I am what I eat: Peter Gilmore

PETER Gilmore is the creator of Australia's most famous dessert, the snow egg, and heads Quay in Sydney, listed among the world's best restaurants.

peter gilmore nov 26 taste

PETER Gilmore is the creator of Australia's most famous dessert, the snow egg, and heads Quay in Sydney, which is listed among the world's best restaurants.

There's no doubt my mum is a really, really good cook. She used to go to the Margaret Fulton Cooking Club and drag me along as a toddler. Fantastic desserts were one of her specialties.

Mum and Dad would have great dinner parties, we were always entertaining. They had Italian friends and Chinese friends, Czech and Yugoslavian friends, all sorts of different influences and all those cuisines.

Having an early exposure to really good food and having exposure to the sense of hospitality that Mum and Dad always used to show at their dinner parties, certainly influenced my early years and certainly made me decide to be a chef. 

The first thing I cooked myself, and remember being very proud of, was a steak. Just a really nice piece of beef with a red wine sauce. I remember cooking the red wine sauce and reducing it down, and my dad saying it was the best steak he'd ever eaten, which was pretty cool.

I always wanted to travel and combine the idea of good cuisine and travel. This year has been really big. I've been to Peru and Austria, and I was also in London, all food-related events. I really love Japanese food and I have been a couple of times now. I'd like to go back and really get into the regional cuisine of the mountains.

I get my kids in the kitchen and cook with them.

On my days off, we keep things pretty simple, foodwise, at home. Most of the time it's things like a good barbecue, a roast dinner or making a really good curry from scratch. I get my kids involved in mixing up of the spice mix and frying off the spices.

My biggest weakness is ice cream, I love ice cream. It's hard to go past just a really good vanilla ice cream. That's probably my biggest indulgence, that and really good quality chocolate, Chuao from Amedei in Tuscany, Italy. It's a really beautiful, intense, dark chocolate.

Christmas this year is going to be at my house and because we just had a woodfire pizza oven put in, we are probably going to have suckling pig. I'll probably start off with a little seafood, some prawns.