very consistent colour that was mind boggling at the time.

 
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Summer Asian salad

We keep coming back to this cold salad theme for premium meats such as lamb loin, venison and beef fillet because it is so successful in being easy to make, so darn flavoursome and even healthful if you are into that cuisine cult. 

Using either lamb loin, venison or beef fillet medallions, to get the best out of our prime meat we cook the meat home-sous-vide in a domestic slow cooker (see ‘Vension so tender’ story in this issue).