The Dirty Chef

by Matthew Evans

  Lamb Winter Feast Menu

  Bruny Island, June 2010

  • Warm spiced apple juice with mace and cinnamon

  • Toulouse-style pure pork sausages from Ross’s Berkshire pig

  • A pressed ham hock and white bean terrine

  • Bruny Island Wiltshire Horn lamb shoulders cooked overnight with wild fennel, Dutch Cream spuds and organic garlic from my neighbour

  • Bruny lamb racks and legs, rubbed with garlic and anchovy and grilled

  • Brussels sprouts and Savoy cabbage tossed with garlic and butter

  • Organic carrots with dill

  • Dutch Cream spuds with butter and a hint of thyme

  • Woodfired sourdough baguettes from Bruny Island Cheese Co.

  • Kentish cherry pudding

  • And for those who stayed until the end, a fifteen-month-old cooked curd cheese that Ross made from a mixture of raw cow and goat milk

  The apple juice was freshly pressed and came from the Griggs’ orchard in nearby Lucaston, with no vitamin C added. (Vitamin C is often used as a preservative—our apple juice was brown, but delicious.) The bangers were simply coarse-ground shoulder meat with a touch of nutmeg. The wild fennel I had found dotted around the homestead on Ross’s property.

  We didn’t film this lunch. But we did film at a party with Jen Owens, as a pig turned on a spit. To go with it I made silverbeet fried with garlic and dark roasted carrots that we mashed up with olive oil. The pig made it into the show, of course. The vegetables, as usual, were edited out.

  Sadie and I are very proud of our carrots. We eat them in the garden. We make carrot pudding with any surplus. I roast them and serve them for dinner with little more than smoked mozzarella and some tomato. Carrots have become a barometer of how our garden is going. If we can’t get them to shoot, we have too many slugs. If they’re neat and straight, we’ve managed to create fine-textured friable soil. If they’re sweet and juicy, the minerals and water in the soil are just about right.

  It was a local masseur and soil-tester, Nolan Alderfox, and his carrots that taught us about the importance of soil and flavour. When we asked him to come and check out our garden and our farm, he brought some of his own lettuce and carrots for us. Nolan uses his carrots as a yardstick for his soil; the better tasting they are, the better his soil has become. At the time I kind of wondered what he meant. But now, with newfound respect for Nolan and his work, I know exactly what flavour means—better and more flavour is a great indicator of more micronutrients in the food, which comes from having healthier soil. There’s a reason to improve soil naturally, which goes way beyond increasing the mere size and shape of what you grow. In fact, in terms of public health, one of the little-brought-up facts is that the nutrient density of the food we buy in shops has reduced, pretty much across the board, over the last 50 to 100 years. In other words, on average a carrot bought from a supermarket today isn’t as good for you as a carrot bought from a shop 50 years ago. We’re eating food with less inherent goodness in it, all because we’ve pursued a flawed model of farming.

  Farmers are paid on quality of produce and on weight. But none of the parameters for testing ‘quality’ use nutrient density as criteria, often because we don’t even know what the micronutrients in a food are, or should be. We’re not talking vitamins or minerals, or other big, coarse measures of nutritional quality. We’re talking antioxidants and a whole host of other chemicals that exist in such minute quantities that science has hardly begun to understand their role. What that means is that farmers will use whatever fertiliser gives the biggest product for the least money. Regardless of what that does to the complex array of micronutrients available to the plant through the soil.

  One of the joys we’ve found since growing our own food is the seasonal thing. Forget consistency; everything, by definition, should vary by the week and the month. Consistency means things must be the same, and nature fights consistency.

  Nature—and evolution proves the point—is trying to create diversity, not consistency. But from a food producer’s perspective, consistency sells. Standing at the market trying to explain the difference in the texture and amount of fat in my pigs from week to week was hard enough. Imagine a restaurant or fast-food outlet trying to justify why sometimes their meals just aren’t the same.

  Of course, consistency can be achieved. You do it very simply, by making sure that the worst day of the worst week of the year is your standard. You can’t afford to pretend to be consistent otherwise.

  So, by definition, consistency is the enemy of greatness. It is the guarantee of mediocrity. If you’re a grower, to be consistent means you must provide a lower standard than the best weeks of the year. As a restaurant it means you can only be as good as your worst produce and your least trained staff member. Aiming at being consistent means you are aiming at mediocrity. I used to see it at restaurants when I was a food critic, especially those with multiple outlets so the head chef can’t be in all places at all times. And I see it now when I look at my strawberries, my kale, my carrots.

  Our carrots are inconsistent. We grow them orange, purple, white and yellow in colour. Some for cooking, some for eating fresh. Sometimes they’re fat and short. Sometimes they’re long and bent. Don’t tell me that consistent products are good products. Any gardener can tell you otherwise. Seasonal variation, and variation between plant types, between gardens, between farms and between years—that is perfectly normal and perfectly good.

  I can tell you that our summer raspberries are far superior to our autumn ones; but if we can ripen strawberries in May, they’re even better than in the first week of December. I believe there’s about a week when our broad beans are at their absolute best, even though we have to eat them for a month either side. I’m okay with that. And we now know that ‘overwintered carrots’ have sat in the ground as it gets frosted over and, as a result, are the best and sweetest carrots all year. There’s only one thing you can guarantee from our carrots, however, and that is they won’t be consistent.

  Carrot pudding

  Serves 4 as a meal, 8 as a side dish

  This naturally sweet, rich carrot dish is perfect for vegetarians and meat eaters alike. You could flavour the béchamel sauce with cardamom or other spices as you see fit, but I like the true taste of the carrot coming through unadorned.

  800 g (1 lb 12 oz) carrots, roughly chopped

  400 ml (14 fl oz/1 2/3 cups) milk

  1 fresh bay leaf

  50 g (1¾ oz) butter

  1 large brown onion, finely diced

  4 tablespoons plain (all-purpose) flour

  1 egg

  salt and freshly milled black pepper

  100 g (3½ oz/about 1¼ cups) coarse fresh breadcrumbs

  Steam the carrot until quite soft and mash to a rough paste using a potato masher.

  While the carrot cooks, make a white sauce by heating the milk with the bay leaf in a saucepan until nearly boiling. Turn off the heat and let it steep while you make the roux (a butter and flour mixture used for thickening). Melt the butter in a 1-litre (35-fl oz/4-cup) saucepan over a low heat and fry the onion until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the flour and stir quickly with a wooden spoon so it combines well with no lumps. Keep stirring for a minute while this flour mixture fries a bit. Reheat the milk and add it a ladleful at a time to the flour mixture, stirring the whole time and reboiling between additions (discard the bay leaf rather than add it to the sauce). When this white sauce has had all the milk added, make sure it simmers one last time, then remove from the heat. It should be the consistency of reasonably thick custard.

  Cool the white sauce slightly, then stir into the carrot mixture with the egg and salt and pepper. Spoon into a 2-litre (70-fl oz/8-cup) baking dish or casserole dish and sprinkle with the breadcrumbs (you can toss the crumbs in oil or butter if you like, but the pudding is already rich). Bake at 170°C (325°F/Gas 3) for about 30–40 minutes, or until the crumbs are browned and the pudding is hot right throu
gh.

  Serve with roasted meats, or as the meal with a light salad on the side.

  Avocados

  Ross is a chef. Quite a good chef, as it happens, which is probably why I went into business with him. For a while he lived in London, and was ranked in the top tier of the city’s cooks. In a book about the city’s best chefs, Ross contributed a couple of recipes, though the book’s editor might’ve done a better job—instead of Ross O’Meara, Ross was called ‘Mark O’Hara’. I still call him that sometimes, just to get a rise from him, and use that moniker to recognise his emails.

  Mark—sorry, Ross—was the missing link Nick and I had been looking for. Having worked the market for a couple of years, and made a small amount of coin, talking Ross into more work for questionable gain was looking pretty likely. Nick and my big plan for putting on regional produce events, which kicked off at the cheesery in my first year in Tassie (the one that was used as a pilot for SBS), had lain fallow. What we needed to make these meals a reality was another pair of hands. Another strong back. Or at least one strong back. It took a couple of years, but thanks to the inclusion of Ross, the concept of hosting roving regional events, in the actual Tasmanian region from which the food originated, finally came off.

  We took inspiration from the success of an American operation called Outstanding in the Field. Even though that first event that Nick and I did manage to host wasn’t open to the public as we had hoped, it did give us the confidence to take the idea on the road. In the following two years, Ross and I hosted a couple of other regional lunches branded under our Rare Food banner from the market (the illegal lunch and the lamb feast on Bruny)—they were locally focused, but based on our own regions and products rather than the food and regions of others. A similar theme, perhaps, but nowhere near as ambitious or as posh as the ones we now had in mind. The ones that became A Common Ground.

  When Nick and I managed to persuade Ross to come onboard for the newly minted events, we had the last piece of the jigsaw. Ross is a bloke who can be thrown a cooking job in difficult circumstances, very difficult circumstances, and produce magic. Nick is an ideas man—he thought of the name, organised the logo and website. And had the bank account so we could take bookings and prepayment. And me? Well, I’m not sure what my role is, except I can cook, I am okay with organisation, and I did notice at our first lunch that we had no drinks cold at noon for a 12.30 start.

  Our first A Common Ground lunch was at Stanley. If you take a map of Tasmania and find the point on it furthest from Cygnet, Stanley is it. A six-hour drive from home is hardly an easy training ground for our first big event, but it’s a region famed for its produce. Problem was, if we forgot a spoon, a few plates, an ingredient of some rarity, we were buggered. Never mind the chairs, tables, linen and more, plus we had to bring all the cooking equipment from home. And of course our every success or failure would, as usual, be recorded on camera.

  We spent the previous five days scouring Tassie’s North West for food, filming as went. We found incredible slow-ripened strawberries and intoxicating goat’s milk yoghurt. The abalone were smaller than the palm of your hand and impossibly sweet. We went out on the octopus boat, a nauseous early morning trip with some fantastic local fishermen. We stood in beautiful cabbage fields filming in the rain for five hours to get twenty seconds of footage. We found fresh wasabi, cracking olive oil and bought live crayfish straight off the boat.

  But the most interesting find, for me, was avocados. Yes, avocados in Tasmania. There’s a commercial grower in the north of the state who comes from that famed avocado-producing nation, the UK. Inspired by the fact that the Kiwis can grow avocados just across the ditch in New Zealand, Dick Shaw decided to give it a crack here. And what avocados they were! To this day they’re still the finest-tasting ones I’ve had anywhere. Rich, creamy, nutty. Simply the stuff of legends. And how blessed we were to get hold of some.

  We were less blessed by the weather gods.

  One thing I have now noticed about the outdoor table events run by Outstanding in the Field is that they’re often held in California. In summer. Where it very rarely rains and the weather is reliably warm. Tasmania, I have to say—and I do love the climate here most of the time—isn’t California. Outstanding in the Field also often uses existing infrastructure, such as wineries.

  We, of course, didn’t think like that.

  If you’ve been to Stanley, you’ll know it is always lush and green around there. The grass grows thick and strong all year, pretty much, thanks to very reliable rainfall. The township itself is sheltered on a headland under a natural feature, a huge rocky outcrop called The Nut. The geography and the shape of the trees implies that the weather, well, the weather sometimes turns foul. Our dream was to run these events in the middle of a paddock or beach or copse of trees. For us, the best location in the North West was on the headland overlooking the ocean where the octopus were caught. Within sight of where the grass-fed wagyu beef was raised, just near the abalone farm. We stood on this headland and dreamed of a curved long table on the grass, serving platters to 50 guests in the still summer air. Or should I say we stood on this headland in the belting rain and dreamed.

  Up in the North West, where the rainfall is consistent and the air pure, on a piece of land jutting into Bass Strait, home of the famed Roaring Forties winds, a table in a paddock wasn’t going to cut it.

  So when the slanting rain came down pretty much every day for a week, and the forecast, despite being December, was for a cool, very wet day with up to 40-kilometre-per-hour winds, we decided to move the whole shebang indoors. Luckily for us, Highfield House, a historic homestead on the same headland as the paddock we had initially earmarked, had a stone barn that looked very inviting. Once the pigeon poo was cleaned off the floor.

  We couldn’t cook there, however, so a makeshift kitchen was rigged up in a shed about 100 metres away. There was an old forge, still with its leather bellows, and within an hour we had the makings of a kitchen. We used the VW Kombi to cart platters to the table, a short distance, but in the cold and rain, one we needed to bridge comfortably.

  And some customers actually showed up, which was a relief. The townsfolk from Stanley were incredibly supportive, some booking seats on the same day they helped truck in tables from the town hall.

  One thing we hadn’t thought of, probably because we’re all cooks, not waiters, by trade, was who was going to serve. If we were all in the kitchen, who would greet the guests, pour the drinks, carry platters and clear the tables? What, with the food, the weather, the film crew and the logistics, waiters had slipped our minds. Luckily our friend Colette Barnes from Ut si Café at Perth, where we’d stopped for a coffee on the way up five days earlier, had thought of it. Not only thought of it, but rang us two days before the lunch to see if we’d found any staff. And if we hadn’t, she had a plan.

  The plan was that Colette and two of her staff would come and work the day. Three hospitality professionals who swung into action from the moment they arrived—Colette and Fiona on the floor and Shireen in the kitchen—three women who saved us from certain failure. We simply showed them a naked dining room and they transformed it into a banquet hall. Or showed them a few kilograms of broad beans and returned to find them double-peeled.

  The idea of the lunch, of course, was to showcase local produce in a way that did the produce justice. To put producers, consumers, cooks, farmers and fishermen all at the one table. To celebrate the stunning food grown in this incredibly fertile region, a place with wonderful soil, magnificent pasture and some of the purest air and water in the world. All we had to do, really, was not muck it up.

  But muck it up we nearly did. Dick’s avocados were really ripe and hadn’t benefited from the best part of a week on the road. So ripe that some had started to colour, but thankfully most were salvageable and the flavour was incomparable. The old forge, which had the potential to create a fire hot enough to melt steel, had to be worked so gently that it took Ross forever to cook th
e meat. The shed was full of smoke, not unusual when Ross is cooking, some might suggest, but the meat spent just a little too long on the wrong side of rare. None of us had tried making the dressing for the abalone until the day, though the theory turned into practice pretty quickly, and successfully. And my first-ever go at cooking quinoa turned out to be quite a decent attempt, thanks mostly to the addition of some rather incredible cooking juices from the goat.

  We hope we honoured both the ingredients and the producers. What we wanted, really, was to cook something yummy and to give those who came a reason to rejoice in an experience that can never be repeated.

  A Common Ground Lunch Menu

  Stanley, December 2010

  • French Breakfast radishes from Yorktown Organics with Ashgrove farmhouse butter and salt

  • Baby abalone from Stanley, steamed with Rosie MacKinnon’s green garlic, topped with wasabi leaf and a seaweed and cider vinegar dressing

  • Couta Rocks crayfish with two varieties of Dick Shaw’s Tasmanian-grown avocados, lemons from the same orchard, Cradle Coast olive oil

  • Stanley octopus slow braised with Paul Day’s Nicola potatoes and new season purple garlic, in Barringwood Park’s Pinot Noir and Chardonnay

  • Milk-fed Mathom Farm goat braised with Barringwood Chardonnay and local olives, served on Australia’s only commercially grown, organic quinoa tossed with quinoa leaves, olive oil and broad beans from the garden

  • Hammond Farm grass-fed Wagyu beef (marble score 6) two ways: braised shin, brisket, ribs and chuck; and forge-grilled scotch fillet with freshly grated Shima wasabi stem

  • Mixed local vegetables—green and red cabbage, chargrilled cauliflower, baby silverbeet and Nicola potatoes with Ashgrove butter