MELBOURNE FOOD & WINE FESTIVAL 2010 UPDATE 2

Our samples from Melbourne Food Ingredient Depot - thanks Phil!

Promotional chocolate supplied by The Cocoa Alliance

Each of our attendees receive a handcrafted Burch & Purchese chocolate piece

Chef Andoni from Mugaritz is presenting 'Theatre of ideas' at the Langham

Are we going to see the famous Mugaritz bubbles on Sunday?

Phew! It's all go at Burch & Purchese HQ, this morning we met with Chef Andoni and his chefs Javier & Leire from Mugaritz. They have a demonstration on Sunday and we have made ourselves available to help them with ingredients and some prep work to ensure all goes smoothly. It is always such an honour to be in contact with great chefs and we are excited that we are able to help. Chef Andoni along with two star Massimo Bottura are planning a spectacular demonstration and we can't wait to see their cuisines first hand and listen to their philosophy on food. We especially wish all the best to Andoni and his team after the tragedy of the recent fire at Mugaritz and we hope positive things happen for them soon.
Back to our Masterclass on Saturday and we are preparing tastings for the class along with gift bags for the attendees to take away. We took hold of some specially prepared samples from our friend Phil Vernon at Melbourne Food Ingredient Depot today which will form part of our giveaway. We are giving away a recipe and the components in the gift bags so the public can go away and make some of the more obscure recipes at home. It was Chef Andoni and Dan Hunter from the Royal Mail that introduced us to Kaolin clay a few years ago so it ties in well with the weekend. Also The Cocoa Alliance, the official Australian distributors of our favourite chocolate, Chocovic, have provided us with giveaway samples. We will be including all of these goods as well as a handcrafted and sprayed exclusive chocolate piece from Burch & Purchese which we made yesterday. Tomorrow we are meeting with Tommy Roff from Fresh As. who is flying in from New Zealand with yet more samples from us from his range of freeze dried fruits. So if you are lucky enough to have procured a ticket for our Masterclass, we have some great presents for you!! Other stuff, we bumped into Chef Andrew McConnell today and he was with David Chang, a special Momofuku dinner is planned for tonight at Andrew's restaurant Cumulus Inc and we wish them well with that. That's it for today so far, it's back to the kitchen to finish preparing for the weekend. We will update you again tomorrow as we will have more fun stuff to tell you by then!!
Check out these links for further information.

http://www.mugaritz.com/index.html    Mugaritz
http://www.cumulusinc.com.au/            Cumulus Inc
http://www.momofuku.com/                 Momofku
http://www.mfcd.net/depot/                  Melbourne Food Ingredient Depot
http://fresh-as.com/                                Fresh As.
http://cocoaalliance.com/                       The Cocoa Alliance
http://www.royalmail.com.au/               Royal Mail Hotel