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Cars… beer… sausages… efficiency… we have much to thank the Germans for. And if there’s another thing they really excel at, it’s baking. We were in the country recently and quite honestly the breads, cakes, pastries, gingerbread, et al were an absolute highlight; dang, these people know their way around a bucket of flour and an oven. With Bavarian travels now just a 2024 memory, we thought we’d concoct a glorious yeasted plum cake…

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Hangzhou

For the China-wary, Hangzhou, a mere 45-minute fast train ride from Shanghai, is the perfect place to go – it’s clean, spacious, and within cooee of pretty green spaces. It’s been a tourist attraction since the Tang dynasty (618–907), although arguably, with a population now of over 9 million, it’s not quite as peaceful as it was in Marco Polo’s day. Nestled on the gorgeous West Lake (西湖) and surrounded by bucolic hills, lush forests, and tea plantations, Hangzhou really is dreamy…

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Tiffany Low in Barcelona, Spain

After years abroad, Tiffany Low returned to New Zealand and is now the co-owner of Tempero, a pan-Latin restaurant and bar on Auckland’s K’ Road. A huge fan of Barcelona and its cuisine, she recently sat down with LSC to share her love for this iconic Spanish city.

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Jjolmyeon

Jjolmyeon (쫄면) is both the name of this dish and the type of noodles used to make it. These wheat-based noodles have a fabulous chewy quality, due to the way they are made – during manufacture, the dough is heated to 130-150 ˚C and extruded under pressure. Served with plenty of crunchy raw veggies and the lusciously…

Mexican-Style Prawn Cocktail

A prawn cocktail is always a fun dish to serve and eat, but this Mexi version brings along everything but the mariachi band. How many recipes do you know that give you the option of adding mezcal? (And really. “If you want to add some?” Of course we bloody do!) In Mexico, this is a classic beachside snack…

Chocolate cherry tart

Perfect for cherry season, this rich tart serves a LOT of people as it’s quite lavish, so it’s an excellent option to serve to a crowd. All it needs as an accompaniment is a good splodge of whipped cream, and it's good to go…

Espresso shortbread sandwiches

Move over, mince pies! Well, maybe not… after all, absolutely nothing beats that melty, gooey, fruity goodness of a superlative Christmas mince pie. Sometimes though, you don’t have the time to make these; they’re really only super-good if you make everything from scratch, including the pastry…

Poached chicken with spring greens and buttermilk dressing

Spring greens! Creamy buttermilk dressing! Poached chicken! All the Spring Things! If we lost you at ‘poached chicken’, hear us out. We’ve legit found a way to poach chicken breast fillets so they don’t turn into tasteless cardboard and it’s super, super easy. Happily for the busy cook, it even involves an amount of neglect. Here’s the scoop…

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What Are The Fresh Garlic and Onion Prep Rules to Follow?

Onions are a kitchen hero—whether you’re slowly caramelising them for a rich stew, soup, or sauce, shaving them for a salad, or tossing them into a stir-fry. But there’s a little onion secret you should know; cutting them too far in advance can make them taste strange. Very strange…

How to make a killer salad dressing

It’s salad time! If you’re like us, you love bringing fresh, vibrant bowlfuls of perfectly balanced ingredients to the table, finished off with drizzles of some zesty, homemade dressing. While dressings are an intrinsic part of all our salad recipes, sometimes it’s great to just wing it and create your own…

What’s the deal with blackened carbon steel?

Professional chefs and serious home cooks swear by carbon steel pans. They’re rugged like cast iron but are much lighter, which makes them easier to handle. More brands are offering pans made of ‘blackened’ carbon steel, and you might be wondering what this is...

Should you cook with extra virgin olive oil?

Extra virgin olive oil is an unrefined oil that’s mechanically extracted from olives using no heat or chemicals… bog standard olive oil is refined and extracted using heat…

What’s with those dark chocolate percentages?

75% and even the 85% dark stuff. It’s slightly hard-core and if you’ve ever wondered what those percentages mean, we’re here to demystify…

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Northern-style kimchi dumplings - Ibuksik kimchi mandu

“My paternal grandfather was from North Korea and I grew up dutifully making these northern-style kimchi dumplings with my family as long ago as I can remember. My father insisted on practising the technique religiously for every family gathering or national holiday – large or small…

Salted soy sauce caramel bites - Ganjang caramel

“One of the things I always try to hunt down whenever I visit Korea are these beautifully packaged milk caramel bites. Often found in convenience stores, these perfectly bite-sized squared caramels come individually wrapped in silver foiled paper; they are a classic confectionery, loved by all for their milky toffee-like taste and softly chewy texture.” - Su Scott

Balkabakli, cevizli havuç dilimi baklava - Pumpkin and walnut baklava

“The Turkish love pumpkin in desserts (either baked in its own juice with sugar or poached in syrup) and baklava are a legacy of the Ottoman palace kitchens. Baked in a round tray and sliced into wedges, havuç dilimi is one of our traditional baklava shapes and traditionally walnuts…

Poached peaches in pomegranate juice

“Peaches have a quite short season in Palestine. They’re flavorful, and I think they go very well with a lot of desserts, including mouhalabieh. These peaches are poached in pomegranate juice flavoured with lavender…

Fried cauliflower with caramelised onion, currants and pine nuts

“If you make this dish correctly, you’ll be asking yourself if you’ve burnt it. It’s okay. My training in modern European kitchens where everything had to be golden brown had me second-guessing, too. It just doesn’t taste the same if it is golden brown. It’s that dark bittersweet flavour that transforms cauliflower…

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Yeast: A guide for reluctant bakers

Yep, reluctant. That’s most of you – we know for a fact. (If we’re wrong, please hit us up with a barrage of comments on Insta and we will grovel. Promise. We’d love to be wrong here). Baking with yeast can seem daunting from the outside looking in. After all…

Chinese soy sauces

Soy sauce. It’s essential to so many of the cuisines we all know and love… yet how much do we really know about it? With myriad soy sauces Out There, we thought it was as good a time as any to take a deep dive into its brackish, salty, umami-laden depths…

Canned chickpeas

Overnight soaking... draining... cooking... sometimes it’s just all too much to prep dried legumes like chickpeas from scratch. For those times, it’s canned chickpeas for the win. Unless you own a pressure cooker, in which case, you’re smart. We don’t so we’re not…

Parmigiano-Reggiano

This isn’t so much a pantry dive as a fridge rummage and yes, it’s time to chat cheese. Specifically parmesan. Dunno ‘bout you but it’s a staple at Chez LSC and no offence to our vaunted cheese producers, but nothing comes close to genuine Parmigiano Reggiano from northern Italy. While affording to use it every day might be…

Turkish pepper paste

A unique ingredient from southern Turkey, pepper paste is a highly concentrated puree made from various types of cooked, peeled capsicums. It comes in a few permutations, tatli (or “sweet” ) and aci (“hot”), with a mild version in between. Called biber salçası in Turkish, pepper paste is incorporated into a wide variety of dishes…

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Desi Bakes: Bringing the best of Indian flavors to Western-style desserts

If you've ever wondered what happens when classic Indian flavours meet sweets and bakes, then Hetal Vasavda’s Desi Bakes is your gateway to the world of desi-inspired baking. ‘Desi’ is a term used to describe the people and cultures of the subcontinent, which includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. It comes from the Sanskrit word "desh," meaning "country" or "homeland." In food, "desi" refers to flavours…

Tarts Anon: sweet and savoury tart brilliance

Like so many did during COVID, the authors of this lovely tome spent their Covid lockdown baking. However, they had a bit of a head start on most of us as Gareth Whitton was the head pastry chef at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal in Melbourne. When that restaurant closed, he found himself working at a supermarket when the pandemic hit…

Sicily, My Sweet: Wholesome treats for every occasion

Victoria Granof's Sicily My Sweet is the cookbook you didn’t know you needed – a love letter to Sicily’s sweet side, where sugar and spice mingle in the most deliciously unexpected ways. If you’re the kind of person who loves to dive deep into the culinary heart of a place, this book is an absolute must-have…

Sweet Seasons, Wholesome Treats for Every Occassion

Author Michael James, who owned Melbourne's Tivoli Road Bakery with his wife Pippa, is a Michelin-starred chef who found himself drawn to the precision of baking. This book isn’t their first cookbook rodeo, but for it they adopted a seasonal approach to baking – a bit unconventional, but it works. The recipes are definitely refined, but the vibe feels more homemade and rustic, thanks to the use of wholemeal flours and grains…

Sofra: Recipes to Share

The world already has a gazillion Lebanese cookery books so what, you might be wondering, is the exact purpose of another? We thought the same when we received a copy of Sofra… but then, we opened it. Instantly, we felt like we were entering a most delicious world, with pics that include plenty of tactile, hands-on action, like wrapping, rolling, mixing and serving. These give a lovely, loose and inviting sense of the home made...

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A first-timer's Prague. Part 1

Prague is a place I’d wanted to visit for the longest time, but knowing it’s so touristy always put me off. Ever the chirpy optimist (not really!), I took a punt that there would still be real magic in the quieter streets, lesser-known sights, and local’s favourite spots, despite the 7.5 million (or so) annual visitors. I’ve written a day-by-day rundown of how I tried to dodge the crowds…

Seville in ten. Part 1

Barcelona gets all the buzz, but most Spain cliches actually belong to Andalusia, the country’s second largest comunidad autónoma (region). Bordering the expansive southern coast, the capital is Seville and it’s a seductive place, famous for flamboyant holy week processions, a gob smacking cathedral…

Why we love George Town and why you will too

How much do we love George Town? Let us count the ways. Charming, a bit crusty around the edges and with a very human scale, the UNESCO-protected heart of Penang’s capital is a gem. It might not have the glossy nightlife, restaurants or Insta-opps of, say, Bali, but we couldn’t give a flying flip…

Hanging around Chengdu’s teahouses

There are plenty of reasons to be drawn to Sichuan (pandas, that food, the local opera style, natural beauty and glimpses of Tibetan culture spring to mind), but honestly, you could ditch the sight-seeing completely, decamp to a teahouse, sit with the locals, break out the melon seed snacks and be totally happy…

Our favourite Bangkok restaurants – A baker’s dozen

We love pounding BKKs hot pavements for street food bargains and the city is heckin’ jammed with them. Sitting in grungier corners and inhaling pad thai with a side-serve of tuk tuk fumes is one of our City of Angels highlights. And we love the thrill of a chugging ferry ride to an obscure, river-side alley for some rumoured, X-factor hawker stall, then feeling incredibly proud when…

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