Eating alpaca: fibre industry eyes meaty expansion

In Peruvian chef Alejandro Saravia's home country, alpaca meat has been part of the national diet since Inca times.

Photo: Peruvian chef Alejandro Saravia hosted an alpaca dinner at his Melbourne restaurant Pastuso. (Cath McAloon)

Now he is introducing it to Australian diners.

Mr Saravia, the head chef at Peruvian restaurant Pastuso in Melbourne's ACDC Lane, recently hosted an alpaca 'head to tail' dinner where diners ate their way through five courses of alpaca.

They started with an alpaca brain ravioli, then moved onto alpaca neck terrine, alpaca strip loin, grilled alpaca cutlet and slow cooked alpaca shoulder.

"During these kind of dinners, our main goal is to present the meat, and also to show there are different ways to cook it. There are different textures in the different cuts," Mr Saravia said.

He says alpaca meat is incredibly versatile, and very healthy and lean, with a low percentage of cholesterol.

"The flavour, if you want to compare it to something, it would be between beef and lamb."

The chef says he's seen growing interest in Australia in eating alpaca.

"I think nowadays, because people are getting more health conscious about what they are eating and also they are a bit more adventurous in trying new meats, the market is more open to eat alpaca as a meat.

"It was a bit difficult in the beginning to introduce it, but slowly people have been tasting it ... and then they start trying it and they start talking about it."

Until now, the Australian alpaca industry has been predominantly focussed on the animals' fleece.

General manager of Illawara Prime Alpaca, Harvey Gollan, says as producers look to diversify and make the industry more sustainable, alpaca meat is becoming a more important part of their business.

"It is a fleece based industry, but what we say is, there's fleece-base, and there's genetic-base, the selling of animals for their genetics, but we say there's a third leg. You can't have a stool with two legs, you need something else and we've always said we need a third leg to the industry and that's a meat industry," Mr Gollan said.

"We can't have 15-year-old wethers running around the paddock eating our pasture, without being productive and at that stage the fleece isn't there."

Mr Gollan's company is the main alpaca meat supplier in Australia, and he says they are working to grow the alpaca meat industry at a sustainable rate.

"We have distributors all around Australia who supply into restaurants, and week after week after week, we get more and more interest.

"We made sure we went slowly. We're still going slowly, to make sure it's a great industry for the alpaca industry.

"We've had export orders. We don't fill them. We don't want to fill them because we want to make sure Australia is right first," Mr Gollan said.

Source : ABC Rural  Catherine McAloon December 1st 2014