The Malaysian Insider :: Food
The Malaysian Insider :: Food |
| Posted: 10 Oct 2012 04:45 PM PDT  Some of Forty Licks Ice Cream's flavours: Salted Caramel, Popcorn & Bandung. – Pictures by CK Lim and Forty Licks Ice Cream My friends and I had more than a lick of this handcrafted ice-cream when we visited the Forty Licks ice-cream booth at Plaza Mont Kiara's Sunday market recently. With the sun bearing down on us, we were greeted by the friendly smile of Cheam Tat Wei, Mr Forty Licks himself. The bright, cheerful colours of the booth (plus the shade it offered) soothed our nerves somewhat as Tat (as he's known) delighted in his role as the ice-cream whisperer and made recommendations on what flavours to try. We tasted the Salted Caramel and the Earl Grey; both were creamy, rich and very intense. "This is really good," one of my friends quipped, "like premium ice-cream. Did you really make this? The answer to my friend's rather abrupt question is a definite yes, but this ice-cream guy certainly didn't take the usual route to dessert wizardry. Ice-cream engineer Tat had initially pursued mechanical engineering in the UK. He admits, "I chose engineering not from interest but simply because I had no idea what I really wanted to do. I had to study something, right?" This sense of uncertainty is something many young Malaysians can surely empathise with. Unlike most of his peers though, Tat went down the path less taken after graduating in 2008: "Rather than returning straight to Malaysia, I took a year off to explore my options in London. The highlight was training for three months at Le Cordon Bleu. I realised then food was my real passion." Upon returning to Malaysia, he worked in management consulting for a few years, while immersing himself further in what turned out to be his true calling. Tat recalls, "During my free time after work, I would cook at home for family and friends. I enjoyed testing recipes, especially ice-cream recipes. A close friend was complaining about the lack of a good salted caramel ice-cream in KL, which motivated me to try to create a decent version myself." His then amateur attempt is now his personal favourite ice-cream flavour as well as his bestseller. Early customers were friends and fellow colleagues but word-of-mouth soon had him fielding regular orders from total strangers. "Eventually it got too taxing as I was working till about 9pm at the office before rushing home to make ice-cream till 2-3am. I did the math and realised I was getting enough orders that I could take the plunge and do this full time," explains Tat.  A couple cups of Earl Grey ice cream. Forty Licks Ice-cream doesn't quite carry forty flavours of ice-cream yet but it does have a healthy head start. Hot picks include Salted Caramel, Milk Chocolate with Peanut Butter, Earl Grey, Thai Tea, Honey with Dark Chocolate and Caramelised White Chocolate. Tat notes that "Local ice-cream makers, I find, tend to go for more Asian-centric or fusion-style flavours, which are popular. I want to keep my options open and not limit myself so I can always play and experiment. For me, the real challenge lies in how to get a particular flavour right and then make it better." His newest ice-cream flavour is Popcorn, made by steeping freshly popped corn in milk overnight before using this naturally flavoured milk to make ice-cream. "Other funky flavours I am experimenting with include White Miso," says Tat, "which needs a bit more tweaking to get it just right. I also made a Bandung flavour for the recent Hari Raya celebrations that was quite a hit." Recipe-wise, he employs the French-style method of making ice-cream: "This means using the right ratio of egg yolks, cream, milk and sugar. My base is the custard mix and the depth of flavour depends on how long I steep the ingredients in milk. I try steeping it overnight so the flavours are intensified." Tat started making ice-cream the old-fashioned way by hand-churning with a spatula. This meant he had to take the ice-cream out of the freezer every half an hour to churn it, and repeat this up to six times. As more orders came in, he bought his first ice-cream machine, a Cuisinart ICE-30BC, which had a bowl that must be pre-frozen. His latest machine is an Italian-made Musso Club which makes up to 7.5 litres an hour.  Cheam Tat Wei, creator of Forty Licks Ice Cream (left); scooping up some ice cream. "The difference lies in the quality of the ingredients used," Tat says, "I use fresh cream and unsalted butter from Elle & Vire, organic raw honey, Madagascan vanilla pods and Varlhona chocolate. For example, Varlhona Manjari is used for the dark chocolate bits while Varlhona Jivara Lactee is used for the milk chocolate ice-cream." He adds, "I import raw nuts and roast them myself to make sure I keep the flavours and aroma fresh. To make the Earl Grey ice-cream, I tried and tested various brands before selecting the TWG French Earl Grey." Tat shares that it's not easy to get good quality ingredients and he spends a lot of time hunting down suppliers who are willing to work with him: "As a small business, it's hard for me to get credit terms as my orders are small. Paying by cash is fine but just finding a supplier who would give me the time of day is challenging." Case-in-point: he had to drive all the way down to Johor Bahru before he could find a supplier to provide him with the ice-cream cups he needed, albeit in small batches. Tat recalls, "The supplier was very kind. He told me he usually didn't take such small orders but he wanted to help me out since I was so young and just starting out in this business." He pauses before adding, "I think I've been very lucky, and had many friends and even strangers helping me along the way, whether as guinea pigs testing new flavours or early customers. Without this support, I wouldn't have decided to go into making handcrafted ice-cream full-time." On continuous learning: "I am quite a risk-taker, I believe. I do prefer learning how to do something from scratch. By throwing myself into the deep end, I'm forced to learn much faster. It's sink or swim, really."  Caramel Affogato: Salted Caramel ice cream with double espresso. For now, Tat is mostly selling Forty Licks Ice-cream in pints through phone and online orders. He plans to supply the ice-cream in small cups to cafés and restaurants; his popular Salted Caramel flavour is available at Hot Shots Coffee & Tea in Solaris Dutamas. Tat enthuses, "Hot Shots also makes a really nice caramel affogato using my Salted Caramel ice-cream with a double espresso. I will also sell ice-cream by scoops at various events. " One question has been nagging at me though: Where did he get the name "Forty Licks" from? Is it the retrospective album of the same name from The Rolling Stones? Tat nods, "That's how I got the idea for the name but I also read somewhere that it takes 50 licks to consume an ice-cream on average. I want my ice-cream to be so good that you'd only need 40 licks to finish mine." Winking, he adds, "Of course, a few of my female customers have naughtier interpretations of the name. I'll leave that to your imagination…" Forty Licks Ice-cream Available for order via: Tel: 018 383 1840. Email: tat@fortylicksicecream.com Elsewhere: *Kenny will happily have more than forty licks. Enjoy more of his edible musings at http://lifeforbeginners.com |
| Chef Dan Barber on how art and sustainability meet Posted: 10 Oct 2012 08:51 AM PDT  Chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill New York. — All rights reserved. The New York chef has just accomplished what few chefs will ever get the chance to do: take over the reins of Ducasse's Michelin-starred kitchen at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris and prepare a four-course luncheon that showcases his own culinary ideals. For Barber, that means promoting sustainable, seasonal and local foods and handing the spotlight over to the ingredients first — the core tenets of his Blue Hill restaurants across New York State. Luckily for him, it's a culinary philosophy shared by the titan of French gastronomy himself, Ducasse, who at Tuesday's luncheon called the 43-year-old the "future American star," one of four guest chefs he's invited as part of his series "Essential Encounters" which celebrates simple, honest cookery that enhances – not masks – the natural flavours of ingredients. In his introduction, Barber tells his French guests that the culinary movement du jour in the US is all about organic, sustainable agriculture and foods. But earlier this spring, that very subject became a point of contention when Thomas Keller and Spanish chef Andoni Luis Aduriz suggested in a New York Times article that their role as chefs is not to shoulder the responsibility of saving the planet through sustainable proselytizing, but to simply create "great brilliant food." 'Must chefs save the world?' The fallout succeeded in sparking an online furore, calling into question the role of the contemporary chef and modern cooking. Do chefs have a responsibility to promote sustainable consumption? Or can they exist just as culinary artists? For Barber, the answer is simple. "Most high-end chefs are always pursuing great flavours," he said in an interview with Relaxnews in Ducasse's kitchen following the lunch service. "Foods with the best flavours just happen to be raised humanely in a good environment, and most are organic, local foods." According to Barber, sustainability and the pursuit of culinary artistry are inextricably linked: using organic and socially responsible products will lead to great flavour, while the most successful dishes invariably use ingredients of the highest quality, he said. Regardless of a chef's environmental view, the best kitchens in the world will be stocked with the best ingredients possible, all in the pursuit of extracting the best flavours. "Most chefs don't talk about sustainability because they're already doing it subconsciously. When you look at the great chefs and their mise en place, you'll see a lot of local ingredients. That's the essence of great cooking." Meanwhile, Barber's luncheon aligns well with Ducasse's call for a return to cookery that highlights an ingredient's terroir and "exalts" the flavours of foods instead of manipulating them beyond recognition. Dishes feature new cross-pollinated hybrid vegetables grown on Barber's own farm in Massachusetts, for example, including the Magic Mountain tomato, a delicately perfumed variety. A "tour de pig" plate features the Crossabaw pork, interbred between the Berkshire and Ossabaw pig and also raised on his farm, which is served with half a roasted mini squash that Barber calls a "gamechanger" for its intensity and sweetness in flavour. "The hope is to work with other vegetables, flavours and animals in a way that respects the past but also respects modernity to create new flavours for chefs and the diners," he said. "We're taking foods from the past and moving them into the future." — AFP-Relaxnews |
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