The Dirty Chef

by Matthew Evans

  Instead of shutting up, which was probably the sensible option, Rare Food was born. The idea was to focus on old and rare breeds, from sheep to pigs and cattle, and supplement that with hard-to-find products, such as wild rabbits, or real, farm-fresh eggs like the ones backyarders have. We tried to get Wessex Saddleback pork, rare poultry and ducks, and heritage beef and lamb. Sometimes successfully, oftentimes not.

  Ross and I met a couple of times to chat about it, neither of us having any real clue about the work, the complexity or the rewards involved. I mean, how hard can it be to take one or two pigs a week, turn them into five or six products and stand there at a market selling them? Sounds pretty easy, right? Especially since we already had some superb pork. Well, the more we discussed it, the more we realised how little we understood the logistics. Sure, we could cook, given some ingredients and a kitchen, but transport to an outdoor market, carrying a product that needs constant low temperatures and a certain amount of labelling to be legal? That was another thing altogether.

  On one visit to Bruny, on the way to check out a farm for sale on the south of the island, I grabbed Ross from work and took him for a drive so we could talk on the hour-long return journey. We chatted about our ideas for rillettes (a shredded pork meat product), for sausages with an all-meat filling (no added starch, preservatives or emulsifiers), for bacon, ham and more.

  We talked about the markets while the real estate agent showed me around. The farmhouse I was looking at fitted the bill for my dream home in so many ways. It had a north-facing sunroom. It had decent paddocks. It had a wood-burning cooker, and a small source of timber onsite. It was a lovely old weatherboard home that seemed in pretty good nick, despite a low doorway or two. There was a big apple shed that’d been used for stables, part of which I could imagine as a hanging room for prosciutto. Perfect, really, for me.

  And a few weeks later, while I dithered and hesitated about whether I could live at the bottom of an island off the bottom of an island off the bottom of an island, Ross bought the place.

  Yes, gazumped by a mate, when he saw his dream farm.

  One day I’ll forgive him for it. One day. If he stops calling it ‘Matthew’s Farm’, which he is wont to do.

  The initial set-up for the first market took three full days after all the planning. One for labels and fridges and fittings. One to get the pigs from the abattoir and cut them up and cure them. Another to make snags and slice and pack the products. Our goal was to use pigs grown south of Hobart, killed south of Hobart, cured and smoked south of Hobart, to sell in the centre of Hobart. A true local endeavour. Unfortunately the kitchen we had in mind wasn’t available, so the pigs ended up doing quite a journey.

  First, Ross drove over from Bruny and I drove from Hobart, and we picked up the pigs, then drove the 45 minutes back to Hobart. Then we drove another hour or so north to Domaine A vineyard, who had very kindly offered to let us use their kitchen. Once we’d cut the pig into bits, mincing some and curing others, we drove some of the products to a butcher in Snug who smoked our bacon for us, and the rest to Bruny where we packed it. Before driving the pork back up to the market. A round trip of nearly 500 kilometres, just for the pig, and a lot more for us. The carbon trotter print was looking decidedly large by the end, somewhat subverting our philosophy of local food, made and sold locally.

  For that first market we made a couple of nitrate-free bacons—one flat, another rolled. We squeezed out a few kilograms of pure pork and fennel sausages, which were a bit leaner than we would have liked, but we were hamstrung (boom-tish) by the fat content of the pork we could get that week from the pig breeder. (Now, as a free-range pig breeder myself, I fully understand the difficulty of getting the exact pig you want into the trailer.) And we made rillettes, a mouth-wateringly good shredded pork dish that we packed in a jar, kind of like mushed-up potted meat. It tastes like spreadable crackling, as one young boy described the flavour. Or like the bit of roast pork stuck on the roasting tray that the cook steals when no-one is watching. Braised in a master stock, it’s hand shredded and mixed back with some of the cooking juices and fat. A bit grey in colour and Spam-like in texture, it’s the kind of thing you have to taste to believe. It is famed in France, and we wanted to make it well known in Hobart too.

  The night before the market was frantic, with new labels and unfamiliar equipment and too many jobs left until the last minute. We got to bed about 2 am in Ross’s bleak, ice-cold cottage (this was a couple of months before he moved to ‘Matthew’s Farm’), before rising at 4.30 to pack the van. We had to catch the first ferry off Bruny so we could make it to Salamanca in time to set up for our grand opening at 8.30 am.

  When we got to Salamanca, it became pretty clear this wouldn’t be an easy sell. Ann’s share of the stall attracted the passing traffic who walked the length of the market, wallets at the ready. Nick’s cheese stall faced the walkway where people could enter and exit the market, and it also faced the very busy, very good organic fruit and vegetable stall opposite.

  The third side, the side Ross and I inherited (were handed, like a poisoned chalice, perhaps), was the side that faced the buildings. It wasn’t really part of the market at all. For virtually the entire length of the market, that side is, well, the arse end. The place where all the boxes get stacked. The rubbish kept. The messy, tangled end of all the market stalls where nobody shops. And that was the side we had to try and make work.

  And there we stood, at the wrong side of the market. Looking at the backs of men, mostly, who were waiting for their wives to come out of the supermarket opposite. When we did try calling out to sell our wares (displayed as a decidedly dodgy fridge full of grey meat, it must be said, with no signage), it was often to one of the buyers at Nick’s side of the stall. Or to those at the vegetable stand. And one thing I learnt is that not everybody likes pork. Certainly not vegetarians, who, I suddenly realised, make up a large proportion of customers clamouring for good veg and good cheese. Of course, pork is not for Muslims and Jews, either. And not for a whole bunch of others who had seen awful footage of pig welfare that had been shot at intensive farms.

  By 11 am the fridge was still just about as full as when we drove in. We were depressed. So we decided to offer tastes of the rillettes, and from there things picked up. Once a person can decide whether they like the flavour of something themselves, it makes the selling so much easier. We sold 80 per cent of what we took that first day, more than covering costs, and when we added it up, we made a hundred or so dollars. It was back-of-the-envelope accounting, but it seemed like we’d more than broken even. Though we did pay our own petrol and ferry fares.

  While it might’ve looked like a profit on the day, we never did take that money out of the business. When Sadie did our books for the end of the financial year, eight months later, we’d made $65. Don’t laugh, it was $65 each. For eight months work. So it wasn’t like we did it for nothing.

  At Sadie’s (and probably Emma’s) behest we changed the way we did things. For a while we offered fresh cherry-fed pork, meat with an incomparable sweet flavour. And about a quarter of it sold. Ditto with milk-fed Wiltshire Horn lamb. Most of it went on a round trip to the market, rather than a one-way journey. Sure, we ate really well on the stuff we brought home again, but eating well was hardly the point. We could eat well and not have to work every Friday and Saturday to prepare for the market and stand at the stall.

  So Ross and I restructured, focusing on cured meat we could store and sell again the next week. We put our prices up to a more realistic and sustainable level. We also, after a year at Salamanca, started selling at a growers’ market on Sundays. One of the original twelve provedores, the market on the cusp of Hobart’s CBD grew and grew, and between both our weekend stalls, we started to turn a dollar.

  Three months after lobbing at Salamanca, with the stress and drama of Christmas ham orders still giving me an ulcer (you really don’t want to be the one to bugger up someone’s Chrissy dinner), I had found the little far
m of my dreams, near Cygnet in the Huon Valley. Puggle Farm, I called it, named after the young of the echidnas I’d seen on my travels around the countryside while looking at properties. Puggle Farm was tucked underneath some silver birches up a dead-end dirt road. The global financial crisis had slowed up the bank’s decision to finance it somewhat, so it was a January 2009 move. I was more than ready to start the process of running a small farm, planting the garden, meeting the locals and bringing in the livestock. And from that first market stall we set up onwards, the whole move was watched, sometimes too closely, by a television camera for SBS.

  Eggs

  Think you’ve tasted eggs? Well, unless you’ve had chooks, think again. The best eggs you’ll ever eat will inevitably come from your own chickens.

  I know this, and yet it was about 30 years between good eggs for me. I hadn’t had consistently good eggs in my life since I’d kept chooks as a boy, in the 1970s.

  When I was living in the big smoke, and on a comparatively big income, I’d been on the search for good eggs. I’d spend $12 (yikes!) on biodynamic eggs. Yes, I’d bought expensive eggs, special vegetarian-fed eggs, so-called ‘free-range’ eggs, which made me wonder whether they had truly come from chooks that roamed on grass and pecked at bugs.

  But the truth is, the chickens I kept (and probably neglected a bit) as a child, produced far fresher eggs of more flavour, of deeper colour than anything money could buy three decades later. Certainly in the city that’s true.

  And although when I lived in Sydney I could buy good bread, good vegies and good milk (eventually), good eggs, of the flavour I remembered from my childhood, were absent. When I decided I would get closer to the source of my produce, my original aspirations were vast. I wanted a vegie garden, and I wanted chooks; three chooks so they could flock properly, and enough room so they’d be able to forage for insects for at least part of the day and look for ‘green pick’ (fresh greens from grass and the like).

  My ambition, if you can call it that, when I was planning to leave Sydney, was to get those three chooks. And as I write, I have 28, so perhaps I overshot the mark somewhat. The desire for good eggs eventually led me to Cygnet, though the journey was anything but sensible or logical.

  It might seem odd to end up on a farm with all those hens, plus 18 head of cattle, 35 pigs and a dozen or so sheep when all I originally wanted was less than a handful of red hens to provide eggs for my omelettes. But in many ways it’s just a logical extension of the same thought.

  Puggle Farm, when I first looked at it with the real estate agent, had a chicken coop feeding into an area which appeared once destined to be the orchard. The house block had a lush, temperate garden, packed with rhododendrons and camellias, a couple of Japanese maples next to a picturesque fish pond, and silver birches, along with a few natives. The two-storey house was cute and cottagey; it faced north, a perfect aspect to trap the all-important winter sun. I was particularly interested in sun, while shivering through a very cool winter in that corner of Maria’s old stone house in Hobart. Puggle Farm also had some land around it—a full 22 acres of it, to be precise.

  I was on the prowl for a good place from which to indulge a middle-class fantasy. I wanted to dip my big soft white toe in the mud of a hobby farm. And Puggle Farm’s house, with its underfloor and in-wall insulation, its sunroom that acts like a heat pump, and timber feel inside and out, was the perfect country hideaway. Easy to heat, easy to cook in, and as quiet as any rural block could be. Perfect, really.

  I was single when I found the place online. Single when I first visited it with the local agent, and I didn’t need much room apart from a bedroom, office and kitchen. Little did I know that before we’d finish filming I’d be joined on the farm by Sadie, whom I met just prior to leaving Sydney, but whose affections I found hard to reciprocate from the wilds of Tasmania. I had left her urban world behind, and it took a great leap of faith on her part to make our romance work. They say that women decide the fate of relationships. It’s certainly the case with ours. And thank god she did.

  The farm was heavily grazed by alpacas when I found it, at the end of a ten-year dry spell. The creek ran lazily, the dam was pretty full. The house garden was neat, complete with a fruiting quince tree and a walnut by the gate. The vegie garden needed attention but it existed and it was netted to keep out possums. The farm had a barn as photogenic as the cottage—a place I could imagine milking a cow. There was space for some sheep. Some pigs too. But, most of all, it had a chicken coop that was just gagging for a few birds to bring it back to life.

  Why did I crave eggs so much? What was the core reason for making a substantial move from the city to a smaller town, and finally the country? Fluorescent yolks. Incomparable flavour. Tight, firm whites (which are perfect for poaching). Chooks, a staple of every farmyard and so many backyards even just a few decades ago, are now industrial agriculture’s greatest shame. The resultant eggs are insipid in colour, bland in taste, uniform in size, and cheap. They come from incarcerated hens whose sole purpose is to make as much profit from as little space as possible. Eggs, as most Australians continue to buy them, are the end result of a couple of thousand years of breeding, scientific feeding and boardroom manipulation. They look and feel like eggs from the outside. But the ones you buy don’t taste like the ones backyard chook owners find laid in their nesting boxes each morning.

  When I was ten years old I had four chooks. Two white, one brown and one black. I don’t know what breed. They were fed kitchen scraps, burnt popcorn from the bottom of the saucepan and seed. And they didn’t get out much to forage in the garden. They were, however, taken with us to our beach block and left to their own devices every holiday and long weekend. We’d pack them in a sack and tuck them under our legs in the back of the Falcon stationwagon; a docile flock that barely made a murmur through the hessian until given their freedom at the journey’s end.

  It’s fair to say these chickens had a rudimentary diet and not all that much exercise or freedom to roam (except during school holidays), but their eggs? Wow. That’s all I can say. What eggs! Deep in hue, complex in flavour. I loved the chooks, and I loved their eggs so much that at that tender age I decided I wanted to be a chicken farmer. Until I learnt exactly what that meant.

  Caged hens. Toxic-smelling sheds. Routine prophylactic antibiotic use. A complete cull of all chooks after one year on the lay to keep production levels up. That’s the reality of chicken farming for many, if not most, egg producers in the nation.

  It still puzzles me how we, as a society, condone the treatment of caged birds when we have the wealth, the nous and the compassion to do better.

  So, I never did become a chicken farmer. Until I moved to the farm.

  I moved in on a Wednesday, with no power to be able to pump water for a shower. Things take longer in the country, and the electricity company only puts on power once a week. Got the dog on a Thursday. A beautiful Kelpie bitch as black as squid ink. I called her Cariad, or Cari, for short, a Welsh name meaning ‘love’ because you can never have too much love in the house. Cari kept me company as I tried to get things growing, both animal and vegetable. I couldn’t wait for my best friend to stop chewing my Blundstones and shredding the front door mat, though. Sometimes she couldn’t grow up quick enough.

  I was in such a hurry to have chooks that I bought my first flock of one-day-old chicks before I’d even settled the finances on the house. When the GFC held up my bank loan, the chicks went to a friend’s place and never came back. The next ten chicks, from the same grower and of the same breed, came home with me. I moved them into the house, literally, just a few days after I moved in myself.

  Kept in a box, with a heat lamp for warmth, these tiny fluff balls with beaks became my first livestock. The neighbours probably thought I was running a new business. From the street all you could see of the house at night was a red light that glowed in the mudroom. (A mudroom is what the airlock room on the entry of the house is often called, because it’s where
the shoes, and their attached mud, should stop.)

  My soft red light, however, wasn’t an advertisement for personal services. A red light was, apparently, the best way to keep my week-old chicks alive—the high-wattage lamp warms them like their absent mother, the red globe helps prevent them from pecking each other. Their skin is translucent and where feathers are due to form you can see the pumping of blood, which to a young bird’s eyes must look a little like a worm. A red lamp means the chicks can’t see the blood pump and mistake it for a worm.

  I felt like a new parent, up each morning, counting heads, fretting about them when I had to venture away from the farm for any length of time. Scared that the lamp would fizzle or blow and leave them chilled, or hang too low and warm their bodies too much. Or that their water would be fouled with chaff as they scratched to find food. The chicks weighed next to nothing, all down and fine bones and miniscule beaks that’d give any passing moth a go.

  The lamp worked its magic (and I didn’t get any unsolicited calls at the door, either). I suddenly had the cutest, fluffiest, most fragile-looking chickens imaginable, the first true livestock on Puggle Farm. Tiny little chicks, the offspring of old-breed, utility chickens; the sort that lay a fair amount, but are also good to eat. The perfect breed for a small-holder like myself, because the ones that aren’t female—the roosters that obviously won’t be kept for their eggs—can be fattened for the pot.

  My first chooks were Barnevelders, a gorgeous double-laced black and brown breed whose feathers shimmer in the daylight like oil on water. Barnevelders also lay a spectacular speckled egg. The bloke I bought them from reckoned I had eight chickens and two roosters. That would mean I could expect a good mob of layers, one rooster to breed from and look after the hens (they protect the hens from predators and help them find food), and one rooster for the pot.