Sarah Graham, Reuben Riffel and Jenny Morris are among the celebrity TV chefs at the DStv Delicious International Food & Music Festival. Debashine Thangevelo found out what’s on the menu
SARAH GRAHAM
RAISED in Zimbabwe, Sarah Graham is in her element in the wilderness. Viewers know her through SABC3’s lifestyle cooking show, Bitten – Sarah Graham Cooks Cape Town. She then went on to do Sarah Graham’s Food Safari on M-Net. The food writer, blogger and author of three books (Bitten, Smitten and Home) is making her debut at this year’s DStv Delicious International Food & Music Festival.
Tonight caught up with the TV personality to find out what she will be serving this weekend.
“I’m doing Vietnamese summer rolls (with Asian satay sauce). There are pulled pork rolls (with red cabbage and apple slaw). There’s also trout with courgetti and soy-lime dressing. Berry basil chia lollies and a millionaire’s shortbread tart which is sugar and gluten free are the desserts.”
Also on the main menu is fig jam, rosemary and Brie pizzas as the second starter option, her Hong Kong hoisin duck with buckwheat noodles and, on the dessert side, sea salt and pistachio nut dark chocolate bark. The welcome drink is strawberry, ginger and rooibos iced tea (but you can add a dash of Pimms).
At the festival, a seat at her pop-up restaurant costs R550 a person. Lunch is served from 1pm to 4pm and dinner from 5pm to 8pm.
REUBEN RIFFEL
BEFORE joining Pete Goffe-Wood and Benny Masekwameng for the third season of MasterChef SA, Reuben Riffel was synonymous with the Robertsons herbs and spices TV adverts. The affable chef, who became quite the eye-candy on the show (he’s married, though, ladies), is a doyen when it comes to combining textures and flavours. Aside from running his own restaurant, he is kept busy with his cookbooks and other TV commitments.
His pop-up restaurant costs R600 a person, with a seating capacity of 100 and his menu will leave foodies drooling. Riffel reveals: “We are going to be doing this prawn umami salad, with soy sauce. All fresh flavours. Then we also doing a butter chicken curry salad. It’s a warm starter. It’s a chicken fillet, marinated and grilled. We add some prawns to it. It goes with a coriander salsa and smoked cheddar croquettes.”
And he has two main options. He explains: “We have cured roasted salmon with star anise and vanilla and orange flavours. It goes with vegetables, little peas and baby carrots, even smaller than the normal ones. It goes with an apple purée sauce. For dessert, I quite like cheesecake. For this time of the year, I thought I wanted to keep it light and easy. So we do a yuzu lemon cheesecake with raspberry, thyme and toasted coconut.”
The second main meal option is a slow-roasted lamb rib with bobotie spices, smoked aubergine cream and basil pesto with honey mustard.Yup, he is packing in those flavours!
JENNY MORRIS
A FAVOURITE at any food festival, Jenny Morris’s bubbly personality, coupled with her comic and playful ways, always have fans making a beeline for her cooking demonstrations. And she has been a regular at the Delicious Festival for three years running. This year, her partner in culinary crime, Reza Mahammad, joins her on stage. Their new cooking show on Food Network, Jenny and Reza’s Fabulous Food Academy, has just started airing on the channel, too. However, she is making a departure from her standard cooking demonstrations and cook-off on the Food Network stage. This time, Morris and Mahammad have something different up their sleeves.
She teases: “No demonstrations this year. We are going to have some fun with food instead. We are going to do a flavour comparisons. So people are going to be blindfolded and then they will have to say which is which, between two similar-tasting foods. And there are lots of ingredients we have (in the pantry).”