The Dirty Chef

by Matthew Evans

  the

  dirty

  chef

  from big city food critic

  to foodie farmer

  Matthew Evans

  Warning

  You should not eat any plant, nut or mushroom you find while foraging unless an expert can identify it as edible. In the case of mushrooms, it’s necessary to harvest the whole fruiting body of the fungus in order to identify the species correctly.

  First published in 2013

  Copyright © Matthew Evans 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 696 2

  eISBN 978 1 74343 565 6

  Internal design by Christabella Designs

  Set in 11.5/14.5pt Sabon by Post Pre-press Group, Australia

  Contents

  Prologue

  Milk

  Cheese

  Mulberries

  Pears

  Flounder

  Abalone

  Pork (to market, to market)

  Eggs

  Apples

  Brussels sprouts

  Prosciutto

  Chicken

  Hogget

  Raw milk cheese

  Fish

  Pancakes

  Turkey

  Venison

  Rice

  Lamb

  Honey

  Butter

  Small fruit

  Water

  Bacon

  Carrots

  Avocadoes

  Mutton-bird

  Flour

  Tuna

  Beef

  Kale

  Saffron

  Veal

  Pulled pork

  Mushrooms

  Salami

  Coq au vin

  Cherries

  Goose

  Tomatoes

  Potatoes

  Cake

  Garlic

  Pudding

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  There wasn’t much blood. Just a trickle from a perfectly round hole only a few millimetres wide. But the pain. Oh, the pain.

  Cari barks at quolls. Bails them up at all hours of the night as they skulk into the yard and try to steal her bones. Kelpies and quolls eat the same things. The quoll, a marsupial carnivore, is more wild—a savage beast, with decent jaws and a bloodlust way beyond its size, disembowelling chickens at dusk if they’re not locked safely away and stealing meat scraps from the compost heap. But Cari doesn’t catch them. Or chase them off. Because she’s a purebred Kelpie, born to instinctively round things up, she merely corners them, then barks at them every few seconds all night. Until they can find another way to flee. Or—as is usual because Cari is very, very good at rounding up quolls—I help them flee.

  So it was about 3 am. That moment in the night when a bark doesn’t so much wake you up as become part of your deepest dreams. We’d lost a mother hen to a quoll only a few nights before and Cari had been up barking at others that seemed to be circling the yard most nights that week. With the chooks locked safely away, sleep—the dead sleep of the labourer that most farmers are blessed to enjoy—was top of my mind. But several barks dragged me from my bed. The quoll had to be chased from the yard if I was to get any more shut-eye that night.

  Cari, in hunting mode, always ignores my calls. A naughty dog at the best of times, she’s wont to misbehave even more when she’s on the scent of a predator. When I tried to catch her to let the quoll escape unimpeded, she did what instinct told her to do—round on the prey from the other side. As I circled around a bush that hid the quoll, trying to let it flee through one side or the other, Cari was immediately on the opposite flank, hedging in the scared, wild yet tiny beast. Cari’s ability to always remain facing me through the other side of the bush also meant I couldn’t catch her to pull her away.

  Bleary eyed, dressed in nothing but PJs and a dressing gown, I stepped from the front door and grabbed the first long stick I could find. Usually I use a broom, a bit of plastic pipe, any long pole to poke under the trees or stairs or deck, to encourage quolls to leave in any direction they can manage. So long as it’s not towards the chook shed.

  Problem was, the long stick I grabbed on this night was a Dutch hoe. With a flat blade on one side and three feisty prongs on the other, it’s a very handy tool in the garden, but a menace in the hands of an idiot after midnight in the dark.

  It had been a long week, preparing to serve 2000 hot pork rolls at the Taste of Tasmania festival. I was about to embark on the first of several sixteen-hour days, after plenty of twelve-hour days and only a single 24 hours off from work in the last six weeks. (And that 24 hours wasn’t even Christmas Day, sadly.)

  Let me tell you, a Dutch hoe isn’t something you should have in your hand when you’re tired, it’s pitch black, and you’re wearing slip-on shoes.

  I still don’t know how it happened, but I reacted to a shadow moving in the dark. The hoe bounced off a log and struck me in the ankle. A bone-wrenching pain erupted. I bit my lip. I cursed. I couldn’t walk. I tried to move, but stabbing pain stopped me. I shone the torch down to find just a tiny hole. A minor puncture wound, with the barest fine line of blood leaking from my foot to the shoe below. Nothing a proper farmer would find worrying or painful or that would stop them in their tracks. I drew deep breaths, tentatively put weight on my foot, then continued in my increasingly futile attempts to help the quoll escape. Until I heard the ‘squelch, squelch, squelch’ coming from the shoe and felt the trademark stickiness of blood pooling below.

  Sadie had joined in the chase by this stage, perhaps roused from bed by my bad language. Or the high-pitched scream I emitted when the hoe bit my heel. I stemmed the flow of blood with a strong, sticky fabric bandage, and together we wrangled the Kelpie and the quoll until everybody was back where they belonged.

  I limped upstairs to bed, exhausted beyond words, half expecting the throbbing in my ankle to cake the sheets with blood by morning, but too tired to care. Sadie curled herself against my prone body and drew in deeply. For the next ten days she alone would have to manage 30 pigs, a dozen cows, a mob of sheep, 35 chooks, two farms and a wild three-year-old boy, while I tried to sell our farm produce for a profit. At dawn—perhaps not as rested as I would’ve liked—I would rise, travel to Hobart, and serve customers for twelve hours a day, every day for a week.

  My brain shifted between lists of chores to do at daybreak, and the desire to rest. Sadie snuggled closer and was already half-asleep after the excitement of the quoll. In that dozy tone I’ve come to love so much, she whispered her goodnight, and added, ‘To think you moved here for the quiet life.’

  Milk

  I blame milk. That unassuming, ubiquitous white substance that we take for granted in Australia. It was cow’s milk that turned my life around, and set me on a path that has changed
not only my way of living but also my world view. Yes, that innocent stuff that comes from the bovine udder was the inspiration to help me make the move from gritty, urban inner Sydney to impossibly lush green Tasmania. From a clean and cushy life to one that involves—quite literally—mud, blood and tears. And to the non-food types among you (apparently there are some out there), the story seems more unlikely with every telling.

  First, a back story. I trained as a chef. But I’m okay now. I was, post-chef, a restaurant critic for a major metropolitan daily newspaper, able to dine at the finest restaurants in the land. Mostly at someone else’s expense. I’d also eaten at Pierre Gagnaire in Paris, at Troisgros in France’s south, and in great restaurants across the US, Spain, Italy, China and Japan.

  But I was also living in a 3-metre wide terrace house in a narrow lane in Glebe, a decent walk from Sydney’s CBD. The overshadowed garden I tried to establish in the backyard was destroyed by snails and rot. There was no room for chickens. I did have some good food locally, though. I had access to a fantastic greengrocer, Galluzzo’s, and a baker who made woodfired sourdough bread had just opened their shopfront a few doors down. Olives, which I harvested and pickled, grew wild in the streets, and if you timed your morning walk right, you could pick ripe figs from a tree overhanging a path next to the stormwater drains without being sprung by the tree’s owner. I was eating out at restaurants about ten times a week for work, and still relishing cooking at home.

  So what about milk? Well, I grew up with decent milk. But in all my searches for the perfect flavours in the world’s great cuisines, I’d forgotten about the taste of milk for a while, until a couple of very small events had a very big impact.

  My work, for the Sydney Morning Herald, involved eating at restaurants and then writing about them. You’re probably thinking, great gig if you can get it. And you’d be right, it was a great gig. But one day I was at a very swank diner in the centre of Sydney, drinking a cup of coffee that cost, and I must admit I’m vague now on the money, $11 or was it $12 a cup? Anyway, it was very expensive. This restaurant I rated extraordinarily highly—three chef’s hats and a score of 18 out of 20, if that means anything to you, and the coffee was the priciest in the land as far as I could tell. But their milk was, well, let’s be polite, not memorable. In their defence that was fairly normal for the time, even for places that prided themselves on their ingredients.

  Milk has long been a favourite topic of mine. My best-ever job was running around the streets of a suburb called Weston in Canberra, delivering milk to people’s doorsteps three nights a week after school. A crate load of glass bottles clutched in one hand, the other pumping the air, my lungs gasping, my legs pounding. The majority of the milk we delivered was normal milk. Real milk. Unhomogenised, gloriously cream-topped full-fat milk in 600-millilitre bottles. Milk that was golden in colour and great in taste.

  That three-hat restaurant’s milk didn’t taste like that. And it certainly didn’t taste like the milk I once watched being disgorged from a cow so we could have Devonshire tea at a farmhouse near Bundanoon in the Southern Highlands. It also didn’t taste like the milk that my mate Alan Benson had discovered on a single afternoon’s scout of a couple of organic stores in Sydney. He made me do a blind tasting, and suddenly this benign (at least to me), high-quality protein was no longer milk. One milk, in particular, had a different flavour, a different texture. Complex, interesting and delicious, it was an expression of a place, of a herd of cows. By comparison, mass-produced, homogenised milk seemed bland, anonymous, manufactured.

  To me, milk was no longer simply milk. It became a barometer of an industrial food system. Instead of having the faint (but glorious) whiff of the pasture and the beast, like the stuff I’d once helped entice from an udder at a two-cow dairy near Denmark in Western Australia, milk was a manmade food. Instead of complexity, regionality, a reflection of the breeding of the animal, it was, in many cases, just white stuff that must have, by law (regardless of the season, the breed, the grasses or the stage in a cow’s lactation), 3 per cent fat and 3.2 per cent protein.

  And I’d just paid more than 10 bucks—at some place that supposedly prided itself on the quality of its produce—for the least interesting version of milk available.

  This, of course, got me thinking. If these famed, fabled and feted chefs were using such a dull version of something so fundamental to their cooking, could there be another story? Were the ingredients that chefs were buying, and their provedores promoting, less than the best we as a nation could actually grow and eat? Chefs and their suppliers had (and still have) a vested interest in telling you they have the best produce in the nation, and that Australia has the best produce in the world. But if they get it wrong with milk—as proven by a mate with a couple of hours spare and a drive to the shops—what else were they using that wasn’t so fine?

  And this, more than anything, set me on a journey—to discover what was really going on where our food was grown, reared and made. I’d always enjoyed visiting and talking to producers; sometimes I even managed to sell stories to newspapers about it. But now I had an overarching agenda. I wanted to find out why some food tasted better than others, why some growers were better known for the flavour and quality of their produce. And I wanted to share that knowledge as I gained it. And that was the genesis of my book, The Real Food Companion, a lifetime’s worth of food knowledge in one tome, intended to be the layman’s guide to choosing ingredients.

  During this time, I managed to get out into the country a bit. I remember being at a beef cattle property near Parkes in western New South Wales, learning to ride a quad bike in searing heat. The cattle I saw were mostly destined for one of our big supermarkets. The station manager was telling me about the tags the cattle had in one ear; these were scanned by computer to record the animal’s details, such as had it ever become lame, how old it was, how much meat it yielded, etc. In the other ear was another tag.

  ‘What’s that other tag for?’ I asked, every bit the city boy looking at a bunch of ‘cows’ in a field.

  ‘Oh, that,’ the stock manager answered. ‘That tag’s got a growth hormone in it. We put that in during the last few months, and they can put on an extra kilo a week.’

  He added, ‘It’s a natural hormone. Just gives them a bit of a lift in weight. It’s perfectly harmless. Completely safe.’

  Despite having eaten more than my fair share of beef over the years, I’d never realised that cattle destined for the pot were given growth hormones. I just thought that they, like us, put on weight naturally.

  ‘How come there’s a few of them that don’t have tags?’ I asked, assuming the cattle were younger or the tags had been inadvertently torn out on a tree or something.

  ‘Oh, those,’ the manager replied in that slow broad accent born of the Aussie bush, because you don’t want to get flies in your mouth when you talk. ‘Them without the tags, those are the ones we’re gonna eat ourselves.’

  While I was writing The Real Food Companion, a process that took about three years, I made an even larger, personal move. I left my job as a restaurant critic and fell in love with home cooking once again. I learnt to taste the unfettered flavour of the ingredients, ones that weren’t cooked ahead or handled too much—often a practical difficulty for chefs. I travelled to regions of Australia more often, and discovered the questions to ask about the way things were grown, reared or handled.

  I had a shocking chat with a chickpea grower which confirmed my worst suspicions about some farms. She grew hundreds of acres of chickpeas and I asked her if she liked eating green chickpeas straight from the pod (something you shouldn’t eat much of, because they’re a bit indigestible, but they are yum). The farmer replied, ‘What?!’ in a very unambiguous manner. ‘Eat them? Have you seen what we spray them with?’

  So I began to wonder, just what was in our food, and why should I trust people who only grow things to sell, rather than growing them to eat? Were there many of these farmers who used chemicals th
ey considered okay for my family to ingest, but not theirs?

  As I moved philosophically to a different place, I moved physically too. From Sydney to Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, the island state off the south of mainland Australia. I moved because I wanted to live in a smaller town than I had for the last 25 years; smaller, in fact, than I’d lived in since I was four. I wanted more air in my life, more time for the niceties that small-town living could afford, more time for those around me. I moved because I wanted better quality air than you ever get in Sydney. I moved so I could have three chooks.

  And I got to Hobart, the wonderful waterside capital, and realised I could have more than just air and time. I could have it all. I didn’t have to live in town. I could actually fulfil a yearning to live in the country. Opting out, or ‘tree-changing’ as it is sometimes called, is probably a secret yearning of many town-dwelling Australians. (The slightly disparaging local term is hobby farming.) Hobby farmer or tree-changer, I was happy to be either if it meant I could grow my own food.

  I had fallen in love with the idea of not just reading about good produce, but wanting to give it a crack myself. What only a year or two before had seemed a pipe dream now became my reality. This ache I had inside to get closer to the soil. To be near my producers and my produce, to be a part of the system that improved the quality of food in my life, and the environment in which it grew; all this suddenly became a serious probability. One day, I thought, I could even start to look for a piece of land of my own.

  I was still working on The Real Food Companion and a couple of friends said some of the characters I was meeting as research sounded like they’d make good telly. I thought it would be a privilege and a joy to showcase Tasmania as a state, and artisan producers as a group. So I met with a television production company, who spoke to one of the two public broadcasters in Australia, SBS. The original idea was based around conversations with the food producers at the farmhouse kitchen table, a place where the farmers felt comfortable. I wanted to hear, and I wanted audiences to hear, their stories and to learn why the food they grew or made tasted different to the mass-produced stuff. I would be a conduit to that interaction, a face at the start and the end of the show, perhaps with Nick Haddow, a cheesemaking mate, to help set the scene. But the stories would be those of the real farmers and artisans we met.