Food has taken a journey to get to a certain point, which is then the point that you're
eating it.
You know, so we try and show off all of that.
We try to let people in on the story.
We try and toast with homemade chips ricotta.
People often don't know what a good tomato is.
And I guess one of the things with having a kitchen garden and something which we tried
to do is not just have produce available to us, but have produce that's been almost played
around with so much of its integrity has been lost within the marketplace, or to grow various
versions of the one thing to show the diversity that's available in nature if allowed to diversify.
We might do a table of three or four and have four different tomatoes, so not everyone
have the same tomato.
So try and capture that diversity.
This dish might have at some time six, seven, eight, maybe 10, 11 types of basil, and when
we make the diviniment with this, with the tomatoes that we grow, we maybe make it with
six or seven, sometimes eight different types at any one time.
We don't just use one variety, we use a mixture of varieties and that gives it really a round
of flavour.
I was eating a green zebra tomato last week, actually, and it was so ripe and it had such
a rich deep flavour, and I was imagining the colour red when I was eating it, and I was
seeing the conditioning that we had to think that the ripe tomato is red, we grow tomatoes
which are orange, which are yellow, which are green, which are black, but that depth
of flavour is the thing that we're looking for, you know, and that's the Kusadumami quality,
that really reaches that savoury centre pallet depth that you get from a really ripe quality
old school tomato.
These are a black Russian tomato, they're probably one of a number of varieties of heirlooms
that we grow, the reason that we grow it is, one that's obviously got interest in colour,
it's a very rich and deep colour, almost black sometimes when they're really ripe, it's
got a really nice pre-design, which is obviously important sometimes in restaurant sense, but
more importantly, the core's quite thin, and the surface area of the edible part is really
wide.
Clive, blaze and diggers are probably one of the well-known sea banks in Australia, in
particular in Victoria, and a lot of the stuff that we grow in here have come from
diggers as a seedling, they obviously have a great commitment to diversity and biodiversity.
Most people are familiar with a paddock to plate, and I don't like that term particularly,
let's say the supermarket tomato might be grown in Bowen and shipped all the way down
to Melbourne, so it's got a lot of food, miles, it'll bounce off the supermarket floor.
So heirlooms is really a crucial part of going back before that supermarket process industrialised
our food system.
The great thing about this food is not just to preserve its horticultural history, these
varieties actually have got more plate appeal, there's much greater diversity, and most of
them have better nutrition, and pretty much they're our varieties, we own them, you and
I can grow the varieties in our back yard, they're not hybrid, they're not owned by
somebody else, and we can plant the seed back.
Mercotto is a handmade ricotta that we make using the Grampian's Pure Sheep's milk, which
is a really beautiful product, it's really great milk, it's something which we're probably
lucky enough to have through the relationship we've built with the visitors coming in the
dairy.
You don't see it in the shop, something which gives us an idea, something which gives character
to our food.
And then when the first time I went to Elizabeth at the dairy, getting out of the car and just
getting this sort of smell of sheep and grass, that mixture of sheep and grass, it's a really
beautiful sweet aroma which is very prevalent in all of their products, and it's something
which is definitely in the milk, and it's something which we try and bring out in the
dish.
Well this is the heart and soul of Grampian's Pure, and this is where we make the product,
and it all gets made in the little silver vat over there.
A sheep doesn't have nearly as much milk, and it's always been prized.
The Greeks have a lovely little say, they say that cow's milk is bronze, goat's milk
is silver, but the milk of sheep is gold, and it is beautiful milk when you look at it,
it's heavier in the vat than the other milks, and the cow's milk is much higher in it, and
it's the closest to human milk of all the milks, so a lot of babies and people that
retire to cow's milk and don't like the taste of goat's milk will turn to sheep milk, because
it's naturally sweeter.
I'm a Mount Zero player, a fairly big part of this dish as well, I'm a Mount Zero, really
great family, run business in the Northern Grampians, I'm most known for their olive
production, and I guess more recently has been sort of running a sense as a cooperative,
helping to produce and promote more diverse products, cereals, legumes, that type of thing,
which are really growing well in Northern Grampians.
So this is the Mount Zero olive grove, taken from half way up Mount Zero itself in the
Grampians, and this was planted way back in the very early 50s, and then my family took
it over in the early 90s, so it's about 20 years now, and at that time it had been totally
let go or abandoned, and it's been the last sort of 15 years or so, just slowly eking
away at the bush, the scrub that had crept in, literally around the grove, and reviving
the olive trees to produce the olives and olive oil we do now.
It's a dish which I guess best represents at the moment, it's the technical ability
of the kitchen, maybe some of the creative thought behind the food that we do, but also
the connection with the garden, and with I guess the resources that we produce, so it's
a really, I think that's why it's so interesting, because it is very technical in one hand,
but it is very natural in another hand, and that's what we try to be anyway, our meeting
around in the middle of those two things, one of the elements of the dish is this burnt
sort of eggplant, the eggplant's been cooked and it's been marinated in some white miso
paste and chocolate actually, and then with the blow torch we completely burn it, so it's
really caramelised and quite black and looks burnt, and I guess when you live close to
the bush you get a lot of visual imagery, and particularly here where there's been
serious bush fires and stuff, you get that colour black is often in your eye, so people
are sort of biodiversity and biodynamic today, all having everything in line and using things
at the right time, and I guess that's what indigenous people are always doing, and I
don't think when people talk about indigenous-saint ingredients, the first thing that springs
to mind is eel, but in this region particularly, it's a very major food source.
This is known as the fish trap, or banals, the eel trap, and this is what the cryptomarrow
would have made up to actually catch the eels, so when the eels come down from Asia all the
way down to the south-east of Australia, what they basically used to do is collect bollards
of rocks and build like channels from the beaches going to Inlands, into the lake, as
long as they're on Lake Condra itself, and what they tend to do from there is actually
in the wetlands, around the actual lake itself, they used to build like big paddocks using
the bollards of rocks, and kept the males separate from the females.
With the cryptomarrow, there's pretty much smoke in the colours of the fire, with the
butter on trial from us on the outskirts of the Duncal region, or the area over in that
area, smoke them in hollow trees, so there's actually a lot of fire on the base of the
hollow tree, then you keep out of wood on and on top, so you've got to a certain height
where the eels actually hang in.
They saw whales apparently, and then they knew when to push the eels up into I guess
the inland region, and at the same time they knew it was time to burn back the bush and
start to regenerate, and I guess that little story, although I don't completely understand
it exactly, you know, it makes a lot of sense in that dish for us, the burning of the eggplant,
and the plating of the very fresh vegetables of the regeneration, obviously, then the eel
flavour comes after you've had all those flavours, so we're interested in doing something with
pickled vegetables, and it's sort of difficult to imagine that pickled vegetables and burnt
eggplant could ever join together, you know, I think they're complete polar opposites,
and I guess looking for something to bring the two together, your weed isn't the flavour
that you finish with, so these flavours build in your mouth, and to do that you need these
counterpoints.
The red bread pancetta, it's with candied radish and rocket, I'm using pork from Greenvale
Farm.
For me at the moment, one of the great producers of Victoria, particularly for us, we find
the Wessex Saddleback to be really great for the pancetta, I mean when you go out there
and look at the farm, it's, you know, the pigs are hilarious, they're complete, they're
blistered out.
So these are four-week-old Wessex Saddlebacks, they are a critically endangered pig.
The red bread pigs are generally a lot slower growing animal, they take a lot more food to
get up to a sort of a market weight as opposed to the commercial animals, you get a lot more
flavour.
It's the same with any piece of meat, the longer it takes or the more work it has to
do, the more it's used, the more flavour it has, because these take a shorter period
of time to grow, they're on the mother for longer, so they're weaning with less stress.
Plus they're starting from a higher position because they are already a really flavoursome
pig anyway, with good intramuscular fat and the external fat as well.
If they're growing in an indoor environment, then you can grow them with less fat and your
feed to meat conversion is better, and it's all about its business, and we run a business
as well, so it's just our business choice has been to raise them like this, but this
is about quality of food rather than getting it to the market as quick as possible.
What we're really keen on is that I think people in the cities may have lost connection
with how food has actually grown and how it's developed, and that connection with the farmer
has gone, and in the middle of that are the animals which actually generate these products
that we're talking about.
There is a movement to get getting back to knowing where your food comes from, and chefs
are out there really helping to do that, and when we take a really fatty piece of belly
into Dan at the Royal Mail, and he produces this awesome pancetta that's just creamy
and mouthwatering, to see that end product is just amazing, you can't get any better
feedback than going into a restaurant and seeing your product and actually tasting your product.
It's just salted, it's salted pretty much in just salt, we use the salt from the Dimboola
Lake, which is an amazing product, which is obviously the relationship between Mount
Zero and the local indigenous community.
They're Naki Naka, which is known as Welcome, so welcome to Pig Lake, this is on the outskirts
of the country town known as Dimboola, which is far northwest of the Wimper Melly.
Many years ago when my ancestors actually travelled for here, they had any serious wounds or deep
gashes or cuts that actually come to this lake, and it was like they're feeding here,
but if it wasn't for a very serious wound, they'd actually come in and click on the salt
and run the banks here, which is just on the top soil, and it does tend to look a bit like
sand, but it is actually the salt, so maybe they're the top scrapers.
Pink Lake over just out of Dimboola has always been a bit of a local source for nipping down
and grabbing a bucket of salt to boil your yabbies in or use in the kitchen.
It was known that it had been harvested commercially in the past, it was actually my mother Jane
that worked quite hard on working with the local indigenous community, Council, Parks
Victoria, all the bureaucracies in order to get back there and actually celebrate some
fantastic product that it is.
I can't speak necessarily for all of Australia, but Victoria particularly I think is an area
which has really great regions, and people are becoming interested in where their food
comes from.
It would be fantastic if we had a Macedan region of cuisine and we had the Dan's region
at the bottom of the Grand Pins, and we had a Peninsula region.
How many decades away we are from that, I don't know, we need to pursue that as a sort
of passion, and I think that's going to happen, obviously having heirloom vegetables and then
getting back into traditional breeds of chickens and also pork and beef.
And really that's what we're trying to do is to take not only the moment in time that
I read, but also all the histories and stories that went through it, the journey that food
took, the journey that people have taken to get to this moment and translate that into
their food, and give customers the chance to taste the terroir of the Grand Pins.
