Food review by James Hill and wine review by Stephen O'Halloran

Food

Near full house for Chilly Hargrave in the kitchen for our fourth ‘chef of the year’ cook off.

Canapés apace

James (the baker) Tinslay up first with puff pastry scrolls with butternut pumpkin, ricotta, cheddar, gorgonzola, spec, hot chorizo, Kashmiri chilli, paprika, seasoning and smothered with egg and maple syrup and lots of butter. Delicious.

Big fan of Chilly’s terrines. Today it was chicken, pork and veal and green peppercorns served on mini toasts and topped with cornichons. Rich, textural and flavoursome with a lingering peppery aftertaste.

Yours truly followed with a tuna tapenade on cucumber topped with bull horn pepper. The tapenade was simply blended and the ingredients were tuna, olives, capers, anchovy, garlic, parsley and mascarpone.

Main

Prawn stuffed salmon tail with potato salad and asparagus.

All the features we look for in a ‘coty’ dish were present today presentation, favours and textures.

The fish was stuffed with prawns, sun-dried tomatoes, spinach Parmesan and seasoning. A good texture and the flavour of prawns shone through.

The fish was basted with teriyaki and sweet chilli sauces giving a perfect gloss finish and sweetness to the dish. It sat on light cream sauce of roué, spinach, lemon juice and mustard.

Accompaniments were wild asparagus and a potato salad, cocktail potatoes dressed with mustard seed, dill, tarragon parsley, scallions, red wine vinegar and evoo.

Chilly praised our Rex kitchen brigade for their assistance today.

Great lunch thanks Chilly.

The bread was baguettes from Taste Providore Woollahra.

Cheese

Our Cheesemaster Mark Bradford presented ‘C2’ cheese from Bruny Island Tasmania. A raw cow’s milk cheese.

Raw milk cheese is still a very new concept in Australia and the Raw Milk C2 is the one that started it all. 

It was the first raw milk cheese in Australia (way back in 2009) and being unpasteurised, is the purest expression of our craft.

C2 is the sort of cheese found throughout the mountains of France and northern Italy. A classic cooked curd cheese made in a traditional large form. C2 matures for 4 to 8months, during which time it develops a sweet aroma and a mildly nutty flavour. The rind is wiped every week to encourage the surface bacteria that provide this cheese with much of its robust integrity.

A well-seasoned salad accompanied the cheese dressed with evoo honey lemon juice and thyme. The salad comprised red leaf lettuce, frisée, rocket, radish and strawberry.

Wine

Fish was the order of the day, a salmon prepared by Chilly Hargraves. See Food Report for details. 

The first wine for the day to accompany the pass arounds was a Leo Buring Leonay Eden Valley Riesling 2024.  It is amazing how the senses of taste and smell can transport you in an instant, back decades ago, to events and experiences had at that time. This wine took me back to the late 60's early 70's when I was drinking Leo Buring's DW series of Eden Valley Rieslings made by the master riesling winemaker John Vickery.  Today's wine was instantly recognisable with the style of those former greats. Crisp, abundant fruit of lime and apple with strong citrus influence. A powerful lingering finish, clean and crisp. The wine is only 12 months old and in my view is headed for greatness. Our Wine Master has with great foresight, secured for us several cases of this wine which we will enjoy over the next decade or so. Perhaps we could have a bottle or two in three year’s time to see how it is travelling. Should be even better then. A wine destined to be one of the gems of our cellar. My pick for the wine of the day. 

Wine 2 was the Domaine Wachau Gruner Veltliner 2022. We had this wine last week and I reviewed it in my report on our lunch on the 11 March. Go back if you are so inclined to see what I said then.  In a shorthand form, I can say that it is a very enjoyable white wine, a bit thicker taste than what we are used to, good acid/fruit balance. It makes for a refreshing change from our usual diet of Australian whites. A perfect food wine for fish or poultry. 

The third wine was a Brian Croser Tapanappa Chardonnay from the Piccadilly Valley near Adelaide. Vintage 2022 This wine is described as the Tiers Vineyard 1.5 M. Sadly I only had a small glass of the wine, but it was enough to convince me that this wine is potentially a masterpiece. Give it 3 or 4 years to fully bloom. Lots of acid but balanced by superb, restrained citrus flavours. Croser constructs his Chardonnay in a predictable style, taught, disciplined restrained. No huge oak with butterscotch topping, this is a serious wine, no flim-flan stuff here. This wine is pure and controlled, even rigid, but the quality is there to see. Made in a style consistent with a quality Montrachet, a wine demanding attention, certainly not to be consumed in the company of some floozy, intent on distracting you into other directions!  This would have been my wine of the day, just edged out however by my romantic and nostalgic memories of Leonay’s of the past, reflected in today's Leonay. 

We then moved onto wine 4 the Valminor Albarino 2022 from Rías Baixas, Spain. An easy drinking, enjoyable, and fresh white wine. High acid, strong fruit flavours, medium body and satisfying finish. Perfect wine to go with a plate of calamari at some seaside cafe in Spain or Portugal. It is pleasing to see our Wine Master introducing us to a number of European whites not seen here often but more than welcome for something different. 

The final wine for the day was an Uccelliera Rapace 2011 from Tuscany, a Sangiovese blend with Merlot and a dash of Cabernet. I really did not like this wine.

Our Wine Master usually provides us with wines of impeccable quality, but not always to everyone's taste. So it goes, you cannot please all the people all of the time and so on. Anyhow getting back to this Italian wine, I was depressed from the first sip. Huge colour, almost black, but behind that screen, nothing! A waste of time. The wine is marketed as a Super Tuscan, an esteemed badge placed on high quality Tuscan wines which had ventured into allowing Bordeaux grape varieties into the local mix.

Some of these Super Tuscans are superb, eg Sassicaia, but this wine, a super Tuscan? What a joke. Super ordinary would be more accurate. To be compassionate to this poor creature it began life in 2011, regarded as one of the worst years in Tuscany in recent times. The poor thing has never recovered from its impoverished youth. 

Dull, flat and boring, with no joy for the soul! Acid gone, no hope of anything better if left in the glass for a bit longer. The wine had a depressing aroma, musty, dank and a vague smell of wet dog! A sad wine to finish off an otherwise enjoyable day.