Restaurants take to indigenous ingredients
Sourcing local indigenous ingredients has always been difficult for Australian restaurants.
They are expensive, hard to source and farming them on a large scale is challenging. And at the same time, they are unfamiliar to the Australian palate.
But some restaurants are now exploring native ingredients and using modern sophisticated methods, they are helping to fuel this growth in this niche supply industry.
One is Perth's award-winning Wildflower restaurant, atop the Como The Treasury hotel. Wildflower is in this year's The Australian Financial Review's Australia's Top 500 Restaurants list which has chefs and restaurateurs from 500 venues across the nation voting for their favourite dining experiences. The shortlist of 100 will be announced on June 19.
Wildflower’s executive chef Jed Gerrard not only uses indigenous ingredients. He has also based his cooking around the six seasons of the indigenous Noongar calendar.
“We follow the local area Aboriginal weather calendar," Gerrard told the Australian Financial Review. "We are currently in the Djeran season, which typically has cooler nights, light breezes and the presence of dew on plants in the early mornings."
The aim, he said, was to create a menu which was authentically West Australian.
That of course had logistical challenges. To manage that, he has in put in place a regime of weekly foraging sessions and painstaking cultivation of local suppliers.
"I asked myself, is this realistic, are we going to be able to follow these seasons, are we going to have enough time to go foraging, do we have enough suppliers to sustain a busy restaurant that has 80 seats. We do 150 covers a day, you need a lot of native produce,” he said.
"I can confidently say that 95 per cent of everything we use comes from Western Australia. The other 5 per cent would be Australia generally, that's just a couple of cheeses and vinegars. All the proteins and vegetables and natives are from Western Australia."
Other acclaimed chefs moving into this area are Jack Zonfrillo (Orana), Ben Shrewry (Attica), Peter Gilmore (Quay) and Dan Hunter (Brae).
by Leon Gettler, May 10th 2017
