ACT NATURAL
Matt Stone’s mission to minimise waste is all about maximising taste. Get your hit in his new book, The Natural Chef.
Matt Stone’s mission to minimise waste is all about maximising taste. Get your hit in his new book, The Natural Chef.
Matt Stone wants you to think before you open your mouth. This month the chef, food-waste warrior and TV personality publishes his first cookbook, The Natural Cook, and he hopes it will encourage us to adopt more thoughtful cooking and eating habits. “Food should be much more than sustenance,” says Stone. “It should be a major part of your evening, of your day, of your morning – and we should talk about it.”
Stone heads the kitchen at Oakridge winery in Coldstream, in the Yarra Valley, with the help of his girlfriend and sous-chef, Jo Barrett (late of Tivoli Road Bakery). The couple hadn’t spent much time in the Yarra before arriving at Oakridge last September, but for Stone the experience has been oddly nostalgic, having started his career as an apprentice at a winery, Margaret River’s Leeuwin Estate.
Stone’s cooking is clever and generous. In the book, he makes fermenting and brining look easy and unfussy, and his enthusiasm for “all taste and no waste” and native ingredients is infectious. Making a curry? Swap kaffir lime leaves for the more local likes of lemon myrtle. “If people were willing to give these things a go it would really change the way they cook and look at food,” he says.
Stone didn’t train as a chef formally, but says he’s been “lucky enough to learn from good people”. Those people include David Coomer of Star Anise in Perth, who Stone cooked with for five years, and sustainability activist Joost Bakker, who handpicked Stone at just 22 to open eco-restaurant Greenhouse, also in Perth, before opening Silo (later renamed Brothl) with Bakker in Melbourne.
Thanks to Stone, Oakridge now has a chemical-free kitchen, three compost bays and almost 500 square metres of kitchen garden. He’s committed to using only Yarra Valley produce – eggs from Bakker’s daughters in nearby Monbulk, for instance, and river trout and Murray cod from the region. His beetroot served stalks and all shows Stone’s ethics at their simplest. “The beetroot tops are just as good as that bunch of kale next to it at the market, and too often we just discard them,” he says.
A whole chicken, meanwhile, might make a spicy Thai larb one night, the bones a broth the next. “It’s not hard to eat well, it just requires a bit of planning,” he says.
It might sound preachy if Stone wasn’t so likeable and his food so tasty.
“If you’re not making delicious food, then no one will want to eat it,” he says. “And, hey, that would be wasteful.” Oakridge, 864 Maroondah Hwy, Coldstream, Vic, (03) 9738 9900, oakridgewines.com.au