Mil Lel Superior Parmesan wins an award for the world’s best-tasting parmesan.

More information on sourdough bread baking.

An article from SanFrancisco on Carlo Petrini.

A Cittaslow community is a family of towns of less than 50,000 people that preserve local cuisines, plants, seeds, farming, produce, products and ways of living. This article from SMH explains.

Harold McGee’s latest article from the NYT on using gelatin and a freezer to make highly flavoured consommes.

via Obsession with Food

From the Epicure blog in the Age.

MASTERCLASS WITH IAN AND ELIZABETH HEMPHILL AT EXECUTIVE CHEF
09.30 TO 11.30 am SATURDAY 18TH AUGUST

Learn about using spices for home cooking vegetables and fish. Session open to SF members, members of the Food Media Club, and the public.

Three recipes will be prepared in the Masterclass. The ingredients are interesting and worth talking about, the recipes are made from fresh, minimally processed ingredients and they display the variety of interesting tastes that can be achieved with spices. The dishes to be prepared are a vegetarian sambar, a Kuwaiti fish stew with black lime, and banana pancakes. Tasting of the dishes will be provided for all attending.

$50 members of Slow Food and Food Media Club $60 non-members. Payment required to confirm reservations. Numbers limited to 40. To reserve your place contact the Lanza’s, Cecilia & Kerry Lanza Landline: 3343 6759, Mobile: 0438 120 822. Mail cheques/money orders for Slow Food Brisbane, to C & K Lanza, 46 Kneale St, Holland Park QLD 4121. For Visa or Mastercard – add the 3.5% Merchant Fee which we are charged.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Please do not park in front of Executive Chef because they need the space for their regular customers. There is plenty of underground parking 5 minutes walk away to Southbank – near the corner of Tribune & Little Stanley Streets.

Friday 17th August 2007, Auditorium 1, State Library of Queensland
6.00 for 6.30 pm
SPICE NOTES AND TRAVELS
A MODERN DAY SPICE MERCHANT’S VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY
A LECTURE BY IAN HEMPHILL

Ian (Herbie) Hemphill’s life has been infused with herbs and spices for as long as he can remember and wife Liz has shared that journey since their marriage in 1970. Ian and Liz will demystify some of the ancient mysteries of spices and the spice trade, peppering their talk with interesting anecdotes about the places, people and spices they have discovered on a voyage of discovery that has no conclusion.

Samples of spices will circulated during the talk. Members of Slow Food, the Food Media Club Australia, and the general public are invited. There will be NO CHARGE, but to reserve and guarantee a place, please call the Lanzas - Cecilia & Kerry Lanza Landline: 3343 6759, Mobile: 0438 120 822.

Ekka Wednesday 15th August, 12.00 for 12.30 - Luncheon at Lurleen’s, Mount Cotton.

Gourmet Traveller 2007 Australian Restaurant Guide “Sirromet Winery is an amazing place. Undulating vine plantings combined with magnificent scenery on the city’s outer reaches make it a perfect day trip for indulging in locally sourced food and wine. Lurleen’s is no small, intimate vineyard affair, but an expansive and imposing 220-seater set in a fabulous space of stone walls with a luminous ceiling and a grand rear balcony.”

Courier-Mail Goodlife Restaurant Guide 2006 “Part of Sirromet Winery at Mt Cotton, Lurleen’s has become a dining destination, and not just a venue to showcase the wine. The entrance features wooden double doors, and towering stone walls, and the dining room is large, seating up to 150 people overlooking the vines and views beyond.”

Gourmet Traveller 2006 Australian Restaurant Guide “When Andrew Mirosch upped stumps on Stradbroke Island and took over this vineyard restaurant a short drive south of Brisbane, his flair for fresh seafood came with him. He has such a passion for local produce: many ingredients are organically grown on the estate”

Executive chef Andrew Mirosch

Organic Vegetables and Charella Goats Cheese Terrine with Creative Crust Sour Dough Bruschetta
Salad of Fresh Figs with Spanish Jamón and Wild Rocket
Confit of Salmon cured in Sake & Olivado Lemon Infused Avocado Oil with Bethonga Gold Pineapple Salsa
Wilga Vale Venison Ravioli with Paul Wruck’s Wellington Point Farm Tomatoes, slow cooked with Sirromet Olive Oil and Garlic
Chilled local Prawns with Sweet and sour Eggplant Chutney
Tambourine Rhubarb Crumble with Kingaroy Double Cream and Vanilla Seed Ice Cream
Selected wines are included.

$75 members $80 non-members
Payment required to confirm reservations
Groups of up to 10 can be reserved,
Total number limited to 150

RESERVATIONS: Cecilia & Kerry Lanza Landline: 3343 6759, Mobile: 0438 120 822
Mail cheques/money orders for Slow Food Brisbane, to C & K Lanza, 46 Kneale St, Holland Park QLD 4121
For Visa or Mastercard – add 3.5% Merchant Fee we are charged.

There may still be places available for the Committee’s Bastille Day Dinner at Restaurant Two. Some members who made reservations have not paid, but were not able to be followed up while the Lanzas were travelling in Europe. The maximum number for this event is only 40.

Menu

GOUGERES OF GRUYERE CHEESE
JAMBON PARSIELLES ON CROUTONS
Kir
DEMITASSE OF VEAL AND MUSHROOM CONSOMME
GAME TERRINE WITH TOASTED SOUR DOUGH
Pierre de la Grange Muscadet Vielles Vignes
TWICE COOKED GOAT’S CHEESE SOUFLE WITH WINTER LEAVES
Denis Pommier Petit Chablis
BEEF A LA BOURGUIGNONNE OR DAUBE WITH SOFT POLENTA
Chateau Monredon Cotes du Rhone
BRIE – FRENCH
APPLE TARTE TATIN, DOUBLE VANILLA ICE CREAM
De Bortoli Noble One Botyrtis Semillon
COFFEE AND PARMIERS

NOTES:
David Pugh, Chef, Michael Conrad, Host.

7.00 Guests arrive; 7.30 Guests seated, 10.30 Guests depart
Address: Corner Edward and Alice Streets.

Local ingredients in season.

Members only (maximum 40), Fully Booked
Payment of $100 required to confirm reservations – phone for cancellations

Cecilia & Kerry Lanza
Landline: 3343 6759
Mobile: 0438 120 822
Mail cheques/money orders for Slow Food Brisbane, to C & K Lanza, 46 Kneale St, Holland Park QLD 4121

I am going to start posting up meeting notices, tagged in this diary with the date they are scheduled for. This will allow chronological sorting of them for easy and logical viewing. They will also be tagged with a category of Meetings, which you can click on the right hand side menu to just see them on their own. Webmaster.

Another article about the “100 mile” diet idea.

The ABC’s Rural Reporter program recently broadcast an account of a feast held at the Crystal Waters Permaculture Village, the feast was designed to showcase organically grown produce and bush tucker. Reporter Robin McConchie speaks with chef Peter Woolfe about the food he’s preparing and also chats with some of the suppliers who’ve provided the ingredients for the feast.

This will be of particular interest to those of us who experienced a very similar meal last year. You can download an MP3 file of this broadcast for your Pod.

Local Harvest is a Sunshine Coast directory that is worth noting. We are also planning a directory for Brisbane fine food merchants, so stay tuned.

An article from Time magazine highlights the dilemma the author has in New York city of buying local (or regional) non-organic produce with unknown pesticide contamination compared with buying certified organic produce from California with hopefully superior flavour but loaded with “food miles”.

Why the degustation menu has taken off.

From Heather Jarman, Director/Founder member of Slow Food Cambridgeshire

Did you know that there are vintages and even frangiture of olive oil? Find out below along with some tips on how to taste it and how long can you keep it.

An almond-flavoured cream made with olive oil? A particularly fragile type of olive oil? Or maybe even something named after that sixteenth-century Italian nobleman the Marquis Muzio Frangipani who invented a perfume for scenting gloves? None of these. The olive oil producers displaying their wares at the olive oil festival of Valdottavo (a small village about 10 km north of Lucca) on 23, 24 and 25 March were going one better than wine vintages. They weren’t just proclaiming their 2006 vintage; they were distinguishing the oil made from olives picked and pressed in October from the November pressing, which in turn was bottled separately from the December pressing.

Olives are pressed at a mill called a frantoio and a pressing is called a frangitura (pl. frangiture). All olives start out green and turn black-brown when fully ripe. Like other fruit, different varieties of olives ripen at different times and those on each tree ripen over a period of time. By about the middle of October some olives on a tree will be dappled green and brown, during November more and more turn uniformly dark brown and by December most are very dark brown, almost black. The small artisan oil producers who selectively pick the ripening olives by hand can keep each month’s pressings separate.

Is there any point to this or, not having enough hands to pick all the olives at once, are they just making a virtue of necessity? I poured a tiny pool of green November oil into the palm of my hand and allowed it to warm up for a couple of minutes; I sniffed the pungent aroma rising from the warmed oil and then slurped it into my mouth with plenty of air: fruity on the tongue, a bit bitter at the back of the palate and then lightly peppery in the throat. The December oil was golden instead of green, less aromatic and mellower in flavour: less bitter and less peppery and too tame for me.

Lastly the October oil: a more intense version of the November oil. I didn’t like it as much, but olive oil tastes are changing and more consumers are looking for more bitterness and pepper. I sometimes wonder whether, in our headlong rush for exotic new flavour combinations, we’ve forgotten the joys of subtle tastes. At least bottling and labelling by frangitura gives you a chance to choose the one you like best, although you might have to come to Lucca and pay a visit to the olive estate to indulge this choice (with Sapori e Saperi, of course).

Not many olive oil labels even show the year in which it was pressed, let alone the month. The year is important, since unlike wine, olive oil doesn’t improve with age, though a six-month old oil is more suitable for delicately flavoured food than a brash young upstart oil. After 18 months senility has set in: even the most intensely aromatic and flavourful oil eventually becomes bland, barely tasting of anything. Don’t expect a date on industrially produced oil, but many of the small artisan producers here give a ‘best before’ date which is worth heeding.

If you want to read more about olive oil, I found Jim Dixon’s ‘An Olive Oil Education’ well written and informative.

Burger King in the US is making some progress to non-factory farmed sourced food.

Here is a recipe for Quark from Kingaroy Cheese.

A new take on eating local.

A food connoisseur’s fantasy will come to life at Peppers Hidden Vale this year with the unveiling of a ‘Slow Food’ weekend. The event will be held on Hidden Vale’s 10,000 acre working cattle station set in the heart of South-East Queensland Country on the weekend of March 23 to 24, 2007.

Offering the ultimate in foodie experiences, the weekend will showcase local produce in conjunction with the slow food movement comprising of a seven course degustation dinner on the Friday night featuring Wagyu Beef and fine food from the South East Queensland region. The event will also include two concurrent food master classes followed by a light lunch and opportunities to talk with local slow food producers. Saturday evening will feature a ‘Slow Food’ grazing table in the lush gardens of the retreat from 5pm to 9pm, with an array of stalls offering local produce samples from throughout the region with a picnic hamper to be provided by local producers on Sunday.

Full details available here.

MELBOURNE FOOD AND WINE FESTIVAL PROGRAMME

Full program now available on line!

The 15th Melbourne Food & Wine Festival program can now be viewed online at www.melbournefoodandwine.com.au

Be tempted by over 150 events across Melbourne and Victoria including Festival favorites, the World’s Longest Lunch (16 March) and Cellar Door at Southgate (24 - 25 March). New events such as the International Flour Festival (24 March) - a multicultural event celebrating noodles, breads, pasta and all things flour and Wicked Sunday (25 March) a celebration of all things indulgent.

Your favourite restaurants are back on board offering their menus for a song with The Age Good Food Guide Restaurant Express and Melbourne CBD’s hottest bars have created a signature festival cocktail for the duration of the festival for B47.

For your free copy of the 2007 Print Program purchase a copy of The Age on Friday 16th February 2007.

Bookings for the festival are open 16th February through Ticketmaster on 136 100. Menus for restaurants participating in Restaurant Express will be available online on 16th February.

Melbourne Food and Wine makes its television debut!

Make sure you are tuned to Channel 10 on Saturday 24th February at 2pm for Melbourne Food and Wine festival’s debut on national television. A documentary filmed around the 2005 festival will screen on channel 10 in two weeks time - don’t miss it.

Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, Saturday 24th February, 2pm - Channel 10

If you can be in Melbourne, there are two programmes of great interest in late March, with overlap - especially at the weekend March 24 and 25. You can then visit community gardens if you are not tempted by the Flour Festival and Wicked Sunday.

If able to attend, don’t miss the 4th Annual City Farms & Community Gardens Conference (incorporating the 19th Annual Seed Savers’ Conference, to be held March 20-23 in Collingwood Town Hall followed by visits to gardens over the weekend March 24-25. Speakers will include Dr Vandana Shiva (by satellite link) - A Nobel Peade Prize winner, physicist, ecologist, author of many book and prominent in Slow Food and Terra Madre; Helena Norberg Hodge, founder and director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture; David Holmgran, co-originator with Bill Mollison of the permaculture concept; Malaika Edwards, a co-founder of the People’s Grocery in California; Jude and Michel Fanton, founders of the Seed Savers Network in Byron Bay; Jerry Coleby Williams a botanical horticulturalist, and ABC Gardening Australia presenter (he lives on the edge of Moreton Bay); Mick Marston who works with city farms in England; AND many presenters from Australia.

Registration before 1st March for non-business delegates is $180. Forms available from website, or from CERES.

Themes for the four days are - School Gardens (Tuesday 20th); Seed Savers (Wednesday 21st); Food Security (22nd); and City Farms and Community Gardens (Friday 23rd).

For complete flyer and registration form please contact CERES (03) 9387 2609 - www.ceres.org.au

THANKS TO ELENA ANIERE OF SLOW FOOD INTERNATIONAL AND TO VANDA EVISON FOR ALERTING US TO THESE PROGRAMMES.

A sad picture of the water situation in Australia.

Slowfood hits Britain.

Celebrations and gluttony getting you down? Here’s some respite, via Slow Web.

Interesting article here about some of the secrets of baking a great baguette.

Jo Wheeler, one of our members, has extended an invitation to our members for her Pantry Tour in association with Babak Hadi. Please RSVP to her if you plan to attend on Tuesday evening 5th December 2006. For further details see the attachment.

A review of Terra Madre, published by the San Francisco Chronicle, can be found here.

Just caught a Landline on the ABC where Bellata Gold wheat and pasta was profiled. The wheat is grown in north western NSW, perfect climate and soil for high quality durum wheat. This company, based in Tamworth, and its product look really top notch, and respected restaurants in Brisbane like ISIS are using this pasta. Most of the yield goes to restaurants and its not available in supermarkets. Contact them for stockists. Another great local alternative to imported Italian product or the typically uninteresting supermarket pasta. An interesting fact at the end of the profile, was that Italy is the biggest buyer of our durum wheat!

Here are a few photos from A Taste of Slow 2006, in Melbourne.

More local suppliers of farm fresh produce. Food Connect and City Cousins.

Farm Fresh Central - managed by Sarah and Amanda Frith of Roma. Delivers high quality farm produce from regional producers to Brisbane and SE QLD.

Although US centric, Food and Water Watch is worth a look, with some disturbing reading.

… alerted from Obsession with Food

A rare opportunity to combine gourmet growers of fabulous, fresh Queensland produce and chefs with a passion for working with that produce. You can experience the best of Queensland food and wine.This will be at the “Enterprising Women in Rural Industries Trade Show” on Tuesday 10 October in the Grand Ballroom at Royal on the Park, cnr Albert and Alice Streets (the limited entry trade show will occur on the Monday).

The programme, found here, describes details of Tuesday’s cooking demonstrations by Queensland chefs, including Slow Food members Alison Alexander (Brisbane).and Matt Golinski (Noosa). There will be talks on Queensland wines (including the remarkable Boreann) by Peter Howard (hopefully also tasting opportunities).

Tuesday is open to the public, and is a great opportunity to meet 40 primary producers from every region of Queensland. Entry is free and all produce is available for sale.

One of our members, Kathryn Beckingsale, has recently experienced some very fine dining in New Zealand.

She writes …

One does not need to go all the way to Italy to experience perfect pasta. On a recent visit to NZ we stayed at a dinner, bed and breakfast guesthouse called Quickenberry. There are many reasons why you would spend a night or two here. There is a world class golf course, the Rakaia River for jet boating, Mount Hutt for skiing and above all a chef called Robbie Koller and his wife Christine, the hostess. The private dining room seats 8 guests and after a pre dinner drink, dinner is served to those who are staying at the guesthouse. In all honesty I can say that the food the night we were there was the best I have ever tasted. As a serious foodie and vegetarian I am often disappointed with my dining out experiences but the passion and care with which Robbie prepares every dish, no matter how humble, rewards the diner with an unforgettable experience. The meat and fish eaters equally raved about their salmon and New Zealand lamb but they were as enthusiastic as I was with the presentation and taste of the vegetable dishes. It is an experience that I would highly recommend for the food alone, though I can guarantee that the accommodation and welcome leave nothing to be desired. As a bonus Robbie is happy to share his recipes with any keen diner and he holds cooking classes on the premises. (See their website for details)

In this months meeting, coming up Sept 28, we are very fortunate to have some new SFB members, Carl Rathus and Heather Matthews, present us with their experiences travelling around the South of India sampling the food, music and culture of this region. Make sure you have a look at their website, which is a good prelude to the meeting.

You should have received the meeting notice in your emailed newsletter, but if not, it can be downloaded here.

This article by Richard Cornish appeared in The Age Epicure section this week. It describes Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) schemes and refers to Brisbane-based Food Connect as such a scheme (although it appears to depart from the model of consurmers paying in advance and sharing any risk of a season’s crop with the producers). Slow Food Brisbane will organise a Club Night about CSAs as soon as it can.

I have finally managed to upload a gallery of photos from this very interesting day. The pictures say it all. Thanks to Gerry Brady for two of the photos.

On our Wood Fired Pizza Day up at Bob’s on 30th July, we had some wonderful slow cooked lamb amoungst other things. Well here is the recipe from a Mt Glorious local, Yvonne Mills, thanks Yvonne!

SLOW COOKED LAMB (7 HOURS)

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons olive oil
I cup seeded mustard
6 cloves garlic chopped
1 cup red wine
½ cup muscat liqueur
1-1/2 cups beef stock
8 small spanish (red) onions
2 tops of lamb leg or 1 whole lamb leg
2 trays of ice

Method
plunge lamb into boiling water for 12-15 minutes, remove from water and pat dry. Score top of lamb about 10 times with a sharp knife cutting about ¼ inch into the flesh. Rub garlic and mustard mixture into the top of the lamb. Sprinkle olive oil into the bottom of the baking pan (it must have a lid). Place lamb into pan and gently pour beef stock, wine and liqueur over the meat. Place 2 sheets of alfoil over the pan and place the lid on top. Cook for 1 hour in preheated oven at 170 degrees. Reduce the oven to 150 degrees and baste lamb approx every 1 to 1-1/2 hours. After 5 hours at 150 degrees remove from oven and place onions around lamb. Place back in oven at 180 degrees without lid – after about 20 minutes cover lamb only with piece of alfoil. Cook for a further 40 minutes. Remove from oven and lift lamb and onions out of pan and place on serving platter, cover to keep warm. Allow pan to stand and cool for about 10 minutes. Tip first tray of icecubes into juice – this will cool the juice quickly. Then add second tray of icecubes and allow fat to solidify – the fat can then be removed from the top of the juice. The juice can then be reduced, made into a gravy (with wheat flour or cornflour) and poured over the lamb and onions.

Supplementary note from Bob … Two weeks later I followed this recipe the morning after cooking pizzas at 300 degrees C in my wood-fired oven until 9pm, too late for the oven to cool for this recipe. The oven was completely closed until we began cooking at 10 am the next morning when the internal temperature was 165 C. The oven remained undisturbed until 4 pm when we took the lid off the heavy casserole and mixed a cup of caramelised onions into the liquid and basted the meat. The lid was replaced and the oven closed shut until 5pm when the meat was similarly cooked to that on the Slow Food pizza day. The internal temperature of the oven by then had fallen to 120 C.

If any are wondering about the Lunch next week at Sirromet and whether to book or not, here is the proposed menu.

A major Slow Food event in Australia is planned for 28 August to 10 September in Melbourne. Especially worthwhile attending if you cannot visit Turin in October for the Salone del Gusto. There is an excellent series of events, especially over the weekend of September 9 and 10 at the Abbotsford Convent site. The extensive programme includes David Pugh of Brisbane’s Restaurant Two who will be demonstrating cooking food which you can later eat. (always the best kind. Ed.)

Also have a look at what’s on offer during the preceding two weeks at http://www.melbournefoodandwine.com.au/

See also www.atasteofslow.com.au/ for the media releases and newsletter.

Robyn Cook kindly sent these details of the Organic Producers of Qld State Conference.

Where: Beerwah Community Centre
When: 1 & 2 September 2006

Precis: The Organic Producers Association of Queensland is an agricultural organization run by organic primary producers which offers a unifying statewide voice representing the interests of Queensland’s organic and biodynamic producers to industry peak bodies and all levels of government.

Federal government figures show that 6 million of the 7.9 million hectares of land certified for organic production in Australia is located in Queensland and that $60 million of the estimated $141 million annual national farm-gate value is from Queenslands organic producers. This state has a significant impact on the national organic scene.

The Back to Basics conference will provide a vital state forum for organic and interested conventional farmers and producers, wholesalers and industry representatives to discuss the many issues faced by Queenslands organic and conventional farmers. Some of these issues include; meeting the increasing consumer demand, Biodiesel and other energy alternatives, national certification standards, food safety standards, marketing and productivity.

• Day One: Delegates will be involved in a variety of workshops, plenary sessions and social events.
• Day Two: Delegates can choose between two bus tours visiting certified organic farms in the Sunshine Coast, Wide Bay/Burnett districts.

Local organic produce will be served at all social functions where delegates, sponsors and exhibitors can enjoy the best that Queensland’s organic farmers have to offer.

I would be grateful if you could pass on this information through your network. Exhibitor and Sponsorship opportunities are also available.

Thank you
Robyn Cook

Secretariat for
Back to Basics State Conference 2006

Organic Producers Association of Queensland 1300 889 177 : piproductions@ozemail.com.au

NOTE: There are two PDF forms with the important details such as cost, enrolment OPAC memership etc.

• Conference Details
• Delegate Registration

Here is a site with lots of audio podcasts on food topics, history, methods etc. You can listen straight off the screen, you do not need an iPod or anything.

Another blog of interest.

To acknowledge his invitation to Turin for Slow Food’s Terra Madre, Executive chef Andrew Mirosch will feature the best of regional fresh food from the sea and land in a Degustation Luncheon, at noon for 12.30 on Wednesday August 16 (Show Day) at awarded Lurleens Restaurant in Sirromet winery, Mt Cotton. Cost of 6 courses with matched wines will be $70. Reservations with Slow Food Brisbane Convivium close on August 13. Contact Mary-Anne Fraser - tel 3311-2687, mobile 0414 673 287. Read the rest of this entry »