Author: Alex

Highway Craft Beer Festival

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date of festival: Saturday 16 and Sunday 17 March 2013

I hate starting sentences like this but … When I lived in England I was an enthusiastic beer festival goer. English beer and ale is, perhaps, something of an acquired taste, but it has an impressive diversity, one which is championed by the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) and the large number of microbreweries. My first beer festival (Maidstone, 2001) was probably to blame for my enthusiasm for real ales, and in particular porters and stouts.

Since being back in Adelaide I have missed both the style of beer and the range. But changes have been afoot in the local industry and small brewers are popping up all over the place. So when I saw that the Highway was running a craft beer festival I was keen to go.

Now Andy and I were lucky enough to win tickets on twitter, so for us the festival was free. Tickets were $30 a head (this got you a plastic schooner glass, marked at 100 and 200 mL, and 10 beer tokens) but I did see that the Highway also had at least one Facebook offer. A single token at most of the breweries got you (technically) 100mL (a great way of trying a beer without over committing – a very important beer festival tactic, as my friend Matt knows!). You could opt for 200mL or even full schooners (generally 2 and 3 tokens respectively), and food was available, which mostly appeared to be at a cost of four or five tokens. Additional tokens were available at $20 for 10.

The two highlight beers for me were South Australian. I started with Prancing Pony, a new brewery in Mount Barker. I kicked off with their Dark Ale: a lovely chocolate and coffee flavoured beer with the kick of bitterness from the dark roasted malt. I also checked out Birbeck’s, an even smaller and newer outfit who had two beers available: the Captain and the Four Brothers IPA.

The Captain is just 2.9% alcohol but packs a ton of flavour. Despite it being a bit fizzy and a bit cold, this is what in England would get called a session beer (er, yes, that’s responsible drinking for you!). It was a very refreshing, fruity beer which reminded me a lot of (I think – more than happy to be corrected on this one!) of Fuller’s Discovery.

The festival was held outside and despite a slightly damp morning, it turned into a beautiful afternoon. There was enough seating and shade and there was even entertainment. We arrived after lunch and left in time to head to Mitran da Dhaba for dinner, so we didn’t actually try out any of the main food offerings – although we were lucky enough to get a taste of the Highways pork ribs and they were delicious.

Someone on twitter asked me how the festival rated in the value for money stakes. This is a tough one. You didn’t actually have to pay to get into the festival (probably not a lot of point in going if you weren’t drinking or didn’t like beer though!), but you did need to part with the $30 for the glass and beer tickets. This works out at ~ $6 a schooner (working on $20 for 10 tokens, 3 tokens per full schooner), which is over the going odds for a standard draught beer. But then it wasn’t standard draught beers that were on offer. I guess my gut feeling is that $30 was slightly over the mark, but if you were able to win tickets or snaffle one of the Facebook offers you were definitely ahead.

Having said that, should the Craft Beer Festival become an annual event, I’ll probably be heading back …  Well done to the Highway for showcasing a small industry and supporting some small South Australian players.

Mitran da Dhaba

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date of visit: Saturday 16 March 2013

No picture today, I’m afraid. Mitran da Dhaba is a tiny, almost nondescript restaurant that sits on Anzac Highway, opposite the bright lights of the Highway Hotel. We’d been over at the Highway’s Craft Beer Festival (write up to come) and needed some dinner. The options were to head home and order pizza or to try out this vegetarian curry house.

When we walked in, the restaurant was empty. It only has a handful of tables and it’s all quite basic. The room is, rather unfortunately, dominated by a massive television (during our visit, we were able to watch a good chunk of Antiques Roadshow …). That’s about the shiniest thing there: a couple of specials were written on a blackboard and a small counter sits at the far end of the room.

The menus were a bit tatty and the selection of dishes is, unlike many curry houses, quite limited. All the dishes are vegetarian so you don’t get the endless permutations you do elsewhere (chicken madras, beef madras, lamb madras, prawn madras – yes, we do get the idea!). The descriptions aren’t particularly wordy but if you’re not overly familiar with Indian vegetarian food the woman who served us was lovely and I’m sure would be happy to offer more detailed explanations.

Despite being an avowed omnivore, one thing I could do is be a vegetarian in India. Indian vegetarian food is not vegetarian food that’s trying to taste like meat (something I never get) and it’s not trying to replicate meat based dishes without the meat. It’s all about singing the praises of the raw ingredients and, I guess over centuries, it’s a style of cooking that’s very comfortable in its own skin. It shows.

I didn’t really need to think about what I was ordering: dahl makhani, my favourite dahl dish ever was on the menu. One of those, a plain naan and a mango lassi and I could have been back in Bradford or Leeds. Mitran da Dhaba isn’t licensed (I’m not sure about BYO – if you’re that bothered, ring in advance on that point) but there was a selection of Indian drinks as well as water on the table.

The dahl makhani was very good: spicy, hot, tasty and creamy. It’s been a while since I’ve had Shabab‘s version but I’d say that this came very close and that Plympton is a lot handier than Leeds! The naan bread was also good, served with lashings of butter.

Andy ordered the malai kofta which I’m sure is a dish I’ve tried somewhere before and decided isn’t quite my thing. The kofta are potato based and they are served in a rich, creamy, nutty sauce. The sauce was redolent with cardamom and had a slight sweetness to it thanks to sultanas. This is not a dish I would ever eat (I have issues with sultanas in savoury food, to start with) and while Andy enjoyed it, he did say that he thought I’d won.

The portion sizes are not huge. I finished my dahl, lassi and naan and still felt able to move, which I think is a good thing. Too often with a curry the table groans with dishes and you end up rolling out of the restaurant feeling vaguely like you never want to see food again. However, I would say that if you arrive at Mitran da Dhaba absolutely famished, you should probably order a side dish.

But don’t worry – because ordering that side dish won’t break the bank. Our meal cost just $24.

That’s right: $24 for two people, for dinner.

My tip: don’t be put off by the fact the restaurant may be empty when you arrive, don’t worry about the TV (though it will compel you to gawp at it) and don’t be put off by the fact that Mitran da Dhaba isn’t licensed. Just dive in and try a few curries you don’t see on every menu.

Mitran Da Dhaba on Urbanspoon

Falafel Recipe

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A while back I made a lovely roast eggplant salad along with some pretty dismal baked falafels*. If I’m honest, this kind of put us off making own falafels.

However, it was the Sunday of the long weekend. It was about 3:30 in the afternoon. And the supermarket had none of the packet falafel mix we’re known to use. Thankfully, the supermarket ALWAYS has tins of chickpeas.

I read through three or four recipes on the mighty internet and decided that winging it was definitely the way to go.

And I was right. Making your own falafels from scratch is easy and they taste a lot better than a packet mix (no surprise there, I guess). The other great thing about making them yourself is that you can make them as coarsely or as finely textured as you please.

Our batch was very finely textured, thanks in no small part to the fact that our toddler LOVES the MagiMix (“oooooh, this one!” he squeals) and has some mad skills when it comes to pressing the ‘pulse’ button! For a coarser finished product, either remove the toddler or add the chickpeas last.

For two people, or to make 12 good size falafels, proceed as follows.

Drain and rinse one tin of chickpeas.

In a food processor, whizzy up the chickpeas with 2 cloves of garlic (or to taste), 1 tbsp of ground coriander, a generous teaspoon of cumin seeds, chilli powder and cayenne to taste, a generous pinch of salt, ½ tbsp of tahini, 1 tbsp each of chopped parsley and chopped (fresh) coriander. Process until you reach your desired texture.

Finish by stirring 3 tbsp of plain flour through the mixture.

THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT! VERY VERY IMPORTANT!

Without the flour, the mixture will be too wet (even if it doesn’t look it) and when you go to fry your falafel they will magically shrink from a sensible falafel size down to that of a little tiny pea … Trust me, I know this from experience!

If you are aiming for a gluten free falafel, substitute chickpea (or besan or gram) flour for the plain but you will probably need to use less.

You can allow the mixture some time to rest (perfect for prepping ahead) or you can cook straight away. With damp hands, roll generous tablespoons of the mixture into balls and deep fry at about 190°C. We use a deep fat fryer for this – it’s much better than a wok and even though ours is a very small, cheap fryer we can still fit 4-6 falafels in in one go.

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Having said that, it’s always a good idea to fry one falafel on its lonesome first. That way you can check seasoning and ensure that you have put enough flour in. If the falafel shrinks massively, stir through more flour! It also will give you a good idea of how long you need to cook them for.

We served our falafels on giant pitas (khoubz), with garlicky yoghurt and salad. While the falafel themselves are fried, if you drain them on kitchen towel and you have the oil good and hot this is actually a very healthy, fresh, and delicious dinner.

There are two people in our family who won’t be bothering with packet mix again. On the other hand, the toddler was massively disappointed to discover that the falafels weren’t actually sausages …

*I would tend to spell this ‘felafel’ but Google tells me I’m in lonely company on that point.