Teddy’s Bigger Burger, Hawaii

Teddy's Bigger Burger

My favourite trait in Americans is the lack of fear. It spawns an infectious entrepreneurialism. It tempts them to cook a patty of ground chuck to medium-rare over fire rather than safely char it to a risk-free tasteless puck. The above was hands down my favourite hamburger of 2010, from Teddy’s Bigger Burger in Waikiki, Hawaii.

Teddy’s is a short walk from “the Wall” surf break, just near the Zoo at Waikiki, a right-hand reef break that gets packed with local bodyboarders even in the smallest swells. It is a convenient break to bodyboard: you can just walk to the end of a pier and jump off straight into the midst of the action, catching waves that propel the fearless alongside the concrete jetty. Tourists line up to take photos. It’s the first place that I’ve ever been alongside someone on a paipo board, the wooden precursor to the modern foam bodyboards; a portly, grey-bearded Hawaiian who looked like he was carved from a brown leather banquette with an uncanny knack of picking the finest wave even from the poorest sets, riding a beautiful slice of polished timber.

Teddy’s is so close that my boardshorts were still moist. I could taste sea salt dripping from my holiday stubble.

Squishy bun, a patty that tastes of pure barely-cooked beef, pickle, sliced onion, an in-season tomato and a decorative frill of lettuce. There is no meal better.

Apologies about the photo. It’s rubbish.

How influential are Australian food bloggers?

Apart from that mythical beast return on investment, the hottest topic in social media measurement is influence. Does anything that happens on a blog or in Facebook or in 140 characters or less drive people to change their behaviour?

I’m banking my current career on it – so I have a small vested interest in saying that it does. While it is easy to make the argument that the totality of social media consumption causes behaviour changes if only due to the volume in which it is consumed, it is currently impossible to judge the influence of any single tweet or blog post with accuracy. There are a few tools out there that claim to be able to do this but they’re extremely easy to game.

Just to separate out food blogs, at a rough guess, there are less than 30,000 people in Australia who actively read a food blog. By actively read, I mean read the homepages and news feeds, revisit a blog at least once a month – rather than visit them as the result of a Google search. Around a thousand of these people are the food bloggers themselves. There are a small handful of Australian blogs with more than 30,000 Australian readers but those visits are certainly not all active readers.

30,000 is just my educated guess: I came to that number by pouring every blog in my list of Australian food blogs into Google Ad Planner, which lets you see an estimate of the traffic to most websites on earth, and looking at the reach figures that were spat out the other side. Ad planner is not accurate: it tends not to measure blogs with less than 15,000 unique visitors a month, which is almost every Australian food blog.

Active readers are important because they’re the people most likely to be influenced (to some degree) by everything that a blogger writes. Everyone else does not see everything. This is of the utmost importance if you happen to be in public relations and prone to throwing out freebies to bloggers. If the blogger does not have an active readership, you may as well give your free meal ticket to a dog because even if the blogger in question writes a ten thousand word dissertation on the power of awesome contained in your generic stock cubes, if their post doesn’t rank in Google then nobody will read it.

Almost 80% of my readers come via search, thanks to me ranking well for a few very generic words in Google. It’s not to say that they’re a worthless audience (and if I started running ads again, I can use them to take cash from indiscriminate and international advertisers) but they are an audience that is very unlikely to convert into an active reader. They arrive, service whatever question that they need to answer or laugh at some of my deep-fried stupidity, then bounce off into the wider Internet. Traffic from restaurant aggregator Urbanspoon or Tastespotting behaves in a similar fashion: a once-off visit that makes the most cursory scan of the photos and then leaves.

Most often the question that the Urbanspoon/restaurant searcher is looking to answer is “What is the restaurant’s phone number or address?” because restaurants tend to have appalling websites where this vital information is not readily apparent. I AB tested this on my Dosa Hut post after getting a number of phone calls to my personal mobile phone asking for Indian street food.

Put the address at the top of the page instead of the bottom and average time spent on that page drops by around 30 seconds. In either case, none of these visitors have ever returned to my blog and read another post. A handful returned to the Dosa Hut post, possibly to get the phone number again. It would only be possible for me to influence these people’s behaviour if I had something extremely negative to say about Dosa Hut. At the point that they’re visiting my website, they have already decided to contact the restaurant. It’s altogether possible that they have already been there.

Influence in blogging relies on attracting an audience who is in a state of mind to be influenced, not one that is looking for confirmatory advice or whose intent is already set. It’s not to say that influencing that thirty thousand is not important as they’re the people who influence others food choices, have higher incomes and spend more than your average person on eating out. It does however suggest that Australian food blogs are a bad fit as a vehicle for most mass market food products.

Takoyaki

Takoyaki

I don’t understand the attraction of takoyaki. They’re balls of octopus and gluten served fresh on the streets of Japan, coated in a three types of umami: mayonnaise, bonito flakes, and their own special barbecue sauce. They turn out of their aebleskiver-like pans with a gluey consistency, a barely formed crust holding the octopus within, not quite cooked through but enough so that they are slightly rubbery. I don’t see the need to adulterate a perfectly good chance to barbecue octopus by itself. The batter seems superfluous.

Japan is mad for them. Within Tokyo, I doubt that you’re ever further than 500 metres away from the nearest chance to eat balled octopus.

Indentured Labour: Camy Shanghai Dumpling House’s secret, part 2

Last time that I mentioned Camy Shanghai Dumpling House, I conjectured that the popularity was due to its open secret status and cheapness. At least now we know where the cheapness comes from: not paying their staff. From the Herald-Sun:

Mr Chang worked 13-hour days from 9.30am-10.30pm with only five-minute breaks, which had to be approved by the boss, for $100 a day.

He worked six days a week and his only holiday was Christmas Day, according to Federal Magistrate Grant Riethmuller. “It is clear that the patrons attended for the quality of the Shanghai dumpling-style cooking rather than the ambience of the premises,” Mr Riethmuller said.

Mr Chang feared if he lost his job his visa would be cancelled and he took action only after he had permanent Australian residency, the magistrate said.

The court found that Mr Chang had been underpaid from December 2004 to January 2008.

Mr Riethmuller ordered restaurant owners Min-Seng Zheng and Rui Zhi Fu to pay $172,677 in unpaid overtime and penalty rates, and $25,000 of superannuation. Their lawyer, Alex Lewenberg, said the owners planned to appeal.

I also praise Federal Magistrate Grant Riethmuller for his knowledge of the premises.

Your Kitchen Sucks

Your Kitchen Sucks

“I’ve seen enough people not cook well. I don’t want to watch people very pleased with what they’re doing but doing everything wrong…What I found on MasterChef when I was on it, some of the basic things the contestants were trying to do – they didn’t know the basic things, such as pastry making,” she said.

Margaret Fulton on her time on Masterchef. My bet: she won’t be back in 2011

I can’t watch amateurs cook competitively for the purposes of entertainment. I’ve tried and I fail.

The chaotic race against the clock to serve up plate after plate of congealed food to pregnantly pausing celebrity judges is not pleasurable. I cringe every time someone cooks “Asian” or “Thai-style”. Amateur knife skills make me feel like throwing a shoe at the flatscreen or inventing a witless hashtag to hurl into the collective Twitter void.

I dipped into Masterchef, Australia’s most popular supermarket advertising platform. I watched My Kitchen Rules until I ran short of shoes, enough to discover out that two sisters beat a guy with a beard. I’m still not sure if either television show is about food or why Australia is altogether transfixed in numbers that are not shy of phenomenal.

The aim of modern Australian competitive food television is for above-average home cooks to create “restaurant food” which is the new shorthand to describe the decorative arrangement of morsels on a plate in the style of an imaginary transcontinental degustation. It is more of a form of food styling than cooking because the viewer can only judge the meal on how it looks.

It is the food that restaurants would cook if they were limited to shopping at a duopoly supermarket or trapped on a desert island and a mystery box washed ashore, filled with ingredients from nowhere in particular. 10,000 shipping containers go missing overboard each year, so it is not beyond the realm of possibility that one contains chilli, besan flour, a bottle of muscat, lentils and gorgonzola. There are no seasons in the supermarket’s fluorescent glare, nor real ethical objection to eating endangered species.

For contestants, the skill most valued is the ability to cook from everywhere and if possible, serve it up at the same meal. Competitors seem to be mocked if they stick to any one food tradition. A real impediment for a contestant is depth of knowledge of a single cuisine or technique.

People with actual experience in a commercial kitchen seem to never make the cut on the shows as contestants and there must be thousands of talented kitchen hands who apply. There is a need to uphold the myth of the home prodigy and that fine food is the result of an innate talent rather than endless repetition and incremental improvement on recipes.

So what keeps Australia feeding the reality food TV maw?

The strained drama and the forced chaos, the characterisation of good guys and bad guys, the perverse delight of watching fat guys eat on our behalf. Predictable schadenfreude at destroyed recipes. There are boxes filled with arbitrary surprises. The promise of fire. Watercooler conversation.

My fear is that competitive food television dissuades people from learning about food. It reinforces that meals must be fast and picked from the supermarket shelves. Every moment in the kitchen is a stressful race against time rather than hours that can be savoured and enjoyed. Gay Bilson takes this up over at the Monthly in her dissection of My Kitchen Rules

Cookery is manipulated towards competition and tortured plating. This kind of television is turning cooking – something we do to survive as pleasurably as might be possible, some better than others – into a contest. Make a sport of it, turn it into harmless, competitive fun, and more people will become interested in food? Surely, the subliminal connection to hierarchy, to competitive jubilation or shame, taints any spark of interest. The insistence on “restaurant” food, the profoundly conservative idea of it being different to home-cooking, does little to further the undeniable satisfaction of something like a large bowl of beans.

The joy of home cooking is that it can be profoundly social. You can inflict recipes on others that aren’t at all feasible in a restaurant due to ingredient cost, time or your insane personal whims.

This year’s season of Masterchef starts next week. If you skip it this year, there are three more years of it in the pipeline. My tip for this season of Masterchef is to spend the entire time that the show is being aired in the kitchen. Work your way through a classic cookbook. Find out if you can cook four of Jamie Oliver’s fifteen minute meals in consecutive order. Learn some knife skills. Enrol in TAFE: there will always be a shortage of real, trained chefs because it’s an awful way to make a living. Spending that hour in front of Masterchef will leave you with nothing.

Food Blogger Tips: Google Recipe Search

This only applies if you write recipes online and care about how many people visit your site. Otherwise, move along.

About a fortnight ago, Google released Recipe View in the US and Japan, a new way to trawl through their index for food preparation. When searching for a recipe online, most people type one or more of the component ingredients then hit the search button, which ends up with poor results. Most people who type “turkey” into the maw of Google don’t want to know what or where turkey is, just how to appropriately deep fry one. For example, the spike in searches for turkey on Thanksgiving isn’t the result of a seasonal interest in Byzantine vacations.

So to rectify this parlous state of affairs, they released Recipe View.

The practice of displaying rich snippets of information in Google search results has been around for about two years, so it was only a matter of time before it came to recipes and food blogging. The problem at the moment is that most of the results for Google Recipe View are trash: they’re stacked with the big recipe sites that scraped a good deal of their early content from the old Usenet archives because smaller sites (and most food blogs) don’t use the hRecipe format unless they’re run by an interminable data nerd.

What to do about it.

If you do write recipes and you use Blogspot, it might be a good time to consider your options. If you happen to use , I recommend the freshly-released Recipe SEO plugin or the older, and slightly less user-friendly hRecipe plugin. They’re both simple to use to appropriately format your content. With any luck (and the impending global rollout of Recipe View), you’ll pick up a few readers who would otherwise miss you.