Good Fortune in Sidney

A week of so ago we ended in Sidney at dinner time and were looking for somewhere to eat

We used Urbanspoon to see what there was in Sidney and ended up at the Good Fortune Chinese restaurant.   The rating made us consider it.

The place is clearly a busy restaurant as it was not yet 6 and it was filling up.   Though this may have something to do with being in Sidney and the average age there.....

We had dinner for six as that is the easiest and fastest when we have all the boys with us.   The food was decent but not worth the drive to Sidney to go there.   It is no better than Royal Palace or Jacks.   The ginger fried beef was good but not as good as many of the people that have reviewed on Urbanspoon.   The war wonton was acceptable.

The price was more than I would expect for this quality of and style of Chinese food.   Good and interesting Chinese food is something I miss from Vancouver.   I know of no decent seafood oriented ones here in Victoria. I would love to have a Buddhist one - I miss being able to get sweet and sour sticky delight.   The regions are not represented well at all, almost all of it is is a variation on Canadian Chinese cuisine.   The lettuce wraps we had were the most adventurous thing Golden Fortune offered, thought it is in part out fault for not choosing ala cart.

This is one more example of people in Victoria accepting mediocre food as reasonable.   There is no way this restaurant would get an 84% rating in the lower mainland.

Not Food....

This is Anthony Sanna of the Ambrosia Event Centre.   Is a passionate local foodie and supporter of local agriculture

Making my own chocolate

I got the cacao beans last week and I winnowed the beans so that I was left with the nibs.   How hard could it be to grind up the nibs into a liquid?   I managed to make peanut butter at home in the food processor, chocolate should not be much harder, right?

I ran the food processor for some time, a lot longer than I expected, and all I ended up with was something of the consistency of coffee grounds for drip coffee with a bit of espresso grind mixed in.  I put this stuff into a propeller type coffee grinder and thought I reduced down fine enough.

Ground chocolate nibs being melted, sort of 

I had not expected to end up with the chocolate liquor at this point as I knew the melting temperature of cacao fat is higher than that of peanut oil.   I put the dust into a pot and put it on the stove.   Initially I thought there was some success as very quickly some fat was released and all of the dust was looking as if it was damp.  

Unfortunately this was as good as it got.  It did not melt into the chocolate liquor I thought it would.

I added some milk and sugar to it to see if the addition of this would aid the melting.   Not really.   I ended up with a fairly solid grainy mass that tasted like chocolate but had a bitter grit within it.  The underlying flavour is actually pretty good.

Turns out grinding your cacao nibs small enough is the single biggest problem with trying to make your own chocolate at home.  I am not the only one that has had this problem.  I also now understand why in the history of chocolate it took so long to get to the chocolate bar, it takes industrial equipment to grind the stuff fine enough.  The first chocolate bar only comes about in 1847 even thought chocolate drinking came to Europe in  the 17th century.  

I am going to try and see if I can rescue what I have.  I am also going to buy some more cacao beans and experiment some more.

Cacao Beans from the Mexican House of Spice

The Mexican House of Spice, 2220 Douglas Street, has many interesting things available for purchase, one of them we found the last time we were in were cacao beans.   For $3.25, how could I resist?

bowl of roasted cacao beans

I have read about how chocolate is produced, but the closest I have come to the raw product is either cacao powder of large slabs of bakers chocolate.  Seeing them in the store piqued my interest right away.  I have no idea what I am going to do with them, but it is always fun to play around with a less processed ingredient.  Better understanding of my food can only lead to more respect for the product and more options of what I can do with it.

bowl of cacao nibs

The beans, about 60 of them, are dried and roasted but have not had their papery skin removed.   They sort of look a bit like misshapen almonds.  They range in size from the size of peanut to the size of a large almond.

They do not have strong smell at this point.

At lunch today I removed the skins from a bunch of the beans to expose the nib.    The nib is actually a whole bunch of segments and fall apart fairly easily into smaller pieces.

I tried some of the nibs.   I scrapped the nib over my teeth.   It has a very interesting texture, I am not sure how to describe it.   I would not call it chalky, but it certainly grinds off very fine.   I assume the texture comes from them being more than half fat.   the flavour was very mild at first but finished with a very interesting bitter chocolate flavour at the end.   I can see how this could work as a spice, it would go very well with things like nutmeg, cardamon, and cinnamon, especially cinnamonum verum or Ceylon cinnamon (which the Mexican House of Spice carries as Mexican cinnamon).

The next step will be to grind the beans to make cacao paste and then melt it to make chocolate liquor.   I might do that tonight or over the weekend.

cacao nib

The Whole Beast - Artisan Salumeria

I have been meaning to write about the amazing new charcuterie on Oak Bay Avenue, the Whole Beast.   I am very much impressed with the product and even more so at how reasonable the prices.  Cory Pelan is doing something amazing at his shop.

The space was previously the bakery/coffeeshop Kadalima, a decent enough place but not one I would cross the city for.   The Whole Beast shares the space with the Village Butcher, to which there is a natural synergy.  


The whole foodie movement going on is creating a lot of new decent suppliers of all manner products, but I find most of them very expensive for what you get and often the quality of the product is only slightly better than existing products.  The Whole Beast is not like that at all.   The product is very good and the prices are very reasonable.

So far I have had some of the salami, the chorizo, some other sausages, and bacon.  I have yet to have anything that was not of a superior quality.

The one thing I should note is that their salami is nothing like the commercial varieties.   It is not a fat and evenly round tube of  meat.   Cory's salami is much thinner and not uniformly round.  He also uses a much coarser grind/chop of the meat.   This means his salami is not really well designed to be a sandwich meat.   This does not mean it is a bad salami, it just means it is a different product which has different uses.

My single big problem with the Whole Beast is the location, and this is my problem and not something that is the fault of the shop.    Being on Oak Bay Avenue means it is not close to where I live and actually not close to any other place I shop at.   Getting there is something I do at most once every few months.  I am certain that over the next three weeks I will get there to buy cured meats for Christmas but after that it is likely to be months before I get back.

That said, there is an increasing number of suppliers located over in Oak Bay that I do like - Slater's Meats, Octavio and now the Whole Beast.  

Here is their list of products:

Our rotating product list:
SALAMI TOSCANA
SALAMI FINOCCHIONA
SALAMI BASTARDO
SALAMI “THE BEAST”
LAMB SALAMI WITH SUMAC AND LEMON
LARDO SALAMI
FAIRBURN FARM WATER BUFFALO SALAMI
SALAMI VENETA
SALAMI LIMONE E FINOCCHIONA
COPPA
LONZINO
PROSCIUTTO (about six months away)
WATER BUFFALO BRESAOLA
GUANCIALE (smoked or non-smoked)
PANCETTA
SMOKED PANCETTA
COPPA DI TESTA
MORTADELLA
LARDO
MAPLE ROSEMARY BACON
SOY AND 5 SPICE BACON
BUCKBOARD BACON
SMOKED GUANCIALE
SMOKED PANCETTA
DOUBLE SMOKE BACON
POLISH HAM SAUSAGE
GARLIC COIL
WATER BUFFALO PEPPERONI
BEEF AND PORK PEPPERONI
ANDOUILLE SAUSAGE
CHORIZO
BBQ SMOKIES
EUROPEAN WEINERS
KABANOSI
SMOKED WATER BUFFALO SAUSAGE
HEAD CHEESE or COPPA DI TESTA
TROTTER BRAWN
KISZKA (liver and heart)
SMOKED CORNED BEEF
CORNED BEEF