The Big Foody

For the past five years (yes!) I’ve been taking guided tours at Zealandia. At the end of last year, another opportunity was presented to me…taking guided tours around Wellington, to various foody establishments. The company, The Big Foody, is setting up in Wellington (they’re based in Auckland) and need guides for its tours. Sounds like my kind of deal, right?

In December, I accompanied the other Wellington guide, once on a training tour and once on what is known in the trade as a ”famil” -  a familiarisation tour for people who will recommend us – journalists, industry professionals, tourism companies etc. Then on Sunday, I took my first tour with actual members of the public, from the cruise ship Azamara Journey. There were supposed to be two ships in Wellington on that day, so the Big Cheese, Elle, had come down from Auckland to take the other…but it turns out that Grand Princess couldn’t dock in Wellington due to the high winds. Azamara Journey is a much smaller, boutique cruise liner, so didn’t suffer from the problems that affect the larger ships: their high-sidedness effectively turns the side of a ship into a giant sail, and they are unable to control docking in high winds.

We’d arranged to meet up 15 minutes before the tour began at the Old Government Buildings. When I arrived, they were already there! I welcomed them all, and explained that as it was Sunday, all the businesses around this end of town were closed, so we had a little bit of a walk to our first destination. Just to complicate matters, Sunday was also the day of the Wellington leg of the New Zealand Pro Classic cycle race. This is normally run in various legs around the Wairarapa, but this year they decided to do the final leg on an urban course on the Golden Mile in Wellington. Which is slap bang in the middle of the route we usually take through the city! We had to divert down Featherston Street. Normally we’d head to Pravda for cheese scones, but they’re shut on Sundays, so we went to our alternate venue, Pickle & Pie. Both are Wellington institutions, with Pravda being world-famous in New Zealand for its cheese scones. During Wellington On A Plate they run scone-making courses, and these are usually a sell-out. Pickle & Pie’s approach is slightly different, in that they cram as much cheese into the scone as possible, and then toast it and serve it with…you guessed…pickles! We also tasted some of their Pie Of The Day – brisket with cheese.

Next, we backtracked a little to Willis Lane, to try beer, charcuterie and cheeses at Churly’s . This is a venue owned by Behemoth, an Auckland craft brewery, but it’s inclusion on the Wellington tour is due to (a) having a strong connection to the owner, and (b) the unique charcuterie from A Lady Butcher. As the sun is over the yardarm by this stage, a couple of beers (tasting size only!) are included.

Out into the sunshine and Wellington wind again – we were certainly giving our group the full Wellington experience! – and across Jervois Quay to the waterfront, our next stop was Karaka café. Sited next to the wharewaka function centre, this café is owned and operated by the Retimanu whānau, of Māori & Pacifica descent. The food is reflective of this heritage, and they work with Māori and Pacifica providers as much as possible. The offering here is a hāngī-style potato and kumara cake, topped with a pork and watercress sausage, washed down with a Taha tonic, flavoured with kawakawa.

Our final stop on this tour is at Wellington Chocolate Factory. WCF is no ordinary chocolate maker – they go above and beyond to produce the finest chocolate possible. This includes going way further than the rubber-stamp Fair Trade that other ethically-produced chocolate manufacturers boast of – they actually visit the chocolate growers themselves, and increasingly source their beans from Pacific producers, notably in Vanuatu. They sort the beans and roast them all themselves, and then mix them into various types of chocolate – dark, milk, vegan (with coconut milk), and some flavoured bars as well. Naturally, it’s more expensive than Cadbury’s and even Whittaker's, but it is as good as chocolate can get. They have recently introduced chocolate “tea”, made with the husks of the cacao beans (which are usually discarded) – a light and refreshing alternative to hot chocolate, but with all the health benefits associated with theobromine.

Elle had to dash away early to catch her plane back to Auckland, so I escorted the group back to the pick-up point where we’d started the tour. It’s a bit of a hike around Wellington, so you get a chance to work up an appetite, and then walk off the calories afterwards. But no-one left hungry!

For the rest of the summer I'll be combining my Zealandia tours with Big Foody tours, which helps to break up my work and provide some variety.

Montezuma’s Chocolate

Whilst in Costa Rica, we went on a tour of a coffee plantation and farm, to find out about the coffee-making process. They also told us about the sugar-making process, and the chocolate-making process. At the end of the chocolate-making, our guide made a drink which he described as Montezuma’s xocoatl recipe. I thought this would be good to make into ice-cream. Here goes:

250ml cream

400ml milk

4 egg yolks

100g sugar

250g Whittaker’s 72% Dark Ghana chocolate* 

2 cinnamon sticks

Pinch of chilli flakes

1 tsp salt

1 tsp vanilla paste

Beat the egg yolks and sugar together until pale. Heat the milk and cream in a saucepan, and add the remaining ingredients. Stir to melt the chocolate, until almost boiling. Allow it to cool a little, then add a small amount of the chocolate cream to the eggs and sugar, and combine. Add the rest of the chocolate cream mixture, combine thoroughly, and return it to the saucepan. Heat it again, stirring constantly to prevent it catching, until almost boiling. It should be a thick smooth custard at this point. Cool in the fridge overnight, then churn it in your ice-cream maker.

* This, I am sure, is what Montezuma would have used if he'd known about it. You may substitute a local equivalent.

Coffee

Here we are in Costa Rica, and my legions of enquiring fans (thanks, sis!) want to know…do they coffee? It is, after all, about the only thing that’s known about Costa Rica, outside Costa Rica.

Well, devoted fans, I have the answer: yes, they do. Early in our tour, all the coffee we encountered was of the filtered sort, and I felt it unworthy of remark. It was good, stronger than is normally served by such establishments that provide coffee in large urns. It wasn’t until we were on our way to Monteverde and stopped at Café Horizonte that I had my first opportunity to have an actual espresso made from Costa Rica coffee. Yes, they can make coffee! Hooray!

On our second day in Monteverde, we booked ourselves on a tour that promised coffee, sugar and chocolate. There were in fact two such tours on offer at the Tourist Information Centre, so I asked which was the best one. Having been told that one was more biased towards sugar, and the other more towards chocolate, as well as the coffee, we opted for the chocolate-heavy option and boarded a bus to Don Juan coffee, a short distance outside town.

We met our guide, Danny, and were joined by another group to make a total tour of 16 people. The first order of the day was to call a Costa Rican Uber, or a cart drawn by bulls. Danny asked who wanted to take a ride, and we put our hands up. There was only room for seven of us in the cart, so we took a short walk up the road and back again. The rest of the group just got to stand there, watch and wait. Then Danny took us on the tour proper, and started showing the coffee-making process, from berries or “cherries” as they’re known, to removing the mucilage, drying the beans, how long they need to be dried and stored for before being roasted – light, medium, or dark. At each stage we were given some of the fruit or beans to feel, taste, suck on etc – it was very much an interactive multi-sensory experience. At the end he got a volunteer to grind the resultant coffee beans for us, and made coffee in a non-traditional Costa Rican way. As he explained the old way: put grounds in an old sock, pour hot (never boiling!) water through, wasting much of the flavour. But you can’t tell your grandmother that she’s been making coffee wrong all her life! The best way, he said, is to pour hot water onto the grounds in a jug, mix and leave to stand for a couple of minutes, then filter through an old sock (the older the better, apparently).

And that’s the coffee-making process. Beaucoup de cheval, pas de glue etc.

Next, we went to the chocolate-making process. They don’t grow chocolate on the estate (it’s too high above sea level) but they do make it. The process is slightly different, involving fermentation of the cacao beans rather than drying, and then separating the cocoa butter from the cocoa nibs. We smelt and tasted the various stages again, before being invited to try Montezuma’s xocoatl recipe: chocolate, cinnamon, chilli, salt, monkey pee (vanilla extract), and hot water. It was a bit gritty, but otherwise fine. I may make an ice cream version of it when I get back.

The final demo was sugar cane. This is grown on the estate – in fact, it grows anywhere hot, regardless of altitude – and Danny had previously cut down a couple of stalks, which two of our group had been using as walking sticks. These were then processed through what looks like a mangle or pasta machine, with the gap between the rollers being reduced with each pass. Nicola was co-opted to feed the canes through the machine.

At the end of the process you have a liquid, known as agua de sapo, or “toad water”, in Costa Rica. The origin of this name according to Danny is that the drink is popular with policemen, who are known as sapo or toads in CR slang. It’s 10% sucrose in water, with impurities. To make sugar, you boil this liquid until you have reduced most of the water and are left with a thick molasses, then let it cool and shave it into a powder. It’s still brown, unrefined sugar at this stage. You can then refine it further to make white sugar.

This looks quite easy...

...Uh-oh...

...It's all gone Pete Tong!

That was the end of our tour. We went back to the gift shop to buy coffee-related products, have another cup of coffee, before boarding a somewhat-delayed bus (we had to wait for another tour group to finish) back to Monteverde Country Lodge. While we waited, there was a rainbow.

   

CoCo At The Roxy

Disgracefully, we have lived in Miramar for over a year without visiting CoCo at The Roxy. Sure, we’ve stopped in for a coffee when we’ve been to the cinema, but we decided that the time was now ripe to break our duck and go for their Burger Wellington offering: The Silence Of The Lambs burger. Unsurprisingly, this is a lamb burger. It also comes with a fava bean purée. The nice Chianti, so they tell us, is optional. In fact it’s served with either a glass of Chardonnay or a Garage Project Trip Hop beer – which is what I opted for (Nicola had the wine).

And what a burger it was! A substantial lamb patty, with lettuce, the aforementioned purée, and grilled halloumi cheese; the burger was cooked pink in the middle, and served on a good bun, with chips. This is one of the best burgers I’ve had, and I scored it a 9 – it would have been 10 if it had been made of beef.

It was followed by an ice-cream sundae with summer berry compote, vanilla ice-cream and Whittaker’s chocolate sauce – very decadent! I don’t have a picture of it because, frankly, I’d scoffed half of it before it occurred to me to take a photo.

Afterwards we went to see The Chef.

Wellington On A Plate

Disaster struck on Tuesday night as we headed up to the Backbencher for our usual quiz night: the pub was closed for a private function! The owner, Boycie, had forgotten to tell us about this last week (in fact, the same thing happened last year when we made our first abortive attempt to participate in the quiz here). I quickly texted all the usual participants to let them know.

But, what to do? We had nothing prepared for dinner, and the night was drawing on. Fortunately, we are slap-bang in the middle of Wellington’s annual festival of food, Wellington On A Plate, where many of the capital’s cafés and restaurants offer special deals for a fortnight, as well as other events being organized. Unfortunately we didn’t have our magazine guide with us, so we just headed to the nearest place we could remember that was participating – and a place we haven’t visited for a good while: Pravda. The deal they were offering was a three-course dinner with matching wines. The menu was cheese leek & pancetta tartlet, sous-vide lamb with pumpkin mash, Israeli couscous and tapenade, and Whittaker's chocolate torte with poached pear and vanilla ice cream.

Other events being offered during WOAP include lunchtime tasting at Kirkcaldie & Stains, Wellington’s main department store. As this is conveniently located just round the corner from where I work, I’ve been trying to drop in there at lunchtimes to sample what’s on offer. On Monday, Kapiti Kitchen were offering samples of their cordials – Nicola is a fan of their Ginger Lemon & Honey, but they were offering new varieties. On Tuesday an olive oil producer from Martinborough, Olivo, was giving samples of flavoured olive oil which included their new cumin flavour, as well as staples such as smoked chilli and fennel.

Tonight we’re booked into Arbitrageur for dinner, who are offering a two-course dinner with wine. The menu is: Blue warehou with potato and fennel, roast pork belly with apple & fennel compote, and meringue with lemon curd, crème vanilla and passionfruit. All accompanied with a Wellington wine, the Ata Rangi Petrie Chardonnay 2009 from Martinborough.

  

More WOAP adventures soon!

Chocolate & Wine

After breakfast at café Ujazi, where Nicola again ran into a colleague from Wellington, we popped into the i-site to find out about gannet tours. The world’s largest mainland gannet colony is found at the picturesquely-named Cape Kidnappers. This is only accessible via authorised guided tours – there is no access for ordinary vehicles. Unfortunately, around the end of March the gannets start to depart for Australia, so we decided that discretion was the better part of valour and we would save this particular adventure for another time…even though the leaflet tells us that it’s “more fun than you ever imagined!”

Instead, (and after checking that it was open) we drove out to the chocolate factory at Silky Oak Chocolates. This has a museum of chocolate, which we dutifully toured, and watched some cringeworthy Cadbury’s TV adverts from the 50s and 60s. We then headed to the shop and bought a selection of chocolates, and went to the café for a cup of extreme chocolate with chilli. This turned out to be more like chocolate sauce than hot chocolate, and was topped with whipped cream and chillis.

Extreme chocolate with chilli

We sat outside as it was a lovely sunny morning, and were watched by some extremely podgy-looking sparrows. Wonder what their diet consists of?

Next on the agenda was to visit some of the Hawke’s Bay wineries to be found in the area. The intention was to get some lunch at one of these, but we were thwarted in this ambition, as it appears to be an incredibly popular pastime to go to a vineyard for lunch on Easter Sunday – who knew? Both the vineyards we tried were fully booked. So we tasted the wines at Te Awanga and Elephant Hill, and bought some wine.

The elephant at Elephant Hill vineyard

We drove to nearby Havelock North, a small town south of Napier, and found ourselves a pub to have a quick lunch in – fish and chips and pasta, nothing too exciting. Afterwards we explored Havelock North on foot, but with very little open, this didn’t take us long.

In the early evening we went to explore the wetlands and estuary area just outside Napier. It was largely deserted, with just the occasional oystercatcher and heron to be seen. We walked around and took some pictures, then came home.