If you can't stand the heat
Producers of wine and other luxury goods are looking at different ways to peddle their wares.
We've been offered a thirtygrand ad in Mango's in-flight magazine for six." The bookkeeping daughter of a glamorous platinum jewellery designer was making small talk at the Avondale gourmet dinner at 1800°, hot new restaurant of the Cape Royale in Green Point, Cape Town, in August.
As the maître d' - who looks a lot like Tom Waits with a thumb ring - explained, the name of the restaurant refers to the salamanderlike sizzler used to cook at 1800°F. Of course, a pedant may insist on his steak done at 982°C, SA being a metric country - except in the air, where Mango flies at 35 000 feet. A physicist may request her steak at 1255.37K, but neither have the historical appeal of 1800° and Lady Anne Barnard wearing two pairs of knickers on her voyage to the Cape, in case fallen on by pirates.
"One minute from frozen to frazzled," noted Tom, "which is why we cook and rest, cook and rest." Whatever they do, they do it very well indeed as their steaks make other hotel sirloins look like a Beyers' braai. They don't even ask you a temperature (bleu, rare); 1800° takes no prisoners.
At these supercharged temperatures, there is no molecule of smoke or grill char, so a touch in the red wine is all the more appreciated. What was Heston Blumenthal smoking when he cooked the perfect steak at 50°C for 24 hours?
His recipe in The Times is a slow-food (literally) classic. "Place the fore rib in a roasting tin. Brown the outside as quickly as possible using a blowtorch. Place it in the oven and let it cook at 50°C for a minimum of 18 hours. Remove from the oven, cover and leave to rest at room temperature for 2 hours - 4 would be better."
Heston is no vegetarian. As he remembers, "My dad took us on holidays to SA, where meat was cheaper and a big steak culture existed. I began to appreciate how sublime a good steak could be: the dark, chargrilled surface, with its butch, browned flavours giving way to the red, velvety centre; the rich, meaty juices providing the perfect sauce. It was more primal than posh - and all the better for it."
And he's a supporter of sous-vide cooking. Translating to "under vacuum" from the French, s-v entails holding ingredients in vacuum-sealed bags in a bain-marie at relatively low temperatures for a relatively long time. For steak, 60°C for 30 minutes. Debagged, it is then seared in a very hot pan - a technique applied to great effect by Laurent Deslandes at Bizerca Bistro in Cape Town's Foreshore.
Naming the restaurant after a temperature must have been inspired by sci-fi maestro Ray Bradbury and his novel Fahrenheit 451, named after the auto-ignition point of paper. Made into the 1966 cult classic by French filmmaker François Truffaut, it deals with "a future American society in which the masses are hedonistic, and critical thought through reading is outlawed," according to Wikipedia. Of course some may argue that "future" is superfluous.
Certainly reading is on a downward spiral in SA as recent newspaper circulation figures confirm. My own morning fix, The Daily Sun, slipped from 507 328 copies to 501 734 in the latest ABC numbers. Perhaps the platinum princess should consider a Sun ad.
"But consider the demographics," she continued. "If you can't afford to buy a magazine when you fly Mango and have to read an in-flight, are you in the market for a gold bar for R30K?" Far better to pass one around among guests at an 1800° dinner, as Avondale knows, having collected the completed order forms from diners before departing back to Franschhoek.
Pendock's Plonk: Avondale Camissa Bio-Logic Syrah 2004 (R117), a wellintegrated symphony of sweet fruit and soft tannins, is perfect for an 1800° steak. Check vintage as Platter's calls the '05 "the braai special"!
