The Boomtown Rap

Well, I said I’d report back on my findings after attending the 2010 Good Food and Wine Show. So here goes…

We arrived at 11.15 on Friday morning, and I have to admit I was expecting my interest to flag within a couple of hours at most. Outside a generous sample of rum by 11.20am, I started to feel optimistic about the day ahead. As things transpired, we were still there at 4pm when the day session finished, and could have put in another few hours quite cheerfully – without sampling all the Show had to offer! Read the rest…

The sellout is me, not the Good Food and Wine Show. See, I’ve accepted an offer of free tickets to the show in exchange for doing a promo post.

Never accepted payola before…then again, I haven’t been tempted with an offer until now. They say everyone’s got a price, and I guess I’ve just demonstrated that mine’s not very high. Think of it this way, teeming and now disenchanted hordes of Boomtown Rap devotees: life’s full of disillusionment – I’m just doin’ my bit in the service of checkin’ your collective realities. Read the rest…

As readers of this blog will know, I have been a home-baked pizza fanatic for a while now. I’ve done lots of experimenting, tried lots of tweaks. Masochists can trace the evolution of my pizza sojourn from its beginnings via the links at the bottom of this post.

While I’m no fan of Masterchef (rave building…but that’s another post), Gary Mehigan and Georgieboy Calombaris are undoubtedly excellent chefs and I do make sure I catch the Friday night ‘Masterclass’ episodes (he lied, trying to suggest he exercised some degree of discrimination, when in fact he hasn’t missed an episode: blame a long-standing trash TV addiction). Last Friday’s class was particularly interesting for me because it featured Gaz and Georgieboy demonstrating home-baked pizza.

Earlier in the week, there had been an ‘Invention Test’ in which the contestants were given one hour to turn out “the best woodfired pizzas in the known universe” – or some such silly hyperbolic Georgism (can someone pleeease dunk his fucking scriptwriter in the deep fryer?).

That’s one hour including making the dough! Errr, pizza dough has yeast in it – and yeasted dough needs a lot longer proofing time than 1 hour! So WTF? Read the rest…

For the past year, I’ve been on a sourdough tour of discovery. It’s been a fascinating ride, taking in many different dough formulae and techiques. Some I’ve sourced from bread gurus – Hamelman, Reinhart, Lepard, Glezer – but most have come courtesy of amateur home bakers generously sharing their recipes and expertise on artisan bread sites like Sourdough Companion, The Fresh Loaf and Wild Yeast.

My sourdough adventures have not been confined to bread…

Try sourdough pizza and there’s no going back.

Ditto pancakes.

Panettone.

Fougasse.

Bagels.

Bananabread.

Even hot cross buns!

The sourdough breads I’ve baked have included pain de campagnes, San Joaquin sourdoughs, Norwich sourdough, walnut breads, barm breads, Italian batards, semolina sourdoughs, country boules, ciabattas, simple milk loaves, San Francisco style sourdoughs, and various adaptations of classics by acclaimed bakers such as Lionel Poilâne and Gérard Rubaud. If you’re not a breadhead these names won’t mean much to you. Don’t speaka this language? Doan worry! For here we come to the core of this post, which is a return to basics: a no-fuss, everyday sourdough bread that tastes great and is simple to make. Read the rest…

Back in July 08, I wrote a post entitled Making Your Own GREAT Pizzas At Home. The title was not an exaggeration. I had experimented with multiple pizza recipes before developing one I particularly liked, and with further tweaking over a period of months was consistently getting results that I was pretty pleased with. My pizzas were on a par with all but one of my favourite local pizzerias, and given the restrictions of a domestic oven, I was chuffed with that.

Naturally, I slipped into evangelical mode and posted my recipe on the web for anyone interested. The response was underwhelming, although a few folk emailed me privately to enthuse after trying the recipe. But there were hundreds of pizza recipes on the web, I reasoned – why should massive tribes of pizza pundits flock to my blog? I sulked vaguely for a short time, then got on with enjoying my home-baked lil’ luverlies.

That was not the end of the story – not by a long way. Driven by a restless and at times self-defeating perfectionism, I continued to experiment with my pizzas, but could not improve on the recipe I posted. Then I happened upon a remarkable site of obsession and instruction that set me back on my increasingly well-padded bum with a jolt: Read the rest…

This post is a presentation of the essentials of sourdough bread baking, a collation of information I’ve acquired through months of inhabiting artisan bread baking forums, reading books by the bread gurus and – most important of all – trying many different sourdough bread recipes. Consider it a short-cut to your own wide wonderful world of artisan sourdough bread baking at home. Hopefully, I’ve included everything you need to know to get started. Read the rest…

I used to love family holidays as a kid. Every year, we’d drive down to Busselton and stay at a cottage in a beach-front ‘resort’ called Glenleigh, named after the owner’s daughters (yep, Glen and Leigh). They were enchanted summers. The old steam train in the park we’d clamber over until we became too old yet eyed off with enduring affection every time we passed it, the best pies I have ever tasted (still!), that endless mythic jetty, drive-in movies, raspberry squashes in frosty pilsener glasses from the Ship Hotel, and of course, sun sun sun, sand sand sand, sea sea sea…these are cherished memories.

If this post was about those good ol’ days at Busselton, I could rattle away effortlessly for hours. But it’s not, so I won’t. Besides, it wasn’t all good.

There were the hated swimming lessons, and stingers that invaded the bay in such numbers as to ruin the beach on some days. There were family squabbles and annoying excursions to scenic locales that I saw as merely depriving us of valuable time at the seaside. The worst aspect of these outings was lunchtime. Never was one for sitting on rugs on the gravelly ground of some national park BBQ area, battling swarming flies and resentful bull ants while my unappreciated and often irritated mother doled out her elaborately prepared esky tucker. So irksome were these outings to me that I ended up with “issues” about picnics and families that remain to this day.

One of the few upsides to those dreaded family excursions was the bread we’d buy in the then tiny towns of Dunsborough, Bridgetown and Augusta. Read the rest…

I watched a doco on TV recently on the erratic but – to my mind – much under-rated 60s UK band, The Small Faces. Their 1968 ‘concept’ album Ogden’s Nutgone Flake, a psychedelic rock classic, was one of the first albums I bought. I still treasure this unique work – for the great music, the warped and inspired narrative in “Unwinese” by Stanley Unwin, and the eccentric fold-out tobacco tin cover (in good nick, this album is now a prize collectors’ item fetching $300+ …but I’d never sell mine).

One of my favourite tracks is Song Of A Baker. Strange, but in all the times I’ve listened to this song, I’d never really pondered on the lyrics until the TV doco – even though I know them by heart: Read the rest…

Here they are again. Random, disorganised, informed by personal prejudice…just how you like it. Yes you do. YES, you DO!

Right, now that that’s established, are you all sitting comftybold two square on your botties? Then I’ll begin…

2009 Boomtown Rap Free-to-air TV Awards: The BR Bogeys

Pet Semetary Award: Hey Hey It’s Saturday. Whose idea was it to dig this rotting cadaver up, give it mouth-to-mouth and send it lurching back to TV land? I never could understand the popularity of Hey Hey even back in its halcyon days, but what do I know – exhuming it was a ratings winner. Daryl Somers proved there is plenty to eat in the afterlife. Other than that, what to say except thank God for the blackface ‘Red Faces’ skit – anything that riles Harry Connick Jnr gets my tick of approval.

Family Show of the Year: John Safran’s Race Relations. This is confessional comedy taken to its limits (until the next Safran outing). Read the rest…

During the early elimination rounds of MasterChef Australia, I suggested in my post entitled ‘MasterChef Australia’ – Egos in Aprons, Seeking Celebrity that this was just another ‘reality TV’ show, and therefore all about entertainment and ratings, rather than determining which of the contestants was the best cook. A fake, in other words. I predicted that the final 20 would be selected not solely on cooking prowess, but on other criteria to do with maximising the appeal of the show. My punt, ignoring the cooking ability factor altogether, was that the finalists would fit into the following categories: Read the rest…