Firepop

Firepop is very new; my friend mentioned it to me amongst other hip and cool restaurants in the Newtown/Enmore area, and this one appealed to me quite a bit - I love places that cook with fire, and the description of the place sounded right up my alley - chicken hearts! Chicken tails! Padron peppers!

Look at the fish bones drying for stock!

My friend and I went for the a la carte menu since I wanted the chicken bits that weren't included in the set menu, and it turns out that it's possible to try all the things on the menu (not the mains or salads unless you have a super big appetite). We went through the priority items first and then later went back to get the things we missed!

This was the lamb marrow and it was my first time eating lamb marrow, it was good!

They didn't have oysters that day, but instead had some really nice hapuka with really tasty watermelon radish!

This is a terrible picture of a really nice wagyu cube. It's not as dark as it looks, and the flavour was good and it was nice and tender! I actually think this would go really nicely with some wasabi rather than the garlic chips, but I'm not complaining!

Wagyu slices, which did come with wasabi! It was also soy marinated so it had a great flavour.

And here are the chicken tails! I love that fatty goodness, it's so bad but so good!

The chicken hearts were really delicious too, maybe one day I should think about possibly cooking with chicken hearts?

They actually had a grilled tofu option which was really interesting, had a slightly spicy sauce if I remember and was quite enjoyable. I had been complaining lately how a lot of cheaper, almost fast food places (and even not cheap fast food places!) often don't do tofu well - I have no idea how. It's so simple to make it tasty, and Firepop demonstrates this well!

Ahahaha the padron peppers, with a side of shishito peppers. I love chilli roulette, and there was a frozen long grape on the side if we got the spicy one. Because I have no spice tolerance though, it's hard to tell if I actually got a super spicy one. I think I can gauge whether or not something is spicier than normal for me; the final padron pepper was noticeably hotter than the previous one I ate, and the heat continued to build up well after I stopped eating more, so I imagine I might have hit the jackpot, and so I asked for an extra frozen grape. I should really freeze some grapes as edible sweet ice!

And here's where we went back to the top of the menu and ordered the things we skipped. Corn ribs with a mountain of cheese, one of their popular dishes, and with good reason! Very tasty corn!

The lamb was also very impressive, I actually don't eat enough lamb but whenever I order it, it's so good. I really think I should look into learning to cook more cuts of lamb too; I didn't cook lamb forequarter chops very well once (I had no idea how long to cook them for) and usually end up specialising in backstrap and cutlets, both of which are some of the most expensive cuts ever. Lamb ribs and lamb leg seem to be grisly? I have no idea why it'd be grisly? So shoulder is the only cut that I really enjoy slow cooking - it's so good! Maybe one day I need to find a cut that I can short cook well.

And the pork belly, a classic, tasty stick!

Okay, this panna cotta was actually amazing. The chef mentioned that they make everything from scratch, even the buttermilk, which is really cool! There was rhubarb and strawberry that cut through the panna cotta nicely, and also the drops of olive oil in there were really nice too! The panna cotta had a texture similar to the type of custard that Teeter Bakery in Perth makes, it's smooth, rich, very, very nice!

What a cute little restaurant that makes tasty food! It's so simple and we could try everything without feeling overly full (I managed to save enough stomach space to go a few doors down and try out some vegan salmon sushi lol - which was fun to eat!). Hopefully they'll do well!

Reine's BBQ and kitchen adventures

Yeah I know I didn't post 2020 Christmas cooking, but it was kinda boring lol. This is far more interesting!

Cube time!! I wasn't planning on using this on Saturday, but I'd found a cheap fish and figured it was the perfect practice object. I already had the coal and firelighters for a situation just like this, so here we go!

I added just one firelighter at first, not knowing exactly how many I'd need since I only wanted a small set of coals. But the first one burned out after a while and I started panicking, because some of the coals were hot and I wasn't sure I could get in close enough to light a second firelighter as I only have normal length matchsticks. But, I was successful! And so most of the charcoal started turning white. Gosh, the firelighters STINK while they're heating up the coals. Luckily I'd already closed the balcony door as I'd seen first hand how BBQ smoke outdoors can set off an indoor fire alarm when it happened to my flatmate XD

Here is my fish! I put some garlic in the belly cavity, and seasoned both sides with salt - just something simple, as I decided I would finish it would more salt and lemon juice once it was done. Good simple flavour. Why cabbage? Because there were sugarloaf cabbages at the shops, and a while back a few food people on my feed were posting about them. They're a conical shape so I find them fascinating. I don't think they taste that different from an ordinary cabbage, maybe they are a tad sweeter based on the name? Plus it was more expensive than the fish lol. I like cheap meat and expensive veg.

Once all the fire went out and it stopped stinking, I put on my fish! For some reason I figured that meat cooks slower than cabbage, when I should have actually done it the other way around, or put everything on at the same time. Here goes nothing!

Why am I moving my fish all around the bbq? I have no idea lol. The head cooked much slower than the rest of the fish, but my goodness it started smelling good real fast. I attribute that to the garlic! But it was just a good cooking smell in general, and the cabbages actually smelled good grilling away too!

After a while, I felt everything was ready! Hopefully. The fish was already done but the cabbages weren't, but I figured raw cabbage is fine haha. I had no idea how long everything cooked for, since I'm an instinctive cook so I just wait and hope for the best, but I was tracking it by the look of the belly since i could sort of see inside a tiny bit, and also by poking the back to see how firm it was.

And the final result! Fish, cabbage with kewpie, and a sriracha, vinegar, salt, sugar marinated apple cucumber and tomato salad. Apple cucumbers seem to taste like normal cucumbers? And these were pink roma tomatoes. It was a fun adventure in cooking, I call it a success!

Now for part 2 of cooking adventures - "fake xiao long bao"!

So, I decided to revisit a chef's Instagram account to see if he'd posted any more recipes, but he hadn't, so I did my usual scrolling thing and found an image of dumplings. I don't know why, but I decided that the instructions of "200g flour, 170g boiling water > Filling: ground pork, ginger, chive, pork jelly." was sufficient for me to give it a go. Am I crazy?! That shouldn't even be a question!

Ok full disclosure, I actually did look up one of his gyoza posts too and revisited the shallot pancake recipe (that I followed successfully!) to get more understanding about how the dough would work. I did the boiling water thing, and then kneaded it till the gluten activated and then it started sticking to itself, and let it rest. However, the ratio was off? Even though I followed it to within 3g? Either that or the warmth and humidity affected my dough, so after several hours when I was finally ready to use it, it was extremely wet and sticky again :(. I had to compensate by dusting the board heavily which helped a lot!

It turns out you really don't need a large amount of dough at all per wrapper! This was one of the first wrappers that was way too large.

I did find it extremely easy to roll each one to super thin though! That wasn't a problem at all. It was very satisfying, albeit very time consuming.

It's embarrassing just how much size variance there is in this dumpling set haha. The final four were because I wanted to ration out both the dough and the filling, since by some insane miracle I'd portioned it almost perfectly.

Into the steamer they went, and lo and behold, dumplings!! Wow!!! Ahahahaha I can't believe I managed to pull that off, especially as I was convinced I had messed up at the dough stage and had been thinking about going to plan B (which was "noodles and stir fry, where I'd just spaetzle the dough and then fry up the filling haha, but luckily I didn't have to execute this plan!). Perseverance pays off!

YAY

So, I originally wanted to do this with the pork filling, but I didn't have the time to buy the ingredients for, and prepare pork jelly. I wanted to save it for the next long weekend, but at the same time, I figured I should do a test run first to make sure I could at least get somewhat close. So I'm really glad! But, now I'm not so sure I want to make them again. I'm really proud that I managed to make handmade noodles and shallot pancakes using 3-sentence recipes (and maybe I'll make shallot pancakes again? I bought beef tallow for the next attempt!). But these are all things that are incredibly time consuming. Now I really appreciate the advantages of modern machinery for food making, because even though the raw ingredients are cheaper, the amount of time and experience you need to make these things from scratch is mind-blowing. I remember reading an article about how a Chinese food vendor can't raise the price of his dumplings for fear of losing out on business as he's already operating on razor thin margins, but at the same time, it's not reflective of what it costs him to make them. Man, such a tough situation, since Chinese food is still considered "cheap". Definitely not. I was fairly confident I could fold up the dumplings to a somewhat passable stage, but I fell well short of my own expectations. It takes a long time to learn how to do this efficiently!

I love cooking!!!

Rusty Pig

Ah, the joys of dining out. Also, visiting a restaurant I haven't been to before. And best of all, cooking with fire! A triple combo that was so good!

It's a relatively new restaurant at less than a year old. Located next to one of my favourite cafes, I always noticed it but never really took time to go visit (plus I never seem to find the money to go!), but now seemed like the perfect time. Yes, what a fantastic night!

It was just myself and another party of 5 on a stormy Friday night. Usually I avoid Fridays, but I was feeling it this time. The max capacity at the time was 10 people, and already there were no shows! How crushing. It always makes me sad when people don't call to cancel.

Their non alcoholic options were almost non existent, so i was contemplating getting a glass of wine, but then I found on their list a green ant gin! Woah! Yeah, I definitely had to try that! It was garnished with lemon, making it harder to taste out the nuances of the gin, but since I've eaten green ants before at Noma Australia, I could use my imagination to sort of bridge the gin to the tonic and lemon. Good stuff!

Fired baked bread with lamb fat, confit garlic. Ooooooh yeah. Do you know how hard it is to get animal fat bread?? I recall having chicken fat with butter somewhere (maybe Automata?), and then there was the beef fat taro at Orana (ok so that's not quite bread, but you get the point), but it seems to be pretty uncommon? This was incredible. I don't usually like lamb fat but I suspect that this is because I never ate lamb growing up because my mum didn't like it, but since I've been experimenting with my own cooking adventures, I think I'm now used to the flavour so this was delicious! And that confit garlic too! It was just SO GOOD.

Corn ribs, chaat masala, charred lemon. Yeeah that spice on the corn is great! Plus I love corn so this was so good! There was so much corn too!

Abrolhos Island scallops, salted kombu butter. This is the crowd favourite, but I've had a loooooot of scallops, so this one wasn't actually my favourite haha (it was the bread). The salted kombu was super tasty though, so I can see why everyone loves this dish. But when I can get live Rottnest Island scallops for myself, this one's a hard call. Yes, it's great, but I've had many great scallops!

Grilled occy, charred corn salad, fermented chilli sauce. The rest of the menu were basically a list of their greatest hits, and this was more of a new/experimental dish. Not bad! I personally felt that it was a bit of corn overkill, considering how much corn I ate earlier, but I love corn so it was fine. The octopus was super tasty and it came covered in fermented chilli! Hmmm I still think Besk's house hot sauce was just that bit tastier, but this also had a similar tomatoey flavour. I feel like the octopus might pair better with a different vegetable? We could just go Spanish? and say potatoes but maybe it does well with other foods too!

Mottainai lamb, pomme puree, minted jus. Yeah wow that lamb. Such deliciousness! And sorry, but I'm going to call that mash potatoes. That was super tasty too! Thick and luscious. I'm amazed at how tasty that lamb was. The chef was saying how he can always taste it out from other producers - these lambs are fattened up with carrots from the carrot farm next door! So good. This was my second favourite next to the bread.

And lastly for dessert, sticky date pudding, bourbon butterscotch sauce, vanilla ice cream. Yeah I love sticky date pudding! It's one of those foods I wasn't terribly fond of as a kid, but started loving it as I grew up. I pretty much demolished this dessert, it was so good, with a great sauce to pudding ratio. Yeah! If anything I wished there was a bit more date? But that's a very minor thing and personal preference.

Overall it was a fantastic and great value dinner! Plus I loved the whole cooking with fire experience. Flames just make everything taste so much better! Because it was so quiet, I also managed to enjoy a lovely conversation with the chef, who seems to have worked at many restaurants! That's pretty cool! What a lovely bunch of people, and I think everyone's just happy to be out and about again. I've been having so much fun with home cooking, but having flavours and techniques constructed by other people is also very fun!

Firedoor in 2019

Most of the restaurants I go to leave a big impression on me. Each restaurant generally has one or two dishes that leave a huge impression on me. And then there's a dish that changes the way you think about something forever. Those come by only every few restaurants, and one of them is the Firedoor steak.

It was the thought of that steak that made me book Firedoor again, even though this time I would be dining alone and wouldn't actually be able to order the steak. But I also think this place made headlines after I visited because they had a goldfish to accompany solo diners at one point? I could be wrong on that. Either way, I was eager to come back.

Bingo! I got the fireside table! Yeah! Perfect for the obligatory fire shot to begin with!

A mocktail to start. I like that restaurants are starting to feature interesting non alcoholic drinks! This one I think was beetroot based, and the foam on top is made using aquafaba. Nice stuff!

Oh. Oh yeah. Marron was on the menu. I mean I should be sensible buuuuut LOOK HOW CUTE THIS LITTLE GUY IS! How could I not eat it??? So I decided to go for it. What an absolute cutie.

Ok, so this visit was actually very special for me. Since it was early and quiet, and I was fireside, Lennox himself introduced himself to me! How awesome!!! He asked me if it was my first time and I said that I was a returning customer. He also shook my hand! Woah! Yay! I SHOOK LENNOX HASTIES HAND this is so exciting!!!

He even gave me this kangaroo dish as a complementary starter as a way of saying thank you. That's so nice! Already this makes me feel like coming back again for a third visit in the future! I think that small gestures like this are really nice. I really don't expect it at all, especially as it was only my second visit and years after my first, it wasn't even like I was a regular or anything!

I chose a light dish to start off with. I can't remember exactly but I believe this was albacore tuna with kohl rabi, persimmon maybe? And you can see it also has tendrils of seaweed! I liked the combination of flavours and textures in this dish! So interesting!

Ah, look at that fire go! It was hard to get a good shot that includes the little sparks flying off to the side. It was interesting to see how the kitchen worked, since the height of the grill was adjustable so you could bring it down closer to the coals or further away. It was also interesting to see how long each item stayed on the grill too - it was actually longer than I thought! I think that's the beauty of cooking with an open fire, it looks spectacular but the flames seem to be cooler than a gas stovetop, so the way food cooks is different too!

My lovely marron was ready now! Isn't it so cute? Tiny limes with ice plant leaves! I liked this version better than the original I reckon!

Also, DUCK HEARTS! Yeah! I'm eating so many hearts this trip! I had the chicken hearts at Chaco Bar and now duck hearts here! I'm pretty sure duck hearts featured a few years back and I really really wanted them, and finally they were back on the menu, so I was very excited about this! And so tender too. Man, if only I was brave enough to cook hearts myself... maybe one day, but I'd want the super good stuff rather than the 500g packs you get at the supermarkets.

For all the greatness of meat and fire, Firedoor is actually a vegetable heavy restaurant. Veges taste just as good with a lick of flames, and this seasonal dish of asparagus and peas with hazelnuts was too good to pass up! Yeah! It's always worth getting the seasonal vegetables, you don't get fresher than this!

And remember to always leave room for dessert. They'd been advertising a bombe alaska for a while and I was so worried that it was only on the chefs menu or otherwise inaccessible, but no, it was on the a la carte menu too! Yeah!

I prepped my camera in advance since I was anticipating some amazing shots. Look at that brandy or similar go! Yeah! I love those flames hahah. There's fireside, then there's fiery food at your table! It wasn't just a pretty show. That was a solid, delicious bombe. I think there was raspberry ice cream inside? Oh man so good. I love chefs here, they have such a great sense of humour too! After I'd finished, the dessert chef came over to collect my plate and teased me! He said it mustn't have been that good because there was a tiny melted puddle that I couldn't quite scrape! So I said I could lick the plate to make it all better hahahaha. Friendly staff are the best!

I don't know what it was about this trip but everything was just so much better than my first visit of many restaurants! Firedoor is such a lovely place, I want to come back again and again!

DID I MENTION THAT I SHOOK LENNOX HASTIES HAND?! TWICE!!! We shook hands at the end too and I tipped a heap since I got the free dish haha. Plus that saw. I loved hearing the bandsaw go again and again!!!

Ok that's enough blogging for now, it's so tedious hahaha.

Firedoor

Ok, finally time to start posting about all my fantastic adventures! I really hope I haven't forgotten too much. I've decided I should do all the restaurants first, then Singapore, then Japan, and Sydney last. Maybe. Only because Sydney is already so familiar.Firedoor. The story with Firedoor is that when it opened, I added it to my list. Communal tables, cooking with fire, what more could you want? But then it never really made the top of the list for some reason. A year or so later, I got linked an article which claims Firedoor has one of the world's best steaks and was expensive, and aged in its own kidney fat. That didn't really get my curiosity going enough to bump it up either. It wasn't until I was looking at the cost of booking Burnt Ends in Singapore that I realised, I don't need to fork out three times as much for an expensive restaurant there, when I could get the "same" thing here for much less! And that's how I finally went to Firedoor.  We were seated about as far from the kitchen as you could get - the bar table and the communal table were both in the way. I should have asked for a kitchen seat, but maybe next time. It's both a good and a bad thing - watching chefs in action, but it'd definitely get very, very hot. My lens was barely long enough to be able to get the shot of the fire.My eye was on the pippies, and my ears were all over the mentioning of the marron special they had. I actually didn't think much of the $167 247-day aged steak on their menu, but I felt compelled to order it because who doesn't order steak in an acclaimed fire-based restaurant.It turns out I forgot to take a picture of the bread that we ordered. Did Sydney restaurants change all of a sudden so that bread is now a menu item and is charged? Or is it because I've just been to too many degustation restaurants in the past so it comes included? I don't actually know, or mind... except that two half-slices of bread cost $8... that was a bit steep.Anyway, the marron! That meat was so tender, so nicely cooked! And of course I love coastal greens. It's been a long time since I've had karkalla! That finger lime was also delicious, though I kind of forgot to spread it all out with the available marron, since I was too busy enjoying the meat as is.The humble spud - ash baked potato, dill creme fraiche, bottarga. Yeah, look at all those bottarga shavings! Of course you have to order a potato at a fire restaurant! This was an awesome version of baked potato which I believe maintained its firmness.Pippie time! The garlic shoots and black bean flavour was really familiar to me, and went great with the pippies! There was a good serving of that too. What was really funny was seeing my brother arrange the shells in a really need way around his plate. I had thought about doing the same, but ended up just stacking the shells randomly on my plate. The shells are such pretty shapes, like butterflies!Behold the special cutlery! That is a really interesting knife design. I love taking pictures of cutlery! And that water was from my mocktail condensating like crazy.Oh yeah. Yeah. I've got a story to tell with this steak. Like I said, this place apparently served up one of the best steaks in the world, and I'd forgotten about that. I thought I'd ordered a normal, albeit super aged 500g on the bone black angus rib eye for stupid amounts of money.That's when I heard the bandsaw. It's been a long time since I've heard that high pitched, piercing sound of a saw going through bone, and it was a gorgeous sound. My head immediately popped up as I looked at the kitchen, and found the massive hunk of meat that the steak pieces were being sliced off. I've never seen that at a restaurant before. It was amazing! It may have been the head chef? Or just whoever was on at the time (I don't recognise Lennox Hastie by sight), but basically I think they noticed that I had started looking in their direction. I really hope I had a goofy looking smile, I honestly don't know! But I was just so happy when I realised our steaks were all being cut to order.It was also about this point that I started remembering that article about this legendary aged steak at Firedoor, and then thinking about how long our steak had been aged for, and how it looked just hanging there in the kitchen, in room temperature, made me think that we might just have ordered that same thing. Not only that, but it also hit me that we didn't want our steak done. So there must have been only one way this steak was served...And just look at it. Rare, and so rich in colour and taste! It was immediately like no steak I'd ever eaten before, and definitely had an aged, gamey flavour. It was actually really impressive! My brother noted that different parts of the steak tasted different. I didn't really like the fat - the marbling was fine, but the actual fat on the sides was just a bit too funky for me, and I realised that the tingling I got on my tongue was similar to that of blue cheese (I don't know if other people get that sensation; I just happen to be quite acid-sensitive so that's how I remember it), and then the flavour started to make sense. I still couldn't eat all the fat though. But the rest of the steak was awesome! Funky, but awesome! It was well worth the money as it's not something you can easily get anywhere else. I'd definitely recommended it, but with a caveat that it's probably not something that everyone would like.And finally, dessert. This is actually the tiniest iced vovo dessert ever! Full of raspberries and coconut. The waiter also told us that it'd be a small dish. I think it's good that it's small, because it means you can pack all the flavours into a single mouthful - I found that separately, while it was nice, wasn't too vovo-like, but as soon as I ate all the components together, yeah, it was definitely vovo. The coconut made it all come together with the raspberries.Even with the expensive steak, the bill wasn't all that much higher than what I'd pay at any other fine dining restaurant in Australia - which made me all the happier because I would have paid the same amount if I'd dined alone at Burnt Ends - I'm certain of it.YAY FOR FIRE