Tasmanian Produce

If a region’s food starts with nature’s gifts, then it’s little wonder Tasmania is often referred to as Australia’s gourmet state.

In the distinctly seasonal climate, the abundance of the surrounding oceans and the soils, rivers and geography of the islands, nature has been generous.

While Tasmania is famous for the export of seafood, cheeses and primary products, more important to those who live here is the fact that you can still dive along the coastal reefs and off-shore islands and get a feed of crayfish or abalone. You can still pull mussels and oysters from the rocks as the aborigines have done for over 20,000 years. Still catch flounder and jag squid by the light of a torch, net shoaled anchovies and whitebait and bring home a feed of trout from the alpine lakes and streams. Quail, hares, pheasant and fallow deer still run wild. Boletus mushrooms, morels and chanterelles can be found in secret places. Fishing boats bring in blue fin tuna and giant west coast crabs. And fruit still comes from the orchards that supplied IXL jams to the nation and the world for over 100 years and earned Tasmania its nickname, the Apple Isle.

Grape vines came to Hobart with the first free settlers whence cuttings were taken to establish many of the early vineyards in Victoria and South Australia. German immigrants, escaping religious persecution in Silesia, brought the first vines to the East Coast, part of the same migration that introduced riesling to the Barossa Valley. Tasmanian wine won its first gold medal at the Paris Exhibition in 1848, vineyards flourished until the 1870s and then, except for a bizarre experiment on Maria Island, disappeared for almost 100 years.

The Cascade and Boags Breweries were among the first manufactures to be established in the colony. Distilleries – both legal and illegal – abounded. It seems the early settlers were adept at fermenting almost anything that grew on trees into alcohol. On the east coast in particular, stories of the potent effect on unsuspecting visitors of these apple ciders, fruit wines and cherry brandies and of pigs becoming drunkenly lecherous on the left overs have become the stuff of hilarious folklore.

In the modern sweep of globalisation Cascade and Boags have passed out of Tasmanian hands, leaving room for the emergence in local affections of Hazards Ale, Tasmania’s first new brewer in almost 200 years.

Today, wine is once again a successful and well-established industry with over 100 vineyards producing outstanding, cool-climate wines, particularly sparkling, chardonnays, rieslings and pinot noirs. Great apple ciders, fruit wines and liqueurs are still produced – now all legal and widely distributed. The first distillery license in over 150 years was issued in 1992 and the Lark Distillery now produces single malt whiskys from local barley, spring water and highland peat that are hauntingly close to the best of Scotland.

Modern aquaculture has commercialized the production of many of Tasmania’s traditional seafoods such as scallops and abalone and introduced the farming of new varieties like Atlantic salmon, ocean trout and Pacific oysters. Wakame seaweed was introduced along the east coast in ballast spillage from Japanese freighters and is now collected for both culinary and medicinal purposes - as is bull kelp, washed onto the shores of King Island by the great storms of the roaring forties.

Quail, deer, Cape Barren goose and other game are now farmed for the table as is milk-fed lamb and veal. Commercial mushroom farms produce five tonnes weekly of champignons, Swiss browns, oysters and shitakes. And, in the first few weeks of winter 2000, over 1.5kg of black truffles were dug up in an exciting beginning to the infant truffle industry, providing the first fresh truffles ever in the world to be enjoyed on Bastille Day.

Lactos and King Island Dairies are among Australia’s most successful and their influence has spread to a proliferation of smaller producers making wonderfully individual farmhouse cheeses such as Heidi Gruyere, Tasmanian Highland chevre, Pyengana Cheddar and a wide variety of washed rinds, blues, camemberts and bries.

Thus has man built on nature’s generosity to produce some of Australia’s best food products.

But in the island’s restaurants and eating houses the picture is somehwhat more varied and, overall, less successful.

In recent decades Australian food has been Asianized, Italianized, Californianized, Mediterraneanized and multi-culturalized sufficiently to have produced what is now claimed by many as an ‘Australian cuisine’. Much of this –izing has passed Tasmania by. It is still, largely, an anglo-saxon population without the wide cultural and culinary enrichment migration has brought to the larger Australian population.

Our ethnic restaurants, with only a few exceptions, are still mostly of the chicken chow mien, pizza and spag bol varieties and, while most mainstream restaurants boast proudly their use of premium Tasmanian products, only a selected few treat them with the care and respect they deserve.

But the exceptions are often exceptional. The innovative food of a restaurant like Mit Zitrone (now closed) is exciting enough to grace the action streets of Sydney or Melbourne and pop the eyes and tatste buds of fashionable food critics. Fish doesn’t come any fresher than when straight off their own boat to the kitchen of Madge Malloys. A chef like Don Cameron, at Ripples Restaurant, is a master at combining the tantalizing flavours of Asia with the freshest of local produce. Toshi Ogihara can lead you gently by the palate into the exquisite intricacies of Japanese food. Navarro’s has a wonderful Italian touch with game. And, more and more, chefs and restaurants are beginning to appreciate and use the rich regional resources they have available on their doorstep, to fashion their menus and cooking to the seasons and to seek that level of excellence increasingly demanded by locals and tourists alike.

As regional differences in food and wine become better appreciated and sought after, it is a restaurant like Lebrina which perhaps points to the future for Tasmania. For this is a restaurant where all Australia’s "cuisine–izing" influences have been quietly absorbed and refined to simply become another part of Scott Minervini’s kitchen armoury rather than fashion statements. Where the stars on the menu come from long-cultivated partnerships with specialty local producers and winemakers of excellence. And where the styles of cooking move effortlessly through the seasons from the slow-cooked, richly-textured game braises of autumn and winter confits to the veal, lamb, asparagus and cheeses of the spring flush and on to summer’s abundance of seafood, fruits and berries.

And, if all else fails, there are few places left in the world where you can catch a sea-run trout 10 minutes from the GPO and wash it down with a wine from the vineyard on the hillside behind you.

Greame Phillips

See also Greame's piece on Tasmanian wine and produce and Andrew Corrigan's essay on Tasmanian wine and Mietta on Tasmania in the winter.

© Greame Phillips 1999