Southeast Asia on a platter at a Noosa cooking school
A Noosa cooking school fills a gap in the market.
THE PLACE
Wasabi founder Danielle Gjestland remembers with a wince the vivid bruises on her arms, earned not in the kitchen of her Japanese restaurant on the Noosa riverfront but 30 minutes’ drive up the road. Gjestland was at Honeysuckle Hill, the restaurant’s farm in Pomona, at the foot of Mount Cooroora in Queensland’s Sunshine Coast region, where she grows small crops of exotic, hard-to-find Asian ingredients.
A summer storm, heavy with hail, struck quickly and threatened to ruin a juicy crop of hand-nurtured melons, just two weeks out from the scheduled picking. Not on Gjestland’s watch. She ran out into the pelting tempest, throwing nets over the fruit and copping hail from shoulder to fingernail.
“It was melon season and two weeks before they were going to be ripe, the storm came. I saved most of them,” she says. “Waste is the enemy.”
The farm — which Gjestland bought overgrown with lantana and camphor laurel — already provides much of the Japanese greenery and herbage for Wasabi, the 13-year-old Sunshine Coast fine-dining institution. And now Gjestland is cultivating Southeast Asian and European ingredients to supply the Cooking School, the newest endeavour in the Wasabi stable. Gjestland says the months-old offshoot, which offers classic French, modern Southeast Asian and contemporary Japanese classes, was “inspired by need”. There’s no other cooking school in Noosa proper, to her knowledge; the nearest is Spirit House’s celebrated program at Yandina, about 30km southwest.
When I arrive early on a dazzling Saturday morning for the Southeast Asian “Spring Experience”, the four-dish banquet menu sounds delicious but daunting for this political reporter: an enthusiastic eater but a less than proficient home cook.
Wasabi co-owner and executive chef Zeb Gilbert is not worried, splitting the group of eight into pairs to attempt a dish each. “If you make a mistake, we can pretty much fix anything,” Gilbert says.
I’m nothing if not strategic, and match myself with a local cookbook author and food blogger to attempt pork and spanner crab dumplings. In the wood-panelled kitchen, fringed with gold-hued tapware and open shelves stacked with jars of spices, each student is matched with a workstation. Wooden chopping board, dyed-indigo tea towel, recipe book, black apron and, most important, a knife, handcrafted by a 10th-generation Kyoto knife-maker.
Notoriously clumsy, I’m already envisioning blood. But Gilbert has the answer. Curve your hand like a spider so the blade runs along the knuckles and not outstretched fingertips, meaning there’s less chance of a sliced digit. It works.
Soon, my veges — from rattan baskets piled high on the long, central island bench — for the star anise and ginger stock are chopped, and extra spices are added to the already fragrant brew. Mincing pork belly with a hand mixer in the scorching Noosa sunshine (we’re outside for the mess) is quickly swapped for a food processor. Then, the group downs tools to watch Gilbert shape the perfect dumpling. The wrapper is cradled in the palm of his hand, the moistened outer rim gently pressed and folded around the plump filling mix. He’s great at it — I’m not — but, then, he and five other Wasabi chefs spend four hours every three weeks making 3000 dumplings at a time. They’re then cooked in the broth before we assemble — flour-covered and hungry — at nearby Wasabi to taste the fruits of our labour. The plating process is delicate. The dumplings are spooned from the stock mix, carefully placed in groups of three or four on chunky stoneware plates made by a local artist. The Honeysuckle-grown microherb garnish mix is piled on top, dotted with sesame oil — not too much, says Gilbert — and doused with stock.
We sit back with a matched sake to eat, and watch as sweating dragonboat rowers glide past on the river. Stand-up paddleboarders float past, pelicans soar and the spring sun glares. Sunglasses are donned. Then, with the edge taken off our hunger, it’s back to the cooking school kitchen to prepare the next courses: a fragrant smoked fish with tart Sichuan pickled cucumber salad, and a creamy Massaman chicken curry, topped with crunchy cashew nuts.
THE PRODUCE
At Wasabi, what’s in season at Honeysuckle determines what’s on the restaurant’s menu.
If melons are going bonkers, melon will end up on your plate (or in your cocktail glass), somewhere. The farm drives creativity, invention and flavour.
Gjestland estimates that about 80 per cent of the specialist Japanese ingredients used at Wasabi are from the farm; most of the herbs and vegetables we’ve cooked with today were grown at Honeysuckle. They don’t bother with bog-standard bulk onions; the focus is on unusual ingredients, such as hakkanou, or Japanese menthol.
The day before we arrived, Gjestland was at the farm on the phone to Wasabi’s barman, suggesting the menthol be preserved to make a sweet syrup for cocktails. “It has to go somewhere. We’ve spent all this time growing it, it must be used.”
(Even the camphor laurel that grew on the original Honeysuckle Hill farm like a weed was cut down and shaped into serving pieces for the restaurant, like the small, smooth stands on which chopsticks rest).
But even Gjestland says the farm is not a commercially smart decision: it’s a labour of love.
“It probably costs us more to do it this way. We’re microfarmers. It’s laborious to pick and there’s no economy of scale because we’re growing such small quantities of things. But what we grow is hugely influential. It gives us a deeper flavour profile to deal with.”
THE RECIPE: Local spanner crab and organic pork dumplings
Ingredients
Star anise and ginger stock (for Wasabi’s recipe, see www.theaustralian.com.au)
600g pork belly (Wasabi sources its pork from Kingaroy)
600g spanner crabmeat (Wasabi uses crab from Fraser Island)
1 garlic clove, chopped
½ tsp ground white pepper
3 tbsp chopped chives
3 tbsp chopped coriander
50 dumpling wrappers
To make
Pre-make stock (see separate recipe online).
Dice pork belly into 2cm squares, then put through mincer (or buy minced pork).
Finely chop chives, coriander and very finely chop the garlic. Combine the herbs with the pork mince in a large bowl.
Add the spanner crab to the bowl and combine. Add salt and pepper.
Spoon a heaped teaspoon of filling into the middle of dumpling wrapper, form a taco shape and start pinching one end of the wrapper to seal, heading towards the middle.
Place finished dumplings on to floured trays. Once all dumplings are made, add into the simmering stock (which you’ve premade) for about seven minutes.
For the garnish, pick and chop all ingredients, place in bowl with sesame oil and toss.
The Australian was a guest of Tourism and Events Queensland.