The Dirty Chef

by Matthew Evans

  My road trip had enormous highs and some lows. At once I was fascinated by the CWA shop in Launceston and their wonderful display of home-baked biscuits, but also saddened by the café in New Norfolk that boasted their cakes came from Queensland. I was dining on great local fish, drinking local cleanskin pinot from Riedel glasses at a chipper in Bicheno one night, and the next night wondering why the expensive guesthouse served salmon baked with maple syrup, which was frozen and boiled in the bag. At stops on little country roads I was baffled by the many flourless orange cakes and bottled imported juices when the place, the mood and the history demanded a teacake or freshly baked scones or a cloudy apple juice.

  Tasmania, on the surface, is good-looking. The light is dramatic, or gorgeous, or moody. The people are incredibly friendly. Compared to the mainland, there are amazing changes in geography and scenery within a very small space. It boasts rocky outcrops, ancient mossy forests. There are countless wooden boats bobbing on insanely pretty harbours, primordial trees reaching for the skies, and endless kilometres of jagged waterways to explore by boat or by land. A relatively small population is scattered over the island, very much at the whim of the place in which they live. At every turn I saw the majesty of the place, and the specialness of the land and the people who work it. And I also saw the potential of a state that has done it too tough for too long.

  My drive across Tasmania was a great interlude between my city world and my new home. It was the realisation I’d actually made this big life change. Unencumbered by a relationship or a job, I was in that lucky state of having the freedom to simply make the move. Just me to think about. I also had the blessing of a mobile income, because I could be a freelance writer just about anywhere. What’s more, I had a book to finish.

  Pears

  My house in Hobart wasn’t a house. It was better than a house. It was a flat hived off the side of a Victorian country house built in 1865, complete with an ancient orchard around it. And as a bonus, my landlord was Maria Lurighi, a singer with a voice that can melt ice-caps.

  My little flat had 12-foot-high ceilings in the main room, a grandiose bedroom that seemed bigger than my whole house in Sydney, and a kitchen housed in an enclosed former deck. The walls, made from convict brick, were as thick as battlements, the view was to the northeast and there was a walking track nearby that climbed up and up, along the rivulet past the houses and onto Mount Wellington.

  The moving men grumbled long and hard about the steep driveway, but they shifted everything safely and quickly. They left me with the problem of too many boxes and no storage space. A problem that plagues me still.

  My first night in the flat was brutal, and one I hoped wasn’t an omen for what lay ahead. Tucked up against the mountain, I wasn’t expecting to hear much noise apart from a few cars, so it was a shock on my first morning in my new digs to awake to the sound of chainsaws. Hurricane-strength winds (more than 170 kilometres an hour) had lashed this part of Tassie, and a tree from across the road had crashed through the fence. It snapped a telegraph pole as it tumbled through the powerlines, and the road was cut. So was the phone. Electricity cables lay draped over our metal gate. The cold snap brought by the wind was penetrating my soul. No hot water for a shower. No heating. To cheer myself up, I headed out into the world, to walk on Mount Wellington and to warm up.

  Mount Wellington is Hobart’s sentinel. Standing tall and proud above the town, it’s often snow dusted, and always cold. From its summit, which you can easily drive to from town, you can get a clear picture of just where in the world Hobartians live. Down to one side is the city itself, a surprisingly small township for a capital city, snuggled against the mountainside, hugging the waterways of the Derwent River. Beyond that lies the convoluted coastline that leads out east towards the Tasman Peninsula. And around most of the rest of the mountain you can see . . . well . . . bush. Nature. Nothing manmade, just endless views westwards, through some of the cleanest air in the world. From here there’s nary a road, let alone any human inhabitants, before you eventually hit the west coast.

  The view from Mt Wellington is, really, a metaphor for Tassie. Small in population, the town bunkers down under the lee of the hill. Tasmanians are a generally resilient bunch of locals who find comfort tucked away from the wilds. And wilds they are. When they talk about World Heritage, Tassie fits the bill. A quarter of the state is in national parks or World Heritage listed areas. The vast, oft-drenched southwest is startling in its beauty, dramatic in its scenery and unforgiving in its nature. Made famous by bushwalkers worldwide, the remoteness, the wildness, the isolation all form part of the island’s identity. When you stand atop the mountain you get a very clear sense of how inconsequential humans are in this corner of the globe.

  Mount Wellington creates a rain shadow, making Hobart, surprisingly, the second driest state capital in the country. Where I lived, however, was far enough up the slopes to catch the corner of many showers, the sun angling in from underneath the clouds on the other side, creating grand and beautiful rainbows. In the first throes of love for my adopted state, I was gifted coloured arches by the day.

  Maria’s house was surrounded by an old and productive garden. My bedroom was overshadowed by a pear tree more than 80 years old. Towering above the house, its branches drooped with hundreds of pendulous russet fruit that would plummet to earth in a strong breeze. More than once I awoke from a deep sleep to the sound of a gunshot, only to realise it was just another pear being dislodged from the tree onto the tin roof overhead.

  Along with two or three ancient pear trees, there were also many apples. The place must’ve been an orchard at some point in its life. It was a rare time I left the house without grabbing a handful to eat on the journey. It was at my little flat that I discovered that the flavour of a tree-ripened Golden Delicious apple is to the supermarket fruit what sourdough is to puffy white bread. Impossibly ambrosial and with an immaculate crunch, it made me realise I’d never really had an apple before. Just things that looked like apples. I couldn’t even visit the washing line, tucked between old orchard rows, without eating fruit straight from the trees.

  To the far side of the house, which was no longer in the country but part of the Hobart suburbs, lay an empty block with the remnants of a garden. Somewhat neglected, it boasted a few fruit trees and, to my joy, asparagus. Someone nearby cared for it, but I think they fell ill, and the asparagus was going to waste. Come evening I’d sneak into the garden and harvest two or three spears for my dinner, learning again that the things you grow in the garden (or get someone else to grow) don’t taste like the stuff you can buy.

  Friends came to visit almost straightaway. Alan (the bloke who was to blame for showing me that milk isn’t just milk) flew down from Sydney with his family for a few days. For my first dinner guests in my new house I cooked chicken and oat soup and tarte Tatin. I snaffled the apples from the yard— Golden Delicious, the perfect variety, I had learnt after a trip to the home of the Tatin sisters in France’s Loire Valley a couple of years before. The tarte was dark and sticky and buttery and just about perfect. With organic Jersey cream, well, all I can say is you should’ve been there.

  So discovering the true taste of apples and asparagus and other similar encounters helped forge a new tack. When I had eaten in those fancy Sydney restaurants, none of them had asparagus this fresh. Or apples this good. I wanted to know why some produce tasted better than others, and now that I lived in Tassie I was often in the right spot to get firsthand experience, not just knowledge from a book. And that experience included foraging for food myself.

  My foraging took me out mushrooming east of Hobart. I drove and drove, trying to find the pine forests I’d spied from the aeroplane many times, though I found only a few Slippery Jacks under a far-flung forest. I had to jump a high fence for those. It took me to blueberry farms where the local berries shook my cynicism about the flavourless ‘super food’ and turned me into a convert, thanks to the taste. Slow-ripened, organic berries have a t
hinner skin than most of the commercial crop, which cost a fortune per punnet in Sydney, with more generous acidity, and far more fragrance. Through foraging I met a pig breeder, and a copper pan maker.

  I visited Hans Stutz and Esther Haeusermann at their goat dairy south of Hobart. Tongola is your archetypal farmhouse cheesery. Except no farmhouse dairy ever looks like this; conventional dairies usually look like factories with very functional and ugly washable walls. They’re often going to be very safe in a bushfire, because there’s not a tree in sight. And they’re usually bigger, more industrial and far less romantic than Tongola.

  At Hans and Esther’s place, they have an idea of the aesthetic. They wear charmingly, rustically practical dairy and cheesemaking clothes inspired by their Swiss homeland. Their milking sheds are tucked underneath the gum trees. When I visited, they carried the milk of 26 goats, which they’d just finished hand-milking, to a micro-cheesery underneath their house. It was everything you’d expect from a traditional European cheesery, done right here in Tassie. The results of their cheesemaking, like Nick’s, pay homage to Europe, yet taste of the place.

  Esther acquired her skills in the alpage, the alp-based cheesemaking culture of her homeland. Each summer she’d move cattle from the low hills up to the higher pasture as the snow melted, all the while milking the cows and making cheese. And when the snow descended again, she’d bring the cows back down to their winter pastures. Then she’d go off to her job as an accountant for the winter.

  Tongola makes a mountain-style cheese, but using the goats’ milk they get from their Toggenburg goats. It’s a semi-firm, cooked curd cheese with a washed rind. They also do a white-mould style, like goat brie for want of a better description, and a magnificent little log with a crinkly rind and chalky centre. The cheese is made underneath the house and matured on wooden boards. You could eat dinner off the floor of the cheeseroom, but it doesn’t look like some processed milk factory. It looks like a wholesome place with a sense of the visual. All this, and it’s not done for the tourists. Tellingly, Hans and Esther’s place isn’t open to the public. They do things because they believe in them.

  I had the same revelation visiting Elgaar Farm in the north of Tasmania. Joe and Antonia Gretschmann have been running an organic dairy for nearly three decades. Theirs isn’t some industrial dairy like those in the US, where the cows are in sheds for their whole productive life. No, these cattle wade about in deep grass. The calves aren’t taken off the cows two days after they’re born; the old cows don’t get shipped off to the abattoir when they’re no longer producing considerable volumes of milk, but rather they die of old age on the farm.

  Elgaar is run by a family of rule-breakers. They have copper vats, commonplace in Europe, but difficult to get past the health inspectors here—despite so many imported cheeses being made in them . . . But Elgaar has proved they’re safe. Ditto with a wooden butter churn; they showed the inspectors it was safe through tests.

  Huge timber beams hold the building up. Even Elgaar’s silos are made of timber, housed in an enormous shed built by the family. Like Tongola, there’s an aesthetic to the place that goes to the soul of what they are trying to do. It’s not about using old techniques just for the sake of it; it’s all about a philosophy of caring for not only their farm but also the whole environment on which it sits. The farm is famed as much for the soil regeneration they’ve achieved over the years as for the milk they sell around the state and into Melbourne.

  Elgaar milk is sold in glass bottles. Yes, that’s right, glass. When I visited they had a herd of Jersey cows producing organic milk, cream, yoghurt and cheese. The glass bottles are delivered to the shops in fire-branded Elgaar wooden crates that are made by the family. It’s not just organic in name, it’s organic in philosophy: real, unhomogenised milk sold in reusable glass bottles delivered in crates made from a fully recyclable material. Who could ask for more? Well, there is more, the milk tastes terrific. And believe me, I’ve spent way too many hours looking for, thinking about and tasting milk.

  Living at Maria’s was a bit of a Tassie honeymoon for me. At nights I could hear her, or her concert violinist husband Peter, or visiting pianists, practising through the walls. Maria can sing opera, summoning her voice from the depths of her lungs and her soul, so moving it can give you goosebumps. She can sing gospel. She can sing blues. She can, quite simply, sing. When they talk about someone having a gift by being able to sing, I never really understood the term—until I heard Maria belt out a few notes, that is. Her gift, thanks to the thin inner wall that separated my flat from the main house, was a gift to me.

  I cooked lamb, again; a rack, seared in a hot pan and bunged in a hot oven for a few minutes. I boiled quartered Dutch Cream potatoes until soft and tossed them with crushed garlic and a knob of butter while still steaming. The heat cooked the garlic slightly, the butter melted, the potatoes fractured at the edges and soaked up the fragrant butter. And through the wall came the sound of an angel on earth.

  One day a neighbour who looked after the garden next door came knocking. And it wasn’t about the poaching I’d done in the yard. She had, she said, too many old Fowlers jars, and was taking them to the op shop. Fowlers jars are the iconic Australian preserving jars. Made of really thick, long-lasting glass, then fitted with a tin-coated lid, a rubber seal and a spring, they’ve been used by gardeners to store seasonal gluts for nearly 100 years. And I got mine for free!

  They arrived just in time. I’d been storing the pears from the enormous tree in the yard for days in my kitchen, having read that pears, unlike apples, ripen best off the tree. But these pears never ripened. They stayed firm, and a bit mealy. So I thought perhaps they were pears that were grown for bottling, particularly given their vintage. Forty bottles later, I had learnt a lot about preserving. Things like you should push the fruit well down into the gaps, so you don’t end up with half bottles of fruit and too much syrup. I learnt that a small amount of sugar is usually enough. I learnt that if you overfill your old Fowlers preserving pan, past the hole in the side where the thermometer used to go, the water will flood out onto your stove.

  After two hours on the simmer, the pears went a gorgeous nipple-pink colour. They held their shape, but became tender and sweet. Some I had flavoured with a simple blade of mace, some with cinnamon, some with a clove. But all came from the preserver in immaculate condition, my first Tasmanian harvest, sealed for all seasons.

  Salty pear tarte Tatin

  Serves 8

  I have a dedicated 25-cm (10-inch) wide cast-iron Tatin pan that I carried back from France. More fool me. In Lamotte-Beuvron, in the Loire Valley, where the Tatin sisters created the dish, they use a very large lined springform cake tin . . . Simply use a cast-iron or other heavy frying pan to make the caramel and pears, then transfer it all to a springform cake tin. (You’ll need to make extra caramel to make up for the bit that gets stuck to the pan.) I, however, like to think my Tatin pan works better.

  about 50 g (1¾ oz) butter

  6 firm pears (Beurre Bosc are best for cooking), peeled, halved and cored

  2 fresh bay leaves

  1 teaspoon salt

  about 150 g (5½ oz/ 2/3 cup) sugar

  about 2–3 tablespoons water

  Pâte brisée (flaky pastry)

  150 g (5½ oz) butter, chilled and diced

  250 g (9 oz/1 2/3 cups) plain (all-purpose) flour

  good pinch of salt

  3–4 tablespoons ice cold water

  vanilla ice-cream, to serve

  To make the pâte brisée, rub the butter into the flour or pulse in a food processor until crumbly. Don’t be fussy about it being too even—a coarser mixture makes a better pastry. Add just enough water to make a pliable dough—about 3–4 tablespoons is usual. Don’t overmix. Cover with plastic wrap and leave to rest for at least half an hour before rolling. Roll out on a well-floured bench or between sheets of baking paper to fit your Tatin dish or springform cake tin and leave in the fridge until needed
.

  Melt the butter in a heavy-based 25-cm (10-inch) ovenproof frying pan over a low heat. Add the pear, cut side down at first, along with the bay leaves and cook really slowly to cook and caramelise at the same time. Move the pear halves around the pan to make use of any hot and cold spots and to stop the butter burning. You may not fit all the halved pears in the pan at the start, but squash them up as they soften and squeeze more in. Sprinkle the salt evenly over as they cook.

  When they’re brown, turn the pears over and cook the other side, pouring the sugar into the gaps between the pears just as you turn them. Preheat the oven to 200°C (400°F/ Gas 6). Keep cooking over a low heat until the sugar starts to caramelise and the pears are nearly cooked through—a tiny splash of water will slow the sugar caramelising if the pears are still firm. If you’ve made an apple tarte Tatin, you’ll find you use less water with pears.

  Again, you’ll need to jiggle the pan and the pears at this stage to avoid hot spots. When the caramel is dark and thick and the pears tender but not soggy, remove from the heat. Cover with the rolled out pastry, carefully pushing the pastry down around the outside of the fruit, and bake for about 20–30 minutes, or until the pastry is well browned.

  When it comes from the oven, cover the pan with a large plate and invert immediately, ready for serving.

  Serve warm or later the same day at room temperature with vanilla ice-cream.

  Flounder

  One of the freedoms afforded me when I first landed in Tasmania was the ability to meet producers. The real farmers, fishers, growers and makers, those who had inspired me to move in the first place. Along with dairies, such as Tongola and Elgaar, I discovered a whole bunch of food I hadn’t really thought much about before. I even went floundering, which is what I thought I’d done a lot of in my twenties, but is actually a method of catching fish. And all the while I was meeting the producers who make this state what it is.