For the love of Pizza

Pizza Porn

My insatiable pizza lust has led me to eating more pizzas around the world than you can shake a stick at and I have finally realised that I may have used up my pizza quota for a lifetime. I am now on a pizza free diet [Boooo!] as none of my clothes fit and my face is looking like a calzone. But before I go cold turkey, please let me share with you some of the best I have had recently and quietly reveal that the number 5 top spot that was open in my top 5 best pizza joints in the world, has now been filled.

In Auckland New Zealand, I was pleasantly surprised at a pub called the Country Club [nothing to do with a golf course] which had great thin based tasty pizzas! [See photo above and below] They were generous and unconventional with their toppings but each one was a reasonable size [ie not that much bigger than your head - Miss Piggy would approve] and no soggy bottoms! We had the additional excitement of the rugby world cup and the joyous reunion with our beloved Kiwi mates, which made the pizzas taste even better!

chicken, chorizo and red onion

Next in line came SPQR, again in New Zealand, in the stylish Ponsonby road area of Auckland. This restaurant was my final meal before heading back to Melbourne and boy oh boy did it meet the mark. We sat outside on the pavement seats, soaking up the sun and being thoroughly looked after by a very flamboyant & gregarious waiter! The pizza I had was incredibly thin and crispy and the toppings were numerous but the best bit was the tomato sauce - it made the pizza one of the finest I have had! The flavours were bold and robust with so many strong topping ingredients but it was thin enough to make the mark! Check this out...

Salami, Black olives, Anchovies and mushrooms

My 3rd and final venue is a little wood fired pizza shack or beach hut called Champling, in Seminyak Bali, Indonesia. I was a very lucky girl to not only spend my birthday in Bali this year but I also got birthday pizza for lunch [who needs cake!]. This hut was behind our Hotel, right on the beach with a massive wood fire and looking out towards the water. When I went up to ask if their pizza was thin or fat based, the little Balinese girl serving behind the bar squeeked 'it's crispy' at me and I was sold! The view was just incredible - the continual & mesmorising rolling waves of the Indian ocean & miles and miles of clean beach was stunning. With music in the background and the warm ocean breeze, I had died and gone to paradise!

Okay so the location, view and warm weather made a huge impact on the choice, but Champling wins hands down and makes it onto my top 5 Pizza list! I found the lunch options on Bali to be pretty aweful - their salads made me ill [probably to do with the running water used to wash leaves not being drinkable or clean - raw food is a no no on this Island] and the other options were the burger/chips-Aussie/British- male-on-holiday-and-junk-food-diet variety. I tried going for Indonesian curries but they rendered me unwell for hours afterwards too and to be honest they were not that impressive. It was best to stick to food made to order in a fire that would cremate all microbes! So I pretty much went back there for lunch on most days but to keep it some what healthier and guilt free, I asked them to make mine without cheese. The toppings were simple, tasty and kept to a minimum. The star of the show was the delicious tomato sauce base and the crispy slightly smoky base. Simple and perfect.

So that's it. Sigh! Back to being healthy. No more Pizza. At least not for the rest of THIS year...[ahem.]

Plenty more fish in the sea - or is there???

At 6am on the day of my Balinese cooking course, me and a group of eager beaver foodies were taken to the only fish market on the south of the island, to pick up the restaurants catch of the day. When we were at the beach we were shown the Balinese side of the beach which was empty and then the Javanese side which showed more hustle and bustle. I was looking forward to a Rick Stein style odyssy of roving around a busy fish market but instead there was hardly anything going on. Turns out the waters surrounding Bali have been all but fished out and due to fear and ancestral superstitions about the sea and their inability to swim most Balinese fishermen have stopped fishing! The Javanese on the other hand, fish in Java and bring their meagre offerings over after a day long trip and sell their undersized fish as so called freshly caught stuff!! Unbelievable! There I was thinking we had sucked the seas dry in Europe but as it turns out there are hardly any fish left in the sea on this side of the world too. How sad.

The fish market had loads of fish that looked deader than dead but the whole place did not smell of fish at all. They have no refridgeration or ice. So what were the day old fish being kept in ? And since there is absolutely no regulation of fishing, the size of the catch were woefully small - in the EU or in Oz they would be fined heavily for trawling such small underlings!

There were some fish that looked freshly caught as they had rigor mortis, slimey flesh and clear eyes but mostly they looked very very miserable indeed. It made me not want to eat seafood in Bali as I realised that all the top end resto's were importing everything and the smaller local places were using these not so fresh undersized babies. There is sadly no escaping the fact that we have over fished our oceans and due to over population and constant demand there is really no fish left in the sea.

This was all that was fresh and available for the restaurant we were doing the course at

Nevertheless having been stunned into silence the group trudged back to the restaurant for our master class and learnt a few choice recipes.

Recipe No. 1: Prawn and papaya salad [Lawar Gedang]

The Balinese curry spice mix for seafood is another complex batch of ingredients that have to be roasted, crushed and cooked down for an hour. Once made it can be cooled and stored for ages and used generously with any kind of fish or seafood as a masala or marinade.

Spice mix: large red chillies [seeded and sliced], garlic [peeled and sliced], shallots [peeled and sliuced], fresh tumeric [peeled and sliced], tomatoes [seeded and sliced], candle nuts/raw skinless peanuts [crushed], corriander seeds [crushed], tamarind pulp [soaked and drained], dried shrimp paste [roasted - stinkiest stuff in the world], veg oil, water, salt and bruised lemongrass stalks.

This amazingly fragrant masala is sauteed in oil to release the flavours and to it you add minced prawns, chicken stock and coconut cream. This is then simmered until the prawns change colour and become firmer. Then you add salt, pepper, lime juice and zest before allowing it to cool.

In the meantime you grate a green papaya and mix it with grated coconut, deep fried shallots, deep fried garlic and fresh red chillies chopped up finely. Once the dressing is cooled it is combined with the papaya and served garnished with deep fried shallots. I have noticed that deep fried shallots and garlic can be bought ready made in jars in most asian grocers these days so you don't have to make your own batch every time.

Recipe No. 2 : Minced seafood sate [Sate Lilit Ikan]

This is a good way of using up fish trimmings when filleting fish. You can use half minced prawns to half fresh white boneless fish too. Basically you mince up the flesh [in a food processor] then mix in grated coconut, a good dollop of the seafood spice mix, salt, black pepper, palm sugar and finely chopped red birds' eye chillies. You can use lemongrass stalks as the skewers or just soaked wooden sticks. Best to use your hand to mould the mixture around the sticks and BBQ until golden and eat immediately!

Sate boys

Recipe No. 3:

Another method of cooking this seafood/fish paste and spice mix is to mould it into a sausage shape and steam in it banana leaves or I guess you could even use the husk of corn or just baking paper.

The Balinese tend to steam these parcels of minced seafood/fish or minced chicken in banana leaves secured with tooth picks. When they cook their steamed rice they pop in the parcels for about 15 minutes before the end of cooking time. Dead simple and a very healthy way of cooking!

I rarely ate any fish in Bali after my experience at the cooking course. I love fish and I don't want to give it up. But it made me think twice while I was there. In Australia there seems to be an abundance of huge great big fish. They do have a very small overall population here compared to the size of their land and their seas and they do have very strict and well regulated fishing policies which definitely helps. I think I can get away with eating fish in Melbourne without worrying. However, will we all eventually have to stop eating fish ? Now that would be a crying shame.

Balinese Banter

My birthday wish last year was to spend my next one, on a beach in Bali and by sheer hard work and bloody mindedness I made my wish come true! As a treat to myself, I booked in to do a Balinese cooking course - one of those days where they take you to the early morning markets and teach you real home cooking. It was a real eye opener to the Balinese way of eating and economising. I also learnt a lot of interesting cooking tips from the course which I will share with you and a few yummy recipes.

When I think of Indonesian foods the 1st things that come to mind are dishes like Nasi Goreng [translates as Fried Rice] or satays and rich curries. It seems that Bali has a lot of influences from other Indonesian Islands like Java and countries like Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and China. Nasi Goreng is essentially a chinese concept - left over bits all fried together with yesterdays rice. The satays with peanut sauce apparently is a Java-nese concept. It was really hard to find a true and pure Balinese restaurant on the Island or real Balinese food on the streets. The real Balinese cuisine is in their home cooking and the cooking school gave me an insight to what the people of Bali really eat.

Their main staple is rice and all the other bits are condiments to flavour the rice. So a small amount of curry or sauce of some description is presented to enable them to eat the rice. I was also told that they are one of the only nations that don't really sit down to eat together as a family but eat as and when they are hungry and it usually is a bit of cold rice with what ever is available! They have a real sweet tooth here as breakfast is usually rice and shredded coconut with palm sugar syrups or an array of sweet desserts made primarily with tapioca, coconut and palm sugar or sweet rice/mung bean puddings eaten with coconut cream.

They have a lot of weird and wonderful fruits too which they grow in their back yard and sell but don't really eat! Ever heard of snake fruit?

Apart from that I learnt that they have 2 basic spice mixes for curries, one for meat & one for fish/seafood. If you make it from scratch you may have to substitute some of the ingredients and the recipe, unfortunately, is as long as your arm. I think I will venture to make a large batch when I get home [if not exactly the same batch as the course!] and store it in ice cube trays in the freezer. Then I can just defrost a few cubes at a time when I get the urge to make an Indonesian curry! They use these spice mixes for every savoury dish so it is worth making. They also prefer to use coconut oil but veg oil is just as good. I personally will be sticking to using canola/rapeseed oil myself as it is the healthiest option! The addition of coconut cream and palm sugar to many dishes make their cuisine very rich indeed and far too sweet for me. So I will be adapting those elements too if I recreate these recipes!

Ingredients for Basic Spice Mix: To use with Chicken/Beef/Duck/Venison/Lamb...

Red chillies, garlic, ginger, shallots, galangal, kencur [lesser galangal = ??], fresh tumeric, dried shrimp paste, corriander seeds crushed, candlenuts [substitute : raw peanuts without the skin], black pepper corns, grated nutmeg, crushed cloves, bruised lemongrass, salam leaves [?? no idea??], veg oil, water and salt!

So all these ingredients get toasted, roasted, crushed and pummeled into a paste before cooking out slowly over an hour! It can then be cooled and stored. I reckon I can make a close imitation with whatever I can find and it will have to do! Lord help the neighbours as it really did stink when they were making up a batch!

Recipe No. 1: Whole chicken
A really great technique for a whole chicken is to mix a batch of the spice mix with chopped spinach that has been wilted then cooled.  This stuffing is then shoved under the skin on the breast side and inside the cavity. The chook is liberally massaged with more of the spice mix and then steamed in banana leaves [which I believe we can get at flower shops in Blighty or just use foil and a bamboo steamer!] for an hour and then roast it in the oven for an hour without the leaves/foil, to crisp up the skin.

Recipe No. 2: Cubed chicken
Mix a handful of the spice mix with cubes of chicken and grate a good bit of palm sugar all over the mix. Then throw in a generous pinch of chopped red chillies and salt and finally give the chicken a Balinese massage. Leave to marinade while the BBQ gets hot then skewer the cubes onto soaked wooden sticks and BBQ yourself some chicken satays. This can be done with cubes of beef/pork too!

Recipe No. 3 : Peanut Sauce
Ever wanted to make a great satay sauce? Well this is what you do... Take 500mg of roasted peanuts with their skins on and grind them finely in a food processor along with 5 cloves of garlic and about 5 red birds eye chillies [or less if you aren't brave enough] and a peeled knob of galangal. Then bring this paste to the boil in a litre of coconut milk and 20g of palm sugar and 4 tablespoons of sweet soy sauce. Simmer uncovered for 15 minutes and serve with lime juice on top [check for salt and season to your taste].