cooking – jewellery style

I was watching Poh’s Kitchen on the ABC the other day; it was a repeat so you might have seen it, it was the truffle episode. As an aside, the Mundaring Truffle Festival happens in, you guessed it, Mundaring. It’s a neighbouring shire of where I grew up, Kalamunda, and we used to go up there a fair bit (there’s a great outdoor cinema where kangaroos often come and hang out during the screenings,) so it was lovely to see a tree-covered wilderness that I really recognised. (Especially after watching Shine on the weekend and noticing that what they were trying to pass off as Perth was just not right – turns out it was filmed in Adelaide.)

Asides aside, a thought struck me as I watched. Emmanuel added truffles to his sauces during the preparation and mixing, and then would carefully strain them out and set them aside each time he was about to apply heat, only to add them back in again for the next step of the process. The thought? This cooking business is so like making jewellery.

We go to great lengths (well, I do in my practice, anyway) to avoid heat destroying many of our ingredients. We layer up our works, using all the parts, but we often have to remove them during the process in order to move forward. But we persist, because the finished piece is built around them.

It’s ok, I’m not proposing a jewellery battle show. Though that is an interesting idea. Something like Scrapheap Challenge crossed with Masterchef…? No?