TasWeekend: Christmas is the season to eat, drink and be merry
They cook for a living so what does a chef do for Christmas lunch? We asked five Tasmanian foodies what their plans for this year’s festivities and the results are simply mouthwatering.
Taste Tasmania
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CHRISTMAS often isn’t relaxing when you’re a chef. Kitchen service doesn’t usually stop because it’s a public holiday — and diners are often hungrier and more discerning than usual. But Christmas is also a time chefs can be adventurous in the kitchen, coming up with innovative new dishes to serve while also putting their own spin on some old classics.
And with so many summer favourites coming into season — including Tasmanian berries, cherries, apricots, peas and potatoes — Christmas is the perfect time to celebrate our wealth of tasty local produce.
It’s also a time to celebrate the bountiful offerings of our waterways — think crayfish, abalone, scallops and octopus — regardless of whether you’re hosting a formal sit-down dinner or enjoying a casual lunch cooked on a backyard barbecue.
From community cooks to executive chefs at some of Tasmania’s top eateries, we talk to five Tasmanian foodies to find out where and how they’ll be celebrating Christmas.
We’ve also asked them what they will be putting on their festive menus, and the tips they have for making your own Christmas lunch a delicious feast to remember.
Analiese Gregory
The former head chef at Hobart’s acclaimed Franklin restaurant is looking forward to not having to work on Christmas Day. Analiese Gregory has decided to take a well-earned break this Christmas, working her final shift this week after resigning from her job.
“Because I’ve been a chef for about 17 years now I’ve pretty much worked Christmas for every one of those years,’’ explains Gregory, who spent two and a half years at the helm of Franklin, which was recently named as one of Australia’s Top 15 restaurants.
She plans to cook a Christmas Day feast for family and friends, at her farmhouse in the Huon Valley.
When she wakes on December 25 she will feed her chickens and goats, check on the plants in her garden and enjoy a coffee before getting to work in the kitchen, alongside her partner — also a chef — who will be visiting from Melbourne.
Breakfast will be crayfish salad rolls, featuring brioche buns from Pigeon Whole Bakers and sparkling wine, followed by a late lunch.
“I’m a Christmas lunch person,’’ Gregory says. “Because I feel like I can eat lunch and have a nap and wake up and eat leftovers.’’
She speaks with enthusiasm about the fresh local produce she’s planning to use. She hopes to source a duck or a goose from the Huon Valley to roast and use as her centrepiece, and will kill a rooster she’s raised to make coq au vin jaune.
She’s also planning to make a smoked octopus salad — thanks to a friend who gave her 2.5kg of smoked octopus — and will scour Farm Gate Market and Cygnet Garden Larder for her favourite greens, including asparagus and broad beans.
She says the menu will be “based around things I really want to eat or things I really enjoy cooking’’.
“I suppose I’m in a lucky position because my friends either make something, or produce something,’’ she says.
“I dive for abalone, so I’ll definitely be doing an abalone dish. And I have an unashamed love of potatoes — I just put 40kgs of them in the ground myself — so I’ll definitely have lots of things based around potatoes … maybe some sort of potato gnocchi dish.’’
Fresh cheese, bread and a trifle, made with her favourite summer fruit, cherries, which she’ll source from a roadside stall not far from home, are also on the menu.
Gregory has a cookbook due in January, so she’ll spend most of December testing recipes and photographing dishes for publication.
But she’s planning to take a 10-day break from that over the festive season to enjoy life away from a commercial kitchen.
She’s also hoping to start renovating the home she purchased in March.
“I had that romantic dream of buying a 110-year-old unrenovated Tassie farmhouse,’’ laughs Gregory, who grew up on a dairy farm in New Zealand. “I spent a very cold Tassie winter here and now it’s time to do some things to it.’’
Dillon Kesur
Christmas cooking in the Kesur house is pretty laid back with home cook Dillon at the helm. The Kingston Beach food whiz says the trick is to plan the kind of dishes that can be prepared before the 25th.
“We generally just cruise through the day,” Kesur says. “Right up until we sit down to the pudding at night.”
This year the day will start with Tasmanian bubbles, and there will be a toast to his mother-in-law Meg Thomason who passed away at 90 in early November. Meg’s daughter Greta will play her favourite Christmas carols.
The first thing the family will enjoy will be cured ocean or river trout. Kesur cures it in layers of salt and sugar and dill. That will be served alongside prawns — always the big ones on a special day.
He’s still not sure whether he’ll serve them cold or throw them into a hot oven with some olive oil and garlic. He’ll make bread and baguettes in a big, cast-iron pot (with the lid on) inside the oven so it cooks in its own steam.
Later in the day, the carols will be replaced with the kind of classic soul music Kesur says will help them all chill out.
He’ll also make his stuffed grape vine leaf dolmas because not only do they look great on the Christmas platter but, according to everyone who has ever tried them, they are simply the best.
“You get really nice, young and soft leaves, and make a stuffing with rice, spring onions, lots of parsley and a little bit of chopped up dill and mint and onion, and then add olive oil and lemon juice.
“You mix it all up and make little parcels out of them and slowly poach them and chill them in the fridge before serving with lemon juice or tzatziki.”
This year he’ll have to try and replicate his mother-in-law’s famous baked ham. Even though it’s a simple rub of sherry and dark brown sugar, he says he’s never been able to make it taste as good as hers.
In the evening, they’ll all sit down to the Christmas puddings that the three generations of women in the family made earlier in the year. They are the kind with hidden threepenny bits and the last of the puddings Meg Thomason made.
In her memory he’ll also attempt her piroshki — a Russian buttery pastry stuffed with onion and speck. “There’s never any left over because they are so delicious,” he says.
Iain Todd
Guests celebrating Christmas at Tasmanian’s luxurious Saffire resort will make their own sauce for lunch.
They will be encouraged to mix in as much sustainably farmed caviar as they like into the handmade and 100 per cent duck egg yolk pasta emulsified with handmade butter and topped with a thin sheet of béchamel. It will be just one of seven courses in the lavish lunch.
Executive chef Iain Todd says it’s a juggling act to make the food familiar enough but also interesting enough to engage but not frighten guests.
“We will try and find the line between traditional and modern,” Todd says. “As well as taking influences from both the northern and southern hemispheres in that classic Australian style, but making it luxurious and surprising too.”
Rather than following the latest and greatest food trends, for inspiration this year the father-of-two consulted the Saffire staff.
“I’ve asked for their ideas and concepts for what Christmas means to them,” Todd says. “Our kitchen and entire team is made up of people from all over the world.
“We have 10 countries represented in the kitchen alone. What I want to do this year is bring these stories of what Christmas is to the dining tables of our guests.”
Todd says they will be preparing dishes for a mix of familiar faces who regularly celebrate at Saffire, who will be sitting alongside first-time, mostly-international guests. For some, he says, it will be the first time they have enjoyed a summer Christmas. And one thing the repeat customers have come to expect is the unexpected.
This year will be the first time they will experience his Australian-style buffet for breakfast. “I’m excited to have some fun with a breakfast of mangoes and prawns this year,” Todd says. Breakfast will also include local cherries, beautiful charcuterie, Christmas-style cakes and pastries, fruit, ham and some of Tasmania’s best cheeses.
His team is also working on some special Christmas cracker fillings, and staff have been sharing their favourite jokes to include. Todd is making chocolate coins for the crackers and there will be other surprises as well. The table centrepieces will also be edible.
Last year the pastry chef made little Christmas trees out of macarons all dipped in green chocolate and decorated with colourful sugar ornaments. “So we will have to one-up that this year and go bigger and better,” he says.
Phil Gordon
He’s in charge of the Christmas lunch, and that means it’s going to be cooked on the barbecue, says Wild Thyme Kitchen’s Phil Gordon. This year he will be preparing grilled, sustainable southern Maori octopus basted with olive oil and lemon juice and served with horseradish yoghurt and chopped parsley.
Given the octopus feasts on crayfish and scallops and crab, he says, the end product will taste more like grilled crayfish.
The seafood chef has perfected the art of cooking octopus at his Farm Gate Market stall every Sunday, and says one of the tricks is to cook it on a hot plate first before throwing in on a char griller.
“It retains a lot of moisture, so I rest it after the char griller before I slice it, and that keeps in a lot of flavour,” he says. He usually sources it from George Town Seafoods. “You can over cook it and under cook it, so you need to be careful.”
Gordon’s family of eight will also enjoy giant king prawns from the Gulf of Carpentaria, because they are wild caught and have a great flavour. He’ll marinate them in chilli, garlic, lime juice and parsley, and serve them with caper aioli. “One thing I like to do with the prawn is to leave the head and tail on, take the digestion tract out and skewer them so they don’t curl and are easier to handle.”
Something that’s a little bit out-of-the-box that will be on his barbecue plate are his duck cevapi — a skinless Yugoslavian sausage with onion, garlic, thyme, orange zest and Cointreau.
It’s a salute to his Croatian uncle who introduced him to garlic well before Australians were eating it, he says, and is always a big hit with the family.
The home vegetable garden will then be harvested so that he can throw together what his wife Kylie calls a big salad, that will be served up in a lovely bowl.
Most likely it will have a kale and coral lettuce base with a few purple lettuce leaves and snow peas and tomato and walnuts, as well as cold, cooked broccoli and Tasmanian goat cheese.
“We like to eat light and stick to more of a paleo and keto way of eating — so that means there are always lots of fresh green things on the table and it’s always served with protein,” he says.
Danny Sutton
Hundreds of hungry Hobartians are expected to flock to North Hobart’s Hellenic Hall for lunch on Christmas Day, for a free feast celebrating community togetherness.
Colony 47 chief executive Danny Sutton says the annual event, which has been running since the early 1980s and is open to anyone, typically brings together people who would otherwise be spending Christmas alone.
Single parents, recently arrived migrant families, older people who are socially isolated and homeless Tasmanians were among the 350 people who attended last year’s event, with a similarly diverse group expected this year.
About 130 volunteers help cook and serve the food and host guests at the lunch.
“It tends to be all those fantastic things like ham and turkey and chicken, served in a very traditional style,’’ Sutton says of the menu, which includes 50kg of potatoes, 25kg of carrots and 25kg of pumpkin.
“Then Christmas cake and desserts and ice cream and things like that as well.’’
The event relies on food donations from small local business and major supermarkets. Donated gifts are also wrapped and handed out to diners, along with food hampers.
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