** May all vegetarians and vegans please be warned, this post contains a lot of meat.Gosh... I can't believe that this is my 100th post! I have gone past the realm of "two-digits" and am now in unchartered territory oooooh... haha. I felt that the 100th post warranted something really
special, so here I am writing about my favorite most
ultimate eating venue - my
HOME. That's right folks, contrary to the popular belief, most of my most memorable and kickass feeds are partaken right here in my humble abode. This also covers the celebration of
JT's birthday but more so a celebration of
MEAT.
One of my most
prized possessions. A 10kg slab of grilling stone that I lugged back from Korea. In fact I actually lugged back three! There's a funny story about how this Korean porter tried to lift my luggage containing all the stones with one hand after laughing in my face when I warned him that it was heavy but we'll leave that for another time...
Come to think of it, it
is rather interesting that most of my dinner parties pretty much degenerate into a meat and alcohol fest. But let's have a closer look at the spread for tonight shall we?
Australian grainfed ribeye, one of my favorite cuts when I was in Australia. This was in the selection for nostalgia's sake.
One of the best things that happened this year was lifting the ban on USDA beef. This is USDA cornfed ribeye.
How can this be considered a meat fest where there's no star of the show? I present my favorite cut at the moment,
Wagyu ribeye.
Look at the fine marbling of interstitial fat. I kid you not when I say that I was salivating when the butcher was slicing this.
No cast is complete without some supporting actors. Spicy Brazilian linguica, the sausages I've grown to love from my churrascaria days.
Cheese and red wine, this was recommended by the butcher but it sounded too classy for my liking. It tasted ok, abit salty but still all good.
And of course we can't forget German bratwurst, although I eat this for breakfast almost everyday, I still don't get bored of it. Amazing!
Wagyu beef patties. The would provide some amusement later on after all the steaks are taken care of.
Although this was very good quality pork belly (hand-sliced by yours truly), somehow it just played second fiddle to the beef that night.
I did enjoy frying the skins which I removed from the pork belly to make this nice bowl of crackling. This was an excellent snack to munch on while the stone was heating up.
Shrooms have got to be my favorite vegetable because they're not green, taste great and do
not contribute any oxygen to our environment hahaha. Here we have shitake, shimeji and oyster.
Condiments are like the foley artistes and backstage crew, you need them around. Good quality steak does not need any marinade, just a quick dash of sea salt and sprinkle of freshly cracked pepper is all you should need. The whole-grain mustard, chicken salt and lemons are in for seasoning other foods like the mushrooms and the mashed ginger and garlic are mainly for the pork. Japanese chilli-pepper is good for anything.
And of course we needed something to wash it all down. My beverage of choice at the moment, shoju.
Australian grassfed ribeye was the first to go onto the grill. Since we wanted to make this somewhat "
academic" we decided to do a taste test between the three ribeyes.
A steak should only be turned once. This ensures that the juices are kept in.
NEVER press your steak down against the heating element, that only creates leathery dry steaks.
Although I eyeball most of my steaks to see when they are done, it doesn't hurt to have your meat timer on stand-by. Yes, I
DO take my meat very seriously muahaha.
Medium rare, I reckon the most cooked a steak should be is medium rare, ok, medium rare plus if it's a bone-in cut but anything more than that and you're pushing it. To everyone who cooks their steak ultra well done because they're afraid of the mad cow disease, I have some sobering news, prions are just simple protein strands, i.e. they can't be denatured further, cooking it at maximal domestic heat is not going to hurt a prion. Anyway this tasted just as good as I remembered it down under.
USDA cornfed ribeye, as you can see the meat fibres are finer in this cut compared to the Aussie one and as such it was significantly more tender as well. This won the Aussie ribeye by a close margin.
Wagyu.... this looked so
beautiful I couldn't bear put my blade to it. But, what the heck, I did so anyway haha.
This stuff literally melts in your mouth, like really, you put it in and it just melts. This
blows away all the competition hands down. It is so tender that even a blunt blade just glides through it.
Grilling mushrooms on a stone grill is always tricky because it's hard to get even cooking especially on the larger ones. That's when we had this
lightbulb moment. Covering it with a stainless-steel plate allows the heat to concentrate and build up to levels strong enough to create all round cooking.
And there we have them, perfectly and evenly grilled tender shrooms.
Grill the garlic slices in butter till they're golden for a nice fragrant condiment to any of the meats.
Grilled garlic goes particularly well with the belly pork slices.
By chance we found that a dash of sea salt and Japanese chilli powder made the pork taste
superb!
We had no choice but to slice up the sausages so that they'll be well-cooked. The steel plate cover method works extremely well with these too.
These tasted so good I almost wanted to sing the
Oscar Mayer Weiner song again but since none of these actually were Oscar Mayer Weiners, I thought it rather rude to do so. You have to
respect your meat. And I'm talking about
serious respect here, like West-Side-Tupac style respect.
I tried to create a Mickey face with these three patties but didn't want them to be too close lest the heat gets poorly distributed, so in the end they looked like this. Not really anything Disney about them really.
Although this was minced, you could still taste its Wagyu heritage. This was so juicy and beefy that you could almost hear "
moo" with every bite.
All of this heat had to be extinguished with refreshing cold shoju lemon on the rocks.
The Korean stone grill is actually on a very slight gradient so all the oil drips to one end and flows out through this nifty oil drain. Since all the oil is gotten rid of, this must be
healthy eating haha.
Of course no celebration is
truly complete without a cake.
Ricciotti is another sister cafe from the Garibaldi group. It is actually really more of a tea and coffee house but still offers main courses like Menotti. They don't have the range of cocktails and more exotic coffees like Menotti. Their cakes are top-notched though and I find their cakes way fresher and tastier than the ones you get at Menotti, this is probably because they specialize in the cakes and they are baked fresh here and transported to Girabaldi and Menotti.
The cakes are very pretty. As you can see, quite abit of effort has gone into making them look good. However, looking good alone is meaningless if it doesn't taste good and fortunately this Mocha Passion tasted most excellent.
"Happy Birthday to JT. Happy 100th Post to D!" Hip hip hooray!
This is a very light mousse cake with layers of coffee and chocolate mousse. Despite being extremely light and fluffy, the richness of the ingredients still show through making this very enjoyable indeed.
Set upon a base made of chocolate and rice bubbles, this was so tasty that we finished it all in one sitting. That's quite spectacular as I'm usually not a big fan of cake.
With so much
meat in the house, it was indeed a
pimp-worthy night. And who better to grace this event than birthday
Pimpdaddy JT showing off his birthday
bling haha!
Dp.s: I do apologize if I sound abit wacked in this post but writing about so much meat gets me high like that haha. So far it's actually been quite fun blogging and all, I'm truly quite surprised with the amount of commitment I've had in this since I started and hopefully I'll be in it for the long run because I'll definitely like to do a *1000th Post Celebration!* as well.
So here I was, 715am at my favorite roast chook (chicken) stall just as they were starting business for the day. It's best to come at this time I reckon because the chooks are still piping hot and fresh.
Paper thin crisp skin covering tender chicken flesh and a generous douse of sesame oil and light soy sauce makes this an excellent start to the day. Their chicken rice is not bad as well but today I wanted to indulge in some dough fritters.
Nothing pairs up better with dough fritters like hot soy bean milk. Soy bean milk and dough fritters go together like pork and apples, lamb and rosemary, Bush and Cheney... ok I think you get the idea haha. This stall has very creamy and thick soy bean milk. It's so thick that if you leave it to cool abit you can observe a thin layer of coagulated soy bean milk forming on top.
There's more than one dough fritter stall in this market and I generally find most of them just as good if you go early enough to get them fresh.
I like to eat my dough fritters with soy bean milk like how I eat my donuts with coffee. By dunking them!
So here I was, 715am at my favorite roast chook (chicken) stall just as they were starting business for the day. It's best to come at this time I reckon because the chooks are still piping hot and fresh.
Paper thin crisp skin covering tender chicken flesh and a generous douse of sesame oil and light soy sauce makes this an excellent start to the day. Their chicken rice is not bad as well but today I wanted to indulge in some dough fritters.
Nothing pairs up better with dough fritters like hot soy bean milk. Soy bean milk and dough fritters go together like pork and apples, lamb and rosemary, Bush and Cheney... ok I think you get the idea haha. This stall has very creamy and thick soy bean milk. It's so thick that if you leave it to cool abit you can observe a thin layer of coagulated soy bean milk forming on top.
There's more than one dough fritter stall in this market and I generally find most of them just as good if you go early enough to get them fresh.
I like to eat my dough fritters with soy bean milk like how I eat my donuts with coffee. By dunking them!
