A TOAST TO VEGEMITE
Chefs are spreading the love for Vegemite as they explore its possibilities beyond the breakfast table and lunchbox, writes PAT NOURSE.
Chefs are spreading the love for Vegemite as they explore its possibilities.
Breakfast lunch and tea? Chefs in Australia have played with Vegemite on and off over the years, but right now everyone’s favourite yeasty spread is really having a moment in the kitchens of our leading restaurants and cafés.
Followers of Ben Shewry’s Instagram feed will notice that he has just doubled down on Attica’s commitment to Vegemite (first made three years ago with Gazza’s Vegemite pie), experimenting with that mum-lunch classic Salada crackers with tomato and Vegemite. This being a restaurant that charges a cool $275 a head for dinner, of course, the tomatoes are grown by the team, the heavily buttered Salada ain’t Arnott’s and the “Vegemite” is made from scratch using black garlic and other bespoke ingredients that aren’t known to be part of Cyril Percy Callister’s original 1923 formulation.
Melbourne is Vegemite’s hometown and Shewry’s fellow chefs over at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal made headlines in 2017 when they débuted a Vegemite-driven dessert. It was months in the making, and the kitchen team felt the pressure. “It’s Vegemite in Australia – we have to get this right,” said chef Ashley Palmer-Watts at the time.
“If it’s not great, we’ll be nailed for it.”
The dish remains on the menu today, listed at $30 as “ice-cream with Vegemite”, incorporating toasted barley cream, yeast caramel, macadamia, puffed spelt and, to really drive the toast connection home, sourdough crumble.
At Anchovy in Richmond, meanwhile, Thi Li dips into the school lunches of yore for inspiration and comes up with “tempura Vegemite, Laughing Cow”: a deep-fried cube of cheese custard infused with Vegemite and served with whipped cheese. At Kensington Street Social in Sydney, the Vegemite is on the drinks list, appearing in the Vegemitini. In Canberra it’s whipped through ricotta for breakfast at High Road, and a similar approach is taken at Smoke, atop Barangaroo House, where Vegemite ricotta joins padrón peppers and crispbread on the bar menu. At the brand-new d’Arenberg Cube in McLaren Vale, Vegemite mayonnaise accompanies “bush coals” of hot-smoked barramundi blackened with onion ash, wattleseed and mountain pepper.
Why so much Vegemite right now? Its very ubiquity makes it an easy go-to – the miso of Australia, ready to add a dash of dark-brown complexity to anything it touches.
Yu-ching Lee, a chef who makes pastries for Paper Bird in Sydney, recently started putting cheese and Vegemite twists in the cabinet, and says that she started using it simply “because it’s there”. “I’d been making delicious XO cheese sticks, but the Paper Bird kitchen changed the
“It’s the miso of Australia, ready to add a dash of dark-brown complexity to anything it touches.”
menu and stopped making XO sauce, so I switched to Vegemite. It’s also vegetarian-friendly, which is a plus.”
But Vegemite has been a staple in an awful lot of kitchens for an awfully long time without ever really jumping onto restaurant menus in a big way. You could point to an intersection between locavorism, nostalgia for Australiana and a fascination with all things fermented. Where else (apart, perhaps, from a can of Fosters) are you going to find all those things in one handy jar?
Chase Kojima, the American-born chef of Sokyo in Sydney and Kiyomi on the Gold Coast, says Vegemite had him stumped when he first arrived in Australia seven years ago, but thinking of it as Australian miso (a “harsh” miso, admittedly) has unlocked its possibilities in the kitchen for him. It appears everywhere in his cuisine, from the Vegemite and shichimi roasted almonds at the bar to the lamb chops grilled on the robata and served with charred eggplant purée in the restaurants. He’s even used it at the sushi counter, making tiny Vegemite-toast croûtons as a complement to poached Moreton Bay bugs. It’s the perfect intersection, he says, between the Australian flavour profile and the Japanese. “You can’t get this taste just from normal red or white miso.”
Back at Attica, Ben Shewry says it’s the kitsch, playful aspect of serving Vegemite in a fine-dining restaurant, and the passion Australians have for it that appeals to him.
“To be honest, I don’t even like Vegemite much myself.”
Topher Boehm, head brewer and co-founder of Wildflower Brewing & Blending, remembers precisely the moment he knew he’d made a beer he could be proud of. “I sat my wife down right here and had the beer arranged in a basket. I set the whole scene for her,” the Texan says, gesturing to the rustic wooden table in his 1890s, timber-beamed former metal foundry warehouse in Marrickville, in Sydney’s inner west. In the past, she’d found many beers were too bitter for her palate. Tentatively, she took a sip. “It’s really good, Topher,” she said.
It wasn’t long before some variation of this phrase was being uttered throughout the wider epicurean community across Australia. Since its launch last year, Wildflower has spread like, well, wildfire. It started with a small release of two wild-yeast ales, Gold and Amber, in April; and a cellar door, where they also sell a table beer, opened in June. The beer is now stocked in a range of restaurants, from Pizza Madre down the road, to Attica in Melbourne and Franklin in Hobart.
“While there are other breweries in Australia making and specialising in wild-fermented beer, the beers of Wildflower have a completeness that comes from them being thoughtful and considered in their production,” says Paper Bird co-owner and manager Ned Brooks, who stocks both the Gold and Amber at his restaurant in Sydney’s Potts Point. “Topher is a high-functioning individual and I see this as being reflected in the end product.”
High functioning is one way of putting it; high achieving is another. The sixth child of a baker and an electrical engineer, Boehm was always fascinated by pulling things apart to see how they worked. Originally, he was headed for a career in physics, but after a short stint in shoemaking that came about not so much from a love of shoes but a thirst for a challenge (“I was less interested in the end result than the process,” he says), he found himself drawn to the curious mix of scientific precision and fatalistic wizardry required in beer making.
Boehm moved from Dallas to Australia in 2009, and learned the trade at Sydney’s Flat Rock Brew Café and Batch Brewing Co. He delved deeper into wild-yeast brewing and blending in Belgium and France, until he and his brother-in-law Chris Allen decided to branch out on their own. The pair started a business they hoped would deliver a product they loved and give them the freedom to spend more time with their families.
The brand’s point of difference is its use of wild yeasts, found on foraged NSW plants including wattle blossoms and banksia. These are combined with a single strain of brewer’s yeast for their fermentations. Wort, the base liquid for the beer, is made at Batch in Marrickville, and Boehm ferments then matures his beers in wine barrels on site. He then blends different barrels of various ages to achieve his desired flavour profile. “It’s a bit like being [Roald Dahl’s] BFG,” he says. “Dream catching. A bit of this, a bit of that.”
But Boehm would rather people focus less on the process and more on taste. He believes Wildflower is a drinkable beer to be enjoyed in a similar way to wine – with good friends and with good food but without too much fanfare. To that end, Wildflower ales are unapologetically subtle. Low-key. Gentle, even. They’re a far cry from the aggressive layers of hops and acid that characterise so many current craft-beer trends. “People are sick of having their faces ripped off,” Boehm says.
Instead, he’s tried to create a lighter flavour. Both the Gold and the Amber possess a freshness that pairs well with food; the Amber sits comfortably next to a caramelised rack of ribs, say, while the Gold finds a natural home with anything with a bit of spice. Both are beers that you’d want in the fridge after a day at the cricket. “I don’t want it to sound more complicated than that,” Boehm says. “People assume there’s a sophistication to what we do. But at the end of the day, it’s just fucking beer. And I can honestly say that if I make something my wife loves, I’m happy.” Wildflower Brewing and Blending, 11-13 Brompton St, Marrickville, NSW. Open Fri-Sat 1pm-8pm. wildflowerbeer.com