Taste: Harvest was worth the weight

THIS year’s harvest has been huge for Terry and Nicky Noonan – one whole kilogram.

throwing saffron petals that of course these are the petals after the stigma have been extracted. empty petals. I imagine this would be the main picture. The people throwing petals are the five who picked the harvest (plus one taking pic). For Elaine Reeves Taste column

THIS year’s harvest has been huge for Terry and Nicky Noonan a whole kilogram plenty when the crop is saffron.

A couple of weeks ago the couple celebrated the 25th anniversary of their business Tas-Saff with a lunch for 25 guests, one for each year.

Progress has been slow for Tas-Saff, but not steady. The “threads” that produce the flavour and glorious colour of saffron are the three stigma of a crocus flower.

In 1990, the Noonans imported 5000 crocus corms from the northern hemisphere, and three years later produced their first, single, flower.

Liz Chessor (then McLeod) heard about that first flower and wrote about it in the magazine Leatherwood.

She helped Nicky design the menu for the celebration lunch, which began with potato rosti to dip in saffron aioli and ended with a shot glass of saffron yoghurt with cardamom, rosewater and pistachio, and a pistachio praline, followed by saffron chocolates by John Zito of Nutpatch.

In between came two huge pans of paella, the dish that demands saffron. Edrick Corban-Banks, of Casa Paella, cooked a chicken and rabbit paella, and one of Tasmanian seafood. They were eaten with baguettes from Summer Kitchen Bakery, which when broken, revealed the golden hue of saffron.

Lunch was in the middle of the 40 days and 40 nights that comprise harvest time. The next “day’s” work did not finish until 3am, when the last stigma were extracted from flowers picked that day.

Several speakers at the lunch remarked on how unspectacular a saffron crop looked. That was because, said Nicky, the flowers were picked every day soon after dawn.

A patch awash with mauve crocuses meant only that the picking was not keeping up.

My own entry on the Tas-Saff timeline came in 1994, when the Noonans launched their business at the Taste of the Huon and I first wrote about them in this column.

The crocus corms were multiplying nicely until 1996, when it rained for 10 months, and Terry and Nicky lost 90 per cent of their corms. They started over, first by moving to higher ground in the same road, in Glaziers Bay, near Cygnet.

The following year Nicky was pregnant and at antenatal classes they met Claire and Tim Tierney. It is easy to track their association with the couple, Tim has been their lawyer and business mentor for 20 years – the same age as their son Patrick.

Lunch guest Garth Wigston most recently came to fame as the skipper of the boat that took Gourmet Farmer Afloat around Tasmania. Garth has a business, Wigston Lures, and 18 years ago he helped Terry and Nicky with their packaging for the 100mg phials of saffron attached to a card – it’s the same as he uses for his lures.

Soon the Noonans were taking on other growers. They supply the new people with corms and the saffron comes back to them for packaging and marketing.

For 15 years, they have been using the shed of neighbours Tony and Marge Hammond to clean and grade 50,000 or so corms a year.

Long before he became their neighbour with his new Fat Pig Farm, Matthew Evans wrote a story about the Noonan’s saffron. He has since championed the saffron in his writing and on Gourmet Farmer TV shows, especially in Tas-Saff’s most difficult year (not that he knew it at the time).

A switch by their initial distributor to imported saffron put a dent in Terry and Nicky’s income and morale last year.

“Last season we took an almighty risk and bought all the saffron from our growers,” Nicky says. Almost all the crop was stockpiled.

Their fortunes looked up last December when Woolworths agreed to take on their product through new distributor McKenzie’s, and independent supermarkets quickly followed – and now that stockpile is being put to use.

Geoff Hammon, from McKenzie’s Foods, attended the lunch, and Pip Courtney and her crew from ABC TV’s Landline filmed it.

When Landline first did a story on Tas-Saff in 2002, Terry and Nicky received 1000 inquiries from farmers wanting to join the network.

They are hoping the second show will have the same effect, because now they need to
up production.