august news
We have moved on to baking our sourdough full time now. I am still perfecting some of the derivitaves of rye, spelt & a wholemeal, but am very close on some, & am extremely happy with my organic white sourdough. We will be baking 6-7 days & producing for the time being, a white, soy + linseed & fruit sourdough for use in house, & to sell. I will bake an olive & a fig, rasin & pistachio sourdough loaf over the weekends, & some others that I am perfecting at the moment. I’m working on the holy grail of sourdough too, some would say I’m obsessed, which is a miche! I’ve been baking & chorizo, fetta & pepperonata loaf (which is awesome), a light rye & caraway, & trying to perfect a polenta, rosemary & peptita loaf. All this & trying to arrange a new oven which should take my bread to a new level & consistency!
We’ve changed some of our dairy products over to Pepe Saya! Pierre makes the most amazing butter, using country valley cream. It is a cultured European style butter with a pro-biotic just like in yoghurt! I would have to say that it’s probably the best butter I’ve ever had, & we are also buying his yoghurt & buttermilk too! Along with this great produce, we’ve changed our bacon from the middle bacon we were getting from Barossa Fine Foods to their Shultz Bacon. It is aguably the best bacon in Australia which they have won a plethora of awards for! Hopefully you will find it up to standard. Along with using shultz bacon for all of our bacon repetoire now, & pepe saya cultured butter for all our toast & butter needs, you can also purchase both to take home with you! Why not grab a loaf of our sourdough & a Pepe Saya butter to go with it!?
Tanvir has been pushing us all along on a great coffee ride, we now have some coffee syphons in house & are encouraging people that feel like a little change to their caffine regime to give it a go! We are trying to keep some lighter roast coffee’s in house to take advantage of this & Mecca is always forthcoming. Our house blend as always is consistently amazing, but we’ve been getting some beautiful single estate coffee’s, some of which are very rare & expensive, but are absolutely amazing, be sure to ask.
Our second produce dinner was a great success, we ended up running it over two nights, & was almost an overload of meat! Darren ripped out some great dishes again, & there’ll be some stunning photo’s from the night coming to our website soon thanks to Bryce! We also ran Bastille night dinner on the 14th July, with of course a strict french theme, six courses included a georgous game terrine, a cassoulet, & a couple of other french inspired dishes followed by some awesome desserts. We are working on the next produce dinner & have slated Thursday 25th August. Same rules apply, we will seat a maximum of 18 for 7-8 courses including matched wine! We are in the
process of sourcing some organic geese, organic lamb & taralga springs beef which will feature on the night! We will try & stick to a theme of everything sourced within 100 mile radius.
Hope to see you all soon, & stay tuned for updates (twitter @alleybreak or facebook)
Regards, Nick
june news
We had our first produce dinner during April & was a great success! We were able to source some organic suckling pig which was featured, & finished with an amazing cheese board we served on a recycled ironbark sleeper with dry ice & some gorgeous french & italian cheeses! I’ve uploaded some pictures on our website if you want to take a look at the amazing food! We are working on the next one, & have slated 23rd June! We have some gorgeous grass fed sirloin aging in our cool room, which will probably feature. It will be just over 70 days aged! We are hoping to get our hands on some truffles to combine into the feast, but if we can’t source them, they may have to wait for another dinner. It will be a 6-8 course dinner again with matched wines. It will be limited to 18 guests again at approx. $100/head. On the note of dinners, Darren & I have also been talking about trialling dinner again...... We have discussed a Bastille day dinner & a mushroom based dinner as July is month of the mushroom (mushroom mania), & trialling dinner on a Friday night over 4 weeks to experiment a few things, & will be open to more people than just the 18!
Fresh produce is all over the place at the moment. Bananas as most of probably have heard are ridiculously priced. We have been very lucky up until the last few weeks, in that we have been able to source reasonably priced banana’s for our smoothies & banana bread. Given that they have hit prices round the $130-$180/box mark, unfortunately we are going to have to increase the price of banana bread. Berries & tomatoes are very expensive too & are quite poor quality, hence we are steering clear of berries at the moment too. Hopefully things will balance out over the next month so that we don’t have to make too many changes. But.... there will be some changes coming, & we are really excited about them, already we have changed the spinach hash & gone back to a home made hash brown which is amazing!
The coffee we have been getting has currently been better than ever! The darkhorse blend from Mecca we serve everyday has been awesome, & personally I am preferring it over even the single estate coffee’s Mecca has been sending us. I think I speak for all of us in saying that we feel very lucky to be able to bring you such a high grade coffee! Talk to the boys about what’s better on the day. If you enjoy good wine & feel like a bit of a change in your caffeine regime, try what we call a “Tanvir” it is basically a piccolo long black, as it cools, it opens up like a great red wine & you can taste the flavours that the coffee inherits from it’s surrounds just like a fine wine! Sometimes citrus, berry or earthy notes, I can’t get enough of it!
The sourdough baking continues... We are now using our own sourdough fruit loaf & soy & linseed. Testing continues with different varietals, & we are still working on baking all our bread!
For those that saw the last news, I am trying to get myself back into shape. I donated a prize for vision’s weight loss challenge that finished running at the end of April, & this kick started what feels like a selfish indulgence to try & drop some weight & maybe even compete in a triathlon or half ironman again. I spent two sessions a week at Vision & through the eating plan & exercise I dropped a kilo a week for the nine weeks of the Vision challenge & hopefully can stay on track to drop a few more!
Hope to see you all soon, & stay tuned for updates (twitter @alleybreak or facebook)!
Regards, Nick
