B-Kyu Newsletter - 25 October 2020
Ghost kitchens, sustainable shopping, sausage rolls, Japanese sweets, Macanese, kava and injera.
Hi folks
Welcome to the B-Kyuniverse for 25 October 2020 (sorry, we are a day late). Did you know you can comment on newsletters? Click through to read online and send us some words. If we’ve forgotten a story link or need to fix an error we update the online version. Also feel free to share the B-Kyu love by sending to all your good eating and reading friends and get them to subscribe for themselves. You can read past copies of the newsletter here and our blog here.
In each newsletter we search out articles for you the curious reader to broaden your eating adventures. We collect a broad menu of stories, blogs (including our own) or other media for you to digest, consume and hopefully, get out and feast on the wonderful world of food in Sydney and beyond. Links in the title, a $ sign after a story means you may have to go through a payment firewall if you’ve used up all your free hits.
Lately we’ve been hit up with a heap of requests to have paid for guest articles on our blog, way more than usual. Yes, of course our readers would love product placement stories unrelated to us and we’d just love to be a brand ambassador for a product not available in Australia. This is the flipside to the ‘bad blogger’ stories of freebies and self promotion in the media, we suppose someone out there must say yes when approached directly and repeatedly. We’re still waiting for that Hello Kitty sponsorship, one day…
Food in media, food writing
13 October 2020: Food, It Turns Out, Has Little to Do With Why I Love to Travel (Noah Galuten, Eater) Not travelling, and the lack of any plans for travel, has really hit us hard. This article discusses what travelling as a food lover really means to them.
“Because here’s a thing I’ve come to understand of late: context really does affect flavor. A place, its atmosphere, the people within it, their mood (and ours) genuinely change the way things taste. A restaurant lasagna has to be twice as good as your mother’s — or that one you had on that trip to Italy — for it to remind you of it even a little.”
It’s so often about the time and place. Piss Alley, Tokyo (B-Kyu)
23 October 2020: “It’s brought joy”: Georgia food writer opens porch restaurant for chipmunk (Steve Hartman, CBC News) The madness of lockdown extends to food writers, in this case one who devises fine dining menus for her tiny little visitor while there’s no restaurants to review.
20 October 2020: Uber Founder Turns Real-Estate Mogul for Ghost Kitchen Startup (Konrad Putzier, Wall Street Journal, $) The founder of Uber is coughing up big bucks for closed restaurants for his new CloudKitchen concept. Get yourself out to a real table before everything gets ghosted.
24 October 2020: New podcast – Joanna Hunkin, Gourmet Traveller (Lee Tran Lam, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Hungry) This interview with the new editor of Gourmet Traveller follows her story from her Hong Kong childhood, starting on day one at GT handing out awards and tackling the ups and downs of a rollercoaster year.
Muesli, fake bees
16 October 2020: How to rate muesli (Michael Mackenzie on Life Matters, ABC) Food writer Nicholas Jordan is interviewed about his previous life dealing muesli and his current insta-life reviewing different mueslis, who knew there were so many? Below, behold the cheese flavoured muesli.
2 October 2020: Real honey… without bees? Berkeley-based startup MeliBio gears up for launch in late 2021 (Elaine Watson, Food Navigator USA) Not just a sugar syrup, this process intends to replicate the creation of honey from pollen without involving the cute, fuzzy stingers.
Sustainable shopping
Alfalfa House in Enmore needs your support. Sales have decreased this year even though grocery sales have generally increased in the large supermarkets. They have been running a number of promotions over the last few weeks and would love to see more buyers. Consider buying from them, reduce your waste packaging and support if possible.
If you are an inner westie, The Food Pantry in the Addison Road Community Centre is another organisation you can support to shop sustainably and help others at the same time. They help minimise food waste by offering end of line or close to expiry food at massively reduced prices, sometimes free. There are Ozharvest prepared meals for sale, loaves of fresh bread, knocked down price frozen meat and bags of ‘needs eating right now’ fruit and veg. If you’re doing it tough, or just want to help reduce the amount of food going into landfill, there’s something here for you.
Australian
21 October 2020: The art of cooking with bush foods (Neha Kale, SBS Food) Rayleen Brown and Mark Olive, long time promotors of Australian bush foods, discuss the native foods of Australia, their seasonality, links to traditional owners and how to elevate them beyond a novelty ingredient.
16 October 2020: A Childhood Favorite Reimagined (Melissa Clarke, New York Times, $) Bourke Street Bakery sausage rolls hit the big time in New York. This article recreates the recipes for lamb and harissa, pork and fennel and mushroom, leek and farro varieties. At Shawn’s high school the specialty was a sausage roll inside a hamburger bun - let’s see a New York take on that!
Chinese
23 October 2020: How to make typhoon shelter soft shell crab – a new twist on a Hong Kong favourite (Susan Jung. South China Morning Post, $) The Hong Kong favourite is cooked with soft shell crab to help reduce the amount of fiddly crab cooking and shell cracking, but doesn’t reduce the garlic.
23 October 2020: The Story of Mandarin Kitchen (Ysabelle Cheung, Vittles) Opening outside of the known enclave of Soho’s Chinatown, Mandarin Kitchen broke ground with live seafood and dishes from their native Hong Kong, including their famous lobster noodles. This year the 42 year old lost it’s founder, but has carried on through everything 2020 has thrown at it.
19 October 2020: Webinar: Chinese Food around the World with panelists Fuchsia Dunlop, Miranda Brown and Yong Chen (Emily Baum, moderator, Long Institute, USA). This webinar has passed, but here’s a thread to the discussion that took place on Twitter. There’s a hint the full discussion will be made available later but we couldn’t source it.
Macanese
20 October 2020: Traditional Macanese recipes are disappearing, says food writer Annabel Jackson (Andrew Sun, South China Morning Post) Former food writer for the SCMP has written three books on Macanese food, and her latest The Making of Macau’s Fusion Cuisine has just been released. A hybrid of many colonial influences, Jackson believes the food of Macau is really three cuisines; Portuguese, Cantonese and Macanese.
“In terms of best representing the essence of Macanese cuisine, I’d nominate porco balichão tamarindo – local pork, balichâo [Macanese semi-fermented shrimp sauce], ginger, bay leaf, tamarind, jaggery and, optional, chillies. It is served with steamed white rice and bread rolls on the side. It recalls Portuguese cooking traditions, and is based on locally available food in Macau but includes ingredients from diverse Southeast Asian sources.”
Macau shopfronts in Portuguese and Chinese (B-Kyu in Macau)
Filipino
7 October 2020: Feels like home: This slow-cooked chicken humba transports you to the Philippines (Pilar Mitchell, SBS Food) From Will Mahusay, the owner of Sydney's Cebu Lechon, this recipe is a great one-pot wonder.
The humba at Sydney Cebu Lechon (B-Kyu)
Japanese
14 September 2020: Matsusaka Backstreet, Haymarket (Chocolate Suze) “Sketchy entrance up a seedy staircase” would get us in there as well. This yakiniku in Chinatown offers buffets of BBQ meat goodness. We love the tip on the patty case of corn and butter.
23 October 2020: Mogu Mogu ~ Japanese - Chinatown (B-Kyu) Next to Starbucks on George Street is this small Japanese resto with neat little outside tables. Go for the eel donburi, leave with an obanyaki.
Unagidon, a little bit sweet and smoky.
Pacifika
13 October 2020: Kava officially recognised by international body as a drink (The Panel, RNZ) Kava has been officially recognised as a drink, not a drug, by the Codex Alimentarius Commission , the body that sets world food standards. This 8 minute story discusses what it means for demand across the islands and the world.
Colombian
19 October 2020: Now Open: Juan Montago, a Latin-American Restaurant Inside a Woolloomooloo Sandwich Shop (Dan Cunningham, Broadsheet) We love places that do double duty, and this sandwich shop moonlights as a Colombian diner at night complete with pisco sours. The dishes focus on a handful of classics, including chicharron con frijoles (crispy-skin pork belly with slow-cooked red beans) and a lighter, cornmeal based empanada.
Mexican
Caldo de Piedra, Tlalixtac de Cabrera, Mexico (Sam O’Brien, Gastro Obscura) The indigenous food of the Chinantec is brought into the restaurant with permission at Caldo de Piedra. The specialty is a stone soup, a mix of fish, tomatoes, lime, coriander and epazote (an aromatic herb) which is cooked by a red hot riverstone dropped right into the mix.
Ethiopian
10 October 2020: Ethiopian food: The 15 best dishes (James Jeffrey, CNN Travel) We could eat this article, every last dish. Ethiopian food is gaining greater recognition, use this list as a guide while you explore. We miss Aaboll Cafe in Merrylands, time to get out and find some more.
Injera with with a mix of shiro, wot, tibs and vegetables and from Aaboll Cafe in Merrylands. (B-Kyu)
French
4 April 2020: How traditional French butter is made in Brittany (Claudia Romeo, Insider) Love, love, love Bordier butter, especially the super salty version. You can get it in Singapore but we have failed to find it here in Sydney.
13 October 2020: La Buvette Terrine (David Lebovitz) The country style terrines and pates are some of our favourites of French food. While we’ve mastered a mean chicken liver pate, next up has to be a terrine. Pistachio nuts and apricots have been procured in readiness, next up is chopping the meat and cooking. This recipe looks to be dead simple and picnic/party friendly.
It’s a B-Kyu world
Mrs Fang, minding the shop in Marrickville. Wouldn’t mind a bit of that terrine, thanks.
As always, get out and explore the beautiful world we live in.
Alison and Shawn, B-Kyu