Foraging with Matt Preston in Sydney.
Bush tucker: Rene Redzepi, near Iga Warta in the northern Flinders Ranges in South Australia.
Gum steamed seafood
The brains behind the world's No. 1 restaurant takes on the flavours of Australia. Matt Preston reports.We are standing in a suburban car park trying to knock down sprays of leaves from a tall and rather imposing gum using a long stick.
I say, "We" but actually it's me who's doing the leaping, the reaching, and the knocking while Rene Redzepi, head chef from Noma - named earlier this year the world's No. 1 restaurant - stands by and instructs. How very much like a head chef that is!
He's already holding a small posy of banksia leaves and red bottlebrush like some sort of reluctant bush-bride. I get the tree-lopping job by virtue of the fact that Rene might be huge in reputation and kitchen talent but he's less monumental in stature and has no chance of reaching even the lower branches of the tree.
The reason for all this bush bashing is simple: Rene believes many Australian chefs ignore the bounty that is unique to this island continent and he wants to show me how he would imbue a dish with the fragrance of this Great Southern Land. This is because for Rene, 32, the ultimate aim for a restaurant should be to reflect the time and place of where it is and what could be more Australian than gum leaves?
This approach to foraging for wild ingredients has made the 12 tables at Rene's Copenhagen restaurant the hottest in the world right now.
Noma not only employs the services of five dedicated foragers to supply the wild ingredients but also a sous chef who doesn't cook but just focuses on researching and securing the best ingredients for the kitchen from unique growers across the Nordic region.
Rather than feel any extra pressure from winning the title of the world's best restaurant, Rene suggests the win has actually given him greater latitude with what he can attempt. Diners are now more interested in seeing exactly what the award-winning team at Noma can do.
"This has set us free completely!" he says happily.
Needless to say for a chef whose menu is dominated by vegetables and other flora rather than protein - something amply shown by the recipes and sumptuous photos in his new book Noma: Time and Place In Nordic Cuisine (Phaidon; $70) - he is blown away with the wealth of edible indigenous ingredients that hes seen on this trip.
These include wild ingredients foraged from Victoria, New South Wales and in the north Flinders Ranges at the Iga Warta community with Aboriginal elder Terence Coulthard.
"Australia is very young and filled with contradictions. Nobody seems to eat the food that is unique to here," says Rene. He says it is strange to have eaten in some 30 restaurants in Australia and never seen kangaroo on the menu.
"Everything has a lot of fragrance here, it's sharp but it's also light," he explains after tasting everything from a lemony native grass to quandongs, bush bananas and - at last - slow cooked, campfire-roasted kangaroo which he declared not dissimilar to well-cooked lamb falling off the bone.
Back in Copenhagen, the eight core members of the Noma team have been with Rene since they opened and have become like family.The birth of his daughter Arwen, now 2 1/2, and the imminent birth of a second child with his wife Nadine, has had a huge impact on the young chef.
He has dulled down his relentless travelling to sell the message of Noma to a slightly less frenetic pace and he's also started to weigh up his future plans.
"I always said I'd give Noma 10 years, go as hard as we could and see how far that could take us," he says. "It's taken us pretty far! I'll still reassess where I want to go and what I want to do when those next three years are up."
Rene's enthusiasm for this side of the world is well known. There's even talk of his interest in maybe opening something over here one day. Ask him about this and he's refreshingly candid: "Noma isn't a lifetime commitment and I'd love to take my family and live in another country, another very different part of the world."
In the meantime, you'll find Rene where he loves to be: in the kitchen at his award-winning restaurant or in his home.
"I like to cook a lot when I am home because it reminds me of why I became a cook. It gives me the essence - the giving," he says.
"The way I cook at home is simplified but I do like to make several dishes - even if one of those might be as simple as just spinach sauteed in butter."
True to his current cause, he suggests that perhaps he might even stir in a gum leaf for some subtle flavouring!
The following recipe was inspired by taking Rene to the Sydney Seafood Market, where he was able to choose from WA marron, New Zealand scampi, Queensland and NSW calamari, South Australian prawns and bugs from Morton Bay and Balmain plus any number of other delicious crustaceans.
Rene chose calamari, prawns, scampi and marron but this dish would work equally well just with using green prawns.
The only special equipment you'll need is a large wok and a big bamboo steamer basket with a lid, which are both available cheaply from Chinese food stores in our larger cities. We used almost exclusively Australian grown or harvest product for this dish from Victorian pink salt to Queensland vinegar and South Australian olive oil. Remember to feel free to experiment with the seafood you choose.
Ingredients:
Method:
Leave the heads on the prawns and the scampi but peel the tails. Cut the marron in half and snap off the tail. Place all these and the calamari tubes on a chopping board.Using a potato peeler take long 1cm wide strips of zest off the lime and the lemon.Make a marinade by whisking together the white wine vinegar, olive oil and soy sauce. Balance the saltiness of the soy and the sweetness of the vinegar with a generous squeeze of lime. Remember to add the lime slowly so you can keep tasting to adjust the flavour. If you can't find any sweet white wine vinegar then add a little caster sugar to achieve this balance.Brush the marinade on the flesh of the seafood.Season the seafood with pinches of salt and then a squeeze of lemon juice.Wash the leaves clean and arrange at the bottom of the steamer. Spread the seafood across the leaves. Around the seafood arrange the zest, the lemongrass, coriander and banksia blooms.Get everyone to sit down to await dinner. Steam over a wok of bubbling water for four minutes. After 3 1/2 minutes take a peak under the lid and check the seafood to see if the prawns have started to blush a reddy-pink showing that they are cooked.If they are, and the other seafood feels firm rather than wobbly, rush the steamer off the heat and to the middle of the table; if not give the steamer another minute or so on the wok.Pick seafood direct from the foliage, for as Rene is fond of saying, nothing tastes better eaten by silver!
You can take this same approach and just use a bed of culinary herbs and then everything in the steamer would be edible. Oh, and while leading Melbourne forager and Attica chef Ben Shewry says there are some 2000 edible plants in Australia, there are a lot more poisonous ones. If you're not sure of your botany, using bunches of tarragon, chervil or sorrel might be safer.If you live so far inland as to be unsure of the pristine freshness of your seafood, this approach of imbuing ingredients with the scent of Australia would work wonderfully with vegetables such as asparagus. Just place or tie the asparagus into a bouquet of bush leaves and cook on the barbecue so the smoke and leaves' scent can be imparted to the vegies. Just remember to wash your bush leaves well before using them.Taste.com.au - October 2010
Matt Preston
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