Rene Redzepi's famous dish gets a touch of home-grown flavours

Chef Rene Redzepi - the other Danish royal - whipped up a feast for more than 400 guests at the Star casino on Sunday night for the Great Australian Dinner, part of Good Food Month, Australia's biggest festival of food.

Redzepi, chef at the world's No. 2 restaurant, Noma in Denmark, cooked the entree for the four-course dinner: a variation of his "Alliums Lightly Cooked", an onion dish that appears on the menu at his famous restaurant.

Redzepi and his head research chef, Lars Williams, designed the dish to include ingredients and flavours that he had discovered on trips to Australia.

"We are using Australian ingredients to complete it, such as green ants, rosella buds, salt bush, riberries and samphire," Redzepi said.

Top of the crop: Local and international chefs at the Great Australian Dinner at Sydney's Star Casino.

He said in July that he still thought about the Australian bush foods he had eaten in the company of the Iga Warta and Wardandi indigenous people three years ago.

''They blow my mind and still stand out. [They gave me] some of the most interesting food experiences of my career,'' he said. ''So many new delicious flavours, so much forgotten wisdom to be relearned.''

Food critic Terry Durack said the Danish chef had a "special relationship" with Australia.

"He has two young Australian sous chefs in his kitchen team at Noma," Durack said. "He even has a ridgy-didge barbie out the back of the restaurant in the middle of Copenhagen."

An advocate for local produce, Redzepi had encouraged Australian chefs to embrace local ingredients in their cooking, Durack said.

"Two years ago, he stood on the stage of the Sydney Opera House and asked why nobody in Australia had offered him kangaroo or wallaby. He left us facing that question: why aren't we cooking like Australians?" he said.

Redzepi joined 10 of Australia's best chefs at the event, including Kylie Kwong, Mark Best, Ben Greeno, Brent Savage, Neil Perry, James Viles, Martin Benn and Peter Gilmore.

Mark Best cooked smoked native oyster, sea vegetables and native honey ale, and Brent Savage created a dish of korobuta pork belly and wattle crumb.

"I think we've been too afraid for too long to apply our cooking skills, our brains and our creativity to our own Australianess, and our own Asianess, and this dinner is an important turning point," Durack said.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 October 2013