Outback Chef Jude Mayall finds new home at Phillip Island’s Wild Food Farm

Outback Chef creator Jude Mayall now has her own native food farm to call home in Phillip Island.

Jude Mayall and Barney the Kelpie. Picture: Zoe Phillips

Jude Mayall has long straddled the two worlds of cooking and horticulture.

Since starting Outback Chef in 2005, the formally trained chef has sourced native foods from around Australia, selling dried botanicals such as lemon myrtle and native peppers, as well as value-add products including teas and mixed curry spices.

But it has only been in the past year that she has really got her hands in the dirt after buying the 4ha established Wild Food Farm in Rhyll, on Phillip Island.

“As a chef I enjoy the outdoors,” Jude says. “You’d be surprised how many chefs love to get out, fossick and pick plants.

“Because we deal in produce it helps to see how plants grow.”

The Wild Food Farm, which offers educational tours to the public, includes 50 different bush food species, with the most prolific being lemon-scented ti-tree, lilly pilly and strawberry gym.

Many of the plants are used in the on-farm cafe (which serves breakfast and lunch), such as strawberry gum pannacotta, lemon myrtle damper and warrigal greens in hamburgers.

Preserves sold in the cafe include relish with muntries (sometimes referred to as a native cranberry), lilly pilly syrup and Davidson plum jam.

Jude says she bought the farm to also supply ingredients for Outback Chef and as a headquarters.

“I really wanted a home for Outback Chef because I’d been operating out of a warehouse and e-commerce site, which can be a lonely experience, just me and my dog plugging away,” she says, adding that the Rhyll farm has 10 staff.

“Now it’s an amazing team of people and I get to work with the chefs and horticulturalists here.”

Wild Food Farm products. Picture: Zoe Phillips

Jude actually started her foodie career with a diploma in confectionary in Germany.

“As a teenager I’d collect old confectionary recipe books and my fascination grew from there,” she says. “I still have recipes scribbled down on pieces of paper everywhere.”

Returning to Australia she completed a three-year apprenticeship at an Australian sweets manufacturer, learning from mentors who had worked at Cadbury, Darrel Lea and Ballantyne how to make chocolate, fudge, truffles, nougat and brittles.

“People say lollies now don’t taste the same as they did years ago. There was a whole different way of cooking then,” Jude says. “Now it’s faster. The sugar process is sped up and we pump it full of colours and flavours so you don’t get the depth of flavour.

“I think working with flavours and aromas helped me develop Outback Chef.”

For a decade Jude’s career took a detour, as she worked in an Aboriginal art gallery. But the experience opened doors into the native food world, leading to her business in 2005.

Outback Chef sources from about 50 suppliers, from farmers who have a few plants on their property, through to commercial growers and remote Indigenous communities.

Jude Mayall with lemon myrtle. Picture: Zoe Phillips

Products come from around Australia, from cool climate products such as native pepperberry in Tasmania and Gippsland, through to subtropical anise myrtle and Davidson plum, as well as hot, sandy desert varieties such as bush tomatoes and muntries.

She sells wholesale and through her online store, with her bestseller the outback bush curry, featuring wattleseed and anise myrtle, sold retail for $7.90 for 50g.

Jude says bush foods have moved on from being a novelty to now defining our national cuisine.

“At the start it was a journey into the unknown. People loved the idea, but didn’t know what to do with them,” she says. “Initially it was a dinner party novelty, but then it became more daily use.

“More and more chefs from every genre use them, alongside distillers and food manufactures. It is now becoming a defining image of Australian food and chefs create a dish around native ingredients to let it star and shine.”

While some ingredients can be seasonal and a little more pricey than conventional alternatives — such as substituting pepperberry for pepper — Jude advises the home cook to use them subtly as “they have punchy flavours”.

Jude is working with the new Melbourne restaurant Farmer’s Daughter, which showcases produce from South Gippsland.

“They have a cocktail named after me, called Jude’s Punch,” she says. “It has aromatics from one of my spice teas in it, including native pepper and wattle seed, which makes it a beautiful soft pink colour.”

Given her new horticultural knowledge, Jude says the Wild Food Farm plants are low maintenance, requiring mulch, water and pruning.

“I find cooking, even just at home, a meditation, but I’m loving watching the birds here scuttle around, the plants grow, and hearing the frogs in the dam and even seeing the odd turtles,” she says.

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