Sisko Chocolate - New Store

Our friends at Sisko Chocolate have a NEW retail and consultation studio open at 330 Auburn Road in Hawthorn, the shop showcases their beautiful creations including their trademark Sisko Chocolate Flowers. Christina is an extremely talented chocolate professional who is a pleasure to know, we are very excited for her and this is THE place to go for exclusive decorative chocolate pieces. Sisko use Burch & Purchese favoured chocolate, 'Chocovic', available from The Cocoa Alliance. http://www.siskochocolate.com.au/

Burch & Purchese Dishes 7 - Frozen Coconut, Lychee, Lime & White Coconut Rum

We have developed this dish as part of the new dessert menu at restaurant No.35 at the Sofitel hotel. The restaurant has been open for just over a week and seems to be on track for an exciting dining experience in Melbourne. The dish comprises of white chocolate mixed with lactose and caolin (edible clay), and then hardened to form the base, a white chocolate clay. Freeze dried coconut shards are added along with dried lychee meringues. This sits alongside fresh lime and vanilla frozen discs. A white coconut rum jelly is added, and the sweetness of this cuts through the acidic lime perfectly. Lemon essential oil is added with a dropper to perfume the plate before coconut sorbet is fragmented to finish. This dish has received great feedback so far and forms part of the No.35 degustation menu as well as its full version as part of the a la carte menu. The wine pairing of '05 Michele Chiarlo - Moscato d'Asti DOCG from Piemonte in Italy provides a clean finish and complimentary fresh flavours. We hope you can visit restaurant No.35 and enjoy this dish.

Burch & Purchese Recipes 3 - Earl Grey Tea Ice-Cream

The bergamot in Earl Grey is such a sublime flavour, this recipe for Earl Grey ice cream captures all of the characteristics of this famous infusion. At Burch and Purchese we are always working and reworking our ice cream recipes in search of the perfect balance, viscosity, flavour and enzymic bond for texture. This recipe is full in flavour and is a perfect accompaniment to the fresh nitro cooked tarragon marshmallow and the earthy milk chocolate clay (pictured above). We show below our ice cream technique which uses the mix pasteurized at a lower temperature to ensure pathogen death and reduce 'eggy' flavour. This mix is suitable for Pac-O-Jet and a conventional ice cream machine.

Whole Fat Milk 3.5% 1000 g

Earl Grey Loose Leaf Tea 35 g

Skimmed Milk Powder 70 g

Caster Sugar 170 g

Liquid Glucose 60 g

Trimoline 40 g

Cream 35% Fat 160 g

Egg Yolk 180 g

Stabilizer 8 g

Mix 100g of sugar thoroughly with the sorbet stabilizer. Place the milk, skimmed milk powder and tea into a heavy bottomed saucepan. Heat this mix to 85 degC and remove from the heat and leave to cool to 35 degC. Strain the mix, discarding the leaves and return the infusion to the pan. Add the sugar, invert sugar, glucose and sugar stabilizer mix and heat to 50 degC. Whisk together the yolks and the cream and add this to the pan, continue to cook to 75 degC and hold this temperature for 15 minutes. Ensure constant stirring during this procedure. Remove from the heat, strain and rapid chill. Leave to ripen for 4 hours before churning or storing in a Pac-O-Jet canister.

We hope you try this recipe and enjoy it, the ice cream base can be adapted for other flavours and infusions.

Burch & Purchese Latest News

The next couple of months are pretty hectic for Burch & Purchese, there will be many exciting highlights which we will bring to you here.

First we will be taking over the pastry kitchen at a top restaurant in Melbourne, Burch & Purchese will be installed as the new pastry team next week with Ian spending most of his time there. Ian will work with the executive chef, developing new desserts and dishes and helping to mentor staff while Darren will provide support from the Burch & Purchese research kitchen plus days onsite. We will also be producing an exclusive range of products to be sold through an outlet in the restaurant, these products have been designed by us and will feature our signature preserves as well as a few new treats. We will reveal the new restaurant name as soon as we can, but it promises to be an exciting new phase in the development of Burch & Purchese.

In July Darren will travel to Barcelona with his wife Cath (another food professional), to embark on a food trip of some significance. The trip will provide us with invaluable experiences from some of the top food operators in the world. Darren will bring back ideas, flavours and techniques to showcase to the Australian public.

Highlights of this trip include:

• Meeting up with our friend Ramon Morato at Aula Chocovic and a tour of his premises. Ramon is an amazing pastry chef who Burch & Purchese worked with at this years Melbourne Food & Wine Festival and his book 'Chocolate' is a favourite of ours.
  
• Meeting pastry chef Jordi Puigvert who has his own pastry company Sweet 'n' Go and is a demonstrator for Sosa Products.
• We have arranged a tour of Espai Sucre through Jordi Puigvert. This renowned dessert restaurant in Barcelona is owned and operated by Xano Saguer & Jordi Butron and we will be lucky enough to meet these two true professionals and we are keen to gain an insight into this successful business.
• We will be meeting up with the Roca brothers from El Cellar de Can Roca for a tour of this legendary restaurant prior to a dinner reservation.
• A dinner reservation at elBulli has been obtained and we hope to meet with Ferran Adria. Dining here is an ambition and we are very excited about this.
• We will be visiting Albert Adria's tapas bar 'Inopia' and Oriol Balaguer's patisserie as well as other famous patisseries and food stores.
• We will de dining at Restaurant Sant Pau, the home of celebrated chef Carmen Ruscalleda. Her food is inspirational and we hope to meet this talented lady.

All of these exciting highlights will be reported on this blog for your enjoyment and education.

Burch & Purchese Raw Ingredients 1 - What Is Sugar?

The raw materials we use every day in the kitchen are sometimes taken for granted, it is in our best interests though, to familiarise ourselves with even the most basic of ingredients. This allows the pastry chef or chef to understand the balance of structure of recipes and methods. In the case of sugar, we have at our disposal, a plethora of different types all of which can serve a purpose and subject a recipe or formula to various outcomes.

Glucids (sweeteners) are materials that give a sweetness of flavour to preparations. Sucrose (sugar) is the most common used but there are other less used or known sweeteners which contribute to a recipe other than to sweeten. Glucose for instance is used to prevent crystallization and give elasticity to a recipe.

Sugar cane (Saccharem robustum) originated in New Guinea and after a long journey was first used by the Hindi and Chinese. 'Sugar' the name comes from a Sanskrit poem written around 3 BC which tells of the 'grain' or 'sarkara'. First the Persians and then Arabs introduced sugar to the Mediterranean region and now it is grown in over 100 countries as cane or beet or both.

Common sugar (sucrose) is obtained primarily from cane but can be obtained from beet as well. The chemical properties of sucrose are carbon (C12), hydrogen (H22) and oxygen (O11), these are composed of two (equal) bonded molecules: glucose (dextrose) and fructose (levulose). It is therefore a disaccharide.

As we have said there are many types of sugar but these can be split into two groups, simple sugars and complex sugars.

Simple sugars are glucose and fructose which are found in fruits, vegetables and honey. They do not absorb water so cannot be hydrolyzed. They do however dissolve in water and therefore ferment, this is imperative to produce carbon dioxide in baking and alcohol in brewing.

Complex sugars are composed of more than one sugar (sucrose for instance), they can ferment, but only after hydrolysis. This is where a chemical reaction occurs when a substance dissociates with the presence of an enzyme in water. This procedure produces a simple sugar and can then ferment.

Each sweetener has differing levels of sweetness which varies according to concentration, temperature and pH. Sugar has a sweetening power of 100 and is the reference for sweeteners. Here is a quick table of common sugars and there sweetening powers.

Sucrose 100

Inverted Sugar 110 - 125

Honey 120 - 130

Fructose 130 - 150

Dextrose (Glucose) 70

Glucose Syrups

DE60 65

DE40 45

DE30 30

Maltodextrins 10 - 30

Lactose 15 - 25

Sorbitol 50 - 60

Burch and Purchese will elaborate further in our blog as to different types of sugars, their properties, strengths and uses. We will also focus on other raw ingredients with the aim for better understanding of their uses.

This for now is an introduction into our work of analyzing and ingredients and putting theories into practice, in the search to improve ourselves in our daily work

Burch & Purchese Recipes 2 - Honeycomb

Burch & Purchese Dishes 6 - Burnt Orange Cream

We at Burch & Purchese are always interested in new techniques and flavours, and this dish highlights both of these. The dish is based around orange with notes of bitter, toasted/burnt and spice. Two isomalt based sugars are produced, one with a prominent orange flavour. This is made with dehydrated orange peel. The two cooked sugars are blitzed to fine powders and kept separate in hermetically sealed containers until needed. The lighter sugar is dusted onto a sil-pat with a sieve, it is dusted onto a rectangle shaped chablon which is removed before baking. After spending four minutes in an oven at 180C the sugar is removed from the oven and left to cool on the mat. Once cooled it is dusted with the orange sugar again using a chablon, again it is rectangle but this time it has diagonal indents which create an offset stripe on to the original sugar. This is then put back into the oven for two minutes before removing and rolling over a tube. The tube is reserved for later use and we begin to make the cream filling. As we mentioned earlier we are interested in using new techniques and flavours, and this cream has both. An orange infused 'sauce anglaise' is made and once cooked is poured into a baking tray and placed into a very hot oven for around 25 minutes. The oven is pre-heated to 220C and as you can imagine, this burns the top of the custard and leaves a black crust. The other interesting thing to note is that the custard curdles with over cooking and separates the fat from the water. This is alarming for any pastry chef but the outcome is correct and can be rectified to produce a smooth and silky cream infused with the burnt overtones. The 'burnt' custard is passed through a fine sieve into a thermomix, including all of the black crust and separated mixture, a leaf of gelatine is added and the mixture is blitzed. A pale, homogeneous mass is formed which is smooth and has a flavour of burnt orange which is sensational. This mix is left to chill and then piped into the sugar tubes at the last minute before serving. To accompany this stunning component are blackened slices of orange, toasted brioche, confit orange zest, Burch & Purchese spice mix and drops of coffee extract. The dish encapsulates our desire for innovative, technical and delicious components. The brioche and sugar tube provide a crunch for textural difference and the cream is sublime, the coffee and spice lift the dish to a new dimension and we hope you find this informative and that you find the dish visually appealing.