What do our top chefs cook at home?
The Great Australian Cookbook will showcase the dishes that 22 of Australia’s most popular food personalities — from legends Maggie Beer and Peter Russell Clarke to young guns Anna Polyviou and Darren Robertson — cook at home for their families.
Paul West believes the best dishes are those you produce rather than buy; whether you’ve grown it, cured it or just cooked it.
“Eating something you’ve made yourself is like salt, it seasons the dish and changes the whole thing,” says the chef turned sustainable farmer, best known as the host of popular television series River Cottage Australia.
“Our connection to food and where it comes from is a pretty intrinsic part of human nature. On an almost physiological level, we’re hardwired to connect to communities and a safe supply of food so growing it taps into our psyche.”
West may have wrapped the River Cottage gig last year and swapped the 8ha farm at Tilba for a 100sq m suburban Melbourne backyard, but his philosophy hasn’t changed.
He’s writing a book about his city-change, to be released late next year, and in the meantime is sharing his passion for honest home-cooked food on The Great Australian Cookbook, a new, 11-part television series showcasing the dishes that 22 of Australia’s most popular food personalities, from legends Maggie Beer and Peter Russell Clarke to young guns Anna Polyviou and Darren Robertson, cook at home for their families.
Screening on Foxtel’s Lifestyle FOOD channel, the dishes showcased range from Matt Stone’s chargrilled prawns and vegetable salad to Gilbert Lau’s classic roast chicken and fried rice, Ronni Kahn’s vegetable lasagne to Darren Robertson’s poached eggs with fermented cabbage and fennell salad. All served to close family and friends with a side of love.
West pops up in episode three, cooking braised rabbit with salami and foraged Warrigal greens over an open fire in the great outdoors.
“I want to focus on helping people grow food in an urban environment,” he says of setting up house in Melbourne with his wife, Alicia, and sons Otto, 2, and Bowie, 1.
“River Cottage was great but it was a luxury most people simply don’t have. People live in the city, so I’ve put my money where my mouth is, right in the heart of inner-north of Melbourne.
“I’m going to grow some vegies, have heaps of chooks and bees. Everything thinks you have to move to Tilba to do that, but you don’t.”
His experience on the farm taught him what goes into raising livestock, so the family only eat meat twice a week.
“We eat really simple food, lots of legumes and a little meat. It’s a bit of a treat for us, but it’s of a higher quality,” he says.
“Cheap meat is a privilege where someone else is paying a cost. One meal out at a cafe costs $20 but I (can buy) half a kilo of pasture-raised mince for $10, put two kilos of veg in it and we had enough to feed three people for two meals.”
Television cooking competitions have given us a distorted idea of how we should be eating, he believes.
“The way we are learning to cook, through reality TV, is not how people should be cooking at home. The home cook is someone who is working, has a family, time constraints and wants the best bang for their buck,” he says.
The secret is a vegetable heavy diet, with simple ingredients thrown together for maximum flavour.
“There’s a lot of asparagus at the moment, so I’m cooking spaghetti with asparagus, parmesan cheese, herbs, garlic and olive oil,” he says.
“You put that on a table on MasterChef and they’ll say, ‘What is this? It’s too simple,’ but sit down and eat it, it’s amazing.
“When you talk to people about what they eat and cook at home, it’s the simple stuff.”
It’s a sentiment even three-hatted chef Peter Gilmore — the man behind acclaimed Quay and Bennelong restaurants on Sydney Harbour — agrees with.
While the food he plates up professionally is technique driven, at home it’s all about flavour.
“Coming out to a restaurant is about the overall experience; ambience, service and cuisine at a high level. At home cooking is about nourishment and enjoyment, they’re quite different ways of thinking about food,” he says.
One of the key ingredients in Gilmore’s cooking is umami, the deep savouriness in dishes that is amplified by ingredients such as kimchi, soy, parmesan, fermented chilli and tomato. In episode eight of The Great Australian Cookbook, he shows how easy it is to use in everyday cooking by adding kimchi to a chicken noodle soup.
While sons Isaac, 17, and Joe, 14, were at school when the episode was filmed, Gilmore says they dine as a family once a week and eat everything he dishes up.
“The boys have a go at making something with me. When we barbecue, my oldest son wants to get in there and turn the meat,” he says.
Gilmore splits the home cooking 50/50 with wife Kath.
“It can be anything from a roast chicken to a stir fry and we make a really nice Indian curry. It tends to be generally simple, like a nice pasta or risotto with good quality ingredients,” he says.
“It’s something tasty that I can make within 45 minutes.”
The Great Australian Cookbook, Lifestyle FOOD, Foxtel, Tuesdays 8.45pm, from November 7
Originally published as What do our top chefs cook at home?
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