Top chefs embrace Australian native ingredients
Forget the cultural cringe — our top chefs are embracing Australia’s ‘bush tucker’, using native ingredients to prepare everything from tasty gin to delectable chocolate to a hot sauce that has US barbecue aficionados hooked.
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It might have taken 60,000-odd years, but our top chefs are now realising something the original custodians of Australia have long known — lemon myrtle, damson plum and finger limes are utterly delicious.
While we arguably have a Dane to thank for finally getting us over the cultural cringe of “bush tucker”, when Rene Redzepi brought his NOMA restaurant to Sydney two years ago and explored the unique plants and herbs, fruits and veg and seafood of our Great Southern Land — putting many on the plate for the first time — it heralded a new era for Australian cuisine that chefs are now exploring with relish.
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While homegrown stars — including Ben Shewry at Attica — have found global fame for their pioneering use of native ingredients to construct a new definition of Australian cuisine, using these to cement a true sense of place is one of the best food trends of the past few years here — and across the globe.
In the US, Curtis Stone — who will be the head chef at the annual G’Day USA gala event held on Australia Day in LA — has recently launched his first Australian-inspired menu at his restaurant Maude in Beverly Hills. Taking cues from a recent trip to Western Australia, Curtis is introducing American diners to ingredients such as marron, pearl meat, salt bush and wattle seeds across a menu that wouldn’t look out of place in one of our top restaurants here.
But it’s not just on menus that these unique ingredients are being used. Here are some innovative new products making the most of our native bounty.
SPIRIT ANIMALS
“It’s taken a long time to get over the idea of bush tucker, but everyone is now thinking about a sense of place, in the food, in their beverage, and looking for ways to make that connection, that true sense of Australia,” says chef Scott Pickett, who grappled with these questions when opening his fire-powered restaurant Matilda last year opposite the Royal Botanic Gardens.
His solution? To use the foraged bounty that was literally on his doorstep to create a bespoke gin flavoured with the native botanicals found within the gardens.
The team started with a list of about 70 herbs and plants and, through a process of trial and error across five test batches whittled that down to about 10 key ingredients that includes river mint, aniseed myrtle, lemon peppered gum and Geraldton wax.
“It’s a bit like making a sauce,” Scott says. “You want to get layers of flavours on the palate. We’ve tried to do the same with the gin.”
As part of the 2019 Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, Scott will be teaming up with Royal Botanic Gardens director Tim Entwisle, along with Sebastian Raeburn from Anther gin, for a guided, multi-sensory journey of the gardens and distillation process.
The Botanist, the Distiller and the Chef event promises to be more than a simple gin tasting, with guests guided through the gardens and the botanicals that make up the Pickett & Co gin, before heading to Matilda for cocktails and a gin-infused canape menu.
“As part of the tasting tour, I will personally guide visitors to smell, touch and see the beautiful native botanicals that help create the fantastic flavours in Pickett & Co gin,” Tim says.
The rise in small-batch, artisan spirits has coincided with this interest in native ingredients for a marriage made in martini heaven. There are an increasing number of gins available that are making the most of found and foraged fare to deliver that “sense of place”.
Following a successful crowd-funding campaign, Ann Houlihan launched Great Ocean Road gin last year and now creates spirits using indigenous botanicals from the Surf Coast region including pig face, kelp, and coast daisy.
The newly opened tasting room and gin garden in Aireys Inlet is the perfect spot to enjoy a drop of this unique gin, while up in Ballarat, Kilderkin is finding fans across the land for its Larrikin Australian gin that adds a mix of myrtles — lemon, aniseed and cinnamon — to other botanicals including rivermint and lilly pilly berries for a smooth and complex gin.
Much like Pickett & Co, Garden Grown gin has partnered with the Australian Botanic Garden in Mount Annan — Australia’s largest — to create a gin made of rare botanicals including wombat berry, Mount White lime and ginger rhizome. And at the original home of Australia’s greatest opera singer, the Melba family at Coombe Varra Valley has just released a limited release of 500 bottles of Dame Nellie Melba gin that combines a London dry gin style with native Australian citrus for a spirit that hits the high notes.
JUST THE TONIC
It’s not just the strong stuff getting an Aussie makeover. Melbourne mineral water company Capi has added a native tonic to its range of innovative mixers aimed at the professional bartender and home mixer alike.
With its low sugar/dry finish, the Native Tonic is infused with lemon aspen, Tasmanian mountain pepper and Mount Zero salt that’s harvested from the pink salt lake in Dimboola. Capi founder Pitzy Folk says this uniquely Australian tonic is “best paired with a craft Australian gin garnished with golden wattle or finger lime”.
Capi tonics are available at Dan Murphy’s and other retailers.
COOL COCOA COLLAB
He’s one of our best chefs who has put the tiny town of Birregurra on the world map for his exploration of and redefinition of what Australian cuisine means today — now Dan Hunter has put his knowledge of native ingredients to work across an exclusive collaboration with Melbourne-based chocolatiers, Koko Black.
Dan says the inspiration for the range is to integrate Australian botanicals and native ingredients in a way that truly highlights and harnesses their unique characteristics, without resorting to novelty.
“I guess I wanted to use this as an opportunity to hopefully progress to a new period of understanding and appreciation of some key Australian native plants and ingredients. To get past the ‘hey, look at these things’ period that we’ve been in for a while and into a fully integrated stage of appreciation where these flavours can be recognised and enjoyed by a wider audience for their deliciousness,” he says.
To that end, the range includes such pralines as strawberry gum and dark chocolate ganache, lemon aspen with Whipstick wattle, lemon myrtle with candied cucumber, and finger lime with green ant and burnt butter cream.
Each ingredient has been chosen for its deliciousness and how it works with the different chocolate and, Dan says, form a vital part of Australia’s culinary language.
“Ingredients such as these need to be understood, used, enjoyed and to be part of the mainstream. It’s one of the reasons why I’m interested in using them,” he says.
“They also pair incredibly well with complex chocolates, often providing acid and balance.”
DRINK IT IN
North Melbourne’s artisanal cocoa purveyors, Mork Chocolate — widely regarded as producing the finest drinking chocolate in the country — have turned their attention to the country with the release of their fifth blend that takes its inspiration from the great southern land.
Using a range of herbs and spices including lilly pilly, strawberry gum, pepperberry, lemon myrtle and anise myrtle, the Australian Natives blend is billed as the team’s “most adventurous yet”.
HOT STUFF
It’s Australia’s only native hot sauce that has US barbecue aficionados hooked. Made in the Dandenong Ranges using Tasmania’s native mountain pepper — five times hotter than regular black pepper — Diemen’s has a unique Australian bush taste thanks to Queensland-grown habanera chillies and other local ingredients.
Try it with steak and pork, fish tacos or freshly shucked oysters, in a bloody mary, or, this summer, in a Mexican Micheladas (a bit like a bloody mary, but made with beer).
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