Foraging off the beach
YOU HAVEN’T visited New Zealand for nine years. What is your impression of the cuisine here since then? I was in Rotorua back then filming for Better Homes and Gardens. I was pregnant. To be honest, I didn’t get a chance to taste much of your food. But this time, I’ve been struck by the produce which is pristine and beautiful and the way your chefs respect it. That’s surprisingly familiar with the way that chefs approach food in Melbourne, and Australia. While here you’ve tasted menus from finalists Logan Brown, Ti Kouka, Zibibbo, Hummingbird and Artisan restaurants. Tell us about that. Most of the dishes we’ve tasted today focus on the local region, and there’s a slight obsessiveness with that. We’ve tasted some stand-out dishes in each of the five restaurants. What we’ve been looking for is the best total, overall menu – the winner was Zibibbo (comments opposite). What’s your impression of the Wellington food scene? Wellington is multi-cultural but that’s not prevalent in its food. It’s more influenced by English or Anglo-Saxon cuisine styles. In Melbourne, our migrant influence is huge. Migrants have been growing eggplants since the 1960s. What are your own cuisine influences? My father was born in Tunisia, and my heritage is Italian, from Sicily actually. My mother is English/Irish. I currently run a pizza restaurant, but we make simple, purist pizzas rather than experimental ones. We’re in our 12th year – we opened it in St Kilda because we wanted a pizza restaurant in our own neighbourhood. You’ve been a judge on My Kitchen Rules since the show started seven years ago. Tell us about the rise of cooking shows and their influence on home kitchens. There’s always room for a great food show. We have 4 million viewers watching the final. One thing that the programme does do is that it educates children and youth about cooking. It’s the kids who look up the recipes and want to cook them. You don’t like the trend towards people spending more time instagramming their restaurant meals than they do enjoying them. Yes, live in the moment. I’ve been in some of the best restaurants where people are spending all this time getting the perfect shot rather than enjoying their meal. I was at an amazing restaurant in San Sebastian having dinner and the room was full of people snapping away on their phones and cameras, looking for the right light. How did you start out? I got an apprenticeship when I was 16 at Austin Hospital. It did mean I left school early but I was running my own kitchen at 20. I set up Icebergs Dining Room in Sydney in 2002, and I’m about to release my sixth cookbook, New Kitchen.
LEA BRAMLEY is passionate about ‘‘legal weed’’. For those in the know, the seafood guru means seaweed – brown, red and green clumps that wash up on the beach and often cause annoyance.
Living near Tora, on the Wairarapa south coast, and running a live lobster export business with her husband, Neil, Bramley returns home with handfuls of colourful seaweed washed up on her beach at low tide, which she either poaches, roasts, steams or dries, to add to bread, soups and salads.
She is keen to spread the word about the nutritional benefits of a food source that Maori discovered long ago and which Japanese households devour, eating up to 3.5 kilograms a year of varieties like wakame and nori. In her kitchen, she turns her favourite weeds – paddle weed, wakame and bull kelp – into stock and adds them to her seafood dishes. She also boils seaweed tea. ‘‘Our family consumes seaweed every day. The good news is that none are poisonous so you can simply practice your own seashore taste test by having a nibble to decide which are most palatable.’’
Bramley is running an event during Wellington On a Plate to show how to forage and use seaweed. Joining Wairarapa chef and caterer Jo Crabb, of Careme cooking school, she will take participants along the seashore, returning to Stonyridge Lodge to turn gathered sea vegetables into mouth-watering dishes. While the common perception is that seaweed is used as a seasoning, such as karenga fronds scattered on top of dishes, or added to miso soup, Bramley says: ‘‘We’re going to go way beyond that.
‘‘New Zealand is such a wonderful place to access seaweed and we have such clean water.’’
You have to get a permit to harvest seaweed but can gather it for personal use. ‘‘But most of us don’t know how to use it. Part of the reason that we should have seaweed in the diet is that it contains every vitamin and mineral known to man.’’ It’s particularly high in iodine and selenium, which we lack in New Zealand soil, and Bramley says many of the hundreds of varieties of seaweed are found in our oceans and on our shores. ‘‘Seaweed helps balance the body. It’s the food of the future. As long as it hasn’t been lying around for a long time, it’s safe to eat.’’
Although the event is still three weeks away, Crabb will serve a menu of seaweed soup, Welsh laver bread, fresh fish crumbed in seaweed served with mayonnaise, and a seaweed salad.
Says Crabb: ‘‘We want to open people’s minds to eating things they find, and also to try new tastes out there. I tried the laver bread and while it didn’t look great, we put some lemon juice on it. The thing it tasted most like was oysters, but with a different texture. It was quite a revelation.’’ Green and brown seaweed: Paddle weed, wakame and bull kelp. Blanche in boiling water to turn them a vibrant green. Their flavour and texture can seem unusual so add small amounts to casseroles, soups, smoothies, breads and cakes. Brown seaweeds are high in carbohydrates, selenium and iodine. Purple/red Karengo-type seaweeds can be sustainably harvested in spring by cutting or plucking them from the rocks at low tide, leaving the bottom third of these paper thin plants still attached to the rocks. High in iron, with 550 species growing here, and a close relative of the Japanese nori, used for sushi.