Hunter Valley chef fired up for 2015 food fight

CHEFS from the Hunter Valley will test their culinary skills against chefs from Canberra and the Southern Highlands next month

Troy Rhoades Brown for Hunter Food Fight. Supplied

THE Hunter Valley’s Troy Rhoades Brown of Muse Dining is rolling up the sleeves on his chef’s whites for the sixth annual Hunter Food Fight on June 2.

He will be joined by Hunter chefs Michael Robinson of Margan and Emerson Rodriguez of Emerson’s as they battle it out with culinary heavyweights from Canberra and the Southern Highlands.

“It’s always competitive and there’s a lot of tongue-in-cheek kitchen banter but we have lots of fun battling it out,” Brown says of the drawcard event.

The three Hunter chefs will go head-to-head with James Viles of Bowral’s Biota Dining, and Canberrans Ben Willis of Aubergine and Sean McConnell of Monster.

Each team will create a three-course lunch to be judged by the guests in an event hosted by fellow chef, Matt Kemp.

Proceeds from the event go towards initiatives that help the Hunter’s young culinary talent.

He talks to us in the lead-up to the big event.

What is unique about food in the Hunter Valley region?

The region is ;less than two hours away from Sydney but is its own food and wine hub filled with artisan producers and suppliers. Menus in this area are usually very seasonal but styles vary greatly from fine French to bistro, contemporary Australian and cantina style meals.

People often find it difficult to describe what constitutes contemporary Australian food. What do you think?

Australian cuisine is all about our great produce, and it’s the best in the world. Australia is still a comparatively young nation, particularly when you talk about our food culture, unlike countries like France and Italy that have been forging a food culture for many centuries. Contemporary Australian cuisine borrows from these culture and is also inspired by Asian cuisine. But at its heart, it showcases our seasonal produce.

Your restaurant, Muse Dining, is described as contemporary Australian cuisine. How do you create your menu?

We are a seasonal local restaurant, so our menu showcases produce that’s in season and at its best and we try to keep our menu as local as possible. Having said that, we don’t completely change our menu with the seasons, but as new produce trickles in, we try to incorporate it.

You must need to work closely with the local producers then?

They really influence our menu. For instance, our milk comes from a farmer close by who milks his jersey cows, then pasteurises the milk himself and even delivers it to us. There’s a winery called Tinklers Wines at Pokolbin who have a beautiful parcel of land at the foot of the hills with six acres of orchards that provide many restaurants in the Hunter region. Essentially, they tell us what’s available and we try to work with it.

How do you come up with a new dish to put on your menu?

Trial and error forms a huge part of the development of a new dish, they can really take forever before they’re perfected. At Muse, we have the regular a-la-carte menu, then we have my take on new dishes, and we ask diners for their feedback on these trial items. I wake up every morning actively thinking about new dishes.

With trial and error, there must be occasions where you miss the mark, and others where you surprise yourself with an unusual taste combination, is this true?

Absolutely. Sometimes something works really well in your head and you think it’ll work a treat on the plate. But then you have a go and it just bombs. By the same token, I am sometimes pleasantly surprised.

Can you give me an example of how this trial and error process works.

I recently put a dish together with four flavours I thought would work really well: variations of pork, buttermilk, black garlic and crab. When we put it together we realised the crab flavour was being swallowed up (excuse the pun) so we switched it for smoked pickled mussels and it worked beautifully.

You’ve been in the Hunter Valley for a decade now. How have you seen the food scene change over that time?

There are many chefs who have trained here, then gone out to explore and returned to the Hunter and bought back their knowledge with them. As a result, there’s a new generation of chefs here who are really putting their personality on the plate, connecting to out area in a way they never have and showcasing local produce. The focus here is moving away from the personalities and people and focusing more on the local produce.

Food Fight, hosted by the Hunter Culinary Association, is at Crowne Plaza Hunter Valley on Tuesday June 2 from 11am. Tickets cost $120 for Hunter Culinary Association members; $160 for non-members and $70 for apprentice chefs. See hunterculinary.com.au