Charity Dinner and Auction

The Wild Oak are holding a charity dinner & auction

Monday 3rd November 2008 Melbourne Cup Day eve

All proceeds to go to Oliver Siddles fund raiser

The evening shall begin with a Champagne reception. Followed by a three course dinner including wine & beer. There will also be a door prize (night at Wild Orchid B&B & massage), raffle and auction.

Tickets are limited and can be bought through The Mount Dandenong Vet, or by booking directly with The Wild Oak on 9751 2033.

Tickets are $100 per person all inclusive.

Oliver Siddle's USA Therapy Fund Raising Appeal

Oliver (son of principal vet Mount Dandenong Practice Moss) has an unknown diagnosis but has atypical cerebral palsy symptoms meaning he isn't able to walk independently or talk. In December 2008 he will be flying over to Florida in the USA to have 3 weeks of intensive physio, speech & occupational therapy + hydrotherapy. The therapy is unique & not available in Australia. It involves Oliver wearing a suit made from bungy type material that was similarly worn by Russian astronauts. It is hoped that the therasuit therapy will help him with his spacial awareness & ability to walk before he heads off to school next year

More information about the therapy can be found at www.ptatherapy.com

Don Burke in our Backyard

Don Burke of Burkes backyard television and magazine fame recently celebrated the magazines 10th aniversary.

Here at Wild Oak we were honoured that Don who resides in NSW choose to fly to Melbourne to the Oak to host an intimate lunch with his publishers and his longest running advertisers. Congrats Don.

Day one in honkers

Well after a delayed departure from the white swan I miss my bloody train to honkers... aaarrrgggghhh! anyhow get the next one which arrives late and manage to cruise through customs and quarantine yet again with my cache of dried Aussie herbs and small armoury of cooks knives, my palms are not even sweating anymore. Quick lunch with Ben Cheung from Watsons wine wholesalers, I settle in and Benny Chan an ex Melbourne boy from Watsons group picks me up and we are off for a briefing at the club! After we go over the weeks promos I get changed and do a specific training session on my menus and dishes showing them and tasting every facet of the dishes. I am sooooo happy to see the ingredients and produce is of A1 export quality all Aussie Lamb, Angus beef, Salmon, YV Salmon caviar, crayfish all nearly better quality than is available here!

Gala Wine Dinner at the White Swan

Well its wine dinner time. This is the big one for us! There are special guests, hotel management and VIP’s, members of government, big wig wine importers, other 5 star hotel management, Chinese food press and of course the people who have paid me to come here, nerves in the kitchen are a little high or maybe just mine, I am a little titchy about what is going on and the kitchen guys are doing their best to disregard my instruction under the guise of not understanding English. It is all I can manage to stop the ducks from being roasted at midday for 7pm service, these cooks just love to be well prepped in advance. The butter sauce buerre blanc was made yesterday (a big no no, must be made within a 30min window!) so in the bin it goes. I manage to take control of the risotto, one thing I have found Chinese like to cook the bejesus out of! So time has come and a swarm of staff appear in the kitchen maybe 20 chefs and 25 wait staff. I am thinking this just a little extreme for 50 guests! As I would do the same with 5 of each! Anyhow given the go ahead it all goes wild, we manage to put out 7 courses in 2 hours with 7 matching wines. I am told this is how the Chinese like it fast and hard so just shut up big foot… funny I was under the impression this was MY signature Australian dinner. Following this a sous chef informed me too much sauce, see there I go thinking is this my dinner? Anyhow I ignore the comment and carry on saucing lambs at lightning pace… after dinner I do a little talk on Australian food and wine and also the wonderful part of the world I live, and then meet and greet some great people. In the end everyone loved it Phew. Chef gives me the Day off tomorrow for lunch with the manger of the Westin Hotel and I decide a day by the pool after that is definitely in order!

Mums scones

So I have flown ½ way around the world from possibly Australia’s capital for Devonshire teas! And the exec sous chef says to me it would be nice to do an Aussie scone with jam and cream on my signature buffet here in China. Well two problems here; scones are from Devon which is in England not to be confused with Mount Dandenong, and I have managed to work for more than fifteen years only cooking one batch of scones “ever”. So quick email to mum and we have the old family scone recipe. Ahh melancholy of Sunday afternoons as a kid. So the locals are wrapped at this new discovery and our French exec sous chef mutters something about the English under his breath as he woofs down some doughy goodness covered in jam. And mum is beside herself that her scone recipe is now of international aclaim… thanks mum!

Chinese farmed emus and other anomalies

Ok, so an inquiry as to where we sourced the Emu I was told it was farmed locally! As in china?….. well at this point you could knock me over with a braised kangaroo shank. ???? Chinese? Emu??? Huh??? Anyway on dining later in the Chinese restaurant upstairs I find 3 Emu dishes on the menu, crazy days.

Two problems with cooking my food here in China are that firstly it is very produce
Driven, and requires the best quality product derived from Australia!
Chinese however have a major supply line problem with their customs regulations
often taking two months for product to pass through, so frozen seems to be the given,also secondly Chinese have a tendency to call any product anything you like, such as why pay so much more for Australian lamb when we can just call any lamb
Australian! After all we have spent soo much on an Australian chef! he has touched it,so Australian it is.

Kitchen Capers

Just as a bit of background the White Swan has two levels of kitchens, western downstairs and Asian upstairs, the western kitchens have a full pastry kitchen and bakery, production kitchen, cold kitchen sushi kitchen, grill room kitchen, butchery, fish mongers, vegetable prep kitchen, a la carte kitchen and buffet kitchen. Each one probably about the size of the entire Wild Oak dining room. Then on the next floor the same floor space size is taken up with banks of wok burners huge dumpling steamers and a kitchen dedicated to canton suckling pig charcoal roasters and duck roasting kettles. Oh I would give my right arm to work with these guys for the week they are amazing and the food they produce is off the wall, I sneak up here on occasion just for a taste of duck feet, sunflower chicken the canton roast duck. And OOOH the prawn dumplings mmmmmmmmm. But alas I must return to the Job at hand downstairs training the guys how to grill kangaroo.

Mongolian Milk and Melamine?

Ok so there is a major milk contamination incident in China with tainted Mongolian milk has claimed the life of 31 babies and caused sickness in tens of thousands of children. So why is this in Bens blog? Because I cannot survive without latte in the morning and in this neck of the woods Starbucks is the place unless you want dripolator or service station push button machine coffee, so Starbucks has NO milk. Oooh what will I doo?

So converting to Chinese tea isn’t a bad alternative anyway “when in Rome”, One thing I struggle with though is that I desperately want to get some great local food into me Guangzhou is the heart of famous canton cuisine creators of dim sum and yum cha, however as I am a international western chef everyone I meet desperately wants to highlight their western food usually in the form of a buffet, a very popular beast in Asia, and this hotel isn’t an exception. One thing that really bends the mind though is seeing dishes I have designed and been cooking for years served in a buffet by different cooks in a different climate with completely different produce, oh yeah and next to a scaled down model of the Sydney harbour bridge and a bevvy of fearsome koala’s armed with boomerangs..

The staffing levels are over the top here in China with the average wage for junior service staff and cooks about $160 a month, there is no shortage of service in the dining room actually it kind of borders on the annoying when as soon as you take a mouthful of water it is replenished immediately by a force faster than the speed of light that your vision naturally cannot follow, I thought I had found the fountain of life!

One thing I can say for sure the hotel kitchens are immaculate you could eat of every surface, and every chef is immaculate and works immaculately. This is in part the product of labour costs, also the staff are very proud so respectful and tend to stay at a workplace a very long time. White Swan has been open 26 years was Chinas first 5 star hotel and was given to the Chinese Gov, and they still have a lot of people that have been here since opening.

Chinese food culture is seriously lacking wine!

So two things I now know for sure about Chinese restaurants, is that the ceiling heights in the kitchen don’t allow for a 6ft 2inch Australian with a footlong chefs hat on his head to move all that feely about the place.

And that Chinese Diners will drink spirits, beer, cocktails or tea before even considering a glass of the ol vino. Something Australian wine companies are desperate to change. Hence why I am here. Dont worry I alone can bump up the consumption by a good whack..

Language no barrier at White Swan Guangzhou

Well after the trials and tribulations of dragging 1kg of dried herbs (lemon myrtle) and a small armoury of chefs knives through Australian, Hong Kong and Chinese quarantine and customs my mind drifts away from Schapelle Corby and thank God I don’t have a boogie board. I start the morning in high spirits at the white swan meeting the team that I will train to create my dishes I start to get a little nervous when I find that there is me primarily English speaking, Madani who speaks excellent French not so great English and absolutely no Cantonese or Mandarin, and 3 fearless hotel sous chefs who speak absolutely no English or French but I Imagine quite good Cantonese and mandarin.

Need not worry these chefs understand the global language of food, and we all progressed well through the menu, Chinese as it appears to me are fantastic at reproducing things! Food is no exception, however I find it very hard to teach them the feel and the taste of food, to find its soul, like I would do at the Wild Oak and like I try to teach all of my cooks you have to find that soul let it sing and don’t overdo it. The Chinese cooks follow a recipe to the letter but fail to taste touch and feel to smell and to really know it or feel it.

Anyhow we do the presentation, take some photos for the kitchen to follow and off to the tasting with the senior chefs, F &B managers and the general manager, I give a little spiel on Australia its food and cultural influences its produce and how I came to choose these dishes and I hope the interpreter got it right because no one laughed during the funny bits!

All goes well a couple of little changes made and the promo starts tomorrow has been a lot of fun today

Welcome to China

Day one of my first ever trip to China. I have designed some menu's focused around Australian flavours and ingredients to compliment some fantastic Katnook estate Australian wines for a dual promotion between the lovely White Swan hotel in Guangzhou (China's first ever five star Hotel) and Watson's Wines in China. The aim is to raise the image of Australian wine and to also give a bit of a push for wine in general. Chinese beverage consumption doesn't usually extend to wine.

So I must train the local lads how to cook the food, talk to some Chinese food media, dignified guests and customers and behave myself. worst news is luggage was over on the way here which doesn't leave much space for retail therapy... So arrived late via Hong Kong sitting next to possibly the only other person on the plane who was over 6ft 2in and 110kg, handed out and received business cards from everyone in sight on arrival, and was then invited to dinner with Food and Beverage Manager and the exec sous chef of the hotel. Lovely, even if i have been travelling for 13 hours and it is currently midnight Melbourne time dinner is appreciated, today is the moon festival so we have some of the traditional Cantonese moon cakes wow these are rich but lovely. The White Swan pastry kitchen makes over 2 million of these for sale leading up to the festival. Anyhow dinner and a quick briefing is followed off to unpack and report for duties at 10am tomorrow.