Each week Greg Bruce challenges a chef to make him lunch in less than 10 minutes.
I was uncertain whether his name was pronounced "shay" or "chay", so I fudged it for a few minutes, then I thought, "This is ridiculous, I'm just going to ask him." But I couldn't really hear his answer, and when I tried to clarify, he spelled it, which didn't help, so I just stopped using it altogether.
I watched him making nam jim in his kitchen at Moochowchow, grinding away hard with a mortar and pestle, and I thought, "It's not right for somebody who co-owns four restaurants to have to do something so potentially physically damaging," but he wasn't worried about it. He said it was relatively easy.
One of his early jobs was as a line cook at Sydney's Longrain, where he would grind the mortars and pestles for much of his days, so the restaurant could churn out the litres and litres of nam jim they needed for the 300 or so patrons they served each day.
"You start at 11 in the morning," he said of his time there, "and that's just a straight shift, that's not a double ... it's just such hard work. And you didn't stop working till 1 in the morning. I had to lie and say I smoked so I got a 10 minute break."
Things aren't necessarily much more relaxed now. He survives the brutal slog of the kitchen mostly on coffee: "Basically, I've had a coffee and a banana and if I was working throughout the day today that's all I'd have until after service, and then I'd eat probably rice."
He's allergic to chilli. It gives him dermatitis. Asked how he deals with that, in a restaurant that uses a fair bit of chilli, he said: "Just taste it. It's like self-sacrifice, really."
He poured an enormous amount of fish sauce into a bowl. "Can never have too much fish sauce," my teacher used to say. "He'd put in like half a bottle. I always used to be surprised. Now I do the same thing."
The fish sauce would be offset by palm sugar. "A bit of palm sugar," he said, throwing in a massive handful, and then he came back to throw in some more. I assumed I must have seen wrong, so I said to him, "Is that more palm sugar?"
The squid and sweet pork salad is a classic of the Moochowchow menu, and for good reason. It's full of violent taste spikes, is tangy and hot, and has little red, crunchy bits in it.
I was leafing through it contentedly when, unexpectedly, a waiter brought out a second dish, comprised entirely of thick, fatty tankards of pork in a treacly-dark umami sauce. In the marketing world, they refer to this kind of thing as "surprise and delight".
It was delightful and it was surprising. It made think that great cooking is only a little bit about hard work and masterful control over ingredients, and a lot about understanding what makes people happy.
Che Barrington's scores (out of five): Quantity of food: 5 Quantity of pork: 5 Quantity of sugar: 5 Quantity of diner happiness induced: 5
Recipe: Squid and sweet pork salad
Squid and sweet pork salad by chef Che Barrington. Photo / Dean Purcell
For the salad 1 whole squid, cleaned, scored and cut into bite size pieces 1 green chilli, sliced into rounds 1 thumb ginger, julienned 2 kaffir lime leaves, finely julienned 1 stalk lemongrass, white part only, finely sliced 1/2 bunch Vietnamese mint 1 shallot, finely sliced
Green chilli nam jim dressing 1 bird's-eye chilli 3 large green chillies, seeded and sliced 2 cloves garlic 3 coriander roots, scraped and cleaned 50g palm sugar, shaved 400ml lime juice
Sweet pork 150g pork neck 2 star anise 2 cloves garlic, peeled 3 coriander roots, scraped and cleaned 8 white peppercorns 250g palm sugar, shaved 4 Tbsp water 2 Tbsp oyster sauce 3 Tbsp fish sauce 2 cups oil
To make the sweet pork, steam pork neck for 20-25 minutes till cooked, cool, then cut into 1cm dice.
Heat 2 cups of oil in a wok and fry the pork until golden in colour, leave to drain on absorbent paper.
Take the star anise, white peppercorns, garlic and coriander root and place them into a motor and pestle, pound to a uniform paste.
Heat 3 Tbsp oil in a heavy based pan and fry the paste until fragrant, golden and crisp. Drain away the oil and add the palm sugar and cook over medium heat until sugar has caramelised slightly.
Add oyster and fish sauce and mix well. take off the heat and set a side until ready to use.
Pound chillies, coriander roots and garlic to a uniform paste in a moter and pestle. Add sugar and and lime juice and mix until the sugar has dissolved, season with fish sauce. The sauce should taste hot, sweet, sour and salty.
Place a heavy-based pan of water over a high heat and bring to the boil.
Place all the salad ingredients into a bowl except the squid, dress salad mix with 4 Tbsp of nam jim.
Place the squid into boiling water and blanch for 40 seconds, remove the squid and place it into the salad bowl, mix throughly and place salad on to a plate, spoon 3-4 Tbsp over sweet pork.
