Native f lavours

Indigenous plants are coming on to the culinary scene, thanks to a couple with a taste for bush ingredients

There would be lots of new tastes and smells Asher Gilding and Franca Zingler promised when I talked to them about the dinner exploring indigenous ingredients they were planning for Slow Food Hobart.

The couple from Port Cygnet Catering Co certainly delivered, in what they revealed was a case of the teacher staying just ahead of the class.

Asher’s experience of native foods was of “flavourings and spice”. And Franca comes from Germany and specialises in patisserie, so she was not the full bottle either.

They had Trish Hodge to fall back on. She runs a business, mina-nina, specialising in indigenous tourism and events.

It is her ambition to recover the lost knowledge about using native foods and share it. She goes about this by talking to elders and spending time on country.

Asher and Franca began their initiation exploring Dru Point at Margate with Trish and her father Bill Hodge.

The first surprise, said Asher, was a big clump of sag grass – an unappetising looking cutting grass, but Trish pulled some out by the roots, peeled it a bit and revealed “a beautiful flesh with the texture of white beans, and the taste of them and raw almonds”. Not only that, it was something “you could actually fill up on”.

The dinner at Drysdale House was for 60 – too many to fill up on sag grass – but some was used on rye and wattle seed crackers, served with smoked sour cream and sag, samphire and pigface – a salty crunchy treat.

The other canape was the lightest pastry wrapped around a curd cheese made that day dusted with saltbush and sea lettuce.

Franca said the smell of correa alba was very new to her. “It is lemony, almost like menthol and the more you smell it the more interesting it becomes,” she said. She used it on its own in a pre-dessert granita.

Asher and Franca actually introduced Trish to a flavour – the little yellow flowers of ice plant, or warrigal greens.

Trish said she had never tasted it because she had always waited for the fruit, which taste of mangoes, strawberries and paw paw. Asher and Franca were struck by how much the flowers tasted of leatherwood honey and used a single flower on top of each dessert with the theme of natives and invasive weeds.

The invasive weeds were represented by gorse flowers infused to flavour ice cream. Scottish gorse has a surprisingly tropical taste. Very alert palates can detect mango, coconut and banana in them. Pine needles were infused in cream.

The natives were represented in a lemon myrtle meringue and a torched anise myrtle marshmallow. Some of the flavours may have been difficult to detect but the overall deliciousness did not escape anyone.

The entreeee was a soft-boiled egg rolled in native herbs and spices, includingding mountain pepper, lemonon myrtle and dried saltbush,sh, on a nest of iceplant andnd pig face.

A sauce of smoked onions,ons, kunzea and baeckea wass served over wallaby. Among the side dishes were oyster mushrooms sauteed withh sea lettuce and a little pickled applee – “flavours thatat funnily enough go together” Asher so correctly stated.

It was a splendid showcase of Tasmanian indigenous food from cooks who at the beginning of the process “had no clear idea of what we were doing”.

Trish found them great pupils, but also liked how they used the ingredients in completely different ways from the traditional.

But she stresses that it would not do for all of us to go beating about the bush for native plants.

Trish is preparing a data base of 220 Tasmanian plants, but was advised to leave one that was traditionally eaten off the list – because there are only five individual plants left in the state.

Instead of bushwhacking buy at Plants of Tasmania at Ridgeway, Hobart, Pulchella Nursery at Buckland or Red Breast at Margate.

“The more you smell it the more interesting it becomes”

FRANCA ZINGLER ON THE HUMBLE CORRE A