Tasmania seemed to boast a whole range of artisan producers. The geography is suited to smaller farms, particularly in the south, on and near Bruny, where the only way to scratch out an income is by diversifying or finding a special niche. I had the sense there was a real, deeply entrenched food culture based on what comes from the land, as opposed to what comes from a restaurant kitchen, which was my experience of the previous decade. I started to dream the big dream—moving to where I could not only know the produce, but also know the producer.
Before I moved, I thought I’d come down and work a little to test the waters. At a food festival, of all places, offering tastes of cheese to unsuspecting punters. And The Taste festival (usually called the Taste of Tasmania by locals) isn’t just any festival. It’s been held annually over the New Year holidays for more than two decades, in a shed down by the Hobart waterfront, and can pull in 300 000-plus people during its seven days.
Nick had, by this time, built and staffed a new cheese factory next door to the Doll’s House, and had a system or two in place. He had run a cheese stall at The Taste for a few years. He even had a staff member other than Leonie. In fact, by this stage Leonie had followed her own dream to design clothes and owned a frock shop in Hobart; she was—very happily it must be said—too busy to make or sell cheese. Nick wanted a little help, probably in the absence of Leonie, and I reckoned it’d be good to see what it was like back at the coalface. I missed cooking professionally, though not enough to want to go back to being a chef full-time. But I wanted to be a part of the food industry again, not just an observer.
Nick promised me I wouldn’t just observe. Two of us were rostered on. Nick and I. All day, every day. For twelve hours of customer service. Plus set-up and pack down. I imagined, however, there’d be a rush at mealtimes, and then we’d relax, take a break, maybe sneak off for a few hours in between.
I flew down before Christmas and joined in the celebrations at Nick and Leonie’s—helping to assemble a toy kitchen for their daughter Tilla on Christmas Eve. Leonie got a metal detector. I’m not sure what she bought Nick that year. And we sheltered on Bruny Island for a couple of days and ate well, of course—crayfish that were alive only hours before we cooked them, a fabulous goat’s cheese tart with caramelised onion halves—before spending Boxing Day preparing for The Taste festival, then setting up the stall the day after that.
On 28 December 2007, the doors opened at 11 am for the first morning of The Taste. It was like a jumbo had just unloaded. Unbeknown to me, queues formed outside prior to opening. Hundreds of people poured into the shed, some rushing to buy food straightaway, others in each group sent to reserve one of the too-few tables, usually outside, near the water. That was where the Sydney to Hobart racing fleet did their sail-past after arrival. Very quickly we had people four-deep at the counter. I was offering tastes of cheese. Selling cheese. Making milkshakes and finishing off some cheese platters. I worked as fast as my middle-aged body could muster, the old chef training coming in handy to avoid Nick and sharp knives, and focus on getting the job done. I’d never worked front of house, as customer service is called, not since I worked in a Woolworths ‘bakery’ at age seventeen. I’d always been back of house, ensconced in the kitchen, away from the customers. So working hard and fast, while still dealing with the public, was something of a shock.
I thought it best to hammer along until the crowd died down, so we could set ourselves up a bit better. But the crowd didn’t die down. It built. Over the next twelve hours, the lineup at the stall would sometimes number 30 people. I’d be giving tastes to eight people at a time, describing the cheeses (‘this one smells like a fourteen-year-old boy’s socks’; ‘if you like Cracker Barrel, you won’t like this’; ‘imagine a Comté, a Gruyère or a Piave, now taste the Tassie version’), taking cash, and learning the art of people management, market-style.
‘We whittle down our customers to the patient ones,’ Nick would say to those who finally got some service, and I would then parrot it.
‘Welcome to the front of the queue.’
‘He’s waving money, serve him.’
‘Just elbow your way to the front.’
And meal breaks, and toilet breaks, and any breaks for that matter, vanished from the day. At times I felt so weak, I’d have to sip a milkshake mid-sentence. When I couldn’t stand still any longer, when I found myself jiggling like a three-year-old still being toilet trained, I’d have to ignore the customers and just take off to the loo. When I was low in blood sugar, I’d eat in between serving cheese. When I was flagging, I’d drink coffee. And when I was becoming mean-spirited with increasingly inebriated customers, I’d have a sip of wine. I felt like an Italian diner.
Italian dining is about management of the human condition. You’ve had five or six coffees during the day, so you go out for a big meal feeling pretty alert. You start with an aperitif and some salty snacks, to give you some zing and a little appetite. Then you drink wine with your food, to give you fuel and some good cheer. Then you have a coffee to pick you up at the end of the meal, as you flag a little from the effort of digesting and the effects of the grog. Then it’s time to hit the coffee with a thing called an ammazzacaffè, a ‘coffee killer’ or digestive, so you don’t stay up all night.
We drank coffee like mad. Each morning of The Taste, Nick and I would go to a local café, order two caffe lattes each, and a big cooked breakfast; there had to be one proper meal a day. We’d start work at the stall an hour or so before the customers arrived, downing another coffee. And then we’d pretty much try to stay fuelled up and sociable all day. I reckon we each drank about a dozen coffees during the day.
All I really wanted after twelve hours of serving customers was a long, hot shower, but the showerhead in the place where we were staying only came up to my chest. Our ammazzacaffè was a pretty stiff Scotch when we got back, well after midnight, Nick often falling asleep mid-sip and mid-sentence. And me not far behind. We slept like the dead, well washed from the waist down.
Strangely, the experience was invigorating after years of office (and dining) work. I was coping okay, considering all I’d done physically for the past decade was exercise my jaws on eating and my fingers on the typewriter. (And some might say, unfairly, my knife arm on the restaurants . . .)
I found some small walnut of resilience I didn’t know I still had. The pain in my feet became, as I had found when I was a long-distance runner in my late teens, a challenge rather than a burden. In short, this horrific working week buoyed me. It gave me purpose. I loved offering a taste of some pretty out-there cheeses to punters. I had to leave my preconceptions behind; in Sydney I always felt that an interest in good food was a middle-class luxury. The realm of lawyers and dentists, of designer jeans and blonde bobs.
And here I was, offering blokes with mullet hairdos in blue singlets a taste of true farmhouse-style artisan cheese. And as often as not, they loved it. The Taste is a festival of all classes. Over the seven days the festival now attracts 320 000 people through the door, in a state that only has a population of 500 000. Sure, some are repeat visitors who come every day. Some are tourists, but that’s a huge number for a small state. The best thing about The Taste is that it’s for all tastes.
And the best thing for me, because I was still quite a recognisable character in Sydney, was that I was no longer a restaurant critic, rather just some bloke doing his bit to flog a nibble of cheese. I stepped, in one week, from a high-pressure, high-profile role—that I’d enjoyed taking on—to the next chapter in my life. No one knew me in Tasmania. Nobody, if they did, cared. I wasn’t the object of mystique, deification or derision, which sometimes happened when I was a restaurant reviewer in Sydney (yes, strange but true). I was just another fella giving things a crack.
Working at The Taste convinced me to move. Sure, I was so worn down I could hardly stand for a few days after it finished. Okay, so I did sleep long and hard for a couple of weeks once I got home. But on the way to the airport post-fes
tival, after dropping off a couple of fridges on the way (fortuitously not far from the farm I would one day own), I bought 2 kilos of raspberries for 20 bucks. Yep, you read it right—$10 per kilogram compared to the $7 punnet containing 150 grams I usually bought in Sydney! Seconds, they were, at the packing shed, too soft and ripe to pack into small punnets and ship anywhere, which means they’re perfect for what I love doing with raspberries: eating them.
As I was tossing them back with abandon, gorging on the generous acidity and mouth-filling sweetness of properly slow-ripened fruit that you can only get in a climate like this, I knew I had to move to Tasmania. I’d met some other artisan producers in the state over the years. I already had good friends in Nick and Leonie, and had met some of their mates too, who I knew I could form friendships with. I wouldn’t be alone in my new home.
So Hobart was the goal. Thanks to cheese, I was moving to, as our former prime minister Paul Keating probably would’ve called it, The Arse End of The Arse End. (Keating once famously said Australia was ‘The Arse End of the World’.) A harbour town, Hobart is sleepy, tucked stoically under the lee of Mount Wellington. The historic centre is breathtaking, and on a clear, sunny day, you could be in Helsinki. (Except the local drinks are beer, wine, cider and whisky, not Aquavit.)
Hobart has a generous arts and music culture. It has theatre, and a groovy art-house cinema. It has good independent bookstores and great local food shops. And Hobart town-dwellers are wont to garden; or at least not waste the fruit that grows, with abundance, on the fruit trees left in their backyards by a previous generation. It has a food culture that is different to the three other Australian cities I’d lived in— Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney. Sydney has the best chefs, Melbourne the best restaurants, and Hobart the best food. Or at least that’s how Nick likes to put it.
It was cheese that led me southward, and that would one day have an enormous role in getting a pilot show made for television. It was gluttony, however, that forced my hand, like most of the great, positive moves I’ve made in life, though this time with cheese at its heart. Know the cheesemaker, eat the spoils. With woodfired sourdough to go with it, and those raspberries, and impossibly fragrant Franklin peaches for afters.
So I packed up my Sydney terrace house and sent my possessions south, with no great plans other than to finally get the last high-quality fundamental ingredient I felt I needed in my diet. And for that I needed three chickens. But before that would actually happen, I had to find my farm and extract finance from the bank, a process that in total took another year. In the meantime I learnt about abalone, pork and the fine art of regional produce dinners, the Tassie way.
Barbara’s scrummy cheese biscuits
Makes 30
My mum’s are quite simply the best cheese biscuits in the world (well, the kitchen is my own little world).
170 g (6 oz) cultured unsalted butter, chilled
250 g (9 oz/1 2/3 cups) plain (all-purpose) flour
pinch of salt
good pinch of cayenne pepper (this bit’s essential)
150 g (5½ oz) mature cheddar cheese, finely grated
Cut the butter into bits and, using your fingertips, rub into the flour until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. You can use a food processor if need be. Add the salt and cayenne, then knead in the cheese until just combined.
Press the dough out on a lightly floured board, as you would shortbread, to about 5 mm (¼ inch) thick. Cut into 2-cm (¾-inch) squares or diamonds and place on two lined baking trays. Bake at 200°C (400°F/Gas 6) for about 15 minutes, or until golden. Cool, then try and eat just one.
Mulberries
You should take your clothes off to eat mulberries.
I learnt this on my first day in Tasmania. Fresh from the boat, the car loaded with possessions, our first stop was a house near Launceston. Nick had roped in a friend’s parents, Bernie and Sheila, to cook us breakfast.
Nick, Ian (Nick’s cheesemaker at the time) and I had just sailed overnight from Melbourne on the Spirit of Tasmania. We had been doing cheese tastings at a small event on the mainland. It’d been a full day of work after a full couple of weeks getting my Sydney house packed and cleaned. We filled the wee bunkroom of the ferry with the smell of washed rind cheese and red wine and boys. I slept like the deceased. The airtight room probably smelt like the recently deceased.
It was a glorious sunny February day when we drove, blinking, from the confines of the ferry out onto the bright sunlit shore. Devonport, at its heart, is an industrial port, and there’s not a lot about the unloading of a ferry full of half-asleep travellers that’s very glamorous. It wasn’t long, however, before the rocking of the boat was replaced by a dreamy early morning drive in the country. Within an hour or so of leaving the ferry, we were being served hot tea and brekkie in the morning sun.
I remember eating bacon and eggs that Sheila had cooked, in a kitchen where every flat surface was filled with preserved fruit. I remember too, the taste of a Nashi, straight from the tree. Did you know that a Nashi isn’t just about texture, that when tree ripened, the fruit can have a lovely elegant fragrance? Well, I didn’t. Not until that morning.
Sheila was overwhelmed by her harvest and had nothing left to preserve it in, so we loaded up crates with two types of Nashi. Both were so small they’d fit in a toddler’s palm, and we knew we’d be able to eat a lot, and maybe preserve the rest. We picked hundreds of tiny apples, too, the result of a tree overburdened with fruit, and then gorged ourselves on mulberries.
I hadn’t eaten tree-ripened mulberries since I was a little boy, and then it was only a handful left by the parrots. What I didn’t know about mulberries—those elongated dark red fruit you grow so you can feed the leaves to your silkworms when you’re a kid (hence the handful of fruit when I was young)—was how messy you can get from climbing a tree and eating them.
For the uninitiated, ripe mulberries are squidgy and impossibly fragrant; as you reach up for one, others brush your clothes and skin. But it’s the bit near the stalk that holds some of the blood-red juice long after the fruit is eaten. What seems like an inconsequential twig turns out to be nature’s paintbrush, staining your clothes and daubing your skin as you reach further and further into the branches in your greedy forage for the most far-flung mulberries.
Ian, Nick and I looked like axe murderers. Crimson stains adorned our clothes, our faces, my hair, their bald heads. The result was three grown men, giggling like schoolgirls at the flavour, the stains on our hands and shirts giving us the appearance of the criminally insane.
But it was worth it. And this day, finding tree-ripened fruit on my first morning as a Tasmanian resident, was indicative of the life I was about to lead. Tasmanians often have fruit trees in their yards. The seasons provide a gift that’s so bountiful that the fruit is shared among all who visit their homes. Tasmanians live close to the soil, more in tune with the seasons. This is the life I had hankered for in my terrace house in Glebe. The ability to find food simply growing in your backyard. Or, just as good, in others’ backyards.
I took a week to drive down to Hobart, meandering around the countryside, revelling in my new home. I tried to see some sights. The stunning Launceston museum, Design Tasmania. The awe-inspiring wilderness near Cradle Mountain. Lush farms, historic houses and more. And as I drove I listened to the radio. It struck me that the weather report in Tasmania is a little different to the one I was used to. Sydney reports, and other city reports for that matter, bemoan the rain. Country reports often don’t, because without rain, little grows. But even then, the weather forecast in Tasmania had an angle I’d not really heard before. It is all based on the assumption that listeners are engaging in, about to engage in, or planning on engaging in, outdoor pursuits.
Yes, the weather in Tasmania really is something else. Because it’s an island exposed to the west, it does get wild. It does get colder than the mainland in general, though the water all around us moderates the extremes. We are exposed to fierce win
ds at times. But the reports on the radio assume everybody listening is heading out among it. Bushwalkers’ alerts. Sheep graziers’ alerts. Small boat alerts. Inland waters reports. The weather reports assume that if you’re not out in the wilderness walking, you’re probably sailing around the coast, fishing on an inland stream or farming. If you’re not doing any of those things, like most people in the cities, why would you want to know about the weather? Just dress in layers and always have a scarf or something warm tucked into your car or bag for emergencies.
To the rest of Australia Tasmania is something of a misfit. It’s small, for a start. The weather is milder, so we don’t get the searing summers or the often brutal frosts of inland New South Wales. For much of the year, at least around me and across the northwest, it’s impossibly green and lush. To travel Tasmania is to step back in time, culturally and philosophically. Perhaps because of its relative isolation, or its relative poverty, much of the state hasn’t changed a great deal over the decades. Historic houses pepper the landscape. It’s what you do on your time off as much as your job that defines you, and there’s a sense of that other old Australia too, where you don’t lock your car, someone fills your tank with petrol at the servo, and you wave to your neighbours as you drive past. A place where there are lolly shops and good bakers in country towns and real fishing villages dotting the shores.
Sadly, in my view, most Australians only see Tasmania on their honeymoon or when they’ve retired. And what they see is the land of the long white doily. Twee, expensive colonial accommodation can lack the subtlety or charm that the historic buildings suggest. And for a long time it had the best produce in the nation, but was known, with some justification, to have the worst chefs. A lot of that has changed, or is changing. And now many people come for the culture, be it artistic or culinary.
The Dirty Chef Page 3
