The Urban Olive

Consider an olive tree, full of large juicy fruit with hues of green, red and black. It’s there, and it’s free, waiting to be picked and turned into food. If this tree was in the middle of nowhere, which incidentally is the worst part of nowhere, I’d understand if the fruit went undiscovered and met its maker as it dropped off the branch – death by natural causes. But if this tree is in the middle of a thriving suburb, with thousands passing by it daily, isn’t it a crime for the fruit to go to waste?

I found this little olive tree in Newtown! Yes, Newtown – the urban center of alternative bohemia, the old and the new, the deeply carnivorous and the savagely vegetarian, the eco-conscious and the overconsumer, the good, the bad and the ugly. Newtown has it all. Sure it does. For some reason though, it still isn’t the kind of place people would consider foraging to be an acceptable hobby. I passed by this tree on my way back from my birthday lunch. Lainy and Sara were there and so was my brother Maroun and the omnipresent Ludwig. I got 2 paper bags from a local cafe, Ludwig climbed and picked the high branches, Maroun and I took care of the lower ones, while Lainy held Sara who was wonderfully amused by the whole scene. Fifteen minutes later, or should I say 2 kilos of beautiful olives later, we were all buzzing with joy from our little treasure. What can I say? The best birthday present ever!

So olives are now at the end of the season. Pick them this week or wait a whole year. I bet there are some in your neighbourhood going to waste. I know there’s a huge tree near Central station that would feed 20 people for a year. Seek it! I would have done it, but I am no where near the city these days. So here’s your chance. Get out there and pick some olives!

Here’s what I imagine you’d ask:

Q: I don’t know how an olive tree looks like
A: It’s the one with olives on it

Q: I don’t know if they’re ripe
A: They are. Now’s the time to pick them

Q: What if they’re poisonous olives
A: They’re not

Q: What if they belong to someone
A: Any self-respecting olive grower has harvested by now, so should you

Q: I tasted the olive from the tree and it was still bitter
A: It will certainly be bitter, regardless of how ripe. You need to cure it

Q: Cure it? Is it sick?
A: No! Curing means adding salt/brine or using a method to extract the bitterness and preserve the olive

Q: How do I cure it?
A: Use Google to find out. All you need is rock salt and a bit of patience – usually 3 weeks or so of waiting. Recipes vary. Mom uses around 200 grams of salt per  kilo (at the most). Others use a kilo. Search for Greek salt cured olives recipe

Good luck!

A Chickpea Degustation at Efendy, Balmain

I don’t know why I do these sorts of things. I can’t just write about food I tell you! For some reason, every 6 months or so, the need to be in a commercial kitchen cooking for a large group of people takes over me. It started with my secret dinners at Element Bistro (to which I stupidly invited SMH Good Food Guide editor Joanna Savill – luckily she loved it!). That was followed by 2 secret dinners at Fix St James, and then a dinner at Bistrode CBD last year with the Merrivale Group, a week or so after my baby girl was born. This year, it’s no different and though I already have a million things to do before I leave for Lebanon, I’m getting really excited about this year’s event: a degustation dinner with Sydney’s finest Turkish chef, Somer Siviroglu of the wonderful Efendy in Balmain.

The great thing about this dinner is the central ingredient we’ve chosen for it: chickpeas! On my last trip to Lebanon I was inspired by an experience I had at a little water-side restaurant in the ancient city of Sidon. The restaurant’s menu was completely based on chickpeas, the humblest of ingredients. At first, I found that strange and didn’t know what to think, but when the food started coming out, oh boy! It was beyond excellent. The dishes included stunning renditions of balila, fatteh bi laban, fatteh bi tahini, hummus bi lahme, all Lebanese classics, and several other chickpea based specialties whose name I can’t recall but which were extremely delicious nevertheless. I was also blown away with how different each dish was, and it struck me how versatile chickpeas really are. That experience has been brewing in the back of my mind and I’ve been contemplating organising this event for over 2 years now. Luckily, chef Siviroglu didn’t knock the idea back, snickering at my petty chickpea dreams, but seemed even more excited about it than I was!

This dinner will to give Sydney siders a taste of Lebanon and Turkey that they wouldn’t usually experience unless they travel to that part of the world. Somer and I will stick to tradition and won’t attempt anything too “chefy”. It’s about being authentic and giving you guys something honest, real and cultural, a little taste of back home. Desserts might get a bit creative, though, but I promise, no sweet hummus!

I won’t leave you hanging for long and will give you the full details very soon, so you could get in and book early. The photo above is a sneak preview of one of the dishes which I plan to include on the night. It’s one of my favourite chickpea dishes, fatteh bi lahme (meat fatteh). Instead of the traditional mince, I slow cook brisket for around 4 or 5 hours. The result is too good for words.

What do you think about this event? Leave a comment and let me know (that it’s not a stupid idea).

Return to Lebanon & A Short Story

It has been 10 years since I left Lebanon. I’ve been obsessing about an extended trip for a very long time and now it’s coming together. In June, July and August, I will be back in my village with my parents, though this time I have a wife and an 11 month old daughter with me. If you’re in Lebanon and would like to catch up, I’d love to hear from you.

The photo above is one of very few I have of my olive grove back home. I will take some decent shots this year. I miss that land and want to get to know it again. I wrote a short story about my olive trees a few days ago. I don’t think I’ll find a suitable publication for it, so here it is. Hope you like it.

An Opaque Life – A Short Story
Fouad Kassab, April 2011

My grandfather, Jiddi, planted two hundred olive trees in the land around his stone home in the small Lebanese village of Ain El Delb. The olive grove sits between two hills where it gathers the rainfall; in front of it stretches a large orchard, a shelter from the Mediterranean sea air. The grove’s position, its fertile soil and the attention Jiddi afforded it allowed the trees to grow and flourish more than any else in the region. “The trees”, Jiddi told my father “are a blessing from God”. He made sure that the fruit was picked with the greatest amount of care and banned anyone from shaking the trees or striking the hard to reach branches with bamboo sticks, as was and still is common. “Would you hit someone who fed you?” he’d rhetorically ask. The trees passed down to my father and Jiddi’s message passed down with them.

At five years of age, I was too young to help with any of the harvests by the time war reached our little village. We left our home and returned when I was 16. For their first season, the trees yielded little fruit, shocked by the effects of conflict and abandonment. My father had a good word with them, and they recognised his voice. They surely trusted him since, come the second season, they gave with such generosity that their branches bent down to touch the ground, heavied by abundance. Each year I would pick the olives delicately with my fingers, dropping them carefully below me on soft, woollen blankets. I climbed the trees with my brothers, stretching and reaching for the high branches, with not a bamboo stick in sight.

I was 20 the year before I left for Australia. I remember the first day of that year’s harvest clearly. It was hotter than usual, and much drier; the fruit were shiny and bursting with oil. I handpicked the best olives for my mother who preserved them in brine. My father took the rest to be pressed into oil, and eager as I was to taste the season’s offering, I accompanied him to the olive mill. The olives were crushed by a large millstone, then pressed and passed through a centrifuge out of which our oil gushed in brilliant golden green, opaque and unfiltered. Right beside the mouth of the precious oil spring sat an old woman baking paper-thin markouk bread on a seasoned saj, a searingly hot, convex metal grill. Perhaps it was the pleasure of being rewarded for a hard day’s work or maybe I was feeling especially sentimental knowing I’d be leaving soon, but that moment has never left me. Folding the crackling sheets of just-baked bread, dipping the crisp shards into the purest, most beautiful of olive oils and consuming them with my father in silent joy is, to this day, one of my happiest memories.

A few months later, I was in Sydney. I found myself a job as a tax accountant, and on one night I was out with some of my colleagues at a local pub. One of them asked me where I came from. I told him, and he exclaimed, “Oh? You don’t seem very Lebanese.”

Food Facts of the Week

As you know, I have started posting daily facts about food on The Food Blog’s facebook page. I encourage you to like us on Facebook (click here) so you could get these cool little facts delivered daily straight to your facebook stream.

The carrot hasn’t always been orange – in its native Afghanistan and Central Asia, the carrot’s colour could be anywhere between a dirty white and a pinkish purple. The domestication of the carrot took place in both eastern and western regions of Central Asia. Before the first reports of orange carrots, purple root colour was apparently more popular in eastern regions, yellow more popular in the west.

Many people believe that orange carrots were bred by the Dutch to honor William of Orange (William III of England) though we find accounts of orange carrots that predate his reign. The Dutch story, with almost complete certainty, is not true.

You can still find purple carrots today. In Sydney, they’re now in season, and I have some at home. They’re beautiful little things, gnarled and twisted, with none of the uniformity of commercial carrots though the flavour is quite similar.

Food Fact of the Day: The difference between jam, jelly and marmalade

I recently read that UK producers of orange marmalade are trying to promote their product as orange jam. It seems the British feel the word marmalade is a bit old fashioned, and that perhaps only those from the Queen’s generation would buy something that sounded as yesteryear as marmalade. Jam is a much cooler word, no?

But what’s the difference between jam and marmalade, and what about jelly?

Glad you asked! The answer is quite simple really, and it’s a good bit of trivia to know. Marmalade is a conserve made from citrus fruits or ginger, whereas jam is from non-citrus fruit like strawberries. Jelly on the other hand is the conserve made purely from the juice of a fruit, rather than its pulp. Now wasn’t that interesting?

Find my easy recipe for wild blackberry and lemon zest jam here: http://thefoodblog.com.au/2009/09/wild-blackberry-and-lemon-zest-jam.html

The following is an excerpt of Jonah Lehrer’s piece: The Subjectivity of Wine. Have a read and let me know what you think. To what extent is wine critiquing objective? Do you go to critics for opinion?

In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its “jamminess,” while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit.” Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.

The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was a fancy grand-cru. The other bottle was an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The grand cru was “agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded,” while the vin du table was “weak, short, light, flat and faulty”. Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only 12 said the cheap wine was.

Find the original article here: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/11/the_subjectivity_of_wine.php

Saffron is the world’s only truly precious spice. Where the cultivation and production of all other spices has become quite a simple matter, it still takes 140 handpicked saffron flowers to yield 1 gram of dried saffron stigmas, which are the part of the flower we use for cooking.

Worth more than its weight in gold, literally, saffron needs a cook who understands it and knows how to maximise the extraction of its flavours. Take a lesson from the Iranians, growers of the world’s finest saffron: gently pan-roast the threads of saffron until aromatic and then grind them with a mortar and pestle with a pinch of sugar. The sugar’s abrasiveness helps break down the saffron threads into a powder, so salt can also be used. Mix the lot with a tablespoon or two of boiling water and saffron is ready to be used in marinades, rice dishes or whatever else the recipe calls for. The extracted flavour is much stronger than what you’d get by simply soaking the threads in hot water.

The Life and Death of a Scotch Fillet

Next week, I will be part of a group of 8 food bloggers whose recipes will be cooked at the two-hatted Assiette restaurant in Surry Hills. My participation in this event has raised an important question for me, and I review it below.

Eating meat is a matter of life and death, there’s no denying it, but an obvious disassociation is involved – we never seem to stop to consider that life that has been taken in order for us to enjoy our food. Since we became removed from the process of killing for own food, most of us regard meat as a lifeless hunk of protein, regardless of its quality or origin. The fact that a steak was only recently part of a living creature is something our brain is very good at ignoring.

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to take part of an interesting event. I and 7 other food bloggers were invited by Meat and Livestock Australia to each develop a beef recipe for a degustation dinner cooked by Warren Turnbull at his two hatted restaurant Assiette in Surry Hills. A moral dilemma presented itself to me. For the dinner, Turnbull has hand selected a “stunning Angus steer from southern NSW” to be butchered by Anthony Puharich of Vic’s Meat and Victor Churchill. I was staring the death of an animal in the face, and my participation in the event meant that I would take on the karmic load of that animal losing its life. This fact was direct and obvious to me, in contrast to that disassociation created by walking into a butcher’s shop and buying steak.

I thought the whole thing over. I, after all, am a meat eater. To refuse participating in the event based on a moral objection to the animal losing its life would be hypocrisy – an animal dies for all meat that is consumed. I decided to use the experience to reinforce to myself the importance of meat, and to reconnect with its source. After confirming that the beef was grass and not grain fed, and that it has had no genetically modified feed, I accepted to take part of the event. I was allocated my own cut, a scotch fillet, for which I developed a recipe with the assistance of chef Turnbull. I admit that as the animal’s life became at the forefront of my thinking, my approach to developing this recipe came with a bigger burden and a higher degree of reverence to get it right. I feel that if we are to eat meat, we need to respect it, and that means no waste and mishandling. Next week I’ll be attending the dinner at Assiette. I’ll keep you updated with how the evening goes, and will share my recipe with you.

What do you think about meat? Do you eat it, and if you do, do you think about the animal that has died? Leave a comment below and let me know.

Food Fact of the Day – Week’s Summary

I have started posting daily facts about food on The Food Blog’s facebook page. I encourage you to like us on Facebook (click here) so you could get these cool little facts delivered straight to your facebook stream. Each Sunday, however, I will be posting all these facts on the blog. This week is our first week, so there’s only 2 food facts, which are very much worth reading.

Food Fact of the Day: How to make the whitest, creamiest hummus

The Food Blog on Facebook

Well, it took me a few years, right? The Food Blog now has a Facebook fan page. I will be posting some cool facts, links and thoughts on food that otherwise would not make it to the blog, You can also use the Facebook page to ask me questions or inquire about recipes. If you love the stuff I dish out and want to stay in touch on Facebook, use that left click mouse button and LIKE! While you’re at it, subscribe to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.

A Bit of Yoghurt

Yoghurt is a relatively new ingredient to the western world, despite being a staple in the Middle East for centuries, which is probably why most yoghurt you find on the shelves of Australian supermarkets isn’t really yoghurt, but a mixture of skim milk powder, gelatine, cream, xanthan gum (for texture), yoghurt bacteria, sugar, salt, additives and flavourings. The West seems to favour yoghurt as a creamy, indulgent dessert style food, and it’s mostly eaten cold and sweet. One of the differentiating aspects of Middle-Eastern cuisine is how yoghurt is used for cooking: we make yoghurt soup and boil meats and vegetables in it. I won’t elaborate, as I’ve discussed this before in my labna post here, which is well worth reading, so go read it.

Little Sara is now 8.5 months old. She’s eating a huge variety of food already: apples, pears, custard apples, apricots, plums, blueberries, blackberries, nectarines, watermelon, rockmelon, bread, chicken, beef, lamb, zucchini, pumpkin, silverbeet, hummus, sweet potatoes, cucumber and a whole lot of other wonderful things. It’s now time to see how she handles dairy products, and yoghurt is a good first choice. Obviously, additive laden yoghurt isn’t what I have in mind. Lebanese brands of yoghurt are fine, but I want a bit more quality control in Sara’s first yoghurt, so I made a batch for her. She might have some for lunch today. I’m draining some of the whey to give her creamier yoghurt. This is a deciding moment. Is she Lebanese and, like me, love the stuff, or will her mother’s English genes dominate?

Yoghurt Recipe

To make yoghurt, bring 2 liters of milk to 83 degrees and cool it to 46 degrees. Add 3 tbsp yoghurt from that tub you have in the fridge (provided that it’s real yoghurt). Mix it in properly. Cover the pot and keep in a warm place for 24 hours. Voila.