Sugar shock at Hudson’s on the Bend, Austin, TX

Foie gras
Foie gras on maple corn bread

I write this at the Oasis, a café with an enormous terrace overlooking Lake Travis in Austin, TX. The sun is beating down, the water is blue, turtles (actual turtles) plash beneath me, and a nice man is coming in a few minutes with my bowl of guacamole. My mission here has been largely barbecue-oriented, and I’ll have a whole list of barbecue tips for you here next week. Last night, though, I realised I couldn’t take any more in the way of brisket, at least in the short term, so I headed out to Hudson’s on the Bend, a cottagey little restaurant out near the lake, famous for its game and rare meats.

My husband used to live in Austin in the summers when he was a student, and has always held Hudson’s up as a pinnacle of his early restaurant experience – the rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia are a powerful thing. Enter through the back, from the car park, where you’ll find a patio strewn with white fairy lights, carpets laid out on the rock floors to soften things underfoot. And some very pretty food, some aloof and indifferent service, and more obnoxiously sugary glazes than I’ve ever encountered in one place.

(Oo. Here is my guacamole.)

Lobster risotto
Lobster risotto

Hudson’s menu is a positive circus of wildlife. It opens with a rattlesnake cake (“coiled atop a spicy chipotle cream”), taking a schizophrenic route through the plains of Africa (yak), America (buffalo) and Canada (elk) via a French flowerbed (escargots). You’ll be disappointed to learn that I simply couldn’t face that much meat after a few days’ hunting down the city’s best barbecued beef ribs, so I ended up with a portion of foie gras (I have still to meet the level of protein consumption that will stop me from finding a chunk of foie appetising) and a quail salad. Dr W also remained untempted by exoticism, and there’s plenty on the menu for those not up for a slab of yak, like the lobster risotto and Nieman Ranch pork chop he eventually settled for.

(Bleedin’ awful guacamole, this. I will give the Oasis café a bye; the view is good, the friend I’m with claims to be enjoying his veggie burger, and they do make a reasonable cup of coffee. There’s also a mural depicting twenty chihuahuas being served drinks by a longhorn cow, and a larger-than-life fibreglass parrot wearing a Hawaiian shirt, which is so fantastic that I’m hard-pressed to be down on them.)

Things started well, last night. A Margarita, puckeringly and curiously sweet, and some complimentary spring onion and dill bread with flavoured butters. The bread had reached great puffy, yeasted heights, thanks to a very generous amount of sugar in the dough. Sugary butters, too – chipotle-honey and some sweet herbs.

Fresh spinach with hot pig vinaigrette topped with smoked quail in a honey cilantro ginger glaze

In concerningly short order, our waiter, facial expression suggesting his best friend had died recently, rolled out with starters. The foie came on a plate shaped like an artist’s palette; weirdly annoying, shaped plates and whimsy, but something I’m prepared to forgive. As it turns out, cornbread and foie is not the best textural combination – the gritty nature of cornbread, especially when, like this bit, it’s been drenched in oil, is compellingly wrong alongside silky, buttery foie. The richness of foie is a no-brain match with sweet accompaniments, but this cornbread, dense with sugar; the slippery, syrupy crust on the foie; and the red strawberry and balsamic sauce alongside were too overwhelmingly sweet to support this teeny a slice of liver.

I can’t comment on the lobster, thanks to an allergy in equal parts deadly and annoying. Dr W says “Toothsome, with plenty of saffron, and very sweet”. You may see a theme emerging here.

Quail, on a bed of spinach leaves. Hopelessly pretty, gently smoked, nicely boned, cooked to a lovely tenderness. And so tooth-hurtingly, pancreas-winceingly sweet, that I was hard-pressed to work out how, honey aside, the little bird had been flavoured. This was a dish so sugary that the baby tomato halves in the salad cringed into sourness against the sticky, sticky meat. I stole a chunk of Dr W’s chorizo-stuffed pork chop, and blenched. I’ve eaten ice creams more savoury.

Pork chop
Chorizo-stuffed Neiman Ranch grilled pork chop with mango jalapeno sauce

This is all such a shame, because the plating is gorgeous (as you can see from the pictures), and the environment at Hudson’s is so green, twinkly and romantic that you find yourself willing them to buck up a bit. I couldn’t face the dessert section of the menu – sculptural glasses full of custardy-looking concoctions kept coming past on the way to other tables, but my teeth were already vibrating with desire for a toothbrush, so we called it a night.

Perhaps this is not Hudson’s fault. Perhaps it is a Texas thing. After all; this is a place where sugary barbecue rubs and sauces are sold on every corner. Maybe after a while, your palate slips, and high-sucrose seasoning is merely standard. (I did have a steak at another restaurant a few nights ago – of which more later – with a crème brulée crust, which actually managed to be very tasty indeed.) All the same, If I succumb to some sort of diabetic crisis before I manage to get home, you’ll know who to blame.

Ottolenghi, Islington, London

It’s been a deceptively quiet couple of weeks on this blog – it’s been very busy here at Gastronomy Domine Towers. Those of you who enjoy the posts on food travel are in for a treat: I found out yesterday that I’ll be in Texas and New York for two of the next three weeks. As far as I’m concerned, this is great news, but I’m extremely sorry if you’re one of the people I’ve had to cancel appointments, meals and get-togethers with at the last minute, and grovel accordingly.

In the meantime, here are some pictures from Ottolenghi in Islington, where I went to meet some other bloggers (big wave to Niamh and Ailbhe) and the lovely ladies from the Irish Tourist Board a couple of weeks ago. The way things work here is tapas-like: everything on the menu comes as a small plate priced around £10, and you’re encouraged to try about three of these dishes per head. There are fifteen of these small dishes on the menu, which changes nightly, and as fortune had it, there were five of us, so we had one of everything on the menu and stuck them all in the middle of the table to share. No commentary here – I was enjoying myself too much to stop eating and talking to take notes – just be advised that it was every bit as good as you’d expect from Ottolenghi, and a very, very fine evening was had by all. I’ll try to make it back for another visit where I’m paying a bit more attention later in the year.

I’ll be posting from Texas next week, in search of barbecue.

Roast aubergine with tahini and yoghurt sauce
Roast aubergine with tahini and yoghurt sauce - probably my favourite dish of the evening.
Stuffed zucchini blossom
Stuffed zucchini blossom, light and herby, with goat's cheese and wild thyme honey.
Pan-fried sea bass with garlic crisps, mushrooms, seaweed and truffle oil salad
Pan-fried sea bass with garlic crisps, mushrooms, seaweed and truffle oil salad.
Pepper and coconut crusted prawns with green mango, cashew and coriander salad
Pepper and coconut crusted prawns with green mango, cashew and coriander salad - I loved these. Beautiful bright, fresh flavours and stupendous texture.
Turkish vine leaves
Turkish vine leaves. Apparently, these contained barberries. Anywhere else they'd have been outstanding; here they were good, but less interesting than much of the rest of the meal.
Pigeon breast in saffron, rosewater and hazelnuts with caramelised pear and pickled walnuts
Pigeon breast in saffron, rosewater and hazelnuts with caramelised pear and pickled walnuts.
Roast sweet potato, spring onion, mixed nuts, chilli with mint and burnt aubergine sauce
Roast sweet potato, spring onion, mixed nuts, chilli with mint and burnt aubergine sauce.
Yellowfin tuna wrapped in nori and panko with wasabi cream
Yellowfin tuna wrapped in nori and panko with wasabi cream.
Char-grilled fillet of English beef with sweet coriander-mustard sauce
Char-grilled fillet of English beef with sweet coriander-mustard sauce.
Passionfruit meringue
Passionfruit meringue, half-eaten.

Smoked haddock, chive and mustard souffle

Smoked haddock souffle
Dr W, holding the light: "No! No! Quick! Oh God! It's shrinking! Quick! Take another! No!" As it transpires, this sort of thing does not create a calm atmosphere for photography.

There’s a reason you don’t see souffles on blogs very often. It’s not because they’re particularly difficult or prone to failure (to be honest, I find making a souffle much less of a faff than making a quiche). It’s because unless you’re making a reinforced, twice-cooked, single-portion sort of souffle, centimetres of gorgeous puffiness will subside between your getting the thing out of the oven and focussing the camera on it. Move fast with a souffle, and for maximum impressiveness, make sure everybody in the house is clustered around the oven when you take it out so they can do the “Ooo!” thing in the three seconds before it starts to deflate gently.

It will only lose a few centimetres’ height, but I wish I’d got a picture in a bit earlier. It looked fabulous on exiting the oven, rather than merely very fine indeed, as it does in the photo above. And, of course, it makes for a particularly fine supper, light in texture and dense in flavour all at once. A lovely springtime dish.

To serve 2-3 with a sharp salad and some good bread, you’ll need:

5 eggs
400g smoked haddock
350ml milk
50g butter (plus extra for greasing)
2 heaped tablespoons plain flour
1 heaped tablespoon creme fraiche
50g Parmesan cheese, grated (plus extra for dusting)
15g chives, snipped
1 scant teaspoon chopped tarragon
2 generous tablespoons grainy mustard

Preheat the oven to 190ºC (375ºF). Put the haddock (undyed, if you can find it – I couldn’t) in a small dish, and cover it with the milk. Put the dish, uncovered, in the oven for ten minutes until the fish is cooked lightly. Strain the milk into a jug, remove the skin from the haddock and use your fingers to flake the flesh, removing any bones as you go, and set aside. Grease the inside of a 2l souffle dish very generously, and sprinkle generously inside with grated Parmesan, rolling the bowl around to make sure the cheese sticks all over its inner surface. Separate the eggs, the whites in a large, very clean mixing bowl (any grease on your whisk or in your bowl will affect the lift you can get into your eggs), the yolks in a mug or small bowl.

Combine 50g butter with the flour in a saucepan, and melt them together into a roux. Make a white sauce by beating in the flavoured milk a little at a time over a low flame. Add the creme fraiche, mustard, 50g Parmesan, herbs and flaked haddock to the sauce with the separated yolks. Stir well to combine.

In your large, squeaky-clean bowl, use an electric whisk to beat the whites into glossy peaks. You’ll know when you’re there; tip the bowl. If the eggs are not whisked enough, they will move when the bowl moves.

Use a large metal spoon to add a spoonful of the whisked whites to the haddock mix in the sauce pan to loosen the mixture. Stir well. Now add a spoonful of the loosened sauce to the egg whites, folding it in with the edge of the spoon rather than stirring; you want to end up with as much air still in those whites as possible. Repeat, spoon by spoon, until all the haddock base is folded into the egg whites.

Pour the mixture into the greased and cheese-scattered souffle dish. Sprinkle the top with a little more Parmesan. Slide into the oven and cook for 35 minutes, until puffy, golden on top and a little creamy inside.