MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM IAN & DARREN

Here are a few festive shots for you, we have been busy in the kitchen creating chocolate & sugar pieces to celebrate the season. We have elegant chocolate christmas trees (top & second), a cool santa with the shades on (third & fourth shots), our chocolate baubles and gingerbread house (next two) and finally our marzipan & chocolate snowballs and our mini chocolate trees. We hope you enjoy these pictures and we would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas. We are signing out for now but will post again before new year. Have fun!!!!!

CLICK LINK FOR PHOTOS!! - A Closer Look At Some Of Our Work

Triple R Radio Recipe - Panettone French Toast

As featured on 'Eat It' on Triple R this week, here is the recipe for the Panettone French Toast. Thanks to Cam for inviting us on the show again.

Milk 250 g

Sugar 25 g

Eggs 2

Panettone

Butter

Mix the milk, sugar and the eggs together well and pass the mix through a sieve. Cut the Panettone to size and soak in the custard for 10 seconds. Drain the soaked bread on a wire rack for a minute while you add a knob of butter to the solid part of your BBQ. Gently fry each side of the toast until you have a golden crust. Serve immediately with Burch & Purchese cherries in vanilla syrup, chocolate spread and creme fraiche. Enjoy!!!

Chocolate Cake With Cherry Blossom

A valued client this week asked us to create one of our fantastic layered chocolate cake with a decoration of cherry blossom flowers. We set to work, constructing a Tarakan chocolate mousse cake layered with Burch & Purchese lemon curd, cherry jelly, cocoa nib biscuit and a chocolate & cherry tipsy sponge. This is the finished piece, pulled sugar flowers, leaves & branches sit on top of the cake alongside chocolate decor, cherry jelly and chocolate ganache. The cake was to celebrate a graduation and we hope it was enjoyed as much as we enjoyed making it.

Chocolate Cakes - Latest Shots

We have been very busy recently fulfilling chocolate cake orders, these are the latest shots of the most recent.

The Composition Of Milk

The above information is concerned with the composition of milk. On of the most common ingredients in the kitchen, milk is a versatile and delicious product. This is part of our continuing series of close up looks into the raw ingredients we use every day.

(P.S. The above image of milk was taken from http://blogs.phillyburbs.com/news/bct/tag/milk/)

Here Comes The Science Part!! - The Physics Of Whipped Cream

As you know, we at Burch & Purchese are always interested in 'why?' and 'how?' things work in the kitchen. We read a lot of books and conduct research of our own to try and improve all areas of our work. This is an interesting article we have come across from the NASA website explaining the physics of whipped cream. Click HERE to read the article. Happy researching!

Burch & Purchese Dishes - 17 Chocolate & Hazelnut Spread On Toast

This dish is meant as an amuse or pre dessert and was inspired by most kids' love of Nutella on toast. We have recreated this flavour sensation using modern techniques and ingredients. There are three components to the dish, toast pieces, chocolate & hazelnut spread powder and nitro frozen chocolate & hazelnut spread pearls. A spoonful of all three together leave an uncanny reminder of thick toast smeared with Nutella. The toast component was created by toasting one slice of bread and freezing it, we also froze a slice of bread (un-toasted) and then blitzed the pieces in the MyCook. The chocolate components were simple, we mixed tapioca maltodextrin into our own brand chocolate & hazelnut spread until powder was formed. This application was reserved in the fridge until serving. The frozen component was achieved by mixing a little hazelnut oil into our spread and dripping pearls into liquid nitrogen. These to were reserved but this time in the freezer. To serve we placed a spoon of the blitzed mixed breads and then spooned the maltodextrin powder on top, to finish we spooned the pearls and serve immediately. The frozen pearls melt upon contact with the tongue as does the powder, this leaves the sensation of a smooth spread in the mouth and the 'toast' connects the senses and brings us straight back to our childhood. Great fun and this light dish won't spoil your appetite!

Beautiful Desserts At Aria Sydney

We just wanted to say what a lovely lunch we had at Sydney's Aria Restaurant this week. The restaurant is stunning and we enjoyed all of our courses and the interesting wine matches. Obviously we made sure we had a special look at the desserts and we report that they were beautifully presented and packed with flavour. Well done the boys and girls at Aria, we look forward to returning very soon.

Guns For Show, Knives For A Pro!!

We just wanted to show you our new ceramic knives, which we just can't put down at the moment. These are quality and don't need sharpening. Made by Japanese company Kyocera Advanced Ceramics, these tools slice through fruits so effortlessly. The blades have been designed with such precision that we have noticed the cell membrane of fruits and vegetables have much less stress and damage to them after slicing with one of these. This is evident in apples, which don't seem to go brown once cut now! The knives are super light due to the lack of metal and they are our favoured tools for sashimi or fruit slicing (see above)! If a bad workman blames his tools, then we have no excuse now!!

Burch & Purchese Dishes - 16 Flavours Of Summer Trifle

With the great weather we are enjoying lately here in Melbourne, our attentions turned to utilizing the excellent summer fruits available to us. Although its still a bit early for cherries and other stone fruits, the berries are coming through beautifully. This dish encapsulates the essence of summer with a modern interpretation of the classic 'pud', trifle. Although this may look unlike any other trifle you may have seen or eaten, the basic essential components are all there. We still have custard for example, this is now in the form of a foam. Cats tongue sponge is still present in the form of an ice-cream and the classic sherry flavour is now made into a jelly. We had fun coming up with this dish and in many ways it reminds us of home, although I don't remember Mum with 20 litres of liquid nitrogen in the kitchen! This dish is enhanced with flavour packed seasonal raspberries, a dried meringue of berries, dehydrated raspberry sponge and aerated white chocolate. Hopefully you enjoy these pictures and if you want to try the dish out it is now on the degustation menu at No.35 restaurant at the Sofitel Hotel in Melbourne where we have been doing some work.

Chocolate Work

We have been working with chocolate a lot this week, (probably why the weather has decided to get so hot!), and we are starting to get thoughts together for our Masterclass at the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival next year. We really want to impress the guests attending and are working on a plated dessert and chocolate display. This is just a sample of this weeks work.

P.S. can you guess which rubber mould was used for the picture at the top of this post??

Interesting Ingredients

Sugar cane, which is juiced and turned into a slush puppy.
Spices are an important part of Asian cusine, especially szechaun!
Wow! This is a Pomelo(on right), a kind of citrus fruit, next to a normal size grapefruit.
Pandan leaves.
Something we were not expecting to see in Asia
We have just returned from some promotional and consultancy work in Asia. One of the best things about working abroad, (for a chef), is exploring the local cuisine and working with produce you don't normally see. These are just a couple of pictures from our trip and we saw so much more. The pandan is a fragrant leaf used in infusions and jellies. The Pomelo was cool, not too sour and massive segments, apparently that was a small one!! It was funny though to see a box of rocket from down the road in Bacchus Marsh, country Victoria in the kitchen. Just shows that great produce is found all over the world.

Thanks To Jasmine & Jess

Ian with Jess Edgar

We just wanted to say thanks to two very talented people who have helped us with photography this last year. We say this because the images taken have been used extensively in programs, brochures and press without credits to these two girls.

So stand up Jasmine Thom for her cool graffiti shots of us and thanks so much to Jess Edgar who took some great shots and is a talented artist.

Check out Jess Edgars work at her website here http://www.jessicaedgarphoto.com/or watch this cool video of kitchen life by clicking this link http//www.youtube.com/watch?T_miAIZx4ZM watch carefully and you may spot Mr Burch lurking in the background.

Really Useful Food Pairing Blog

When we have a spare minute or so we love, (like you we suspect) to surf the web for interesting food sites. Here is one we have found and have spent quite a lot of time using lately. Foodpairing is absolutely quality and so much effort has been put in to give the reader as much information as possible on this vast subject. Check out the database on the right hand side which allows you to choose an ingredient and find out possible food pairing combinations. We have no connection with this site but we thought we would share with you what we have found. Click on the text for the link and happy surfing!!

Burch & Purchese Recommended Books 3 - Chocolate by Ramon Morato

Ramon's book: Chocolate

In depth recipes with Spanish and English translations.
Quality photography throughout.
Ramon signs our book!!We were asked just recently by a journalist, "What is your favourite and most used cookbook of all time?", well where to start. Firstly we individually and jointly have an extensive range of books on all subjects covering the culinary spectrum. All have them have provided us with much joy and knowledge over the years. Looking at the question again though "most used", well we probably don't need to look much farther than the book illustrated above. 'Chocolate' by our good friend Ramon Morato was a revelation to us and was a benchmark in books on chocolate in our opinion. It is massive in content and quality and covers all areas including, plated desserts, entrements, pralines and much more. We were big fans of this book before we met Ramon, so when we had the chance to work with him we felt privileged. The book certainly conveys his professional attitude and we could not resist asking him for his signature which has pride of place in our library. We recommend this book to all pastry chefs out there.

My Boy Lollipop!!

We were tempering chocolate this week for another use and decided to make some cool different flavoured lollipops for petits four. To garnish we used some bits and pieces of mise en place that we had ready. Crushed honeycomb, freeze dried fruits and fresh pistachio nuts were just some of the different varieties we tried and judging by the reaction of the waitress, everyone was happy with the outcome!! These are easy to make so why not give them a go yourself?

Latest News - Burch & Purchese Sell Out At Melbourne Food & Wine Festival 2010

We are pleased to announce that we have sold out our Masterclass for next years event. We would like to thank everyone who has supported us and we hope to inform, educate and entertain all those present. Thanks again and see you at the Langham!!

Burch & Purchese Handmade Chocolates 1 - Salted Caramels

We appreciate the (careful) use of salt in the pastry kitchen, it balances flavour especially in very sweet confections. These chocolates are made with the highly recommended Murray River salt from Australia. A thick caramel is made, cooked to 145C, which gives a 'dropping' consistency. This is flavoured with the gorgeous pink crystals of salt and left to cool. We cast tempered Tarakan chocolate from chocovic, this is especially good for moulded chocolates as its high cocoa butter content gives high fluidity ensuring a thin mould. After the chocolate has crystallized we add the caramel and seal with more chocolate. Once turned out these chocolate are decorated with gold lustre and are ready for consumption. They have a great shelf life and are delicious as a petits four.