Other everyday vegetables contain these ‘delicious’ compounds, but to a lesser extent. Potatoes and cabbage contain 100 milligrams per 100 grams, and carrots 30 milligrams per 100 grams. When vegetables are cooked, however, this ratio can double. This is because when vegetables are sautéed, fried, stewed and baked they lose moisture—or water. This is what chef Jacques Reymond was referring to earlier in this book. ‘Cooking down’ or ‘reducing’ a dish, in kitchen language, means heating it so the water evaporates. When vegetables are reduced by cooking, the ratio of glutamic acid therefore increases. When vegetables are reduced they become more delicious. This was explained to me by a Catalan chef a few years prior to my beginning My Year Without Meat.
I was in the relatively remote village of Falset near the famous wine-growing region of Priorat, south of Barcelona, where chef Roger Felip had a restaurant called Mas Trucafort. It is perched in a relatively high valley in the Montsant mountains, looking out on the Ebro River below. When I visited, it was a cool day with a chance of rain and we were making paella under the cover of his shed. The walls were made with the same slatey stone that forms the famous llicorella, the stony soil in which the bush vines of this region manage to produce such outstanding wine. Roger had stacked logs from old olive trees around the walls. He is well known for his indoor/outdoor, all-weather paellas. Rice dishes are found throughout Spain. The most famous seafood paella, laden with prawns and mussels, is the paella valenciana. In other regions, paellas are made with whatever is in season and available. Roger had lit a small fire in a rustic open fireplace built into the back wall. The fire was now building in size and strength as Roger fed it with handfuls of dried grape vines. He placed a paellera on top. This is the flat pan in which the paella is made, and after which it is named. On top of this he started his sofregit, which is Catalan for sofrito. This is the jam-like tomato and red pepper base used to add the rich intensity to paella. Into the paellera went a vast amount of extra virgin olive oil from his own grove. Into this an entire head of garlic was placed. He added a handful of wild thyme pulled from the rocks where it was growing at the back of the shed. He pushed these around in the oil. The intention was to flavour the oil. These ingredients were removed after fifteen minutes or so, when the garlic was well and truly brown and the thyme had disintegrated. He then threw in handfuls of uniformly chopped pieces of red and yellow peppers that sizzled in the hot, aromatic oil. They were slowly cooked down until they were soft and deeper red and gold. To this were added chopped ripe tomatoes, which hit the hot metal and let out a last defiant hiss as they gave up their juice. All these actions were dispensed with a deft, almost subliminal, addition of salt.
The fire died down and the vegetables simmered away, reducing to a dark, sticky, jam-like sofregit. ‘Try it,’ insisted Roger, offering a dessertspoon from his back pocket. It was good. It was really good. It was greater than the sum of its parts. Sweet with a lovely sharp finish, it had an overwhelming sense of savouriness that was memorable, as are so many of the dishes from the Iberian Peninsula that start with a slow reduction of vegetables.
While the Spanish, and Catalans for that matter, understand instinctively how to incorporate that savouriness in their cooking, they don’t have a specific term for it. To them it is simply delicioso. Delicious.
They are not the only culture to have developed a cooked and reduced base. You will find this layering and cooking down of vegetables in so many cuisines. Many French dishes start with mirepoix. This is a medium dice of celery, carrot and onion that is often sautéed in butter or oil (or rendered animal fat) to create the base of the dish. Depending on the region, the vegetables are given some colour with a fast sauté, or allowed to cook under their own steam over lower heat and with a lid on. As other ingredients are added, the vegetables release their ‘flavour’ into the cooking liquid, which is reduced as the dish cooks. It is this process of addition and reduction that increases the flavour. It’s a numbers game.
Similar bases are found in Italian cooking. The Italian sofrito is basically mirepoix with the addition of garlic. (Italian food nationalists—yes, they exist—always like to remind the world that France did not have a cuisine until Catherine de’ Medici married Prince Henry of France and took her entourage, including cooks, with her, thus introducing ‘proper’ food to France.) The French royal family was not the only royal household to be infiltrated by the Italians. Polish king Sigismund I the Old married Bona Sforza, an Italian. This is why many Polish dishes start with włoszczyzna. This means ‘greens’ and refers to the base of many soups and stews made with carrots, parsnips, celery, leek, and sometimes, cabbage. Similarly, the Germans start soups and stews with Suppengrün. This means ‘soup greens’ and refers to a mix of leek, carrot, and sometimes, celeriac—a variety of celery appreciated for its engorged root and not the stems. It can also include one, some or all of the following: swede, onion, parsley leaves, parsley roots, thyme and celery leaves. The ingredients can be removed before serving, allowed to cook down to the point of creating a thick sauce, or served whole as part of the finished dish.
The idea is to create an intense vegetable stock. As the vegetables give up their liquid they also give up their water-soluble nutrients and flavour compounds, including acids and sugars. Note that starchy vegetables, such as potato, are not included in these flavour bases, as the starch would thicken the dish prematurely.
So with this new understanding of the process of layering and reducing vegetables during cooking, I approached the preparation of meals with a newfound zeal. I re-embraced a huge swathe of traditional dishes made without meat that combine different vegetables to create deliciousness. The summer vegetable braise from the south of France, ratatouille, sees onions, tomato, pepper, eggplant and zucchini gently cooked together. The addition of an egg cooked in the sauce makes a meal. Bubble-and-squeak is a classic English dish and an amazingly transmogrifying one, that turns the most unappealing leftover vegetables into a delicious rustic vegetable pancake with a crisp and caramelised crust folded through it. Colcannon is ostensibly a poverty dish from Ireland, of potatoes, cabbage, shallots, cream and butter. When brought together, these ingredients create a warming and tasty embrace.
Another evergreen in the flavour arsenal are sauces made from fermented foods—the breakdown of proteins releasing amino acids and sometimes yeast, adding a little umami, too. It is this breakdown of proteins through cooking or fermentation that creates these incredibly tasty combinations. I was standing in Nan Yang, a Chinese–Vietnamese supermarket owned by an elderly matriarch, Chi Yao, who arrived in Australia as a boat person in 1979. There was an entire double-sided, tightly stacked aisle filled with diverse sauces and condiments derived from protein and packed with delicious glutamates. Soy sauce, mushroom sauce, tonkatsu sauce, teriyaki sauce, oyster sauce (not vegetarian), tamari, hoisin, fish sauce (made from fermented fish guts and not vegetarian), Kewpie mayonnaise (made with processed oil and lots of MSG), sriracha chilli sauce (made with red chillies, themselves a good source of glutamate). It was literally a wall of umami made mostly by fermentation.
I really love salads. Not lettuce and cucumber dressed with vinaigrette, but great big plates of vegetables that are meals in themselves. The secret is to layer umami-rich vegetables—such as asparagus, avocado and mushrooms—in raw salads and make a dressing with an umami-rich sauce, such as soy sauce balanced with lemon or lime juice, and perhaps a splash of sesame oil. With the combination of veg and dressing, you get that umami hit. Yummy and quite decadent dishes include cauliflower cheese (the addition of a vego stock cube to the sauce is a revelation, although a culinary transgression for purists) and potatoes cooked in a sauce made with onions, garlic and tomatoes. If you’re still hungry for umami after that, have a cup of good-quality Japanese green tea—with a whopping 668 milligrams of glutamate per 100 grams. Enjoy.
Dried kelp—the Japanese call it kombu, and use it in making dashi—can hit levels of over 3000 milligrams of glutamate per 100 gram
s. While not reaching these stellar concentrations of glutamate, its more common cousin is nori. You will know this as sushi sheets. It’s a type of sea algae that is cleaned, dried, reformed into fine sheets and packaged. It is really good for making vegetarian chicken salt—chicken salt being salt, hydrolysed protein or MSG and seasonings. Take a pack of nori sheets and break them with your hands, then place in a high-speed blender. A Thermomix is perfect. When the nori’s reduced to a powder, add twice as much salt and an eighth of a teaspoon of celery seeds, if you have them. Blend again. Sprinkle on everything.
Perhaps the most well-known source of umami in Australia is a salty black paste in a squat jar. First made over ninety years ago in Port Melbourne, Vegemite is one of our food products known around the world. In global gastronomic circles, Vegemite is recognised as Australia’s source of umami alongside Germany’s sauerkraut, Italy’s parmesan cheese, Malaysia’s shrimp paste belachan, Thailand’s fish sauce and Spain’s anchovies.
Like Holden cars, Aeroplane Jelly and Chiko Rolls, Vegemite is one of our greatest and most iconic brands. Sold as a healthy spread to smear on our toast, its 1950s radio advertising jingle ‘We’re Happy Little Vegemites’ was absorbed into our national vernacular. It was championed as our globally recognised condiment in Men At Work’s 1981 song ‘Down Under’, in which Colin Hay buys bread from a muscular 6-foot-4 Brusselaar and asks if he speaks his language. In return he gets a smile and a Vegemite sandwich.
And just like Holden cars, Aeroplane Jelly and Chiko Rolls, Vegemite is American. It is owned by Kraft Australia, itself a wholly owned subsidiary of Mondelēz, where it sits alongside brands such as Toblerone, Philadelphia Cream Cheese and Oreos.
The Vegemite recipe was developed by a food chemist called Cyril Callister at Fred Walker’s eponymous cheese factory in Albert Park. Walker was in debt to the tune of £80,000 from a previous failed business venture and was developing new food lines to push himself back in the black. He was working on a formula to make a paste from the yeast left over from the brewing process.
This was not a new concept. The process of extracting the nutritious insides of yeast cells had been developed in Germany in the previous century. The English had already developed Marmite, a yeast extract first produced in 1902 in Burton on Trent using post-ferment brewer’s yeast from the nearby Bass Brewery, thus solving the problem of what to do with spent yeast.
The food culture of creating concentrated nutritious extracts packed in tins and jars extended even further back, to the Franco-Prussian War, when Scottish-born Canadian John Lawson Johnston developed Johnston’s Fluid Beef to feed Napoleon III’s Army. It was later renamed Bovril. This was made by boiling down beef in abattoirs in Brazil.
Callister’s Australian version of a yeast extract was developed in 1923 with marketing beginning the following year. The name Vegemite was supposedly chosen at random from competition entries pulled from a hat by Walker’s daughters. The winners were local Albert Park girls whose entry mirrored the marketing phrase on the first amber-coloured jars: ‘Pure Vegetable Extract’ and ‘delicious on sandwiches and toast. Improves the flavour of soups, stews and gravies’.
In 1926 Walker formed a new company with James L Kraft of Chicago, called The Kraft Walker Cheese Co., to process cheese. By 1930 manufacturing for both companies was consolidated, and when Walker died of hypertensive heart disease in 1935, the Australian holdings of the company were absorbed by Kraft in Chicago.
The Vegemite plant is now in Salmon Street, Port Melbourne. You may never have seen it, but anyone driving to Melbourne Airport from the city surely would have smelled it. Vegemite is made from post-ferment brewer’s yeast trucked in from breweries around Melbourne and, during processing of the yeast, releases a sweet bakery-like aroma into the air. The yeast is treated with plant enzymes to break down its cell walls to leave, basically, a lot of protein, B vitamins and amino acids that are cooked with salts and natural vegetable flavours, including onion-seed extract and celery-seed extract. For several months after, the ‘black velvet’ is stored in drums to mature. Freshly made Vegemite and Vegemite that has been stored for a few months are very different, as it takes time for the flavour to develop. The Vegemite is heated, extruded into jars and sealed. More than 25 million jars are produced annually, with 95 per cent sold in Australia and New Zealand.
Vegemite’s appeal is deep-rooted in our brains. Its saltiness pleases our ancient and instinctive desire for salt, while the amino acids give an enticing, mouth-filling sense of umami. However, its intensity means that it is an acquired taste.
And it is because Vegemite is an acquired taste that we are so fond of it and so defensive of it. As Australians, we take great delight in watching the facial reactions of people from other cultures when they taste Vegemite for the first time. The question ‘Have you tasted Vegemite?’ has replaced ‘What do you think of Australia?’ in celebrity interviews.
In 2006 Australian officials investigated reports that the US Food and Drug Administration had banned sales of Vegemite because of its levels of folate, an additive regulated in the United States. The Australian Embassy was aware of reports that people were being stopped from bringing the breakfast spread into the United States. The story later turned out to be based on rumour.
Transpacific relations were further tested in 2011, when Prime Minister Julia Gillard was at a school in the United States, meeting President Obama. She was asked by a student: ‘What is Vegemite?’ and replied: ‘Right. This is a bit of a difference between the President and I. I love Vegemite.’ Obama replied, with a laugh: ‘It’s horrible! … it’s like a quasi-vegetable byproduct paste that you smear on your toast for breakfast. Sounds good, doesn’t it?’ The reason we love Vegemite is because others hate it. It helps define who we are.
NOSE KNOWS BEST
Andrew Wood is a peasant. He is a modern peasant. For him the call of the land was so great he turned his back on a career in publishing and bought a block of free-draining granite country near Heathcote and planted heritage vegetables. Wood was previously a pioneer in food niche marketing, publishing what many argue was Australia’s best food and wine magazine at the tail end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new one. It was called Divine Food and Wine and, at a time when the glossies were publishing recipes for lamb shanks and sticky date pudding, he was publishing several-thousand-word pieces on Australian cheese and wild yeast wines.
The first time I saw Wood was back in the 1990s. He was a guest speaker at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, where I was studying professional writing and editing. Back then, he admitted that he mortgaged his house several times to finance his magazine. Wood gave me my first break at writing long-form stories, paying twenty cents a word (a rate that some publishers twenty years on think is reasonable reward). In the early 2000s I was lucky enough to organise a massive lamb tasting in which we collected ten different rare-breed lamb carcasses from across the state and had them butchered in an inner-city restaurant. Each of the ten beasts was served five different ways, so the tasters could get an understanding of the ways the different cuts of lamb tasted: meat from the forequarter, ribs, rump, leg and shank. The tasters came from the realms of the food and wine world and each consumed roughly 20 to 50 grams in each tasting. This meant that at the end of the session they would have consumed between one to two-and-a-half kilograms of lamb. One of the tasters, an up-and-coming chef called Andrew McConnell from a little restaurant called Diningroom 211, claimed, albeit jokingly, that he was traumatised by the event.
Divine was marginal, to say the least, and Wood was decades ahead of the game. When the digital age spread across the planet, one of the world’s best food and wine magazines quietly folded.
The next time I saw Wood was at my local farmers’ market. Very quietly he and his business partner, Jill McCalman, had packed up, moved out bush and turned into peasants. They came to town with their ute loaded up, like Okies. In the back of their HiLux were crates of leafy greens, ro
ot vegetables and tomatoes. Tomatoes with names so exotic they sounded like they were titles from a swamp boogie songbook. Rouge de Marmande. Glenora Green. Black from Tula. They were green, burgundy, yellow and campfire red. They were every colour other than the fire-engine red of the Roma tomatoes most farmers were growing. ‘I put my money where my mouth was,’ said Wood. He had always been a critic of food that lacked natural flavour. In his careers as an editor and publisher he had favoured chefs who had gone out on a limb and sought out natural flavoursome ingredients.
He held a red tomato flushed with yellow in one hand and a sharp, stubby knife in the other. He pushed the sharp blade into the thin skin and easily carved out a fat wedge. The skin was fine and the flesh soft and strongly aromatic of … well, tomato. The jelly-like pulp within the flesh held fat seeds. I placed the tomato on my tongue. It was delicious. Nicely sharp, a touch sweet and a lovely mouth-filling savoury sensation. The tomato was named by an American farmer in the nineteenth century for its meaty flesh. Its name was Beefsteak. It was a variety of heritage tomato selected for flavour.
Wood and McCalman specialise in heritage vegetables, and called their business Glenora Heritage Produce. ‘We have tried many varieties of heirloom vegetables and failed,’ said McCalman. ‘Now we have our tried-and-tested varieties but they are still a bugger to get perfect.’ She explained that heritage tomatoes were bred for certain growing conditions and not commercial yields.
My Year Without Meat Page 8