The Dirty Chef

by Matthew Evans

  The word came back—a show based on The Real Food Companion, championing local producers in the style that I’d suggested?

  ‘That sounds, really . . . ahem . . . boring,’ I was told. I had just written 65 000 words on the topic, so I hoped it wasn’t too boring.

  ‘What else are you doing?’ the production company asked.

  ‘Ummm . . . I’m planning on moving to a farm, fattening a couple of pigs, getting chooks, planting a garden, having my own sheep,’ I offered, slightly embarrassed about my very loose plans. ‘I’ve even thought of maybe milking a cow,’ I said, vocalising what I had always dreamed of doing, but had never had the courage, or the opportunity, to actually do.

  ‘Milk a cow! Do you know much about milking a cow or rearing pigs?’ they asked.

  ‘No, nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Well, now that does sound like interesting television,’ the production company replied, rather too enthusiastically. Perhaps they already understood a lot more about the kind of show that would eventually be made than I did.

  Sour curd tarts

  Makes 10 small tarts

  Making your own curd is a very simple way of using good milk. I first fell in love with curd tarts when I was hitching around the UK quite a few years ago. Because I was a bit short on money, I spent most of my food budget in bakeries, and hence discovered quite a few regional specialties, including this Yorkshire favourite. You can bake it as a large thin tart, if you like, but I kind of enjoy individual tarts, maybe because it makes me feel a little nostalgic.

  1 litre (35 fl oz/4 cups) milk

  80 ml (2½ fl oz/ 1/3 cup) white wine vinegar

  80 g (2¾ oz) butter, softened

  80 g (2¾ oz/ 1/3 cup) caster (superfine) sugar

  1 egg, lightly whisked

  ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg, ideally freshly grated

  finely grated zest of ½ lemon

  50 g (1¾ oz) currants, soaked in a little brandy for a few hours or overnight

  Pastry

  175 g (6 oz/1¼ cups) plain (all-purpose) flour

  generous pinch of salt

  2 teaspoons caster (superfine) sugar

  100 g (3½ oz) butter, chilled and diced

  1 egg, whisked

  To make the pastry, place the flour, salt and sugar in a large bowl and rub in the butter with your fingertips. Alternatively, pulse in a food processor. You’re aiming at fairly evenly distributed butter, so the flour is not dissimilar in appearance to breadcrumbs. Add the egg and, using the end of a spoon or knife at first, work together until it becomes an even dough. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for half an hour before rolling.

  Heat the milk until boiling, turn off the heat and immediately toss in the vinegar and stir twice quickly to distribute the vinegar. Leave to sit, undisturbed, for about 10 minutes or so, letting the curds rise to the top.

  While the curds form, cream the butter and sugar in a bowl until pale and creamy. Whisk in the egg until well combined, then fold in the nutmeg, lemon zest and currants with a large metal spoon.

  Drain the curd gently through a fine piece of muslin (cheesecloth) or a clean cloth, discarding the runny whey. When the curds are cool, fold gently through the butter mixture.

  To assemble the tarts, on a lightly floured surface, roll out the pastry to about 5 mm (¼ inch) thick and cut out rounds to line ten 5-cm (2-inch) mini tart (flan) tins or similar. Line the pastry shells with baking paper and pour in some baking weights or uncooked rice. Bake blind at 180°C (350°F/Gas 4) for about 10 minutes until the pastry is pretty much cooked through but not too dark on the edges. Remove the paper and weights. Spoon in the curd mixture, and bake the tarts at 200°C (400°F/Gas 6) for about 10–15 minutes, or until the top is starting to colour. Remove from the oven and cool before taking from the tins. Serve the same day.

  Cheese

  ’Twas a woman led me away from the farm in my twenties.

  I never did have the decency to thank her.

  (With apologies to WC Fields)

  ‘You must be kidding,’ Lynn said. ‘Live in a caravan?’

  Pause.

  ‘With you?’

  Now, if you’d met me at 25, even lankier and more unkempt than I am now, with no real means of earning a living, and with even fewer practical skills than I have today, you may well have sided with my then girlfriend. Most would side with her still, including Sadie, the darling woman with whom I now share a child and my life. Living in a caravan is for the seriously hardcore, and I wasn’t—and I’m still not—resilient enough to be counted among them.

  When Lynn made these comments, I was looking at a block of land out near Wamboin on Canberra’s outskirts. A scabby, paltry piece of dirt, with a stubble of bush, some seriously depleted soil and a harsh climate. There was no water. No view. No topsoil. Hardly a track in, though the salesman promised there was a large, handy access road slated to go through the very next year. (It never did.)

  It was my dream to step out of suburbia and onto a piece of rural Australia. My own land, no matter that it was degraded and unproductive. No matter that it was frostbitten and drought-prone, and it would cost a fortune to put in any kind of services. It was cheap. This was the one bit of ground I could afford. But there was no chance that Lynn was going to move out of town and live in a very confined space with an incompetent bushie, an apprentice chef who had taken six years to finish his second year of training; someone not famed for his personal neatness in the home. Someone on an appalling income and working even more appalling shiftwork. No, there was no way she was going to leave town and be ensconced with me in a caravan. And for that I should be grateful.

  At age 41, however, things were a little different. For a start, I was single. And as a food writer, I had an income that, while modest, was mobile. I had finished my training as a chef, so there was always kitchen work to fall back on, in the regions as well as the cities. And I was marginally better at knowing my limitations. I had no intention of moving to an impoverished piece of land and living in a caravan while I scratched out a new career path. When I started scouting for a new place to live, a house, something with weatherproof rooms and a proper kitchen, was pretty high on the agenda.

  I was also going somewhere where the living was easy. Or at least the growing was going to be easier than it would’ve been on that rocky, scarred, steep, pocket-sized piece of crusty dirt near Canberra. I was moving to Tasmania.

  My epiphany with milk had given me good reason to leave Sydney. Two years after I left my job as a restaurant critic, the role continued to impinge on my life. I was fighting a court case for defamation (the hearings for damages are still scheduled to be heard in court as I write this, nearly a decade after the review was first published). I had been threatened and abused by jaded, overworked chefs and restaurateurs. And yet none of that actually prompted my move. In fact, I was leaving town because I had reached a point in my life where, shock horror, I had begun to get interested in, wait for it . . . gardening. I think some people have a brain snap when they near 40. Some get a blonde. Some get a sports car. Others get into meditation and visit ashrams in India. I wanted to grow my own parsley.

  And I wanted to get closer to the source of my produce. While it was milk that was leading me away from the constant pressure of big-city living towards a quieter, calmer life, it was cheese that brought me to Tasmania (and, inadvertently, catapulted me onto the small screen).

  Now some foodies may think this sounds just perfect. Tasmania is famed for its cheese, right? Well, yes and no.

  When I moved to Tassie, there weren’t many true farmhouse-style cheeses of the kind that would make your toes curl. The interesting stuff made by artisans. Cheese that reminded me of the great cheesemaking nations I’ve visited—Spain, France and Italy. The UK, even. Yes, there were some good examples in Tasmania, but there were probably more near Adelaide, or Melbourne. No, it was a single artisan-style cheese that brought me down to the island. And to be honest, it wasn’t a cheese, it was
a cheesemaker.

  I’d met Nick Haddow when he worked at Melbourne’s Richmond Hill Café and Larder. He ran the cheese room, and I was a novice food writer with a bicycle, a share house and a palate that didn’t quite match my budget. I’d go into the Larder and ask for a cheese that would simply rock my world. Or my dinner guests’ world. And Nick, or his offsider Sophie, would always produce the goods.

  My second winter in Melbourne I wanted to make cassoulet. Two winters before I’d spent a month in a town in France’s southwest called Najac, where cassoulet is all about the local dried lingot beans, cured duck and goose, and stunning pork, both salted and in snags. It was then, and is now, my tradition to make cassoulet each winter from the meats I have to hand. I confit my own duck or goose legs. I pickle pork belly, cure my own lamb, sometimes use my own sausages.

  But I was a recent arrival in Melbourne, and my cassoulet recipe fed twenty. I could easily fill a table with ten friends, but twenty would be a stretch. Especially in the tiny space I rented. So I spread my cassoulet entertaining over two nights and along with my usual tiny crew of mates, I invited a string of people I thought I’d like to get to know. Including Nick.

  Well, I think he liked the cassoulet. It had pork belly. And pork sausages. And I think there was some lamb in there. And duck confit and duck fat in the crumbs on top. He certainly ate his fair share. And he didn’t tell me until the next day that he was vegetarian. Not a very good one, obviously, but a vegetarian nonetheless. A strapping 6-foot-something not-very-pale vegetarian who was more interested in food than in lecturing me on my food choices, or limiting his too much.

  In return Nick invited me to a vego meal at his place. We got talking about food, as only food-bores can, and hit it off. Over the next few years, even after I moved to Sydney, Nick and I got to know each other really well. Then he did the strangest thing.

  Nick had long been interested in cheese. He had worked with Irish and Italian cheesemakers. He had worked at Neal’s Yard Dairy, one of London’s most interesting cheese shops, before he started at the cheese room in Melbourne. He went to Japan to woo Leonie, the woman who would move back to Australia with him, but instead of coming back to the mainland like we all expected, they moved to Tasmania. To a relatively remote corner in the northeast of Tasmania. It was Nick’s dream to make cheese and he had talked his way into a job at the acclaimed cheddar producer Pyengana.

  Now, I’d known about Pyengana for a few years. I’d heard of the Healey family’s famed cloth-bound cheddar when I lived in Sydney, and one day I called them to find out where I could buy it. They didn’t seem to have a local supplier, so they mailed me a whole small wheel of cheese, called a truckle, the next time they went to town, and I posted them a money order for the cost of the cheese and the amount of the stamps on top. It was, I have to say, a revelation compared to the mass-produced cheddar I’d grown up with.

  Real cheddar isn’t matured in plastic bags. Made in the traditional fashion, where the cheese is robed in cheesecloth (and here I was, thinking cheesecloth was just something that hippies wore), real cheddar is remarkable. Mastered by the cheesemakers of England, the art was almost lost in Australia, apart from a small band of cheesemakers, with Pyengana at the helm. The curd is cut (a process actually called cheddaring), then pressed into shape and matured in huge wheels. With its natural rind, the cheese dries and needs constant attention as it ripens—to be turned and any errant moulds wiped off. In the process, it becomes more intense, with complex flavours and sweet aromas. Modern so-called cheddar is matured in vast plastic bags so there’s no waste. They require very little labour, but they never get the great taste of the real thing. Pyengana, for me, was the first great Australian cheddar experience. One I loved at first bite of that wheel Jon Healey sent to me in the 1990s, and a taste I hanker for still.

  My relationship with Pyengana went a little deeper than that too. I’d once adopted a Pyengana truckle that would ripen in the maturing room at Richmond Hill Café and Larder. I wasn’t the only one; it was a lovely concept where a whole bunch of customers bought the cheese, and the experts matured it for us. Nick and team rubbed and turned the adopted truckles over a period of months. I’d visit the cheese when I would visit Nick at work in Melbourne. I eventually carried the round north, as a Christmas present for my father, complete by this stage with a butterfat- and mould-stained card bearing my name. As you can tell, I was, and still am, a real Pyengana fan.

  Anyway, the fact that Nick and his very urbane and well dressed lover Leonie were going to live in a bucolic corner of Tasmania, and he was going to make that quite renowned and extremely yummy cheese, was a very, very romantic notion. I visited a few times while they were at Pyengana, taking refuge in a region that was a cultural world away from the constant self-imposed need to keep up with Sydney and international dining. And eating just as well at their house as I would in a $200-a-head fine diner. We salt-roasted Cocky Salmon we got from a bloke at a nearby beach. We baked sourdough bread and churned ice-cream using milk from the dairy. We bushwalked to the nearby abandoned tin mine and drove through some stunning, emerald green farmland. I learnt how good vegetarian food can be too, because Leonie was, and still is, a far more disciplined vegetarian than Nick.

  Over the years, despite the distance, our friendship flourished. Nick and Leonie eventually moved to Bruny Island, south of Hobart, a 70-kilometre-long strip of land just off the coast of mainland Tasmania. Only about 600 people call the place home—a mix of farmers, commuters and retirees. North and South Bruny are joined by a narrow isthmus called The Neck, and a single road traverses most of the island’s length. Dry, more open and with sheep as its central industry in the north of the island, Bruny’s main centre is in the south. Adventure Bay, originally home to an old whaling station, is overshadowed by a tall wooded peak covered by rainforest.

  Nick and Leonie moved to a cute, if perhaps cold, weatherboard cottage on the main road that links North and South Bruny, at a place called Great Bay, famed for its oysters and not a bad place to forage for mussels. The house was nicknamed the Doll’s House, because it was all front and no back. In their tiny lean-to kitchen we ate fresh-caught flathead, abalone, wild oysters and mussels harvested from the cold, pristine waters nearby. Bruny Island is a half-hour drive from Hobart, and then accessible only by ferry, which doesn’t run at night. So when you’re on, you’re on, and when you’re off, you’re off. Bruny only had mobile phone reception on the ferry in those days, not at the Doll’s House. It was the perfect refuge for a busy Sydney critic.

  When I wasn’t dining out in Sydney I would come and plant trees in Nick’s front yard. Or walk to the dramatic yet sheltered Cape Queen Elizabeth a little further south, near The Neck. Or go into Hobart and watch the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra before sleeping on a boat shed floor (owned by Nick’s mate; I should point out I didn’t just camp in any boat shed), because there was no ferry home and we couldn’t afford accommodation.

  During this time, Nick and Leonie set up the Bruny Island Cheese Company. Nick’s dream was to build a cheesery onsite on Bruny, but in the short term he and Leonie rented space from other cheese companies and slogged at developing their own distinct styles and types of cheese. During the day they made the cheese, at night they worked in a bar in town to pay the bills, which meant sleeping in their van. If you visited them during this time, you worked. I came down about twice a year. And did more physical work in those few days than I’d done in a decade. Making cheese, I discovered, is 90 per cent washing up.

  Making cheese is also, at its heart, pure alchemy. In an attempt to prevent milk from souring, and to store the goodness in the milk for later, humans invented cheese—a joyous miracle of a process, and one that promises endless variation in style. If you take milk, allow it to sour ever so slightly, then create curds, ferment them, dry them, rub them, or inoculate them with moulds, you can create a thing of incredible flavour. Or, more accurately, many things of many different flavours.

  Nick
is passionate about place. So instead of just copying the cheeses he’d seen and learnt to make in Europe, he was inspired by them but tried to make his own style of cheese. Good cheese, like good milk (and good food generally, quite often), can be an expression of place. Good cheesemakers will, of course, pay homage and learn from the thousands of years of knowledge that has been built up by European cheesemakers, but they don’t need to just make the same cheeses here. So Nick developed a washed rind cheese that was matured on a sliver of Huon pine, the native Tasmanian timber adding its own resiny, almost smoky character to the cheese. He made another one by washing it with local red wine and wrapping it in vine leaves; the idea was to make a cheese that is perfect to eat while drinking Tasmania’s famed cool climate pinot noir. He made a fast-maturing, semi-hard goat’s cheese, called Lewis, named after a buck he’d saved from a farmer’s bullet. The milk came from several tiny goat dairies, spread all over the state. If you added up the cost of the trips, and the fact that you only get about 10–15 per cent of the amount of cheese from a litre of milk, Lewis was probably worth a few hundred dollars a kilo.

  Back to my move. I knew Nick and Leonie well. So I had two good friends in Tassie. I’d spent enough time there to know about long, possibly wet winters and the mild, extended days of summer. I wanted to move from Sydney to somewhere quieter and closer to the soil. Tasmania promised, at first impressions, the perfect climate for so many of the things I was hoping to source. Sure, there are no pineapples available commercially (though they have been grown in the state). There are no bananas, or macadamias, or mangoes (sadly), but there are, believe it or not, avocados. And the moderate climate is perfect for most livestock. It’s brilliant for root vegetables, the frost is important for decent-tasting stone fruit and berries, and it has some of the finest dairy country you’ll find anywhere.