The Gourmet Forager - foraging for tasty finds in Sydney and abroad

French Food Safari to inspire Francophile adventures

June 22, 2011

Ah hello wintery cold Sydney – a bleak, icy contrast from the humid, hot weather and semi-tropical thunderstorms we experienced in New York. We touched down in Sydney only a few days ago, narrowly squeezing in before the Chilean ash clouds, having circumvented the globe, decided to grace our shores again and shut down our [...]

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Risky business: on copper pots, Teflon pans and exploding ovens

June 4, 2011

On my Paddock to Plate degustation post, one reader, Alex, left me an interesting, albeit totally unrelated comment to the post topic: “…Teflon contains a chemical called per-flouro-octanoid-acid also known as PFOA, which can cause cancer. If you over heat teflon coated pans, to 260 degrees Celsius, you get the risk of releasing that chemical…and [...]

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Frisbees, tiles and lessons in wastage from Wasted popup

May 28, 2011

What’s the most adventurous, most challenging thing you’ve ever eaten? That was the question I posed to my friend, Jo, as we waited outside Ten Buck Alley – the location of Wasted, a new pop-up restaurant in Darlinghurst offering a value-packed 6 course degustation for $70 or matched wines for $120. Most pop up restaurants [...]

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Foraging for sea urchin roe

May 22, 2011

Or should that be sea urchin gonads? Let’s not beat about the bush here. There’s no “roe” per se, the revered Italian ricci di mare or Japanese uni you find atop sushi is actually one of 5 gonad segments in a sea urchin. Didn’t think you’d ever eat reproductive organs? Sorry to burst that bubble. [...]

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Putting Carlton Draught’s beer-fed wagyu beef to the test

May 12, 2011

When I was researching about artificial meat, I came across the work of Emeritus Professor Jeff Wood at the University of Bristol, a “meat expert” whose research on meat quality involves extensive taste testing of meat. That’s right – scientific research requiring consumption of steak. Is that my dream job? I have a serious bone [...]

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Celebrations at Rockpool Bar and Grill

May 3, 2011

Another year, another birthday and this year, the roving lunar Easter holidays have collided with my birthday. Normally over Easter the Co-pilot and I would be off on an overseas jaunt – typically somewhere in SouthEast Asia involving barely identifiable street food and frosty cocktails next to piping hot beaches but this year, for the [...]

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The vegetarian strikes back at Efendy

April 27, 2011

After the meat fuelled posts of late, it’s time I veered off the meat freeway and explore other paths. In recent years I’ve been reading more and more about the types of food groups we eat; where the food comes from; what the Western diet has come to be and even what we’d evolved to [...]

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Paddock to Plate: A degustation of beefed up foodblogger creations

April 17, 2011

My much anticipated followup to the previous post is here. In my last post I introduced The Paddock to Plate project that I and 7 other foodbloggers were participating in, a project designed to increase the appreciation of the process and energy required to get a beef product from paddock to plate. I had been [...]

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Paddock to Plate: Pulled beef and pine mushroom cannelloni

April 8, 2011

There are plenty among us that have heard of mock meat or the more “appealingly” named, meat analogue where things like soy protein, wheat or vegetable protein are moulded, flavoured and transformed into the likeness of your everyday meaty goodies. My intriguing local mock meat store sells a mind boggling array of curious meat phonies [...]

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Fair Dinkum barbequed prawn dumplings

April 3, 2011

What do we consider Australian? What’s fair dinkum Aussie? For the uninitiated, “fair dinkum” is Australian lingo for “genuine”. It is a term probably lost of the current urban and multicultural generation, but one still stereotypically associated with farmers, the older generation, and folks born and bred in the country – generally those characters we [...]