Peter Thornley's Salmon Fondant with Rhubarb and Citrus Salad

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Jun 24, 2003

There is home cooking and there is restaurant food. True, many of the dishes served in restaurants are quite within the capabilities of the accomplished home cook. But there are some dishes we would probably never tackle because they are either too fiddly, involve too many ingredients - or ingredients we don't have a lot of use for in a home kitchen. Some dishes require lengthy preparation - special stocks and reductions and so on - and are really only practical when made in restaurant quantities. Who wants to slave away for a day or two to product a couple of tablespoons of some highly concentrated flavouring that will merely be drizzled over a finished dish?

There are some dishes that are definitely best left to the chef and his team so that dining out becomes a memorable experience. It's nice to be challenged by someone who has pushed the envelope, as they say; who has managed to blend some totally disparate ingredients into a harmonious whole.

I was listening to the radio this morning and heard chef Peter Thornley talking. He runs Icon restaurant at Te Papa , the Museum of New Zealand. He predicts that the days of mash are numbered and he has come up with some cutting edge dishes for his new menu.

How is this for his new take on bacon and eggs - soft poached quail eggs, Parma ham, confit tomato, artichoke and sage latte, parmesan tuille. The sage latte is made from the quail egg poaching liquid.

It is his pleasure to tell the consumer that the bacon comes from last century. It's real aged Parma ham that has been some years in the drying.

It certainly won't be oozing water like much of today's overprocessed bacon that hits the pan and then sheds liquid like the pig has been on diuretics! Whatever happened to real bacon?

You might be interested in looked at Icon's menu here: http://www.tepapa.govt.nz/about_tepapa/f...

It's also worth browsing the lunch, bar and degustation menus to get an idea of what an innovative chef is doing with local ingredients. True, some dishes will require an adventurous diner, but then we don't want dishes we could have made at home.

One of Te Papa's forthcoming exhibitions features Japonism in Fashion and as you will see from the menu, there are Japanese references in some of the dishes with tea flowers, mirin, sake, Japanese pear, miso etc.

Thornley mentioned making some little bonbons out of quails eggs, swathed in parmesan and deep fried, injected with a little truffle oil and presented wrapped up like a sweet. Crispy outside, soft inside. I was trying to envisage a mass production line turning out these "confections" and decided it might well be a "don't try this at home" number.