The Dirty Chef

by Matthew Evans

  John and his son, Will, ground the flour that Ross and I used to sell at the market. Decanted by me from their huge sacks into little calico drawstring bags, the flour was wholemeal and low in gluten. Good for cakes and biscuits, but very hard work to use for bread. The rye flour, however, was gloriously fresh and incredible compared to the packaged product. At the market, we sold about 1 kilogram a week. Hardly an item worth pursuing, but one I persisted with for the first two years simply because I thought the quality worth supporting.

  There’s now another stone mill in Tassie, and this one is even more impressive. Since I’ve lived down here, a Georgian stone windmill in the Midlands town of Oatlands has been restored and the sails spin once again. Callington Mill has started grinding industrial quantities of local wheat into flour. Thanks to the mill, in negotiation with bakers—in particular Graham Prichard—and growers, the quality of Tasmanian flour has improved out of sight. We now have high-gluten varieties of wheat, grown and harvested at the right moment, which are well suited to bread, as well as softer grains for cakes.

  It was with Graham that I first started to really appreciate the art of making sourdough, that old-style bread made with only naturally occurring yeasts. The best sourdough is baked in a woodfired oven—a meeting of two ancient techniques, it would seem. And the best woodfired oven designer, by many estimations, was a Tasmanian called Alan Scott.

  Alan grew up in Oatlands, but went off around the world on a bit of a hippie tour, hitchhiking and working as a jeweller in Norway. He ended up as a blacksmith in the US, where he also garnered a reputation for building highly efficient woodfired ovens, the likes of which are now in use all over the Napa and Sonoma valleys. If you haven’t heard of him here, you should have. Maybe it’s that thing about Aussies being ignored while those from elsewhere are feted; when he died, his obituary was in the New York Times. But not in our local rags. Not The Age. Or The Mercury.

  Alan’s ovens have been built all over Australia and in their thousands in the US. There’s one at Sunnybrae restaurant in regional Victoria. There are some at bakeries, like the one in Berry on the New South Wales South Coast, and Nick has one at his cheesery on Bruny. They’re renowned for retaining heat when other ovens cool, allowing a baker to put multiple batches through the oven without the need for restarting the fire. That, and the way Alan managed to get the heat transferred to the bread, was considered a landmark moment in woodfired oven design.

  I was privileged enough to meet Alan Scott, though perhaps when he was a little past his prime. About ten months before Alan passed away I spent a night at Ross’s house with him after he bunked off from hospital and ended up at the cheesery; to the end he was a man who poked out his tongue at convention.

  The best bread to eat on a daily basis, as far as I’m concerned, is sourdough. Making it strikes fear and wonder into the hearts of the most hardened taste junkie. If you’ve tried to make it, you’ve probably failed at least once. If you buy it from a reputable baker, and know how hard it is to juggle the timing and ovens each morning, you’re probably in awe. If you haven’t had the true, proper sourdough that artisan bakers are making around Australia these days, you’re poorer for it. Where dodgy bakeries add vinegar to their dough to make bread taste sour, the real thing is made using lactic acid created by multiple bacteria and yeast. It’s complex, great on the tooth, keeps extraordinarily well, and varies by the week, by the month and by the location in which it is baked.

  My sourdough, I humbly admit, is usually terrific. I can’t take much credit for it, however. Yes, I did culture the starter, the mother if you like to call it that, on the kitchen bench at Puggle Farm. The starter is the mixture of wild yeasts and bacteria that gives sourdough its characteristic flavour, texture and mouthfeel. But the expertise, the reason my sourdough is as good as any I’ve had in this state, and most I’ve had in my life, is because of the incomparable Graham Prichard. And because we make one loaf a day, not a hundred.

  Graham, who runs a site for sourdough nerds called sourdough.com, knows as much about this humble loaf as anyone can. He knows flour, he knows woodfired ovens, he knows how the natural leaven, the wild yeasts, act on rising bread. And luckily for me, he moved to Tasmania, to the sleepy town of Oatlands, where eventually he set up a woodfired sourdough bakery. Using an Alan Scott oven.

  When we caught up for a baking lesson, which was prior to the opening of Callington Mill and Graham’s bakery, the flour I had gathered was Bignell’s wholemeal flour, with the scent of a granary and the texture of talcum. The oven we baked in was a domestic woodfired oven at a mate’s place, where the thermometer wasn’t up to the task at hand. And the day was windy, smoky, cold, rainy, warm, sunny and everything a Tasmanian day can be.

  Graham worked miracles. Out of the oven came three loaves. One, using 100 per cent Thorpe Farm flour, had a fine, almost cake-like texture, but a long-lasting nutty, unbelievably good flavour. The others, a 50/50 mix and an 80/20 mix using a high-gluten flour from Queensland, were joyously light. They had large, textured holes. They had a cracking crust, a delightfully resilient mouthfeel, and a warm flavour from the local flour. Despite the obstacles I put in Graham’s way, this was about as good as bread could get.

  One thing I learnt is about hydration. This is the amount of water compared to flour. So if you have 1 kilogram of flour, and add 650 millilitres of water, this is called 65 per cent hydration. We hydrated our doughs that day to about 90 per cent hydration. This makes for really, really wet dough, so sticky that it’s a nightmare to work with. It’s like trying to knead putty. Or glue. Graham has a technique where you swing the dough over your shoulder and flick it back to stretch it as it comes crashing down on the bench. It’s hard work, and some say you need to flick each loaf several hundred times. I managed about 50 before my arms ached and my hair was full of dough.

  And the result of Graham’s influence is that my bread is now wetter, less kneaded, and far better to eat than I thought it possible to bake at home. We hydrate to about 70 per cent. It’s a soggy dough to which I often add a bit of rye. I let it rise slowly on the bench overnight. Into an oven at about 230 degrees Celsius and the crust is dark, the innards holey, the texture close to perfect (for me, not for Hedley, of course). When it’s paired with top-notch butter, or even better, a bit of John Bignell’s sheep-milk blue cheese, I turn to putty myself.

  Yoghurt flatbread

  Makes 4

  I quite like this flatbread for mopping up curries, as the yoghurt adds not only a sprightly flavour, but some flakiness as well. It’s also good for making wraps, particularly roasted cauliflower and hummus.

  270 g (9½ oz/just under 2 cups) plain (all-purpose) flour

  150 ml (5 fl oz/just under 2/3 cup) water

  50 g (1¾ oz/2 generous tablespoons) plain yoghurt

  ¾ teaspoon baking powder

  pinch of dried yeast

  pinch of salt

  40 g (1½ oz) butter, melted

  Mix all the ingredients except the butter together, knead well and leave for half an hour on the bench. The dough may be a bit sticky and that’s okay.

  Knead in the butter and leave for another half hour before rolling. Divide the dough into four even-sized balls. Roll out to about 22-cm (8½-inch) rounds with plenty of flour.

  Dry fry in a heavy-based frying pan over a high heat for a few minutes, turning twice so each side cooks and browns a little.

  Tuna

  While moving to the land has had its fair share of hard yakka, there’s also been an inordinate amount of fun. Some of it is based on and around my own land, and some of it a long way from home.

  Ross, Nick and I aren’t really a group of blokey blokes. We’re the cooks in our families. We’re not likely to get together to change the oil in the ute; we’re more likely to make cider. Or roast a pig. And sometimes, a pleasure recorded quite nicely on Gourmet Farmer, we go on pretty exciting trips.

  I will never forget two days on a boat with a legendary local fisherma
n, Morrie Wolf. We set off on a perfect Tassie morning, all golden sunrise and water so still you could see your nose hairs in it. The southward journey was marked by magnificent scenery, as we motored down the channel from Kettering, where the ferry goes to Bruny, to Recherche Bay, near where the French built Tassie’s first European-style garden. We hooked plenty of flathead, a great eating fish, and a few squid to boot, and Morrie kicked in with some lobsters he’d got from a pot. We cooked it all on the rocky shoreline at Recherche, arguably the finest seafood feast of my life.

  But the best was yet to come. In a massive 4-metre swell the next day, with the boat pitching and the camera crew chundering over the side, I pulled in my first tuna. Morrie killed it instantly with a spike to the head then bled it on the boat by inserting a knife into a blood vessel behind the gills and flushing the blood out with a hose—the textbook Japanese way to preserve the fish’s quality, making it ‘sashimi-grade’. Back on Bruny we ate some as sashimi with fresh wasabi I got from a bloke’s back porch in Hobart after making a single phone call (God bless those Bignells!). We had some as steaks, cooked over a wood fire. And we preserved half the fish in jars using seawater to cook it and olive oil to steep it.

  I was often reminded of that trip, months later, when I opened jars at a moment’s notice and could still taste the exhilaration of being on a fishing boat in a wild storm. Eating a simple tuna and lemon pasta after a busy day on the farm, I was able to taste the remarkable flavour of a fish that we caught and preserved ourselves.

  I have caught a couple of tuna on fishing trips off the Tassie coast. Both have been Southern Bluefin Tuna, a majestic wild fish categorised by many as critically endangered. Both times I’ve felt inordinately guilty for adding to the ocean’s casualty.

  But when you look at the numbers, it’s not recreational fishing that is the problem. Yes, it adds to the problem, but the real issue is the industrial ranching (wild harvesting then fattening) of fish off South Australia. Tasmania’s total Southern Bluefin Tuna catch is estimated at 2.5 tonnes, while the Australian Fisheries Management Authority—the people charged with policing responsible fishing in this country— estimates there were about 4200 tonnes caught commercially in 2011. Which makes Tasmania’s haul roughly 0.06 per cent of the total.

  As a fisherman, you can try but you can’t really choose what takes your line. I can make just as good use of albacore, and would rather catch that, but when I’ve had the line out on tuna boats, Bluefin is what I’ve been blessed with.

  Generally, to use a line my friend Simon’s wife has to say about him, we’re quite sustainable fishermen; we take very little from the sea. Nick, Ross and I have been fishing for trout on a lake smack-bang in the middle of Tassie, with no success apart from hooking my beanie. I’ve been out with fishing whizz Plinio Taurean, and watched him snaffle about ten trout in an hour, and caught nothing but the end of my thumb. And the one time Nick did manage to get a trout on the line, when we were fishing an inland stream, the Picton, which leads into the Huon River, we thought it was undersized (nobody had thought to check before we went) so needlessly tossed it back. Further downstream, with the camera running and the telly bosses in Sydney panicking about how hopeless we were at catching fish, we dispatched a local fishing shop owner on a separate boat off-camera. The idea was he’d show us his massive haul then lend us his knowledge on what bait or lure was working best. Problem was, he didn’t catch any fish in his three hours on the river either.

  On other trips we’ve had more success. We caught plenty of gurnard off the east coast. I’ve jagged a lot of flathead in my limited outings. Ross and I caught squid on Bruny, we’ve done well at floundering, and even got a small shark or two off the side of a two-masted Huon pine ketch near Maria Island.

  But mostly, the fishing, like the diving for abalone, is just a great excuse to get together, whether we come home with anything or not. My life has proved too busy to get in the habit of going out fishing, something I’m consciously trying to change, especially so I can introduce my son to the joy of dangling a line off a jetty on a nice day.

  One day, however, I really would like to bag a trout.

  Beef

  We never intended to eat our own beef. With a small farm, and not a hell of a lot of grass, it seemed as if we’d have to be content with lamb as our red meat. Or alpaca. But the reality of mixed farming is that some things are just easier to get than others. And while possums ate my vegetable garden and the fruit trees struggled to take hold, we were milking a cow that had come with a calf at foot, and that calf became so big that we didn’t have the grass to feed both it and our cow, so we were suddenly the recipients of a year’s supply of meat.

  When you kill a cow, you really do get a lot of meat. A seriously large amount of bones (to Cari’s delight) and also a freezer full of meat. Not just a freezer, but when all the bits of a whole yearling are brought home in cryovac bags, you can fill a fridge as well.

  Coco was probably a bit over a year when she went off to the cutting shop. Unusually for us by that stage, she had a name and yet she was still destined for the pot. It’s hard to refer to an animal by a number if you have to handle it often or much, and because she was the daughter of Maggie, our house cow, it made sense for her to have a name.

  As an Angus/Jersey cross, the calf was a deep dark chocolate colour. But the name Coco came from my then-job writing a food column for a young women’s magazine called Grazia. (I could never quite work out how a middle-aged man from rural Tassie ended up writing about food for twenty-somethings who read popular magazines on the train in Sydney or Melbourne, but it was a column I had a lot of fun writing.) I asked the girls in the office if they could help come up with a name for the calf. After they put the word out with the staff (and I was inundated with good choices), the one that shone for us was Coco. After Coco Chanel, apparently. I’m not sure of the connection, but maybe it was her coat. Or that she was a cow or something. Anyway, Coco was it.

  Coco was a bit younger than ideal when we had to take her off to the cutting shop. We weren’t exactly over-blessed with pasture, so we had to leave enough for her mum. Coco was of good size and it gave us a chance to see exactly what our beef could taste like.

  Now, if you’re a vegetarian and use dairy products, here’s a bit of home truth you need to know. A calf has to be born to each lactating cow on a dairy farm every year or so, and only the pure milking-breed heifers (girls) will live. The boys are usually shipped off to the abattoir for human or pet food after their first couple of weeks of life. Some are grown out and used as veal (less than six months old) or as vealers (6–12 months). Very few of these boys will live past a year.

  So when I get emails saying that veal is cruel, usually based on some erroneous view about animal husbandry from European or other overseas websites, I can’t help but wonder what people mean. Unless you’re a vegan or don’t eat any dairy products, veal in Australia isn’t any more cruel than lamb. Is it more cruel to kill an animal at one week or one year? I’d probably say one week. Is it better to allow an animal at least some life or very little? So long as that life is a relatively natural one, where the animal gets what it needs to thrive, then it’s probably not cruel. We don’t use so-called ‘veal crates’ in Australia to isolate calves. We aren’t allowed to keep them anaemic—something they do in Europe to keep the veal flesh very white. The veal you get in Australia is usually rose veal, where the calf has been on milk but has access to the outdoors, to a herd for company, and to grass. If you drink milk, or eat cheese, or use butter, but don’t want people to have rose veal, animals will die at a few days old, rather than a few months. Either way, if you use dairy products, those animals will die. I’d argue it’s better to get more meat, and give the animal more life, and eat veal, or vealers, than to kill the beasts at a week old to feed to your dog.

  The reality of most meat-eating is that a lot of what we consume is physically immature. Pigs are killed well before maturity, often at about three and a half mo
nths of age. Lambs are, obviously, young sheep. And chickens, ducks, geese, pigeons and most of the birds you eat too. They are animals on the cusp, or not even close, to total physical maturity. The only real exception to this lack of maturity is beef, because that often comes from an animal that is of breeding age and also pretty much full size.

  So our yearling had been milk-fed, and was also on grass from the time she was about two weeks old. She’d lived a happy life and died a quick death. And the carcase had hung for a few weeks to try and intensify the flavours. Apart from a small amount of lamb, Coco became our red meat for the next year.

  The problem with having big animals, a dairy cow included, is land. And for a while we had too many animals for our land. There were four sows; a boar; a new house cow, Priscilla; and a handful of sheep. The problem, actually, wasn’t so much the animals as the quantity and quality of our land, and the uninvited animals. There’s good research to show that if you live within 800 metres of the bush in Tasmania, over winter wallabies will eat 100 per cent of any pasture growth. In other words, with our property bordering on bush, and without wallaby-proof fences, which are expensive and hard to maintain, we were growing grass to feed wildlife.

  Every year, the farming gets hard in winter. In midwinter, in the first years after I moved to Puggle Farm, I would get a sinking feeling in the colder months. It’s not the cold—I just adore winter, which is lucky, because the season goes a bit longer down here than it does in most of Australia. No, it’s something to do with the lack of grass, and the surplus of mud.

  I tried to increase my soil’s fertility from the day I arrived. I spread blood-and-bone on the grass while it was between grazings. We made in-paddock worm farms. We soaked newspaper in water and made about four or five stacks of paper and poo, corralled by hay bales (again in between grazings so the cow and sheep wouldn’t eat the hay). The idea was that the worms would eat the poo and paper, turning it into organic matter for the soil, and we would end up with great mounds of wonderful, rich organic matter filled with bugs; glorious bugs that will give more life to my soil and more grass growing in it.