Paymasters Cafe – without Peer?

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Steve Shipley

It may be a bit of a stretch to say any restaurant is without peer, but Paymasters Cafe would be close, and I did like the play on words! We had a most delightful Christmas in July meal there recently and the food was outstanding. Rodney Scales is the head chef. What I really like about Rodney (in addition to being a great chef) is his passion, his absolute need and personal attention to make sure his customers are having a great time, and his sociability. Rodney likes to engage with his customers and is also very active on social media. Rodney took the time to show us his kitchen, his dining rooms, and even the surrounding area, while explaining the Newcastle history behind the building that ultimately become Paymasters Cafe.

We had four great meals in July around the Hunter Valley and surrounding cities such as Newcastle and Singleton. It would be a toss-up as to which one was the best. Our Christmas in July meal at Paymasters Cafe would have been number one or two along with the meal we had at Two Naughty Chooks considering the food, the ambiance, and the overall experience. I felt though that the food at Paymasters Cafe was the most approachable though in terms of a good family outing. I identified with the food and style of cooking and want to go back again and again.

Our Christmas in July meal was special. We started with several ‘beyond’ canapes including the Tourtiere Quebecois Meat Pie and the Gravalax Salmon with Toasted Saffron Brioche. These were complimented by the McLeish 2012 Dwyer Rose which was a great match. The entree was a Brined Pork Loin with Molasses Mustard Glaze, Sour Mash Sce and Apple Butter matched by the 2013 McLeish Semillon and McLeish 2011 Chardonnay. We then had a main meal assortment which included Pineapple Chipotle and Coca Cola Glazed Ham, Roast Turkey with Cranberry Sauce, and Braised Red Cabbage with Bacon. The mains were served with a 2011 McLeish Tri Moir. Dessert was Baked Walnut Stuffed Apple with McLeish Semillon Chardonnay and Polish Bowtie Fritters and Eggnog, served with the 2009 McLeish Jessica Botrytis Semillon.

The food was outstanding and I admire the adventurousness that Rodney and Jessica had in matching up the wines with the food. They bucked traditional match-ups, but the pairings worked very, very well. The meal was international with the recipes representing Europe and the Americas. What I really enjoyed though was how approachable the food and wine were. Neither required any thinking – they were just enjoyed. As my wife, DAZ in the Kitchen says, “you know it is good food and wine when it goes down before you even think about it.” And that was the case this evening.

Rodney Scales, like a few other chefs I greatly admire, is passionate about his food, his service and his experience. He started cooking early in life and worked his way up through a variety of different experiences gaining expertise and knowledge. Some of his opportunities required that he drive or train two hours each way, just for the pleasure of cooking for us! But for the last decade, he has been at Paymasters Cafe, having built a great reputation. Next time we are in Newcastle, we will be eating at Paymasters Cafe again, enjoying the great food and learning more from Rodney. If you get Newcastle way, you need to try this place and make it a regular experience. We certainly plan on it!

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, out early 2014. Published by InkIT Publishing
© 2013. Steve Shipley
SAZ in the Cellar on Facebook
Wine Pinterest Boards
Twitter: Steve Shipley @shipleyaust; InkIT Publishing @inkitpub

Wine and soapy glassware do not mix!

Posted on August 13, 2013 by Steve Shipley

I have learned a great deal about wine over the last fifteen years and take my wine drinking seriously. But from time to time, I make a stupid mistake. In my upcoming book, Wine Sense(s), I discuss the importance of rinsing glassware thoroughly so as to not leave any food odors or soap films on the glasses or decanters. Unfortunately, I did just that and poured a $200 bottle of wine into a decanter which I did not realize had a leftover soap film from the last time I cleaned it! Ugh! What a waste and what to do?

I was leaving the wine to decant, then poured a glass for me to have. I returned the rest of the wine into its original bottle and stoppered it to keep it fresh for the rest of tonight and tomorrow. It was not until I was rinsing out (without any soap) the decanter that I realized it had a soap film from the last time I cleaned it. Such a shame and such a waste. I went to give the decanter a good rinse with plain hot water and all of a sudden, I was pouring out soap bubbles! There was not much soap, but it did have a number of bubbles and I had to give it a really good rinse to get it clean. Unfortunately by then, the damage had been done.

The brick purple color was dulled slightly from the soap and it appeared to have just a touch of grey to it. More importantly, I could taste that the wine was a bit off, even though the underlying flavors were still evident and huge. Still since I am having it with a spicy, hot red Thai beef curry, I am going to drink this wine (or some of it). And I feel I need to do that as penance for my mistake and to cement the lesson learned. I want to never, ever make this mistake again! It is still an excellent wine, if not a bit soapy. Interestingly enough, the tactile sensation via mouth feel is the same or possibly even slightly enhanced by the soap! But the aftertaste and finish is not what it should be.

I continue to learn and want to pass those learnings onto others. More and more in talking to the people at Riedel and others, I have heard them tell us that (1) do not clean glasses with soap between courses of a meal; there is nothing better than alcohol (from the previous glass of wine) for cleaning your glasses followed by a rinse of water, and (2) glasses and decanters are dishwater safe. I am now going to follow their advice. I have been washing all of my glasses and decanters by hand and also using too much soap. From now on, I will look to clean them with no or very little soap and then rinse them or use an alcohol spray to disinfect and clean them (this is what most restaurants do), and for larger gatherings, will now use the dishwasher to clean and THOROUGHLY rinse my glasses and decanters.

I made a large mistake this evening and hope to never repeat it. Feeling bad as SAZ in the Cellar!

Wine writing update

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Steve Shipley

First and foremost, SAZ in the Cellar is a wine resource site. It is my intent to blog about wine, share ideas on enjoying and appreciating wine, and provide links to other resources on wine. I believe my upcoming book, Wine Sense(s), fits into that concept. Therefore, I will be providing the occasional update on the status of Wine Senses(s) and post on other wine writing. I will also provide reviews and links to other wine blogs and books that I find useful and expect you will enjoy to broaden your wine reading. Over time, the Resources page and sub-pages on this website will provide references to other wine blogs and books, and wine-related products and services that hopefully will be of interest.

But the focus of my blog posts will continue to be on wine tasting and enjoyment. We will review wines, match wines with food and also provide useful tips for buying wine, storing wine and most importantly, drinking wine. These ideas are being consolidated into the book and should provide you with a great read in the coming months. I have found that in blogging about wine and then researching and writing a book on wine that I learned a great deal – much more Continue reading →

Great Chefs of the Hunter Valley and Surrounds

Posted on August 7, 2013 by Steve Shipley

When I was on Food in Focus several weeks ago, we were discussing how difficult it is to make a restaurant commercially successful, especially in the prolonged economic environment we currently face. Natascha Moy, our radio host, mentioned with sadness the closing of one of her favorite Sydney restaurants. We talked about how important it is for a chef to be the face of the restaurant and truly hands-on to infuse his or her passion and quality to give the restaurant every chance of success. This made me think about how those of us in the Hunter Valley are fortunate to be able to have some access to some great restaurants and superb meals by some of the finest chefs Australia has on offer.

My wife and I took two weeks vacation in early July. It was great to get away. For the most part, we took the time to cook every meal at home, had some people over for a nice meal, and really spent the time writing, learning new technology and blogging. However, we did have four meals out, all which were exceptionally good. We have a few restaurants in the Hunter Valley we frequent regularly, but none with more enthusiasm than Bistro Molines, up Mount View Road and next to Tallavera Grove winery. It has beautiful views, but most importantly is one of the few hatted restaurants in rural NSW and under the ownership of Robert and Sally Molines who are Hunter Valley icons. If we want a good meal or a special celebration, this is where we go about 80% of the time.

However, we were anxious to try a few new wineries and restaurants this trip and were able to combine both by attending two great meals hosted by McLeish Wines. We really fell in love with their 2012 Rose, 2007 Reserve Semillon (numerously awarded internationally), and the 2009 Reserve Chardonnay. Jessica McLeish, proprietress of McLeish Wines, also has a fine taste for good food and introduced us to two excellent restaurants, Two Naughty Chooks in Singleton and Paymaster’s Cafe in Newcastle. Both were outstanding restaurants with great chefs that we are certain to go back to. The meals were on back-to-back nights and were two of the best meals we ever had.

The next week, we visited Restaurant 221 in Cessnock for another outstanding meal, even though, I must admit that I had a bit of a ‘concept conflict’ with such fine dining in a pub environment. And the following day we ate lunch at the restaurant at Margan Wines in Broke.

Four new restaurants with four great head chefs (actually five as Two Naughty Chooks is a husband / wife team) which we are certain to visit again. Each restaurant and their great head chefs deserves their own write-up, so I will be writing a post on each of them over the next month or so. You may feel this has more to do with food than wine, but food and wine go together so well and each of these restaurants has a great wine list and close relationships with wineries in the region. They all have some ‘special’ wines for consumption and make every effort to provide the best food and wine dining experience available. That is why I want to introduce you to them as you deserve to know about such outstanding places to eat and they deserve your support.

I wrote a review of the great meal we had at Two Naughty Chooks already. So I will be reviewing Paymasters Cafe next and their outstanding long-term chef, Rodney Scales. We did my first ever Australian Christmas in July meal there and it was magnificent. Rodney is passionate about cooking and serving and is also well versed in social media, so feel free to connect with him and follow what he has going on in terms of upcoming events and new menu items.

Is a red wine diet a real diet?

Posted on August 3, 2013 by Steve Shipley

There are many forms of diets available and frankly, I think most are crap. Anything that is counter to your normal lifestyle is not sustainable. I believe you need to change your lifestyle and your choices a little bit at a time, and then make sure they are sustainable. When I have tried dieting previously, I have seen quick results only to backslide after some period of time. I love drinking wine, I love eating great food and I have always loved my snacks, be they potato chips, popcorn, ice cream or chocolate.

Over the last two months, I have lost 13 pounds (6 kgs) and have been happy about the results. But I have done that before only to have backslid sometime later and put the weight back on again. But this time, I have notice something different. I am still eating the same amount of food for a main meal, but I have been able to substitute my previous poor choice of snacks with healthier ones and be content doing that. The giant Kit Kat bar with 900 calories or the bowl of microwave popcorn with 500 calories has been replaced by an apple at 45 calories. If I feel the need for a small sweet treat, I have one piece of chocolate at 70 calories, or a small piece of homemade baked banana, zucchini, or carrot cake with about 125 calories. I am not munching on the six or so biscuits I used to eat every day at work, nor am I eating multiple chocolates or having multiple treats in a single sitting after dinner. That’s it – that’s all I did and I have dropped 13 pounds.

Fortunately, I did not require eliminating wine or even cutting down on wine. I am drinking the exact same amount of wine I had before. Wine is not high in calories. 150 ml glass (about 5 ounces) is 125 calories. This means an entire bottle of wine is only 625 calories on average. I can have half a bottle wine every day and consume only about 300 – 325 calories which is about the third the caloric intake as the giant Kit Kat bar I mentioned earlier. Once I knew this trade-off, I gave up the mass consumption of unhealthy snacks and allowed myself to keep drinking wine. Wine is satisfying and it is also good for you, if you are drinking two or three glasses per day.

In my upcoming book, I recommend a lot of other books for reading, including two on wine diets. There is good science supporting a wine diet along with other healthy foods. For me or almost anyone else to lose weight, there are many other things you should give up or constrain before you need to consider limiting your wine intake. I won’t go into the details here as they are presented in the books. I have included excerpts from my upcoming boo k which describes two wine diet books. a description of them follows:

The Red Wine Diet (Roger Corder): The Red Wine Diet credibly explains the health benefits of red wine. It shows how to use appropriate amounts of red wine to provide an increase in antioxidants and lower hypertension to improve overall health. It goes further and provides healthy food recipes into an overall lifestyle plan of which wine and particularly red wine are an integrated component of that healthy lifestyle. I found this book useful, if a bit detailed in the science, but it is the explanation of the science which makes it credible. Minimally, this book reduced guilt associated with drinking a bit of wine almost every day and has encouraged me to continue to enjoy wine as part of a healthy lifestyle.

Age Gets Better With Wine: New Science for a Healthier, Better & Longer Life (Richard Baxter, MD): This text is similar to The Red Wine Diet, but an easier and more enjoyable read. It focuses less on the scientific understanding of ‘why’ to follow the diet and focuses more on ‘how’ to follow the diet and what to do. However, it is still very credible.

Either one of these wine diet books is a great read. Since it involves your health and your passion for wine, I recommend reading both as they provide somewhat different perspectives, and the combination of both provides a number of useful tips, some which may work best for your situation.

My last Blogger post, but not my last SAZ in the Cellar post

Posted on July 30, 2013 by Steve Shipley

After 18 months of using Blogger, I have decided to switch over to WordPress. This decision was based primarily on the ability to easily build out a more proper website. It will continue to be used for blogging, but also used to start describing and promoting my upcoming wine book. I can also easily create additional web pages to provide links to anything and everything wine-like. The blog is stilled called SAZ in the Cellar, but just has a new URL.

All Blogger posts have been imported into WordPress and still available! However, the internal links to other previous posts still point to Blogger, so I will keep Blogger reference-able until all links are changed.

I am very excited about both my upcoming book and the capabilities provided within WordPress. Using WordPress should allow me to significantly grow the usefulness of SAZ in the Cellar. For regular updates, please also like my Facebook SAZ in the Cellar page. And the book, Wine Sense(s) should be available around the end of 2013 or very early 2014.

I am integrating my wine and writing brand into SAZ in the Cellar to make it easy for you to follow and continue to partake in the wonderful world of wine with me!

Thanks to all of you for your tremendous support and to Google Blogger for making it possible. We had over 33,000 page views since launching about 18 months ago. But it is time to expand and do many new things. And WordPress provides a brand new vintage for doing that!

A perfect food and wine match

Posted on July 28, 2013 by Steve Shipley

My wife, DAZ in the Kitchen, is making a magnificent slow cooked beef with mushrooms and barley for this evening! I have been smelling it cook for the last two hours and getting ravenous! We will have a serve of Quinoa and a light salad as sides. With such a combinations of flavors going on, we thought a nice Bordeaux style blend would go really well with this meal. I have had one bottle left of the 1992 Lindeman’s Pyrus which I have been saving to enjoy with some friends, but we just have not been able to arrange a meal together (well, we did, but had a bottle of the 2001 Henscke Hill of Grace with that meal). Fortunately for them, we still have two bottles of the 1992 Lindeman’s Limestone Ridge which I am sure we will drink together.

The ’92 Pyrus is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Malbec and Cabernet Franc. I love this blend as each flavor comes through. I have written about this wine previously, when I pulled a bottle out and we had it with soup! You can refer to that post to get a review of the wine. As with that bottle, the cork was perfect on and the sample of wine I had while decanting indicates that this is a slightly fresher and fruitier bottle than the last one we tried. It should be a perfect match for the dinner. We once again will be serving this wine in the Riedel Vimun XL Grand Cru Bordeaux glass to get maximum enjoyment from the wine. The only thing that beats a perfect food and wine match is the same thing, but serving the wine in a Riedel glass! I discuss the benefits of using proper glassware and taste in my upcoming wine book at some length. For a synopsis on why proper glassware is important, review my previous post on Riedel glassware.

This meal and wine will be special. I am sorry we could no longer save our last bottle for dear friends, but we have more than enough ‘last’ bottles to share with them – more than we can find time to drink them all. So it was with some regret, but more excitement that we opened our last bottle of the 1992 Lindeman’s Pyrus to match our wonderful beef dinner this evening.

Now that Daz in the Kitchen has rebuilt her computer and is catching up from helping me with a number of technical and publishing issues, she should be able to get a post with the recipe out soon. In fact, she just wrote the post with the recipe, and I am sharing with you here.

While you are unlikely to find a bottle of the 1992 Lindeman’s Pyrus to go with this meal, any good Bordeaux blend or a blend such as the Rosemount Traditional should work just fine. Just make sure it is a Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot blend and optionally either Malbec or Cabernet Franc. A Shiraz blend or a GSM (Grenache, Shiraz, Mouvedre) is likely to be too heavy.

SAZ in the Cellar speaking on Food in Focus tomorrow

Posted on July 26, 2013 by Steve Shipley

I will be speaking again about wine on Food in Focus, the great radio talk show about food and wine, hosted by Natascha Moy. Tomorrow, we will be discussing chocolate and spices and the wines that match well with them. As always, it should be a great show.

The show starts at 4 pm Sydney, Australia time. To find out how to listen via the air waves or over the Internet, just check out Food in Focus! I love doing this show – it is always fun and educational. Reviews of some of the previous shows I have been on earlier can be found on my old blog site for the show of 18 May, 2013, 19 January, 2013, and 10 November, 2012. Join us if you can, and if not, read about it here next week!

What Wine with Truffle?

Posted on July 24, 2013 by Steve Shipley

We have been on a bit of a truffle kick the last few weeks, even posting a vlog on making scrambled eggs with truffle. And last night, my loved one, DAZ in the Kitchen, made a great pasta dish with chicken, cream, and a mushroom and truffle paste. It was delicious and will be posted in Daz in the Kitchen soon.

Truffles

Both mushroom and truffle have strong umami mouth taste and feel. Jeannie Choo Lee, Master of Wine (MW), and expert in Asian haute cuisine (and everyday Asian food fare!) in her book Asian Palate: Savoring Asian Cuisine and Wine, explains umami as follows:

“Umami is a Japanese term that is widely acknowledged to be the fifth taste, the others being salty, sour, bitter and sweet. It was identified by Professor Kikunae Ikeda at Tokyo Imperial University over 100 years ago. as amino acid glutamate (aka glutamic acid) and later confirmed by research as a type of amino acid that is detectable by tongue receptors. Rather than having its own recognizable flavor, umami is subtle and expands, creates depth and rounds out other flavors. It occurs naturally in foods such as seaweed, mushrooms, soy sauce and aged cheese.”

She also recommends a full body, aged white wine such as Chardonnay or Semillon to compliment and enhance umami flavors. We had a 2006 Penfolds Yatarnna in the fridge, pulled it out, matched it up against the pasta and it was a perfect combination! I love a big, aged Chardonnay with cream sauce and mushrooms and the heightened and enhanced flavors derived from the truffle only added to the flavor (to the point of satiation!). The meal was magic.

We have used truffle to enhance scrambled eggs as shown in the video and also in quiche. (If using 100% real truffle, you only need a very small amount which is good because it is expensive!) With the eggs and possibly some cheese in an omelet or quiche, I would recommend an aged Semillon instead of a Chardonnay.

If you have not tried real truffle, you should! If you cannot bring yourself to pay the price for real truffle, you can use a truffle flavored oil instead, but there is a drop-off in taste. With half a teaspoon of truffle added to our scrambled eggs, the finish on the truffle lasted hours on our palate. It is an amazing ingredient to add to many meals. And if you are looking for a wine to go with truffle, a big, aged white Chardonnay or Semillon is the way to go.

Wine blogging or wine book writing?

Posted on July 21, 2013 by Steve Shipley

Many people have asked why I have not been releasing as many blog posts in the last few months. I used to post about 10 – 15 per month, but have only posted twice now in the last month. I apologize for that and need to get more diligent. But there is good cause as I have been very focused on getting my first wine book published. This has been a far larger effort than my previous book Still Stupid at Sixty which I wrote under the pseudonym, Blake Stevens. It was a great experience and I learned a lot about the electronic publishing industry. But that was a tale that I needed to write, not a book that I hope influences a much larger audience.

I have written about 300 pages so far and expect the wine book will end up between 350 – 375 pages. I am putting a heavy-duty effort into finalizing my research and restructuring the book to make it more readable and accessible. I am really excited about the book and hope it reaches a wide audience that will enjoy and benefit from it. My last book was only published in electronic format and limited to Kindle mobi format (which has about 90% of sales for authors electronically). My wine book will be published both electronically (in a number of different formats) and in printed form and will have a number of photographs. It will also have video links using QR Codes. The photography and video components adds a great deal of work to the effort, but is well worth it.

My last book was a personal tale so I did not need to do any research or citation of references. My wine book will have a substantial bibliography and set of footnotes and endnotes. This is another dimension of why the wine book requires much more effort than my first book did.

Note taking in Evernote

I had been writing the book in Word, but have now converted the Work In Process (WIP) to Scrivener which is an authoring management system. I am also using Evernote for collecting research and clipping notes. Both are brilliant applications which have really increased my productivity. I review my sources, enter comments into Evernote on my iPad (see picture), then cut and paste into the correct section in Scrivener. This has really helped me to improve the organization and structure of the book. It has also provided me a vehicle to do much more electronically instead of working with paper to-do lists and a multitude of different files, notebooks, Post-It tabs, margin writing, etc. Additionally, I am learning HTML and CSS to be able to better understand and control the final output of the books even though I will have a professional designer work with me to accomplish that.

However, all of the book writing and coming up to speed with new applications (great as they are!) on top of working a full-time job has limited my desire and ability to blog, and for that I apologize. I am flattered that a number of people have been querying my whereabouts and look forward to my posts! And I want to let you know that I will be blogging much more over the next month again. I will do limited writing on my wine book, but much reading and research and restructuring of the book before I get into doing a significant rewrite in about four to six weeks time. This will leave more energy over the next month for blogging. Plus I will extract a number of the basic concepts from the book and use those to create blog posts and to start to introduce you to the book.

Thank you so much for your support! I really appreciate it and hope you will become as interested in my wine book as you are my wine blog. I will release some ‘teasers’ along the way as each section of the book is further developed.

We had a tremendous time in the Hunter Valley, meeting with some wine makers and cellar door friends, and also meeting some new great chefs around the region. It was so wonderful to have two solid weeks of vacation to do a major restructuring of the wine book, but my blogging has suffered due to my dedication and focus to the book. I will try to keep both better balanced while I am finishing off the book. I promise each of my three blogs will receive more attention.

Thanks again for your support and interest, and keep drinking well!