Artist’s food journey leads to creations for ‘Ripe’
Amy Melchior featured in the Otago Daily Times arts pages last week for her work as a talented encaustic painter, but she also has a passion for food. She talked to while in Dunedin about her food journey.
REALLY spicy street food is Amy Melchior’s type of food. The Auckland cook visited Dunedin last week to open her exhibition of encaustic paintings, but when she is not painting she is in the kitchen.
She is the woman behind the art, styling, writing, food testing and styling in the popular Ripe cookbooks created by Angie Redfern who owns the Ripe cafes in Auckland.
Melchior’s food journey began as a child growing up in the Hawke’s Bay and going with her parents to their night work at a local restaurant.
‘‘I ended up in the kitchen helping where I could. It’s where I wanted to be.’’
She remembers as a child being in the backyard happily ‘‘cooking up’’ random things she had found in the garden and trying to feed it to people.
At about 8 years old she was making brandy snap baskets at the restaurant and helping out with the puddings.
By her early teens she was helping out at an Americanstyle milk bar making pies and doing prep after school.
In her late teens she moved on to a ‘‘funky cafe’’ in Havelock North as a kitchen hand and filling in when the chef was indisposed.
‘‘I thought this is quite easy and I really enjoyed doing it.’’
Then when she moved to Sydney for art school she kept working in cafes.
‘‘So I just fell into it really.’’ Backing that experience up was a family upbringing where food was ‘‘intrinsic’’. Both her parents were good cooks and had a good vegetable garden so having capsicum or eggplant on the menu was not unusual — much to her friends’ confusion.
‘‘Mum and Dad had travelled extensively. So we had interesting food. We were not eating chops.’’
She returned to New Zealand for her 21st and stayed, getting work in Auckland and Waiheke cafes and restaurants before 20 years ago meeting Redfern and joining the team at Ripe.
‘‘I found my good food family.’’ Her first job at Ripe was as a baker as it is something she loves doing and is good at, if ‘‘not precise’’.
‘‘It’s a bit like art. Once you have got the knowledge you know what you can and cannot pull off. I like to experiment with different flavours and incorporate different spices.’’
She prefers savoury to sweet flavours but really enjoys the process of baking.
‘‘Even as a kid I’d be baking the birthday cakes and taking baking to parties. My mum wasn’t a good baker so I was the one that made sweet things.’’
She attributes her skill as a baker to learning at the bench of her grandmother and believes the gene has been passed on to one of her sons.
‘‘He’s an amazing baker. At 8 he made French macaroons for the very first time using the internet and following a recipe and they were perfect; better than I ever made. I said he was showing me up.’’
Her love of savoury food came from her time in Asia and India. Their cuisine was her ‘‘go to’’. She also loves Japanese, Moroccan and Middle Eastern food.
‘‘I’m a flavour girl. I think Angie calls my food ‘‘a party in your mouth’’. You taste it all. When you are biting into something you go ‘oh yeah’ immediately.’’
They are flavours she serves up at home as well with her boys occasionally asking to just have pasta.
‘‘I say no it’s boring.’’
Her go to is a curry of any kind which can be served up in 15 minutes or if cooking is not ‘‘on the cards’’ an antipasto board with olives, dips and spreads that could be shoved into pitas.
‘‘We’re definitely not a roast family.’’