WA Signature Dish Competition 2015
Posted by | Categories: Events, Featured, Gascoyne Region, Perth, Regional WA
This year I return to join the team of bloggers and follow the journey of the WA Signature Dish Competition 2015. Many of you will remember my comprehensive coverage of last year’s competition which included a trip up to the stunning Gascoyne region where I went on my own paddock to plate experience meeting the local farmers and producers in person. I visited a number of banana plantations, ate chocolate pudding fruit straight from the tree and even got to climb on board a crabbing boat.
From the Archives: WA Signature Dish 2014, Carnarvon
The WA Signature Dish is an annual cooking competition that promotes Western Australia’s beautiful and abundant local produce. The competition is open to amateur cooks who must create a recipe that best represents our “State on a plate” using one or more of the “hero ingredients” from either the Gascoyne, Kimberley, Swan Valley & Surrounds or Peel regions. Two contestants from each region will be chosen to compete in the Semi Final cook-off event on the 14 October in Perth.
Image courtesy of Buy West Eat Best
This year Peter Manifis will join us again as the mentor chef for the Gascoyne region. Peter grew up on WA’s Pilbara coast and being the son of a commercial fisherman, he developed a passion for our State’s abundant seafood from a very young age. By the time Peter was ten years old he had already decided that he was going to be a chef. He trained at the famous Loose Box under French Master Chef Alain Farbregues and is now a partner in the successful South Perth restaurant InContro. Read my interview with Peter last year and see some of his mouth-watering creations at InContro restaurant.
The Hero Ingredients that the contestants must use from the Gascoyne Region this year are:
• Wild Shark Bay Prawns (Northern Star Ocean Products)
• Carnarvon grown tomatoes, capsicum, zucchini, eggplant and chilli (Loveapple)
• Shark Bay Mullet, Shark Bay Scallops, Pink Snapper and Shark Bay Whiting (recommended by the WA Fishing Industry Council)
Last year’s winner Rhiannon Birch with the Chefs. Image courtesy of Buy West Eat Best
Once the four regional Semi Final winners are selected, they will each then work with their mentor chef for their chosen region to prepare them for the Grand Finale which will be held at Margaret River Gourmet Escape on the 22 November. The judging panel for the Grand Finale will consist of Guillaume Brahimi (Bistro Guillaume), Shane Osborn (from Michelin starred St Betty’s restaurant in Hong Kong) and a third high profile chef who is yet to be named.
The regional winner for the Gascoyne 2014 Paul Kelly
The winner of the WA Signature Dish Competition 2015 will receive two days mentoring with Guillaume Brahimi at Bistro Guillame in Crown Perth, plus a trip for two to a luxurious remote Western Australian location for a wine and dine experience and the opportunity to meet some of WA’s most respected chefs and industry figures along the way.
Disclaimer: Chompchomp is the official blogger for the Gascoyne region for the 2015 WA Signature Dish Competition. The competition is organised by Buy West Eat Best, a food labelling program that’s all about supporting the local food industry in Western Australia. Buy West Eat Best aims to grow the value and consumption of local WA produced food. Buy West East Best provides consumers and the local food industry with a food-specific brand to clearly show Western Australian grown, farmed, fished and produced food.
Singapore Hawkers Food cooking class with Red Hot Spatula
Posted by | Categories: Chinese, Events, Featured, Malaysian, Perth, Recipes, Singapore
If you live in Perth and have attended any food festivals or hawkers markets, you will probably will have heard of Red Hot Spatula. Lead by Yvonne Bleach with additional help from her family members, they have become one of my guaranteed sources of a gluten free dish when at a food festival as often, unfortunately, this can be a little lacking from other stall holders.
I first met Yvonne a couple of years ago at Perth’s famous Cake Club. Since then we have become great friends and will often cross paths at the various food events we both attend. In addition to feeding the market-loving masses, Red Hot Spatula also provides a catering service in addition to running a variety of cooking classes in their commercial kitchen located in Middle Swan. Topics of these classes range from Asian cuisines such as Chinese Dim Sum and Malaysian, to Spanish Tapas and making pasta.
My last Red Hot Spatula class that I attended was about a year ago before she had her own kitchen to work in. I haven’t had the chance to attend one of her classes since, so when she kindly invited me and a guest to her Singapore Hawkers Food cooking class it was an offer that was too good to refuse. I invited Colleen who is one of my close friends from work to join me. Her parents lived in Singapore for years and she is a big fan of Hawkers food.
The classes are conducted in small group sessions of no more than ten people. I recommend that you make sure to arrive with a big appetite as you will leave the cooking class feeling very full. For our Singapore hawkers food cooking class Yvonne and her mum demonstrated to us how to prepare five different dishes which were served up over the course of the evening. Our first course was grilled crisp tofu pockets (Tahu Bakar) with Rojak sauce.
Grilled crisp tofu pockets (Tahu Bakar) with Rojak sauce (GF)
To prepare these the tofu puffs are cut in half and grilled over hot pan before being stuffed with a flavoursome filling made from roasted shrimp paste, chilli and tamarind along with some fresh bean sprouts, cucumber and then topped with roasted peanuts. These tasty morsels didn’t last long!
Rolling up the Ngoh Hiang (GF)
Our second course was Ngoh Hiang, which I can basically describe as kind of a Hawkers version of a sausage roll, but much tastier! The meat stuffing is made from minced pork belly, dried shrimps, coarsely chopped prawns, water chestnuts, carrot and soy.
Rolling up the Ngoh Hiang
The stuffing is wrapped in bean curd skin before being steamed and then deep fried. It was mesmerizing to see how neatly Yvonne’s mother could wrap each roll in succession with every roll matching the exact size of that before it.
Our next course was one of my favourite South-east Asian street foods, otak otak. It is a snack that I know will always be gluten free and tastes amazing. For those not in the know, otak otak are a type of fish cake which wrapped in banana leaves and baked.
Otak otak (GF)
Otak otak (GF)
They are made using blended white fish combined with egg white, rice flour, coconut cream and a variety of spices including turmeric, candlenuts, kaffir lime, lemongrass, garlic, belacan (dried shrimp paste) and chilli.
Having successfully worked our way through three entrées it was time to move onto our main course, Rochor mee or fried Hokkien prawn noodles. Being mindful of the risk of contamination with gluten for cooking Yvonne was very kind to make up a gluten free batch of noodles for me first by omitting the wheat noodles before going onto cook the more traditional style for the remaining guests.
Gluten free adapted Fried Hokkien prawn noodles (Rochor mee)
I always thought noodles were just a quick, almost lazy dish made with a bunch of ingredients all thrown into a wok with a dash of soy and a splish of fish sauce. Maybe that’s why I was never really a big noodle eater. But these noodles were out of this world! I found out that the secret trick that makes these noodles so incredibly delicious was that they were cooked in a homemade prawn stock.
Fried Hokkien prawn noodles (this is not the GF version)
Yvonne showed us how to prepare the stock before cooking up a big batch of noodles for the gluten eaters with both the rice noodles and the wheat noodles. She also tossed in bean sprouts, fish cake, fresh prawns, squid rings and pork belly. Despite serving up a huge plate, everyone managed to eat every last morsel.
Ondeh ondeh (GF)
Despite groans around the table of fullness followed by a lot of belly patting, it didn’t take long for us to find some room for our final course, little bite size sweets called Ondeh ondeh. These are made from pandan flavoured glutinous rice flour and filled with liquid palm sugar which bursts into your mouth when you bite into them. Despite having already eaten so much, there were hard to resist.
As the night drew to an end I was thankful I had only eaten a small lunch as we had certainly worked our way through a lot of food. I was amazed at how easy it was to prepare Hawkers food gluten free. Each class participate received a full list of recipes from all the dishes so Colleen and I promised to each other that our next catch up will have to be trialling these recipes out for ourselves!
Disclaimer: Chompchomp and her companion Colleen were invited guests of Red Hot Spatula. Red Hot Spatula Cooking Classes Unit 5/5 Toodyay Road, Middle Swan, WA 6056 | www.redhotspatula.com.au
Coffee Pecan Bundt cake, Gluten free
Posted by | Categories: Desserts, Perth, Recipes
Coffee Pecan Bundt cake, Gluten free
I made this cake for my first participation in Perth’s Clandestine Cake Club. Each monthly meet up has a theme and for July it was “gluten free”. Lucky me…this time I could eat all the cakes!
- 120 g butter
- ¾ cup (165g) sugar
- 1 tsp. vanilla essence
- 3 eggs
- 2 tbsp. instant coffee, dissolved in 2 tbsp. hot water
- 1 cup (170g) rice flour
- ½ cup (80g) gluten free cornflour
- ½ cup (80g) potato flour
- 1 tsp bicarb soda
- 2 tsp. gluten free baking powder
- 1 tsp xanthan gum (optional)
- 1 cup (250g) sour cream
- Filling
- 40 g butter, cubed at room temperature
- ⅓ cup (90g) firmly packed brown sugar
- ½ tsp ground cinnamon
- 2 tsp instant coffee powder
- ½ cup (65g) pecans roughly chopped
- Cream cheese icing
- 250 g reduced fat cream cheese
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- ½ cup (85g) pure icing sugar
- ⅓ cup (40 g) pecans, chopped
- Pre-heat oven to 180°C. Grease a ring cake pan.
- Cream butter, sugar and vanilla together in a large bowl with electric beaters.
- Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.
- Sift together flours, bicarb soda, baking powder and xanthan gum three times or whisk with an egg beater to thoroughly mix together.
- Add to egg mixture, alternating with sour cream.
- Spread half batter into greased pan.
- Spoon prepared filling on top of cake batter being careful not to touch the sides of the pan.
- Top with remaining cake batter.
- Bake in pre-heated oven for 30-35 minutes or when firm to touch.
- When cooled remove from pan and top with cream cheese icing.
- Filling:
- Cream butter, brown sugar, cinnamon and instant coffee.
- Add chopped pecans and mix well.
- Cream cheese icing:
- Combine cream cheese, juice and icing sugar in a bowl and mix well.
Adapted from Sue Shepherd’s “Irresistibles for the Irritable” cookbook available through her website
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Clandestine Cake Club Perth
Posted by | Categories: Desserts, Featured, Perth, Recipes
Via my fellow bloggers on Twitter I recently became aware of a brilliant phenomenon called the Clandestine Cake Club. The CCC was created two years ago by cake lover Lynn Hill in Leeds, UK with the aim to be able to get people together in a relaxed social environment so they could “Bake, Eat and Talk about Cake”.
The concept was to strictly only include cakes; no cupcakes, brownies, pies or tarts are allowed and since its inception it has grown to over 133 groups around the world including Switzerland, Spain, France and Finland.
There is currently only one group in Australia and luckily for us it’s here in Perth! The Perth branch is coordinated by Carolanne from Carolanne’s Kitchen and Jackie from Where the wind blows me. Recent awareness of this group has surged thanks to some awesome publicity in Scoop magazine, on Great about Perth and Agenda City.
I was so excited to hear that the theme for the July meet was to be gluten free and signed up to come along. As I am by no means a talented baker by anyones stretch of the imagination I began madly flipping through a number of my food stained cookbooks. I eventually decided to make a Coffee Bundt cake adapted from one of Sue Shepherd’s books.
For those who don’t know who Dr Sue Shepherd is; she is one of Australia’s leading clinical nutritionists specialising in patients with gluten intolerance and fructose malabsorption. Being a sufferer of both these conditions myself, I have all her cookbooks on my shelf every single one is worn and well used. (For the recipe for my Coffee cake please click here.)
Knowing what a sweet tooth my bestie is, I wasn’t surprised when she agreed to join me as my guest and off we headed to our first Cake Club meet! We were greeted with a warm welcome and were both blown away by the wonderful collection of cakes that had been made for the occasion. Everyone had experimented with a wide range different types of flours and ingredients to create a decadent selection that would make any gluten eater jealous.
Carolanne made a scrumptious coconut and berry cake using coconut flour. She taught me something new; apparently coconut flour has such a high fibre content that it expands dramatically once you add your wet ingredients meaning you only need to use a third of what you would use with normal flours. I have a bag of coconut flour sitting unused in my pantry, I am best to remember this expansion effect when I first use it!
My favourite cake of the day was Red Hot Spatula’s Kuihs – little Asian style cakes made from rice flour, green bean flour and tapioca flour. It was interesting to find out that traditionally in Asian cultures they do not usually bake large cakes like what we are accustomed in Western society. Instead they tend to make small single serve cute little cakes. These cakes were steamed not baked and I loved them so much that I ordered some more from her to be delivered to my work the following fortnight! She was kind enough to share the recipe with us all as a guest post on Where the Wind Blow Me.
My bestie’s favourite cake for the day was the white chocolate, macadamia nut and honeycomb cake. This cake was subtle flavoured with all three elements and had a very moist, almost syrupy texture without being too gooey.
As well as being the welcoming hostess, Liv from Col Panna baked the “Best Cake full stop”; which was a hazelnut cake with Frangelico ganache. This deliciousness was nothing sort of incredible and was made even more spectacular in that the outer layer of the cake was the best part, not the centre like many standard cakes. My bride diet went completely out the window with this one. She was also kind enough to share her recipe for us all to try for ourselves.
A final cake of note was the raw chocolate avocado cake made by Bri from East Meets West. Unfortunately I didn’t try this one as it contained dates which are chock full of fructose. I figured after the sugar and dairy overload, I didn’t need to add a fructose blow out to deal with as well. It looked almost succulent and I watched enviously as the rest of the group devoured it.
One of the great things about these cake meets is that once we are all finished at the end, we all get to fill our own plates with slices of everyone else cakes to take home to share and enjoy. As much as I dreamed of eating cake for breakfast, the Boy tucked into the container as soon as I got home and there were only slim pickings by the following morning! I guess this is a good sign on how good the cakes were as he isn’t really a sweet tooth.
The next meet’s theme is Scandinavian style cakes and is on the 4th of August from 3-5 pm. If you are interested in joining this brilliant phenomenon click the link for details how to register.
Perth Clandestine Cake Club: http://clandestinecakeclub.co.uk/groups/perth-australia/
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