The Dirty Chef

by Matthew Evans

  It’s this kind of thing that makes producing your own food so empowering. Like growing your own broccoli, or fattening your own pigs, there is a discernible difference in the way things are grown, reared or handled. And often that means there’s a difference in flavour too. We may not have had the time to extract honey from our own hives every year, but I now know that the difference in flavour, between cold-extracted and all those other honeys you find in the supermarket, comes from a labour-intensive process that isn’t just some romantic notion from a simpler time. It’s a method that’s used because the end result just tastes better.

  Honeyed Anzac biscuits

  Makes about 25 bickies

  Traditionalists will be mortified at this but sometimes we use honey in our Anzac biscuits. We find the texture changes by some whim of the gods; sometimes they’re runnier and flatter, sometimes they’re thicker, and no amount of careful measuring seems to explain the difference.

  100 g (3½ oz/1¼ cups) rolled (porridge) oats

  140 g (5 oz/1 cup) plain (all-purpose) flour, sifted

  200 g (7 oz/1 cup) caster (superfine) sugar

  70 g (2½ oz/1¼ cups) shredded coconut

  125 g (4½ oz) butter

  2 tablespoons honey

  1½ teaspoons bicarbonate of soda (baking soda), sifted

  Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F/Gas 4).

  Mix all the dry ingredients except the bicarb in a large bowl.

  In a small saucepan, heat the butter and honey and stir to melt. Stir in the bicarb (it will foam up, and this is normal) and stir well to combine evenly.

  Pour this foaming mixture into a well in the middle of the dry ingredients, and mix it all up with a spoon. If it seems too stiff, add a tablespoon or two of water.

  Place dessertspoon-sized blobs about 5 cm (2 inches) apart on lined baking trays. The biscuits should spread but sometimes they just don’t. If you’re worried about them not spreading, press them down with your fingers to flatten a bit. Bake for about 15–20 minutes, or until golden.

  Allow the biscuits to cool on the tray, then transfer to wire racks.

  Butter

  They say the happiest days of a man’s life can be numbered on one hand. There’s the day he meets the woman who will eventually share his life. There’s the day his first child is born. There’s the day he buys his first Jersey cow. And there’s the day he sells his first Jersey cow. Such is the burden of milking. But I knew all that, and I was still up for it.

  So along came Maggie. A glorious girl, she was already milking and with a calf when I bought her. She was an impossibly good-looking purebred Jersey, meaning she was the colour of caramel, with some lighter shades underneath and darker parts around her head. Her milk was deep golden in colour, topped with plenty of that all-important cream.

  At dawn and dusk she would wander up to the farmyard and wait patiently at the gate, like all good milking cows do. Her massive girth filled the barn as I fed her oaten chaff and hay, molasses and minerals, getting her ready to be milked. It was terrifying and thrilling to be with her in such a confined space, me trying to control her, when she was actually the boss of me. She trod on my foot, once, in the paddock, and I didn’t want that to happen on the hard concrete floor of the barn.

  It didn’t take me long to be smitten. Her long lashes and deep brown eyes. Her gentle demeanour. Her coarse tongue. She followed me whenever I had work to do in the paddocks, and wandered over to say hello when I was in the garden. A house cow, I was thinking, is a very nice thing indeed. Especially compared to turkeys.

  Maggie came to me early. If you’re sensible, for the year after you buy a farm or small-holding you’ll just do what the previous farmer has always done in terms of crops or animals. Or you’ll understock the place, or leave it fallow, and watch the land and the seasons. Learn from this first year how things thrive or don’t, what animals you’ll have to compete with (or that your livestock will have to compete with), in which months the weather is conducive to growing, and when the land is dormant.

  Of course, I didn’t do that. In the first few months I did a whole bunch of things that you’d normally do over the course of a decade. Maggie arrived in my fourth month, after I got a phone call from the bloke who was selling pork meat to Ross and me for the market, asking if I wanted a house cow.

  A house cow is a milking cow that you use for the home, usually a smaller milking breed such as Jersey or Guernsey or Dexter, though in those milk factories favoured by commercial dairies, the high-producing Friesian (sometimes called Holstein) can make an appearance. The house cow is part of the family. She needs to be quiet and, even better, timid, and well trained. She is often bucket-reared, so she’s used to people. You socialise with your house cow when you do your chores, chatting to her over the fence. Offering her an apple as a treat when you visit her paddock, rubbing her neck, scratching her back.

  I took Maggie in on a whim. I’d long harboured a desire to milk a cow at home. While I knew I’d have to buy in some feed for her as my farm wasn’t big enough to produce that much grass all year, I leapt at the chance to have her.

  Maggie came with her daughter Coco, which meant I wouldn’t have to milk every day. In commercial dairies they wean the calves almost immediately, then bucket-rear them. House cows are often left with their calves for longer, so the small-holder can take a day off, or get away with only half milking her out, leaving the rest for the calf. It does mean you might have to sacrifice some cream, as this comes out last and most house cows can stop letting down and hold on to it for their calf. Maggie had been both hand-milked and machine-milked. She was calm, relaxed and bossy.

  And her milk promised to be a simple joy. But first I had to learn how to get it.

  I’d milked once in Western Australia, urging a few squirts from the udder of a Dexter, a pocket-sized cow beneath which you can’t even fit a bucket. The woman who let me milk only gave me a moment to try, because her cow, like most cows as I was about to find out, would only stand and be milked for so long. Once the feed in the cow’s trough ran short, or once she became bored or distracted, she’d want to get out of there. And you don’t want to get in the way of a cow once she’s decided she doesn’t like standing around.

  I now know I should’ve trained Maggie. Got her used to the barn where I would milk her. Instead I simply led her into the shed, forgot to give her udders a wipe, and tried to gently squeeze her teats over my brand new stainless steel bucket. It probably would’ve been fine. She probably would’ve been quite a good first cow to learn to milk. Except we were filming for Gourmet Farmer. So poor Maggie, on her first visit to the barn, chomping her chaff and swishing her tail with a novice crouching underneath her udder to try and extract some milk, poor Maggie had a cameraman wandering in and out of the shed behind her in the dark. And a sound-bloke lurking outside too. Enough to make the most docile house cow a tad nervous.

  A cow can’t see immediately behind her. She can see to the front and a fair bit to the side. If you want to sneak up on a cow, and probably get a hoof to the chest for your troubles, approach from straight behind and then veer into view. Like all animals, how much they startle depends on their personal traits, and the way they’ve been treated. Maggie, it must be said, was very good, but she still didn’t like having strangers in her blind spot.

  She jerked on her halter. She stepped forward and back to show her dissatisfaction. She whacked the bucket with her hoof. Knowing what I know now, I’d never try to milk a cow for the first time with an audience. What should be, and became, a glorious intimate moment full of peace and calm and the rhythm of hand-milking, was far more harried. Both Maggie and I felt somewhat cheated by the process.

  By some miracle, though, I did get milk on that first attempt. With my head tucked up against her flank, the smell of her filling my nostrils, I did that most intimate of things you can do with a lactating animal in your care, and milked her. It was only about a litre and a half, full of dirt and hair because I’d forgotten
to give her a good wipe-down first. It may’ve been the dirtiest milk I ever got from her, but I simply had to drink this milk as soon as it was strained.

  I thought I’d tasted milk before. I thought the milk I’d tried straight from the vat at other dairies was good. But this, well, this was the real thing. This was firsthand experience of what some call terroir, the flavour of the land, the taste of my cow, of my farm. Terroir, or regional variation, is something talked about a lot by those who think raw (unpasteurised milk) holds the key to some of Europe’s great cheeses. And here was this exact thing, the proof in the glass. The proof in my big milky moustachioed grin.

  A mouthful of grass that a cow takes, I once heard but can’t confirm, is called a woofle. Cows only have bottom teeth. They swipe their thick, coarse tongue over a swathe of grass, curl it around and chomp it off using the teeth and a hard pad on the upper jaw. With this quick, efficient action, a cow can graze quite happily for about ten hours a day, walking forward past the eaten blades to fresh grass further afield. They need long grass for this action to work, hence the pasture required for cattle is longer than that for sheep. Sheep and wallabies can compete for very fine grass, particularly over winter, when many cows in cold climates are put on dry food, such as hay. When a cow isn’t eating, she’s probably chewing her cud, masticating food that has been through two stomachs and is partially digested, before depositing it in the next stomach. All up, a cow has four stomachs and can make 40 000 chewing motions in a day.

  These things probably aren’t that interesting to your average person. But to me they’ve become mini-obsessions. Watching the animals eat. Seeing how much time they spend lounging and chewing their cuds. Seeing the three-leaf stage of grass, and how long it takes to appear. Watching the almost immediate impact of the new wallaby-proof fence on the length, colour and quality of the grass within the paddock. Observing the slow movement (or lack) of moisture through the landscape. And wondering how best to harness what nature has given us.

  Nature gave us a lot of milk. It also gave us clear skies, which meant cool nights. I would step outside to water where the lemon tree used to be and would be amazed by the stars. The lemon tree had long since been picked to death by the possums, and I only thought to net it when it had two leaves left. It died, though even today I still do my manly duty and water its grave each evening.

  Watering the former lemon is really just a great excuse to potter about outside at the end of every evening. Overhead there’s usually a band of cream in the night sky: the Milky Way in all its glory. People in rural Australia, more so than in many other countries, get a joyous view of the stars. Unimpeded by city lights or humidity or the gunk that abounds in the northern hemisphere’s higher atmosphere, the stars shimmer brightly here. A full moon in Tasmania sheds enough light to walk around the property; no torch needed, none taken. In this low light, I’d often find Maggie at the fence, a kindly girl, always looking for a scratch or a handful of fresh grass from the garden.

  On some nights I would see the Southern Lights, a wonderful greenish-coloured display of meteorological beauty. On cold nights, when the cooker was on, it was the perfect time to make yoghurt and butter.

  Yoghurt is the simplest way of storing milk, by heating and adding a bacterial culture so that it sets into a thick, silky mass. Having the cooker means a large, warm place to let it set. However, like all simple food processes, making yoghurt is also a complex procedure that changes according to the kind of milk, time of year and consistency of the culturing temperature. Sometimes ours wouldn’t set very well. Sometimes it would go a bit stringy in consistency. But always, real yoghurt—which isn’t just thickened with gums and sweetened beyond belief like most bought yoghurt—is alchemical magic.

  I have spent a bit of time playing around with butter. The end result of getting a lot of Jersey milk is that you get a lot of cream. And at its heart, butter is just over-whipped cream. I’d made quite a bit of butter when I was an apprentice, to my chef’s chagrin. Once the mixer gets to thick whipped cream, it’s only a minor distraction before the cream curdles and looks grainy. While this isn’t great when it’s got sugar and vanilla in it and you’re making 20 litres of whipped cream for desserts, you can then continue to whisk until the curdled cream clumps together, leaving yellow bundles of butter in a wash of buttermilk. This, of course, is just what we wanted to do with our surplus cream on Puggle Farm.

  Then, it’s simply a matter of pressing the butter and washing the buttermilk out. Originally, though, we didn’t wash out the buttermilk, relying on the action of kneading and pressing, but any amount tends to send the butter sour within a day or two. Now we do the tedious but necessary rinsing of the butter in fresh water, while also massaging it as we go.

  But there are more complex ways to make butter. I cultured some cream using a little homemade yoghurt stored by the side of the cooker for warmth, and whipped it to produce a lightly soured, clean-tasting butter that would put any commercial stuff to shame. I spoke to a local who told me to clot my cream on the side of the cooker, as they used to do when she was a lass. You scald the cream on the edge of the cooker before whipping and then pressing out the buttermilk. I clotted some cream on the Rayburn, and ended up pouring the runny half of it over my porridge. The other half I whipped, though I should’ve scooped off the crust first—a splendid caramel-flavoured layer that made the butter grainy—but it tasted like the essence of cream.

  While Maggie wasn’t a big producer by any commercial standard, as a small family we were awash with milk and well graced with more butter than we could use. We did what they do commercially, and froze the surplus butter for the time when Maggie would have to be dried off, left unmilked for a time, ready to have her new calf.

  Small fruit

  Virtually every part of the Huon Valley that isn’t forest (and some that is regrowth forest) was once used to grow apples or small fruit. Small fruit is the group term for berries, including gooseberries, raspberries, blueberries and strawberries, as well as currants (red, white and black). Puggle Farm, apparently, once grew some decent currants and gooseberries. The local town once boasted at least two jam factories, with more on the waterfront in Hobart, so the fruit was preserved at the peak of ripeness. But these days you’ll hardly find a gooseberry to save yourself. Or a josterberry, silvanberry or youngberry, though some strawberry and blueberry farms have survived and seem to be flourishing.

  Puggle Farm, the parts that are still cleared, grows a bit of grass. Enough for quite a few alpacas, it seemed, from the number that were living here when I first saw the place. And enough to feed a cow, I had hoped.

  Our farm, however, no longer grew small fruit. There were no commercial-style berries, apart from a single blueberry bush in the vegetable garden, which had three small but sweet, dusky blue orbs on it when I extricated it from the weeds.

  Sure, I’d embraced the small-fruit mentality, as you do when there’s a glut of anything around here. I’d made jam (well, sauce), using Wil Brubacher’s organic strawberries. I’d discovered Carl Sykes’s incomparable blueberries at Oyster Cove (though he was more excited by a dried blueberry and raspberry leaf tea). I’d planted alpine strawberries (like a mini strawberry with the flavour of ten strawberries in one, and that one has been dipped in sherbet—when they’re properly ripe), four types of strawberry, three types of raspberry and in one corner, a thorny but absolutely essential gooseberry. I grew up with gooseberries, and the flavour makes me go all, well, goosebumply, even today.

  No rows of small fruits on our farm, though. No, what I was trying to do was grow grass. As much as I could. In a good year the grass easily outgrows the competition, and in my first year I had enough pasture to enjoy milking Maggie.

  Milking is based on a lot of trust, between this enormous, potentially dangerous animal with very hard hoofs, and the person trying to entice the milk from the cow. Maggie had to feel comfortable to let her milk down, without swiping me with her tail or smashing me with her leg. And
most mornings from that first day on (with Max thankfully nowhere to be seen), sometimes even before the market at 5 am, I’d bring Maggie into the barn and get a couple of litres of glorious milk, topped with a good swadge of Jersey cream. Strained into glass bottles, it was the only milk I had for a good year or so. The only cream for our pancakes, and often the source of our butter. I’d watch the dawn sky through the barn door as I milked. The pink light in the sky glowing through the pines. The frost looking heavier as dawn broke, sometimes so thick that it resembled snow on the stockyards. I’d carry my boy out with me, leaving Sadie to sleep longer, parking Hedley’s bassinette on the bench. Later, when he was big enough, I’d give him a ringside seat in his stroller, a gurgling, happy chap who loved watching his dad navigate the udder of this very large animal.

  Our Maggie had to have the right food in her chaff bucket. And lucerne chaff was it. No hay, or she’d thrash her head around, and spray me with dust from her nostrils. Given a good ration of chaff with a slurp of cider vinegar and a good drizzle of molasses, Maggie was happy. I found out later, through trial and error with this morning feed, that she was indeed a fussy eater inside the shed. Outside the shed, she was far less discerning, almost pushing me out of the way to get to the hay she’d just rejected while I’d milked.

  The problem with feeding Maggie was not Maggie. It was Puggle Farm. The place simply couldn’t produce enough grass. What it did grow, the wallabies were very good at eating down. So while the grass was supplemented with hay and silage, even that wasn’t enough to keep Maggie in feed all year round. We get two periods a year around here when the grass simply stops growing—one in winter and the other in summer. Winter because of cold and day length, summer usually because of a lack of rain. I’d factored in the winter hiatus, but not the wallabies or the summer dormancy.