Agribots

How could I not share this - the bringing together of two of my great loves, food and sci-fi. It's all in an article titled Down on the robofarm, by James Mitchell Crowe in New Scientist, No 2888, 27 October 2012. The article is a short review of developments in agribots, farm machinery with robotics that are already  doing some extraordinary things - farm machines that talk to each other, like a John Deese system that lets one farm machine, like a harvester, call another to help with the next stage of the process, like unloading the grain. Then there's the German firm Frendt that has developed a system of paired tractors where one is manually driven and the other goes along next to it doing the same things that the first one is doing.

They are looking at developing machines that can track along a crop row, identify a single weed and hit it with a micro-dot of pesticide or ones that can do regular checks on each plant and give it just the right dose of fertiliser to spurt its growth. The long term projection is developing farms designed specifically for agribot farming - smaller fields, crops planted in grids instead of rows.

But what about the social costs - the labourers thrown of the land, the growth of agribusinesses who will be the only ones that can afford to own and operate the agribots! Aren't I one of those who goes gooey eyed at organic, small holding, ma and pa produced crops!

Guilty as charged. But these are the futures I've read about all my life and I have a childlike glee in hearing they are being realised.

Mango Pickle

Vinayak in King Street Newtown is my local South Asian spice shop. There's always a selection of home made pickles, upma, dhokla, home grown chillies, karela (karawilla in Sri Lanka), okra (commonly called ladies fingers in Sri Lanka) brinjal (eggplant), the occasional gourd. The owner is always pressing product onto me as he knows I write about food and suppliers and I am not one to refuse.

The other day he had just got in some fresh mango pickle which is wife said people from all over Sydney had been coming in to get (a tad exaggerated I thought given it was only supposed to have come in that morning and it was barely mid-day, even given the speed of the South Indian mobile phone tree). It looked fantastic as you can see below, the dark green of the skin, the sunny yellow of the flesh, the orange of the exuberance of oil and the dark brown of the spicing.

Happily the taste lived up to it also. Fiery, oily (what, you don't like oil - then pass on South Asian pickles, we like them greasy to get the rice slippery for its ride down the gullet), the roasted spices robust and the salt excessive. It had the strength to stand up to being dolloped onto a nice bit of sourdough and savoured for lunch (okay, I lied about the savouring part which suggests I took it slow - no way, Jose! The second something this good hits my palate I time travel back to my oral phase (you know your Freud, right, we're talking babydom here) and the imperative to get it all in now in case there never ever is anymore kicks in bigtime).

Mango pickle in its many forms has been a constant craving for me since said babydom days. The accharu woman outside the school grounds was the favourite going home snack stop, her chatty of fresh sliced mango marinating away vinegar, salt, chili, lime, diced red onions and sugar, spoonfuls of it ladled then into a newspaper packet, to be pecked at by fingers on the bus trip home. The Vinayak version was more the keeping kind of pickle hence the oil and the more complex spicing. It's easy to make and keeps for a good while, that is unless you have this fixation on it like I do. The recipe below is adapted from a recipe of mine for green mango temperado pickle.


MANGO  PICKLE

Ingredients:
1.5 kg just ripe mangoes100 gms black mustard seed20 dry red chillies100 gms coriander seed25 gms fennel seed50 gms cumin2 tbsp turmeric2 tbsp cinnamonvinegar
salt
good quality vegetable oil
sesame oil


Method:Cut the mangoes into fingers as per the picture below.

Roast the dry spices and the dry chili together till they are aromatic and a deep brown colour. Grind them fine.

Mix the mangoes and the ground spice mix together.

Slosh in a little vinegar, just enough to wet the pickling mix.

Add a little salt, taste, and if you want to add a little more until it is salty enough to heighten the mango flavour but not drown it entirely.

Now add a teaspoon or two of sesame oil and mix it all again.

Finally add the vegetable oil a little at a time mixing as you do till the mangoes are thoroughly oily and slippery.

Concerning Citrus

Growing up in Sri Lanka I didn't have much truck with citrus fruit other than limes - lime pickle an invariable part of a Sri Lankan's upbringing, lime juice squeezed onto papaw, lime sodas, lime as an essential component of sambols (pol sambol and katta sambol being favourites), lime sharpening prawn curries, and candied lime (and orange) peel in the Sri Lankan Christmas cake. With the variety of tropical fruit in our garden, the neighbours' gardens and the streets I lived and played in, oranges and mandarins didn't measure up, not even as something exotic.

When we came to Australia in the 1960's that fruit profile changed. My first few months were a summer spent on an orchard in Arcadia at that time on the outskirts of Sydney (how apposite that name was I didn't realise until encountering it in books of Greek myths and legends). There was a plenitude of apples and oranges and my brothers and I were allowed to pick what we liked from the home paddock and provident overhangs thereinto. But even here it was to under-ripe apples I was draw more, continuing my craving for the sourer end of the fruit spectrum. Orange juice would appear unsought and under appreciated at the breakfast table and a mandarin or two would be tucked into my lunch box. Sunnyboys, on the other hand, the pyramidal packaged frozen orange tuck shop treats, were irresistible, and orange fizzy drinks, but then neither of these had any but a passing acquaintance with orange juice.

So it continued into my adult years. I don't recall the last time I actually bought oranges. I don't drink orange juice unless someone else has bought it and it happens to be staring at me when I open the fridge door. I buy blood oranges in season because one should more than because I want them. Lemons and limes on the other hand have always had their place in my cooking.

But the citrus cohort wasn't finished tyring to lure me in. When I moved into my present house there already were a mandarin and a lime tree, neither of which had been doing much for want of any attention. I was excited by the prospect of harvesting my own limes, and taken with the idea of re-invigorating the mandarin, not being one to have a fruit tree in the yard and get no benefit from it (though I have yet to encourage a very old established mango in the front to do anything). I took to caring for them as per information available on line, for example that from Gardening Australia which I always find helpful at just my level of need-to-know, and they have rewarded me for several seasons now, each time with just that much more, larger and juicier fruit.

For my 50th birthday I asked those gift-giving inclined to give me fruit trees and thereby acquired a kumquat and a lemonade tree. These too have taken a liking to the garden and me and produce in abundance in season. Being no resigned to having citrus in my live,when we came to plant out our nature strip rather than succumb to the Council's plan to replace the cracked concrete of the street's footpath with buffalo grass, I planted two lemon trees which are yet in their infancy and have tentatively flowered but gone no further.

All of this of course means that suddenly I have more citrus than I have ever wanted or can consume while they are in season. This has set me on the path of finding ways to conserve what I don't consume, and that extends to the peels.

The first step was simple. I recalled my father feeding the skins of lemons he had juiced to the family lime pickle jar, which by this stage was more a lemon pickle as a consequence. Having inherited said jar is seemed only sensible to keep up the practice. When there was no room left in the heirloom I struck out on my own.

Simple Lime Pickle Base
Take some fresh limes and quarter them. Rub salt into them and leave them to dry out in the sun until the skin goes a yellow to dark tan. The salt draws the moisture out of the limes and wrinkles them up. Bottle these up with enough vinegar  to cover them, you can add some fresh or dried red chillies too. Leave for a couple of months, till the limes get soft again and have absorbed some of the vinegar. Now they are ready to use.

This is also a great way to recycle lemon and lime peels post squeezing. Save them up in a bag or other container in the freezer until you have a heap of them and then proceed as above.

The kumquat tree was the next to demand attention. I go two ways on these. My sister-in-law introduced me to eating them whole raw, skin and all. But I still  get way more than I could snack on. an snack on so I've turned to pickling them. Once ready I serve them as a relish with roasted and barbecued meats, and indulge myself with a bowl of vanilla ice cream topped with a generous spoonful of the pickled fruit.

Kumquat Pickle
Ingredients675 g kumquats
450 g preserving sugar 175 ml white wine vinegar 2 x cinnamon sticks, each about 5cm long.6 whole cloves 
 

MethodPut the cumquats in a saucepan over a low heat. Cover with water, add the sugar and simmer for 20 minutes.

Remove the cumquats and divide them equally between sterile preserving jars.

Add the white wine vinegar, cinnamon sticks and cloves to the sugar syrup, turn the heat up to high and boil for 20 minutes. Skim off any scum that appears on the surface.

Strain the syrup into the preserving jars (use a funnel if you have one). Screw the lids on tightly. Store the pickle for one month before eating.

The huge globes of the lemonade tree presented one obvious solution - lemonade, or at least lemon cordial that could be mixed with either still or sparkling water. This recipe from Matthew Evans has never failed in preparation or enjoyment.

Lemon Syrup
Ingredients

2 lemons well-scrubbed
350gs caster sugar
2 cups boiling water
25g tartaric acid

Method
Finely grate the lemon rind. Juice the lemons, keeping the squeezed halves.

Put the rind, the juice, the squeezed halves and the caster sugar into a bowl.Pour over the boiling water and stir well to dissolve the sugar. Leave it to cool overnight, in the fridge if it's a warm night.

The next day, take out the squeezed lemon halves, stir in the tartaric acid and pour into sterilized bottles.

Keep stored in the fridge till you want to use it. Shake it well before mixing with still or sparkling water.


Finally, this year, even the lemonade tree has produced more than I can make syrup from. In desperation I turned my thoughts to other big citrus fruits and their possibilities. This led me back to candying citrus, and I am looking forward this year to using my own candied peel in my Christmas Cake - that is if it avoids being tossed into cookies and muffins my niece Casey bakes on a regular basis.

 Candied Peel



Ingredients

450g peels  all pulp removed

Pinch of salt

700g sugar

1.5lt (6 cups) water

Method

Wash the peels.  Put them in a pot with plenty of water and a pinch of salt. Bring to the boil and simmer till the peels are translucent (about 1 hours should do it). Drain and rinse them.

Heat the sugar and the 1.5 litres of water till it boils, put in the peels, turn the heat to a simmer and let cook for 20 minutes. Turn the heat off and let the peel stand in the sugar syrup.

Next day, bring the peels and sugar syrup to the boil and again simmer for 20 minutes. Repeat this on four more days.

On the next day, remove the peels from the syrup and drain them on a wire rack for 8 hours. Store them in a jar or takeaway food container in the fridge and use as you like. 

You can use the syrup as a dressing on a fresh fruit salad or pour it over ice cream or jelly.

Bread pudding

Sitting down at morning tea today to tuck into bread pudding from Black Star Pastry in Newtown, Sydney, (see image below) I thought a short note to celebrate this simple but satisfying pud was due in on this blog.

Here's bits of the delightful entry on bread puddings from The Oxford Companion to Food (edited by the much missed Alan Davidson):

Bread puddings an important category...It is safe to assume that from the very distant past cooks have sometimes turned stale bread into a sweet pudding, if only by soaking it in milk, sweetening it by one means or another, and baking the result. The addition of some fat, preferably in the form of butter, and something like currants is all that is needed to move this frugal dish into the category of treats, and this is what has ensured its survival in the repertoire, even of cooks who never have stale bread on their hands...this same dish can also be made with something more exotic than plain bread, for example, brioche, pannetone, slices of plain cake etc., and can be enlivened by judicious spicing or by reinforcing the currants with plumper sultanas and mixed peel. But such elaborations must be kept under strict control, so that what is essentially a simple pudding does not lost its character under the weight of sophisticated additions.

I love his insistence on not elaborating the dish so much as to lose its simplicity. Certainly my mother, whose cooking skills focused on desserts and casseroles (one day I shall do a blog on macaroni and tuna casserole), kept hers simple, drawing no doubt on those of her youth produced by her mother and her mother's mother in the tradition of Sri Lankan Burgher women and as codified in Hilda Deutrom's Ceylon Daily News Cookery Book, first published in 1929 and never out of print since. Here is Hilda's recipe:

Bread and butter pudding
slices of bread and butter
sugar to taste
2 oz sultanas
1 pint milk
2 03 3 eggs
vanilla or almond flavouring


Butter a pie-dish, put in a layer of thin bread and butter, sprinkle sugar and sultanas, then another layer of bread and butter, sugar and sultanas, and so on until the dish is about half full. Beat up the eggs, add the milk, a little sugar or flavouring, mix well together and pour over the bread in the pie-dish. Allow the pudding to stand for about one hour until the bread is thoroughly soaked, press down the top slices so that they may get soaked too. Put into a moderate oven and bake for about 40 minutes or until nicely browned.


Mum used to use sliced white bread, crusts and all, and sultanas with a little vanilla for flavouring. She baked it in a deep, oblong, clear sided pyrex dish and I was always fascinated by the view of the brown crusted sides studded here and there with dark brown/black sultanas. We would have it hot when it was first made but there was always enough left over for a cold slice the following days. It was usually dressed with golden syrup, an elaboration that I am sure Davidson would not object to. When I make it these days I dress it with kitul, a palm sugar syrup that is a staple in a Sri Lankan cupboard.

My friend Margaret makes her bread pudding with brioche and cream. Black Star's bread base is a secret - well I could ask Chris but it's better to have some mystery to it (I suspect it is brioche). It's baked in small square cups (sort of like very mini popcorn containers) and comes with a serve of pouring cream flavoured with vanilla seeds. Again, I think these stay nicely within Davidson's prescription for simplicity.

Banh mi thit

I write today in praise of the banh mi thit, the Vietnamese pork roll, and particularly that from the Marrickville Pork Roll shop on the corner of Illawarra Rd and Marrickville Road, Marrickville, NSW Australia. I had driven past it several times of late, or at least I had driven past what I had supposed from the long line that leaked from it each time I passed was an ATM until I looked up and noticed the bright red sign advertising it as a purveyor of said rolls. I had been missing them since the shop that sold excellent rolls outside of Newtown Station had closed to make way for refurbishment of said station. So I was excited to think that the rolls from this hole-in-the-wall take out joint - no really, it is as hole in the wall as maybe two ATMs - were so prized that no matter what time of day or what day of the week I passed there was always a line up.

But perhaps you know not of what I speak. Here from Wikipedia is as clear a description as any:

Bánh mì or bánh mỳ (English pronunciation: /ˈbʌn ˌmiː/, Vietnamese pronunciation: [ɓǎɲ mî]) is a Vietnamese term for all kinds of bread. Bread, or more specifically the baguette, was introduced by the French during its colonial period. The bread most commonly found in Vietnam is single serve and resembles a torpedo, therefore the term bánh mì is synonymous with this type of bread. The bánh mì is usually more airy than its western counterpart, so as a result, has a thinner crust.

The sandwich made from bánh mì include meat and soy fillings such as steamed, pan-roasted or oven-roasted seasoned pork belly, Vietnamese sausage, grilled pork, grilled pork patties, spreadable pork liver pâté, pork floss, grilled chicken, chicken floss, canned sardines in tomato sauce, soft pork meatballs in tomato sauce, head cheese, fried eggs, and tofu. Accompanying vegetables include fresh cucumber slices, cilantro and pickled carrots and daikon in shredded form. Spicy chili sauce is normally found in bánh mì sold by vendors in Vietnam. In western countries, especially the U.S., the chili sauce has been replaced with sliced jalapeños, a type of chili pepper that is not grown and consumed in Vietnam. In southern Vietnam, homemade mayonnaise is commonly added to the sandwich. Laughing Cow cheese is also a popular filling in Vietnam.

The Marrickville shop offers four varieties of pork roll - the basic roll with pate, three varieties of sliced pressed pork and strips of barbecue pork, with grated carrot, slices of onion, thin lengths of cucumber, a mess of coriander, Vietnamese mint, tomato slices, slices of fresh ripe red chili, a thickish fish sauce, all in exploding out of a crunchy crusted torpedo bun; a version which promises pork skin, another that prioritises barbecue pork, and one with pork meatballs - of a size here that is confronting but alluring. I had the basic and it fully met my expectations. The delight of eating these rolls is both the complex mix of textures/mouth feel and flavours you get with each munch and the mess the practised and unwary alike make as flakes of crust shower bodices. laps and any eating surface while pate oozes out the ends and juices/sauces dribble down chins and fingers. It's one of those foods you have to eat leaning over and back somewhat - there's no way you and the roll can remain upright and remain clean. I ate mine in my car, sitting in the driver's seat, the plastic bag and paper bag it came in spread on the passenger seat to catch the drips and splodge. It was a rainy day so the car steamed up and I felt a kind of guilt as I hunched over shielded by the misted windows.

The Rough Guide to Easy Excellent Food Part 12

My good mates Ross and Maria Kelly brought down from Mount Wilson their first crop of jerusalem artichokes for this year. These aren't really artichokes, but the tubers of a variety of sunflower (Helianthus tuberosus) which while delicious have a tendency to be a windy veg when eaten. Still  they are well worth the investigating and when you do you might like to do so via the following soup.

You will need:
jerusalem artichokes
leek
lemon verbena or lemon thyme
vegetable stock
salt
pepper
saffron
ginger
bread
garlic

Take a goodly lot of the tubers. If they are clean and creamy yellow of skin, don't worry about peeling  them. If the skin is a firmer brown scrub it off. Slice the artichokes thinly.

Set a handful of thinly sliced leek to saute in a pan with a slosh of olive oil. When slicing the leek reserve some for garnishing.

Shred some sprigs of lemon verbena/lemon thyme, add to the pan and saute a little longer.

Add artichokes and saute a few minutes more.

Pour in enough stock to cover the artichokes plus a couple of cms more. Sprinkle in some salt, pepper and a pinch of saffron threads.

Cook on a gentle boil till the artichokes are quite soft, say 20 minutes.

Puree the contents of the pan.

Slice some garlic into matchsticks.

Slice the bread and lightly toast it. Rub each slice of toast with garlic.

Pour the soup into individual serving bowls, garnish with the reserved leek and the ginger and serve with the toasted bread on the side.

A dollop of yoghurt is superfluous but adds tang.

Gut Germs: The story continues

Two pieces in New Scientist No 2862, 28 April 2012 add to my fascination with the hidden world of my gut flora and its impact on what I eat and what happens to what I eat and what happens to me when I eat it.

We've known since 2006 that the types of gut bacteria in obese rats differed from those in non-obese rats. Now a group of whitecoats at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research  have swapped gut flora between obesity prone and non obesity resistant rats and found that the obesity resistant rats now ate more and  'put on the pounds.

Across the grey pond (a.k.a. Atlantic Ocean) whitecoats at the University of Toronto in Canada have found that the gut flora in the faces from 20 month old babies overlaps with the bacterial make-up of dust samples found in the particular baby's home. They conclude that babies and their domestic dust are are sharing a common bacterial pool (oops - almost childish pun). The extension of this is that maybe other people in the house will also share whatever health and behavioural influences these bacteria produce when in the gut.

Putting these two together, I give full warning that I will carry around those white point nose covers that are supposed to keep out things like avian flu germs and have no hesitation in putting them on should I find an obese baby in a home or restaurant I enter, particularly if someone happens to be changing the kid's nappy while I am there, or I suspect they have returned from doing so without washing their hands and are about to hand me a slice of pizza or I gloved finger wiped across their mantel shelf goes any shade less than white.