How one South Aussie chicken shop owner shook up how we eat our chips

THE creator, and original recipe, of Adelaide’s most important contribution to food, chicken salt, has been revealed. And it’s far from what we shake on our fries today.

SALT MASTER: South Australian man Peter Brinkworth created chicken salt.

• Adelaide’s best hot chips

IT’S a salty revelation that shakes up Aussie condiment-creating folklore.

The South Australian creator of chicken salt and his original recipe have been revealed — and it turns out what we dust on our chips today tastes nothing like the original.

“They’ve butchered it,” says the unmasked inventor, Peter Brinkworth.

Former Adelaide food identity Adam Liaw sparked conversation on his social media pages this week, when he shared that his high school friend Jodie Brinkworth had always been coy about whether her dad had invented Australia’s beloved seasoning.

Jodie’s mother, Helen Brinkworth, confirmed that her husband, Peter, was in fact the man behind in the salt.

The SourceSA tracked down Jodie — now Jodie Bricout — and Peter to ask them about the savoury sprinkle.

“We were selling cooked chicken in a retail outlet,” said Mr Brinkworth, who ran a chicken shop in Gawler, “and we also had a wholesale business where we were distributing fresh chicken to chicken shops and fish ’n’ chip shops.

Chicken Salt inventor Peter Brinkworth.

“I’ve always been one to try to get the upper hand, so I thought maybe I need to do something to make my chicken taste better.”

Mr Brinkworth’s chickens were a hit thanks to his chicken salt. “People loved it,” he said.

But when time came to sell the successful chicken business, Mr Brinkworth’s secret recipe had to go, too.

“We had the wholesaler and wanted to get out of the business. My chicken salt was being sold to fish ’n’ chip shops and chicken shops through the wholesale business — so with the sale of business went the chicken salt.

“I sold the company sometime around 1980.”

Local food firm Mitani bought the business and turned a word-of-mouth hit into a national icon, most famous as a seasoning for hot chips.

Ms Bricout describes the invention as her family’s “claim to fame ... but no one ever believed us”.

“We never had proof that Dad invented chicken salt because Mitani bought the business and they were the ones that commercialised it,” Ms Bricout said.

The Mitani family with a display of chicken salt; Con Mitani, with Tas Mitani, Elia Mitani, Jim Mitani and Les Mitani, in 2005.

So, more than four decades after inventing it, is Peter a fan of chicken salt on his chips?

“Yeah, ‘course I am,” he said, “but I’ve never tried theirs... they’ve butchered it since then. And why would I buy theirs? I make my own.

“I don’t know whether food laws might make it difficult to produce exactly these days, but the one that I’ve seen on the shelves these days has got rice flour in it and yeast extract. I’d never heard of those things.”

In Liaw’s follow-up article for The Guardian, Mr Brinkworth shares the secret recipe for the first time, saying his chicken salt blended “onion powder, garlic powder, celery salt, paprika, chicken bouillon and monosodium glutamate” with a bit of curry powder.

Tas Mitani, managing director at Mitani, said of today’s chicken salt blend, “It’s special recipe that has been developed and continually refined by our family over many years to make it Australia’s leading chicken salt.

He said Mitani Chicken Salt now uses ingredients such as “sea salt, onion, garlic, paprika” and added that their chicken salt is now MSG and gluten free.

Mr Mitani added that it “still remains a favourite on hot chips, of course.”

And did Peter Brinkworth, who says he’s now semi-retired, create any other famous foods in his day?

“A food writer in Sydney told me that I make the best apricot jam in the world,” he said. “So that’s something else I guess.”