Chef Ben Shewry spends part of each day meticulously foraging for wild ingredients in local parks, alleyways and the coast of Melbourne.
His efforts have paid off. Attica, the Melbourne restaurant where he is executive chef, broke into the San Pellegrino 2013 list of the world's 50 best restaurants at a respectable 21 earlier this year.
The 36-year-old New Zealand native, who published the cookbook "Origin" last year, talked to Reuters about his cooking philosophies and history.
Q: How did you first get into cooking?
A: I got into cooking when I was five years old in rural New Zealand. I had a grandmother who was a very economical cook and provided good food for her family for a long time. My parents ran a sheep and cattle farm, so their primary job was producing food. My father produced meat from the cattle and the sheep that he reared and slaughtered for us. My mother grew all of her own vegetables and we were pretty self-sufficient.
Just being around that environment probably led me wanting to pursue a career. But I'm still not really sure to this day how I made the decision to become a chef at age five, especially in rural New Zealand, where being a cook then was unheard of.
Q: What is the Australian food scene like? How do other Australian chefs push and drive you? Are they encouraging?
A: It's great, it's home now. It's a young scene still proving itself on a world stage, but I think it's held in a high regard. It has a very good quality of ingredients and a lot of restaurants and chefs are very passionate.
There's huge encouragement from the Australian scene. That's about being part of a community, recognising that, and spending some quality time with people in the industry, sharing ideas and inspiration. There's a great feeling of camaraderie here. You don't feel any competitiveness with anybody.
Q: What sort of ingredients do you forage for and how do you know what to pick? What do they add to your dishes?
A: We forage for over 100 different species of wild plants through the year. I know how to pick things because it was part of a family and cultural history. In New Zealand and Australia, we have history going back thousands of years. Native Aboriginal Australians foraged extensively and were one of the pre-eminent groups of foragers. We have that history to draw on as cooks in Australia, and that's what I did when I started Attica.
My father taught me (foraging) as a boy growing up in an isolated area in New Zealand. It quite often supplemented our diet with wild shellfish that my father had picked or dived for in the coast. Our father taught us some basic plants we could eat so we had survival skills. It's been a lifelong thing.
(The ingredients) speak of the area which the restaurant is in. A lot of interesting native plants are available to us here, completely different to other parts of the world. When you eat at our restaurant and eat these less common plants, that's what gives the food its unique flavour.
Q: Where and how long do you forage for every day? What happens if you don't find anything?
A: My chefs forage as well. It depends on the season - in summer, there's not many things to pick, so we might spend maybe one hour each day. In winter or spring, where there's a lot more variety, we might spend up to three or four hours trying to locate some interesting herbs.
As far as location is concerned, we don't really talk about that. We don't want there to be undue pressure in the ecosystems we forage in. There's a vast array of herbs along the coast where I live, on the Balnarring peninsula.
We grow a lot of our own herbs and ingredients. On some levels, that's replaced a certain extent of the foraging, but not completely. If we're sick of serving the same things over and over, we would look to our garden to provide these ingredients for us.
ARTICHOKE, SHEEP'S MILK YOGHURT, ALMONDS
Artichokes
5 g (1/8 oz) natural vitamin C powder (non-acidic)
5 g (1/8 oz) natural citric acid
2 g (1/16 oz) table salt
1 litre (35 fl oz/4 cups) water, at room temperature
6 small globe artichokes
2 Jerusalem artichokes, gently scrubbed and cut into 2 cm (3/4 inch) rounds
15 ml (1/2 fl oz) extra virgin olive oil
5 ml (1/6 fl oz) strained lemon juice
sea salt flakes, to taste
Mix the vitamin C powder, citric acid, table salt and water together until dissolved.
Prepare the globe artichokes by removing the outer green leaves and trimming off the tops. With a turning knife, peel back the green part of the stalk until you reach the soft tender white flesh. With each cut, dip the artichoke into the citrus stock to prevent discolouration. Use a melon baller or a sharpened teaspoon to remove the hairy choke in the middle. Gently break off 12 tender yellow leaves and store in the citrus stock. If any of the tips of your tender leaves are purple, they will need to be trimmed off with a pair of scissors as the purple parts are often inedible.
Place the leaves in the refrigerator until needed. Drain and pat dry on paper towel when ready to serve.
Place the globe and Jerusalem artichokes into 2 separate vacuum pouches with the citrus stock and vacuum-pack on 100 per cent in a chamber vacuum sealer.
Place both bags in a steamer and steam until tender - this will take about 15 minutes for the globe artichokes and about 30 minutes for the Jerusalem artichokes. When ready, remove from the steamer and cool to room temperature in the bags.
When ready to serve, halve each globe artichoke lengthways and warm in a small saucepan with the Jerusalem artichokes and 60 ml (1/4 cup) of the cooking liquor and the olive oil. Season with the lemon juice and sea salt.
TO FINISH
4 x 1 mm (1/32 inch) thick slices of kohlrabi (use a mandoline)
few drops of lemon juice
150 g (5 1/2 oz) sheep's milk yoghurt, whisked and lightly seasoned with salt
50 g (13/4 oz) organic raw almonds, lightly toasted and halved
12 wild cabbage leaves
8 wild milk thistle leaves
28 wild cabbage buds
10 ml (1/3 fl oz)extra virgin frantoio olive oil
Place the kohlrabi slices in a vacuum pouch with the lemon juice and a few drops of water and vacuum-pack on 100 per cent for 40 seconds in a chamber vacuum sealer.
To plate, spread the yoghurt over the base of each plate. Place the globe artichokes on the yoghurt and then the Jerusalem artichokes. Scatter over the toasted almonds and garnish with the cabbage leaves and buds, artichoke leaves and kohlrabi slices. Dress the plates with a few drops of the olive oil and serve.
