The Test Kitchen

The Test Kitchen by Luke Dale-Roberts. Un-be-fucking-lievable.

So I went out for a much-belated birthday meal last night to The Test Kitchen. I felt like a little kid, I was so excited. Luke Dale-Roberts is a world-renowned chef, who pushed La Colombe to 12th place on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list last year. The man is a food genius, proven by the fact that The Test Kitchen has been open for about 8 months and is fully booked two weeks in advance.

There are two menu options on offer for dinner: the à la carte menu, where you can choose either 3 or 5 courses, with or without wine pairing, and then there's the other option - the reason you go to The Test Kitchen - the tasting menu. Currently The Test Kitchen is offering an incredible tasting menu which has been meticulously put together by Luke Dale-Roberts and winemakers Adi Badenhorst and Eben Sadie.  I know very little about wine, but I know that these guys produce some seriously good wine and I was very keen to see what kinds of foods would be paired with which wines.

Needless to say, I opted for the tasting menu. The menu is called "The Fantastic Eben, Adi and Luke show". And what a show it was. I wish I could describe the quality of the food which I was served. We were sitting at the kitchen bar counter, which was literally right next to the pass (where the food is plated and sent out). Luke was standing a metre away from me plating the dishes to be served. It was unreal to have that kind of dining experience. I was able to ask him questions about the food, and it was incredible how open he was about the food, his preparation methods and what his flavour combinations are. The food itself was mind-blowing. Every ingredient complemented the next expertly and made my mouth sink into a cloud of blissful enjoyment. The tasting menu is an 11 course meal, composed of small flavour explosions which just happen to arrive in the form of food on a plate. I couldn't believe how complex the food was (yet it seemed so simple? - incredible), and at the same time how balanced the flavours, textures and ingredients were in every dish. This is extremely difficult to get right, so to get it right 11 courses in a row was phenomenal. Everything was (dare I say) perfect. It seems like whirl of colour, flavour and emotion made up my world last night. Little surprises probe your tastebuds to ask "Hey! What is that? Thats a match I never would have imagined but it just works so well."

I would explain each course to you, but that would take far to long and would not even do the garnish on the plate justice. The wine parings were beautiful, and brought out flavours in the dishes that were hiding away. This really opened up my eyes to just how well wine can complement food.

To say that I had a meal would be lying. What Luke and his team provide is an unparalleled, mouthwatering, exquisite food experience. The food, the service, the wine, the setting, everything came together to provide what is probably the most intimate, sensual food experience available in Africa. Don't hesitate, get yourself to The Test Kitchen for a food experience like no other.

dK

*please excuse the lack of quality pictures. It was a "I-half-forgot-my-camera-at-home-half-left-it-there-because-I-thought-it-might-be-rude-taking-pictures-of-restaurant-food" kind of situation. But I'll be sure to take it next time. The potential for great photos is huge in that space. The photos of the menu are taken by me, the others are copied off the interweb.

Mojitos

Yay! Its Friday! And Fridays mean one thing to me: cocktails. Every week, I experiment with cocktails, getting pretty slaughtered in the process of finding the ultimate balance between the alcohols used and the other ingredients. But hey, thats all for you guys, you should be thanking me for doing all the dirty work. I think its a noble quest, anyhow.

I like cocktails where you can taste the ingredients. Good ingredients = good cocktails. So don't be stingy, go and buy proper limes, use the best rum you can find and use fresh mint. You'll get to notice that I like my cocktails rather strong, so if you're a bit of a pussy feel free to water it down a little by using more ice / water / soda water.

Today, I found what I think is a great recipe for Mojitos.

Ingredients

8 mint leaves

3 level teaspoons sugar (I use brown sugar)

juice of half a lime

2 shots white rum

crushed ice

• Place the sugar, mint and lime juice in a pestle and mortar, then grind together to form a nice liquidy paste.
• Pour the liquidy paste into a low tumbler glass, add the rum, and fill the glass with crushed ice. Stir together, garnish with a mint sprig (if you're in the mood) and serve.

This cocktail is great, and I like the fact that you can taste the sugar, mint and rum quite clearly, and there's a good balance between them. The original recipe uses soda water, but I don't dig it, so guess what? I don't use it.

Get drinking!

dK

# Photographically, I like to see the difference in focus range, and the overall feel of the photo, when I focus on objects which are in the foreground, and then take the same photo but focusing on the objects in the background, as in the following 2 photos. #

Almond and Lemon Cake

"S'ils n'ont plus de pain, qu’ils mangent de la brioche." - Marie Antionette

"If they have no bread, let them eat cake!" This famous misquotation (What? You didn't know it was a misquotation? Read about it here.) by Marie Antionette is wonderful when you analyse it and realise that, really, all she was trying to do is do the peasants a favour and let them eat glorious cake. 

Speaking of, this IS a glorious cake. I found the recipe while blog-trawling the other day, promptly gave it a try and was very impressed with what came out of my oven. Its very simple, and is made using very traditional cake baking methods. I would encourage anyone to bake it; you can't really fuck it up unless you overbake it, which is unlikely to happen seeing that you, being such a keen food enthusiast, are here, reading this post. Or whatever. Just make the cake. You will be thanking me.

Ingredients

225g unsalted butter, at room temperature

225g castor sugar

4 free range eggs

125g plain flour*

100g almonds*

zest and juice of 2 lemons

1 tsp almond or lemon extract, if you can find it, or just use vanilla extract if you want

*The mixture of ground almonds and flour can be altered. If you can afford it, go for as much ground almonds as possible, just make sure that the total mixture makes up 225g. E.g. use 175g ground almonds and 50g flour, etc. DO NOT use less than 100g ground almonds. You can make ground almonds by processing whole almonds in a food processor if you can't find it at the shops. Try dry-roasting your almonds first, it'll probably give off a completely different, more complex, flavour.

• Preheat your oven to 180°C. Set up an oven rack on the lowest level. Grease a 24cm springform cake tin well with butter. You can line it as well if you want to.
• In a large, wide bowl, cream your butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy. ("creaming" is a process whereby you beat butter and sugar together vigorously so that the sugar and butter become one pale and fluffy mixture).
• Add one egg to the creamed butter and flour mixture along with about 2tbsp of the flour. Mix it in well. Add another egg and another 2tbsp flour, mix in, and continue like this until all the eggs and flour are well mixed in.
• Carefully mix in the ground almonds, lemon zest and juice, and whatever flavoured extract you may be using. Don't worry if you think the mixture looks curdled when you add the lemon juice, it will be fine. And if it does look curdled, just mix well and it will turn out fine.
• Pour the mixture into the prepared tin, even it out, and place on the oven rack on the lowest shelf (this will make sure that the top of the cake does not burn as it bakes). Turn down the oven to 170 °C and bake for 20 minutes. 
• After 20 minutes, place the cake and oven rack onto the middle shelf (this will help the top to brown evenly in the final stage of baking). Bake for a further 5-10 minutes. Check regularly by inserting a toothpick into the middle of the cake. The cake is done when the toothpick comes out almost clean and the top of the cake is firm. TAKE CARE NOT TO OVERBAKE, as this will cause the cake to dry out and will ruin the whole point of this cake.
• Take the cake out of the oven when it is done and allow to cool on a wire rack for about 15 minutes in the tin. Unmould the cake and place it back on the wire rack to finish cooling. 

Try not to cut the cake before the cake has cooled properly. It WILL tempt you. Your willpower WILL be tested. It's that good. But, seriously, if you cut the cake before it is cool, it will not complete its baking process properly and it will end up crumbly. I would say allow at least 30 minutes cooling time.

If you want, sprinkle over some toasted almond slivers, and dust with icing sugar (if you're aiming for that super-duper professional look).

This cake is moist, rich, and really simple. You can taste the almonds and lemon beautifully, which epitomises the whole point of this being such a simple cake: you can taste what is in it!

dK

#  On a photographic note, notice the difference between the lighting of the picture above and the one below, and what it does to the overall colour of the picture. The one above was taken using a flash, and the one below without, with the same background lighting. Seeing as they are relatively similar pictures, I was interested by the differences in colour hue, amount of noise in the picture (the one below is far "noisier") and overall clarity and definition. #

Esp015 from Espressolab

Coffee. Its the elixir of life. Seriously, as much as you'd like to say "Nahhh, come on now," its true. Plus its good for you. But this is about a new coffee blend, in particular, the Esp015 from Espressolab Microroasters. When I buy coffee, it usually comes from one of two places:

Origin Coffee Roasting (Hudson Street in de Waterkant)
Espressolab Microroasters (the shop is located in the Old Biscuit Mill in Woodstock)

I like Espressolab because of the people there. They've got a serious passion for coffee and are very conscious of sourcing their coffee from farms where the farmers are paid the correct prices for their coffee, and as far as possible the coffee is organic. If you didn't know, the coffee trading industry is notorious for drastically underpaying farmers for incredible quality coffees and exploiting the farmers in general. If you're interested, go and watch a movie called Black Gold. That'll be as good an education as any about the coffee industry. Its a sad, but true, reality.

So Espressolab really make me feel like I'm doing a good thing by buying their ethically-sourced coffee.
Plus, the coffee is fucking amazing. I was there this morning, and I've read about their new blends on their blog. I'm always sceptical about the way people say that they taste all these "profiles" and "flavours" in the coffee. I just know when a coffee tastes great or tastes shit. But anyway, wanting to make a believer out of myself, I took their words into consideration and decided that I would taste their new blend with an open mind, and I decided to really look for those flavours, and see what I could find.

The Esp015 really surprised me. Read how they describe the blend here. I'd forgotten every flavour profile they had mentioned, so I wanted to see what came up for me. In the aroma, I could smell honey, fynbos, and dark chocolate. These smells were all quite distinct, which impressed me. In the cup, I tasted a smoky, woody flavour, with fruity notes, and a slight chocolate backtaste. The finish was extraordinary, and remained around my tongue for a good 20 minutes. When I read the flavour profile afterwards, it seemed quite different, but I was nonetheless still astounded by the complexity of the coffee.

I love discovering new things like this. This next week will now be that much better because of it (I promptly bought myself a bag of the goods).

Espressolab. Check it out. They're doing some great things down there.


Monday-Friday from 8am-4pm
Saturday from 8am-2pm

The Old Biscuit Mill
373-375 Albert Road, Woodstock
Cape Town, South Africa

t: +27 21 4470845
e: info@espressolabmicroroasters.com


website: http://www.espressolabmicroroasters.com/
blog: http://espressolabmicroroasters.blogspot.com/


dK

Focus! on the espresso

Pictures from the Biscuit Mill. I got lazy. So these are all unedited. Notice the HUGE jar of Nutella...

Crusty white bread

I love bread. This bread comes out of the Ottolenghi cookbook, but I've changed it quite a bit to get what I wanted out of it. Its a nice bread, perfect for everyday consumption. It takes two days to make, but is extremely easy.

The bread is made in 2 parts: the biga, and then the final dough. Making the biga a day in advance allows time for the gluten to develop, and for the bread to develop a slightly deeper flavour.

I use Eureka Mills flours. They are preservative and bleach free, and are stone-ground, making them more wholesome and healthy than other flours. I wouldn't recommend using anything else.

Ingredients

Biga: 375g strong white bread flour

          200ml water

          1-1½ tsp active dried yeast

Final dough: 25g strong white bread flour

                       2tsp barley malt syrup

                       120ml water

                       1½ tsp fine salt

DAY 1

Make your biga. Put all the ingredients for the biga in the bowl of a stand mixer with the dough hook attachment and run on low speed for about 7-10minutes, or until the dough comes together as a tight ball. You may need to add a bit of water, or get your hands involved to incorporate some of the flour. Seeing as the dough is quite 'dry', it tends to be stubborn in incorporating all the flour itself. 

It'll start off looking like this:

Then after a few minutes, this will happen. Notice the few dry pieces refusing to become part of the dough. Give it a bit of a knead inside the bowl to get these into the dough.

You should end up with this:

Lightly brush a bowl at least twice the volume of the dough with some olive oil. Put the dough in the bowl, cover the bowl with a damp cloth or lid, and leave for about 24 hours at room temperature.

DAY 2

Take the biga out of the bowl. It should've roughly doubled in size, i.e. from this

To this:

Take the dough and cut it up into little pieces with a pair of scissors or a metal dough scraper. 

Put these pieces into the bowl of the food mixer with the flour, malt and water.

Knead on low speed for about 7 minutes. If the dough battles to come together, use one of your hands to squeeze it all together in the bowl of the mixer. The biga can be a bit of a mission sometimes to incorporate just by using the mixer. Your hands will do a great job. Increase the speed and knead on a medium-high speed for another 5 minutes. The dough will go from this:

To this:

Add the salt at this point and knead for a further 5 minutes or so on medium-high speed. Keep an eye on your dough to make sure that it does not creep up the dough hook and into the mechanism. This will cause untold shit. So keep an eye out. The dough will be quite sticky and will look like this:

Take it out of the mixer and put in in an oiled bowl. Cover with a damp cloth or lid and place in a warm place which is draught free for about 45 minutes.

*A NOTE ON PROVING DOUGH*

In order for the yeasts in bread to activate, they need two things: warmth and fuel. The fuel comes from the gluten in the hydrated flour. Optimally, yeasts want a temperature of around 40°C. Obviously, we cannot control the weather. What I like to do to give my dough a warm environment, is I switch the oven on for about 3 minutes just so that it heats up slightly, then I switch it off and place my dough in there to prove. It works fantastically.

After 45 minutes or so, you are going to give the dough a series of turns. Lightly oil your hands, tuck your fingers under one side of the dough, and pull the dough upwards to stretch it. Push this flap down onto the middle of the dough. Turn the dough and repeat this, until you have turned the dough once all over. Flip the dough over in the bowl so that the flaps are on the underside, and cover and leave to prove in a warm place for a further 1 hour.

Put your baking stone on a rack below the middle of your oven. Switch it on to the conventional heat or conventional baking setting, and turn it up to 245°C. It will need this amount of time to heat up properly.

After and hour or so, turn the dough again as you did, and let it rest for 10 minutes. Prepare a teflon baking sheet by placing it on a chopping board and lightly dusting it with flour. Flour your hands. Turn your dough out carefully onto the sheet. Gently handling your dough, shape it into whatever shape you please (I like the classic ciabatta shape, its great for slicing the bread and making sandwiches). Leave the dough to rest for around 30 minutes.

It will start off looking like this:

And will relax slightly into this:

Now its time to bake the bread. If you look at the picture above, you will notice a water spritzer (sprayer) and a container with water in it. What you need do next must happen very quickly, so that your oven does not lose too much heat.

Step 1: Open the oven and slide the dough (still on the teflon sheet) off the chopping board and onto the baking stone.

Step 2: Carefully throw the water out of the container and onto the bottom of your oven. It will boil instantly and will create steam inside the oven.

Step 3: Spray your water spritzer directly into the oen about 5 or 6 times. Close the oven door immediately.

All of this should take roughly 15 seconds. Turn your oven down to 235°C. Bake the bread for about 15 minutes until the crust starts to take colour, open the oven door to release the steam, then close it and bake for a further 20 minutes or so until the crust turns a dark colour. Don't stress if it takes longer, the bread can't really "overbake".

*A NOTE ON STEAMING YOUR OVEN*

In order for the bread to be allowed to rise in the oven without forming a crust immediately, we need to create steam inside the oven. This moist environment will allow the oven spring to occur before a crust forms. We create this environment in a home oven by throwing water onto the bottom of the oven once the dough is in, and by spraying water vapour into the oven as well, just for reassurance. Once the bread has risen to its full potential height (after about 15 minutes) and you can see colour starting to form on the crust, this moist environment is no longer needed, and we need to quickly release the steam from the oven by opening the oven door. This new, dry environment will allow a dry, crunchy crust to form.

The bread will go from this:

To this, within about 3 minutes:

And then to this a further 4 minutes later:

And it will finally end up like this:

When the bread is baked, take it out of the oven and allow it to cool on a cooling rack.

The bread develops a wonderfully crunchy crust, and a light, soft crumb (the crumb is the part inside the bread). I find that it is best enjoyed on the day of baking, as the extreme crunch of the crust softens slightly after a day. However, the bread stays fresh for at least 3 days, and is brilliant toasted. 

Have fun baking.

dK