Queso Blanco for Mamasita Inspired Corn

Mamasita is an awesome mexican restaurant in Melbourne. It is young (it opened the same night I arrived here, four months ago, which makes us soulmates) and it is great. I've never been to Mexico and so I can't say whether this is authentic or not but I also don't give two shits. It's the closest to the great mexican food we ate in the States, and that is good enough for me. If you live in Melbourne, you should go to Mamasita. If you don't live in Melbourne, you should come and visit, and go there, and take me with you. Everything we have eaten there has been excellent, but they have this corn on the menu that is so good, you will want to cancel every other dish ordered and just get repeat corn instead.

("The Corn" is actually Elotes callejeros: "Street Style" chargrilled corn with queso, chipotle mayonnaise, & lime)

Anyway. The other night we had friends over for tacos and as a starter I attempted to recreate this dish. I made Homesick Texan's chipotle mayonnaise and I also used her recipe for Queso Blanco which is a soft creamy and very mild spanish/mexican cheese:

Ingredients:
2L whole milk
1/4 cup lime juice
salt

Bring the milk to an almost boil, add the lime juice and let it simmer for 5 minutes or so. From here on, it looks pretty disgusting as the milk curdles and goes lumpy and you have flashbacks of being spewed on by baby cousins.

Pour the contents of the pot into a cheesecloth lined colander in the sink and drain for a few minutes, and sprinkle with salt.

Bundle up the cheesecloth and tie it so the cheese is all in a ball, and hang it somewhere to drain for a few hours. I left it overnight, which was fine as it is winter but obviously you wouldn't want to do it if the temperature was anything near warm.

In the morning I untied the cloth, and inside was a neat little white ball of cheese! It held together pretty well, there was quite a bit stuck in the cloth but I don't know if that is just what happens.. The cheese apparently will keep in the fridge for as long as the milk would have.

For the corn, we simply grilled it in a pan, brushed on some chipotle mayonnaise and grated the queso over. It didn't grate particularly well, as it reached room temperature it got quite soft. Next time I would make sure to grate it straight from the fridge - or even frozen might work. We ended up just sort of crumbling it over the corn, and then sprinkled some smoked paprika over and served with limes.

Not as pretty as Mamasita's but it tasted good, and having leftover chipotle mayonnaise and queso in the fridge is a good bonus!

Recipes

"If you have a good palate and oodles of patience, you can achieve amazing dishes with the right recipe. You must, however, follow the recipe". -Matt Preston.

What a load of crap.

Preston is a very good food writer, despite being prone to the occasional lapse into encyclopaedic recitation of factoids. His unfortunately-titled book Cravat-a-Licious is an enjoyable read. 

However, I couldn't disagree more with his "rule" about recipes. In Cravat-a-Licious, Preston lists a number of "rules" that he thinks ought to guide home cooks. They're mostly fairly unobjectionable, if a tad patronising. The recipe rule, however, is pretty much offensive. Preston's silly rule tells us home cooks that the fundaments of cooking are beyond our feeble grasp; that our role is merely to reassemble pre-ordained dishes as if they were flat-packed furniture.

It's also at odds with his rule #13, "cook from your heart". How can you "cook from your heart" if you're robotically, slavishly following a recipe?

I started out highly recipe-dependent and completely scared of failure in the kitchen. Cooking, for me, was something I took up as a means to an end when I first moved out of home, the end being my slightly gluttonous love of eating. I soon found that I loved cooking for its own sake, but it took a while to learn when and how to veer away from the strictures of recipes, to substitute and improvise and even create dishes of my own: ie., to actually cook properly. 

Preston's rule tells us not to bother, that we're better being fearful of food and dutifully following a recipe, measuring out 125 grams of flour here and 15ml of olive oil there. He does backtrack a bit with rule #34: "if you are a good cook you don't have to follow a recipe word for word". What a generous concession to the abilities of home cooks.

As I said at the start, I like Matt Preston. I didn't watch Masterchef, but I do think he's a good writer. I just find his attitude towards home cooks a bit patronising and dismissive, which is surprising from someone who often seems to value rustic "authenticity" over fiddly fine-dining.

Melbourne

Hello internet! It has been a while.

Since we last posted, we've moved to Melbourne! Well, I've moved to Melbourne (I'm Matt; hi). Soda is moving in a few days.

I think this blog will continue, but will be less about things we've cooked and eaten in Perth, and more about things we've cooked and eaten in Melbourne. Makes sense, really.

I've already started to eat my way around this city. The highlights of January were Cumulus, Inc., Rumi (twice), Cafe Vue, MoVida, Auction Rooms (a million times), the bratwurst and borek shops at the Queen Vic Market and Gigibaba.

Expect to see the same shoddy iPhone photography and tediously overworked prose you've become wearily accustomed to, only this time applied to the restaurants of a whole new city! A city with a million food bloggers who have already blogged about every last cafe, milk bar, soup stand, izakaya and laneway pop-up restaurant!

I'm not quite sure what I'll contribute by adding my voice to the thronging virtual masses of Melburnians yelling across each other about the latest developments in Andrew McConnell's career (dude is KING of this city, apparently). I'll give it a go anyway. Also we will keep cooking things and posting about things we cook, in another startlingly original contribution to the weblog genre.

Hope you'll still be interested in reading!

Tacos!

Oh hello here are some tacos we ate in chronological order, in California 2009.

El Coyote, LA & Danny's Deli, Venice Beach

Kogi Korean Taco Truck* & LA Farmers Market

 

Taqueria Castillo in SF & Nopalito, SF*

 

Pancho Villa, SF & somewhere on Market St, SF

 

Market St, SF & Baja Fresh in a Service Station on the drive back from SF to LA

*Special written super praises may follow for Kogi & Nopalito, easily the kings of 2009 Taco Adventures!

The French Laundry

Yountville is almost creepily scenic. Imagine Margaret River if it wasn't full of franchises. So, imagine Bridgetown, only without a highway down the middle. It also feels a bit like Disneyland, except instead of Mickey Mouse the central character that the town revolves around is Thomas Keller.

Keller has three restaurants in this small, one-street town. The Michelin one-star Bouchon, the casual family-style Ad Hoc, and the world-beating reason we'd driven an hour and a bit north of San Francisco, the French Laundry. He also has the spin-off Bouchon Bakery, a little shop front that started off purely to supply the restaurants, but is now open to the public. They still deliver bread down the street in a little branded delivery bicycle, a twee touch that would make me retch and wince in disbelief if it was in an Audrey Tatou movie.

Keller has a lot going on, but the focus is very much the French Laundry.


We wandered up the main street from the little converted train we were staying in, hoping to stumble across The Restaurant, when we came across a farm. Rows and rows of cabbages, herbs, lettuces of all kinds, a giant persimmon tree, a greenhouse.




Then we looked a bit closer and realised...

That's not just a farm, that's the farm, the French Laundry's kitchen garden. We turned around and there it was, the culinary mecca.

A few hours later, we were inside, and ready to eat.

I'd love to describe each dish we ate, but I'm afraid I'd bore you. The menu is a nine course degustation plus assorted canapes, with a choice between an omnivorous menu and a vegetarian menu. Each menu gives a choice between two alternatives on several courses, giving you the chance to taste even more than the allotted number of dishes if you're willing to share (we did, although sometimes reluctantly).

We ate the signature salmon cornets, a foie gras terrine with hazelnuts and brioche, a dumpling with tripe and black truffles, two different fish dishes. Tiny rolls from the Bouchon Bakery were served with a French butter and one from Vermont that comes from a dairy farm with four cows. Soda raved about her tiny rack and saddle of rabbit. We had incredible lamb from Elsyian Fields Farm, the saddle wrapped in its own fat and cooked sous vide, tasting much more strongly gamey than the lamb we eat at home and the more subtle roast we had a few nights earlier at Chez Panisse.

There was a composed cheese course, a pre-dessert that took its cues from the Dark and Stormy cocktail  featuring a ginger beer foam and ginger tuile, a bakewell tart and chocolate cake (that of course didn't look like bakewell tart and chocolate cake), some mignardises including a sublime salted caramel truffle.

You can see some fairly average photos of these incredible dishes on my Picasa, but I really need to rave about two courses in particular: Oysters and Pearls, and the "Caesar Salad".

I almost wish I hadn't eaten Oysters and Pearls, because now that I have there's no turning back. Oysters and Pearls set the bar so high, I'm not sure any other restaurant will be able clear it. This is a dish with aims so far beyond sustenance that it deserves its own category as a pleasure-delivery vehicle: to call it it "food" feels woefully inadequate.

Oysters and Pearls consists of lightly poached oysters, all briny and sweet, in a delicately chive-scented sabayon studded with tapioca pearls. On top goes a hunking great wodge of unspeakably good caviar. That's it. It builds and builds, subtle at first, but then the delicate, salty roe start to work their magic, popping in the mouth, the tapioca spheres a textural echo of the caviar. The oysters themselves tip it over the top into pure hedonism.

I have to eat this again someday. Perhaps, someday, Per Se. Until then, I'll just have to dream about it.

Oysters and Pearls, as you'll have gathered, was a very good way to begin a meal. Things got better from there.

I have no hesitation in naming the French Laundry's "Caesar Salad" as the greatest single dish I've ever had the pleasure of eating. The dish bears very little relation to any Caesar salad you or I have seen before, instead using classic Caesar dressing as a jumping off point for a dish that is based around Keller's famous butter-poached lobster tail.

On the base of the plate is a generous but inadequate mound of Caesar dressing (I would drink two litre cartons of "Caesar Chill" if it existed), with bottarga playing the role of anchovy. Bottarga is sun-dried mullet roe, and shares a similar salty, intense, umami-laden deliciousness with anchovies, one of my favourite foods. The bottarga gives the dressing a light orange hue, which mirrors the butter-poached lobster tail perched on top.

Sitting next the lobster is a rectangular piece of cos lettuce ('romaine', to the Americans), caramelised on the outside and giving an extra nod to the salad that gives this dish its name. Perched atop it all at a jaunty angle is a little garlic crisp, a delicate tuile with the muted taste of roasted garlic.

Over the top, a waiter shaves another few flakes of bottarga tableside. Wow. From the first forkful, I went into a glassy-eyed stupour, something S tends to refer to as my "polenta face" after first encountering it over a plate of crab and polenta at Icebergs in Sydney a few years ago. The lobster is tender and moist, tasting of the sea, its natural fattiness reinforced by the beurre monte (butter emulsified with water) in which it was poached.

The lobster, in a nice fusion of the classic and modern techniques, is poached in a vat controlled by an immersion circulator, but isn't vacuum sealed first, so it's halfway between a sous-vide poach and a traditional poach. A nice summation of where the kitchen sits on the modern-traditional spectrum, I think.

We even got invited to view the kitchen and meet the Chef de Cuisine, Tim Hollingsworth, a man who represented America at the last Bocuse d'Or culinary Olympics. The kitchen is shockingly small, with six stations managing to turn out food of such precision and quality, with two menus that are really more like four given the choices available, plus canapes, every night. Oh and the menu changes every day. These are cooks at the top of their game, at the top of the world, and I'm incredibly glad I got to eat their food.


The French Laundry
 6640 Washington St
Yountville, CA 94599