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Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
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Foods & Ingredients
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In
this week’s MENU:
30th
Blaauwklippen Blending Competition Awards Heritage
Day Caramel
sauce
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whole story here would take too much space. Click on Bold words in the
text of this edition to open links to pictures, blogs, pertinent
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This week’s Product menu: Truffles are the flavour of the moment and
truffle related products are bmoving out as fast as we can replenish our stock.
Must be the wintry weather! In addition, we continue to receive enquiries for
Mediterranean and Middle Eastern products like sumac and za’atar and for Puy
lentils, black beans, beluga lentils and other pulses. We do have all of these
currently in stock. We surmise many of you are using Ottolenghi cookbooks! Our
online shop shows our range of rare and exciting products which you are
unlikely to find elsewhere in South Africa. See it here
Our market activities Come and visit us at the Old Biscuit Mill’s
wonderfully exciting, atmospheric Neighbourgoods Market, as always, this Saturday and every Saturday between 09h00 and 14h00. Tip: Some visitors
tell us how they struggle to find parking. It’s quite easy if you know how. Click here for a map which shows where we park.
A relatively quiet week has given us a chance to catch our breath and spend a little time
doing essential things around the house and entertain a few friends to a dinner
party. Off again tomorrow to Muratie for the Cape Winelands Cooking Challenge,
more about which next week.
30th Blaauwklippen Blending Competition
Awards If you are in a wine club that meets
regularly, you probably know about this annual completion. If you don’t, be
sure to enter your club next year. Or you could use the time in the next year
to form your own club. You can get details on the Blaauwklippen web site. For a small
charge they send you a box of wine and instructions on what to blend and how to
blend it.
We have certainly taken part several times over the
years as member of our wine club, the Oenophiles and had great fun doing the
blending of the bottles of different Blaauwklippen wines into an acceptable
blend for Blaauwklippen to market and sell. One thing it does illustrate very
clearly is how complicated and how finite it is to blend wine. We have found
that it teaches wine lovers not to be so blasé about the wine they are
drinking.
We attended the award ceremony at Blaauwklippen last
Friday, where we met all the possible winners, and many of the people
responsible for starting this competition, who were really surprised at how
quickly the years have gone by. Walter Finlayson, Alan Mullins and Angela Lloyd
told us how it had started and how it had evolved over the years to become the
success that it is. This year, they decided to create a small side competition
and invited all the media to enter their blends and we took part in this, sadly
without success. The winners were the Natalia Wine Society from Durban and this
is their third time of winning, so these people obviously know what they are
doing. Interestingly there are two other clubs who have also won the award
three times. The media award was taken by winemag.co.za.
Congratulations to all. Click here to see the photos and what we had for lunch.
Here’s your Heritage Day Steve Jeffrey of The Charcuterie will be
releasing a once off limited release of two unique boerewors’ available on
Saturday only at The Neighbourgoods Market. As he says, “To celebrate our
national heritage on National Braai Day, what better ingredients than Brandy
& Coke and Mrs Ball’s Chutney and Old Brown Sherry!!”
1. Brandy & Coke with fragrant
sweet spice notes and roasted coriander.
- Mrs Ball’s
Chutney with warm piquant spice notes laden with apricots poached in old
Brown Sherry
Their normal range of seven unique fresh sausages will
also be available. Come and try and buy.
Special things to do on Heritage Day can be found in our Events Calendar
Recipe We had a
dinner party this week and Lynne made one of our favourite desserts, a classic
Tart Tatin. We tried another variation this week and used good apples and a
small tin of pineapple rings. Lynne arranged them in the centre with a cherry in
each ring. We had this recently at The French Connection and particularly liked
the caramel sauce they served with it. It is much easier to make than it seems,
if a little risky as making caramel can be hot and dangerous. Just be careful.
Caramel sauce
200g / 1cup white sugar - 90g butter -
120g cream
Put
the sugar in a thick bottomed deep pan and cook on medium until it melts. Keep
swirling the pan so that the sugar can cook evenly, but do not stir or it will crystallize.
Once
the sugar has melted and reached a deep brown colour, move it off the heat and
add the butter all at once. It will foam up, so be careful. Stir until it's
completely melted into the caramel. Then pour in the cream - it may still be
foaming - and whisk until you have a good sauce.
You can bottle this and keep it in the
fridge for about two weeks. Warm slightly if you want to serve it with dessert.
Or you can pour it over a cake, ice cream, tarts, crumbles, pancakes, brownies,
waffles even toast., there are endless delights.
If you want a salted caramel sauce, stir in 1 teaspoon
of sea salt.
Buying from us On Line We have
a lot of fun putting MENU together each week and, of course, doing the
things we write about, but making it possible for you to enjoy rare and
wonderful gourmet foods is what drives our business. We stock a good range of ingredients and delicious ready-made gourmet foods. You
can contact us by email or phone, or
through our on line shop. We can send your requirements to you anywhere
in South Africa. Please do not pay
until we have confirmed availability and invoiced you, then you pay and then we
deliver or post. When you make
an eft payment, make sure that it says who you are. Use the form on the website
to email us your order. Click here to see our OnLine Shop.
There is a huge and rapidly growing variety of
interesting things to occupy your leisure time here in the Western Cape. There are so many interesting things to do in
our world of food and wine that we have made separate list for each month for
which we have information. To see what’s
happening in our world of food and wine (and a few other cultural events), visit
our Events Calendar.
It needs updating and we’ll do that tomorrow. All the events are listed in date
order and we already have a large number of exciting events to entertain you
right through the year.
Learn about wine and cooking We receive a lot
of enquiries from people who want to learn more about wine. Cathy Marston and The Cape Wine Academy both run wine
education courses, some very serious and others more geared to fun. You can see
details of Cathy’s WSET and other courses here
and here and the CWA courses here.
Chez Gourmet in Claremont has a programme of cooking classes. We plan to visit
their French establishment after Vinexpo. A calendar of their classes can be seen here.
Pete Ayub, who makes our very popular Prego sauce, runs evening cooking classes at Sense of Taste, his
catering company in Maitland. We can recommend them very highly, having enjoyed
his seafood course. Check
his programme here. Nadège Lepoittevin-Dasse has cooking
classes in Fish Hoek and conducts cooking tours to Normandy. You can see more details here. Emma
Freddi runs the Enrica Rocca cooking courses at her
home in Constantia. Brett Nussey’s Stir
Crazy courses are now being run from Dish Food and
Social’s premises in Main Road Observatory (opposite Groote Schuur hospital).
Lynn Angel runs the Kitchen Angel
cooking school and does private dinners at her home. She holds hands-on cooking
classes for small groups on Monday and Wednesday evenings. She trained with
Raymond Blanc, and has been a professional chef for 25 years. More info here
18th September 2013
Remember - if you can’t find something, we’ll do our best
to get it for you, and, if you’re in Cape Town or elsewhere in the country, we
can send it to you! Check our online shop for details and prices.
PS If a word or name is in bold type and underlined,
click on it for more information
Phones: +27 21 439 3169 / 083 229 1172 / 083 656
4169
Postal address: 60 Arthurs Rd, Sea Point 8005
Our Adamastor & Bacchus© tailor-made Wine, Food and Photo
tours take
small groups (up to 6) to specialist wine producers who make the best of South
Africa’s wines. Have fun while you learn more about wine and how it is made!
Tours can be conducted in English, German, Norwegian or Dutch flavoured Afrikaans.
Recommendations
of products and outside events are not solicited or
charged for, and are made at the authors’ pleasure. All photographs,
recipes and text used in these newsletters and our
blogs are © John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus.
Our restaurant reviews are usually unsolicited. We prefer to pay for our meals
and not be paid in any way by anyone. Whether we are invited or go
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