Time to Saüc up the good life.

Saüc (the local word for Elder Berries) is a one Michelin starred restaurant in Barcelona and head chef Xavier Franco provides a menu which reflects Catalan cuisine using traditional, local flavours and ingredients in a fine dining setting. With several different options in tasting menus and a very reasonable fixed price lunch menu plus a la carte, you can have a great meal at a highly rated restaurant without breaking the bank.

I decided on the full five course tasting menu this also includes two appetisers, a cheese plate and two desserts.

Firstly, the service was excellent, the staff spoke English, were extremely helpful, described dishes clearly and answered any questions. Also one of the staff members was kind enough to provide me with a copy of the menu and mark the dishes I had during the meal. The fact that I accidentally forgot this in the taxi on the way back to my hotel is entirely my fault.

To start, along with the bread I was given a plate of the brightest green olives along with a cracker and a mysterious jelly cube.

These olives were very morish and the cracker was a cheese cookie which was rich and salty and the jelly was a black olive jelly. These make a great snack and would go well on a bar with a few glasses of wine.

The first appetiser was Mackerel with Dried and Marinated Tomato.

Unfortunately, this photo does not do this dish justice. The slight oiliness of the mackerel was balanced with the sweetness of the tomato.

The second appetiser was Roasted Catalan White Sausage with Parmentiere and Pea Cream.

The colour of this dish jumps out at you and while I went straight in and tried the sausage (and it was a couple of bites if meaty goodness) the parmentiere and pea cream was amazing. Parmentiere is a potato puree, but the potatos are usually cooked in butter instead of water.

So that was the appetisers out of the way, now for the first of the main courses. White Asparagus, Razor Clams, Almond Milk and Basil Mayonnaise.

It was great to see razor clams again and the texture of shellfish alongside perfectly cooked asparagus was a good combination and the asparagus certainly held it's own in the flavour stakes. The almond milk was thick and creamy and the vibrant, almost flourescent dash of basil mayonnaise brings the colour that this dish so obviously needs along with a sweetness that complements the other ingredients.

The second main course was Haricot Beans from Santa Pau, Prawn and Funghi Pil-Pil.

Here once again is the common Catalan flavour combination of seafood and beans. The earthy flavours are powerful, but not without finesse, definitely a combination I would love to work on when I get home. Pil-Pil is commonly a sauce made with garlic and hot peppers and this brightens up the dish quite well.

The next course is a "surf and turf" combination and is not on the main menu. Crispy Dewlap Pork, Baby Squid and Wild Mushroom.

More of those earthy Catalan flavours here, the baby squid which if you've been following the posts about Barcelona you will recognise as a common ingredient here combined with a meaty local mushroom and finger of delicious mystery pork. Dewlap is the fold of skin hanging under the lower jaw and from the neck of the pig and in this case is crispy, crackly goodness on the outside and soft melting pork on the inside. The mushroom is Amanita Caesarea or Ceasar's mushroom and has firm yellow flesh and an orange cap.

Next came the fish course, John Dory on Roasted Tender Wheat with Sea Urchin.


I'm probably a little biased here as John Dory is one of my favourite fish to eat and this was a wonderfully cooked example. The flesh was white and almost translucent and flaked very easily. The skin was crispy and slightly salty, but not overly so. The fish was sitting on a bed of roasted wheat topped with sea urchin roe. To me, the star of this dish was the wheat, I understand that it is roasted in fish stock until tender, but the wheat still retained plenty of chewiness and contrasted very well with the tender fish and ethereal sea urchin roe.

The meat course was the final main course and this one was certainly full of local flavour. Iberian Pork Secret, Jabugo Ham Curd and Beijing Green Beans.



I'm not sure what the secret is, but this is some of the best pork I have ever tasted in my life. Still slightly pink in the middle, this melted in the mouth and tasted like an amazingly tender bacon. This was intensely rich and to be honest was almost more than I could eat because of this, but with a little of the curd to cut through the richness, I managed to make it....:) The beans were nice too, but to be honest I used them more to space out the intensity of the pork than as a part of the dish (but maybe that's why they're there). I'm not entirely sure of the process of making the ham curd, but Jabugo ham is one of the best Iberian hams you can get. I believe the bones of the ham are cooked like a soup and then the soup is curdled somehow to produce a slightly sour, ham-flavoured curd. A memorable dish, but would have been just as memorable in a slightly smaller portion...but I'm not complaining!

The cheese plate was an assortment of Catalan Cheeses.


There are sheep, cow and goat's milk cheeses here served with a pumpkin marmalade, elder (Saüc) berry gelatin and some Strawberry, Raisin and Nut Bread. The first cheese on the left is a sheep's milk cheese with a blue-mold rind which was my favourite. Eaten without the rind it a mild flavoured cheese, but with the rind it gets all those blue mold tastes and becomes something very special. I can't recall exactly what the others were, but the marmalade and elder berry gelatine were a welcome alternative to the common accompaniment of muscatels or quince paste I often see in Melbourne.

Dessert time! The first one is a combination of dessert and palette cleanser. Melon and Ginger Soup with Watermelon Ice and Basil Gel.


Bright and refreshing, this was a great way to move from cheese into dessert. All the flavours were distinct and worked well together, a very summery dish.

Following after this came the Muskovado Cake, Tia Maria ith Mascarpone Cream.


Muskovado is a type of brown sugar and has a strong, syrupy flavour. The cake is a sponge soaked in tia maria and I believe the foam is a chocolate foam, but I'll hope for confirmation on that at some point. A refined, but gentle dessert, this is a great way to finish a good meal. Oh wait, I still need my coffee.

Along with coffee came another surprise:


Petit-Fours: Liquorice and Anise Scum, Almond Cake, Chocolate and Feuillet-Paulletine Rock and Cinnamon Biscuit. Scum is a bit of a strong word for a glass of lightly anise flavoured foam, but these are all wondeful little gems to send me packing back to my hotel for a siesta.

I had a great time at Saüc and seeing Catalan food in this way gives me a different perspective on the ingredients and flavour profiles of this unique region of Spain.

Bologna

Bologna has given its name to perhaps the most famous pasta sauce in the world - Bolognese. Spaghetti Bolognese is possibly the best known Italian dish in the world, but the funny thing is you wont find it in Bologna. Here the sauce is called Ragu and is served with tagliatelle, not spaghetti. Another very famous product of this area is Bologna Sausage, which Amercans call Baloney and Australians call Mortadella.

One of the restaurants I that decide to try is called La Trattoria del Rosso, which has a very reasonably priced lunch menu and is almost always full. I started with the antipasto of mixed salumi served with a fresh creamy cheese and fresh fried dough crostini.


This was a great selection of four different salumi, including prosciutto and mortadella. The cheese was creamy and mild.

Of course had to try the ragu, but since the menu had both tagliatelle and tortelloni with ragu, I decideded to try the tortelloni.


The meat was very finely minced, even though different restaurants have different ragus, some chunkier than others. The pasta was very nicely cooked and I was full at two courses, a great lunch.

After spending several days walking around the town looking at all the chruches and sights of Bologna (it's a beautiful city and many of the sights are within walking distance of each other) and doing a bit of research on the internet about which restaurants to visit, I found some discussion of a restaurant called Ristorante Pappagallo, a very old school place (90 years old) which is very proud of it's history and has photos all over the walls of famous people eating there from many decades ago. Located under the shadow of the Two Towers (a major landmark near the centre of the town), Papagallo serves high-end Bolognese cuisine. I wasn't anywhere near hungry enough for a full meal, but I didn't want to miss out on the opportunity to eat here, so I decided on entree and dessert. To start, the risotto with prawns, apples and zucchini flowers grabbed my attention.


These flavours worked very well together and the rice was perfectly cooked and seasoned, I was very happy with this. For dessert I had the strawberry mousse with balsamic vinegar reduction.


The mousse was light, without being too airy, the flavour of strawberries was delicate and the blasamic balanced the sweetness with its acidity.

Bologna is an amazing place to visit and I would love to come back here again.

This Little Piggy Went To Market

One of my favourite things to do even at home is to visit the market, but even more so in a new town or country. Today was no exception.

I've been looking forward to see what the Belgrade markets have to offer and knowing that most of the stall holders are the farmers themselves only makes it more exciting to see what they have. To say that the produce is amazing is an understatement, but lets start with breakfast. After the cooked breakfast from yesterday, we decided on a traditional Serbian breakfast of baked goods.


I wanted to try everything here, it smelled and looked so good, so I had to drag myself away and left the ordering to my mum and went across the road to grab some Kiselo Mleko (literally Sour Milk) which is the same thing that we call yoghurt, but what they call yoghurt here is what we call buttermilk. Anyway, here is what breakfast for three looked like this morning.

As you can see, while many of these things look a similar colour, the flavours are very different. The mini-pizzas on the right had a very thin slice of proscuitto, some shredded mushrooms and cheese on a base of puff pastry (nice enough, but not outstanding). The darker rolls on the left were fairly plain with a flavour I couldn't quite identify, probably some sugar based coating brushed onto the loaves before baking like molasses which gives them that beautiful brown colour. In the front left is something called a Pogacica (similar to a scone, but made with lard so it has a strong savoury flavour. This is what we had the yoghurt with and while very nice, I have had better ones made by my grandmother). To the right is a cheese filled burek which was the absolute highlight for me, these were flaky and delicious, with the cheese filling being crumbly and slightly salty. Lastly for a little sweet finish, at the very back and small scones filled with jam, which you have to be a little careful with or the jam may spurt out all over you.

On to the market.

The first stall we encountered sold some dried cranberries which were delicious so we bought some of these to keep in the apartment as a snack (I'm muching on them as I write this). We walked to one end of the market which was where the cheese stalls were set up inside a building.


One thing I noticed immediately is that the cheeses at this market (and that the Serbs usually eat) is very fresh and very plain. There are no mold cheeses or smoked cheeses. They have cheese made from cow's milk and sheep's milk and a product called kajmak which is basically the cream skimmed from the top of milk and turned into a cream cheese which you can buy mild or aged. The other main cheese is a delicate, smooth, mild cheese similar to fresh mozarella. The thing that struck me the most about these stall holders is how proud they all are of their product. Every single stall we walked past, we were offered tastes of almost everything in the stall with the stall owner wanting to tell us all about his cheese and how it had been produced.

Behind the cheese area we found heaven.



I mean the smoked meat area. Now we're not talking about champagne ham or ham on the bone here, or "chicken" lunch meats. We're talking about home made sausages, cabanas and BACON. Bacon with so much flavour you can see it.

Wow. I wanted to bottle the smell in this place and use it to spray around my guests at dinner parties to generate an appetite. So, after spending surprisingly little in this room, we moved out into the fresh produce area.
It is just the beginning of summer here and you can tell by all the amazing berries and stone fruits that were on offer at the market stalls. There were fresh raspberries, strawberries, cherries, even red currants, which I haven't had since I was a kid. This tiny, round, smooth-skinned berries explode with flavour when you bite into them and have an amazing taste that wakes your tastebids up. Most of these berries were around 200 dinars per punnet (or about $AUD4). The most amazing of the berries was the strawberries...these things were bigger than golfballs and smelled absolutely fantastic. We bought a bunch of these to take home too.

The colours and smells from all the stalls were amazing, and I could wander for days just sampling a little here and a little there.
I had a preconception (as much as I try to avoid them) that Serbs, while very good with meat, didn't really have an appreciation for good, fresh fruits and vegetables. I am happy to say that this is not the case, as everywhere I went, I saw amazing variety of fruits, vegetables and herbs and fresher and better looking than those you would find in our larger markets back home. I guess this is due to the fact that there is no wholesale market in Belgrade, these stalls are all run by the farmers themselves and while we have farmer's markets back home, they are often hard to get to or only open once a month.
By the time we left the market we needed a coffee, so we stopped at a cafe just outside the market and started thinking about how we were going to go back to our apartment and prepare some of the fresh ingredients we had purchased. We got up and started to walk home, when my Dad wondered off and came back very excited, telling us to forget eating what we had bought, he had found what we had to have for lunch. We followed him to a shop called a Pecenjara (or Roasting House) which was a tiny little shop that just sells roast meat. You probably have an image in your head of a nice piece of roast beef or pork from which slices are carved for sandwiches, but what I mean is this:

Yes, that's a whole piglet and a whole lamb. You simply tell the owner how much you want and he cuts it off the whole carcass with a huge guillotine. I thought the smell of the smoked meats was the best I would find all day, but I was wrong. So wrong! We asked the owner how many he goes through in a week and he said about 50-60 whole animals. I can see why.
So we bought a slab of each and took it back with us for lunch and while I expected the pork to be good (and it was), the lamb was absolutely sensational, tender and juicy and delicious.
What a day!