Chefs Peter Gilmore, Ben Shewry and Neil Perry present Australian cuisine
When award-winning Sydney chef Peter Gilmore thinks of showing the international food community the heart of culinary Australia, he thinks far beyond the nation's "great" fresh ingredients.
"For me it's about expressing the freedom of cooking that we have in Australia," says Gilmore. "We don't have a very traditional, laid down set of rules around our culinary culture so we are able to take our multicultural influences and infuse it in our food in a very subtle and intricate way. We have the freedom to explore ideas and the freedom of spirit as Australian chefs to express that through our food."
Like smoked and confit pig jowl served with blacklip abalone and koji rice grains with shiitake mushrooms and seaweed – the cross-cultural main dish Gilmore will be presenting alongside chefs Ben Shewry and Neil Perry at the Invite the World to Dinner gala event in Hobart on November 14, the grand finale of Tourism Australia's Restaurant Australia campaign, aimed at acquainting the world with the food Down Under.
What Gilmore refers to as a "subtle Japanese-Chinese influence" will also be evident in Neil Perry's contribution to the event, which begins with canapes cooked over an open flame at Glenorchy Art and Sculpture Park before moving across to the Museum of Old and New Art for the main course and desserts.
International food and wine experts will taste the fusion in the kombu butter dousing coal-fired Tasmanian lobster eaten outdoors while taking in the view of mountains and water. But the same multicultural influence will be present in the seared wagyu, Japanese cattle bred in Victoria by David Blackmore, a man Perry considers one of Australia's finest producers.
Like Gilmore, Perry is keen to reference spirit of place as much as provide an exploration for the palate.
"I would imagine our guests will expect to taste our amazing lobster and marron and abalone, and to experience that Asian influence," he muses, noting that all three chefs will present two canapes, a main course and two tasting desserts, "but that incredible geography and sense of the spiritual in the landscape is just going to blow people away."
New Zealand-born Ben Shewry, known for his foraging of local seaweeds and grasses, intends to showcase indigenous ingredients – think South Australian red kangaroo served with bunya bunya (ground berries) sourced from Melbourne's Ripponlea Estate, red pepper berries from Tasmania and red carrots from the Mornington Peninsula.
"Society here is a big melting pot – Melbourne has the largest Greek population outside Greece, the largest Italian population outside Italy – but one thing that is really important to me is to recognise the tribal owners of this land," he says.
"In a small way I would like this dinner to pay homage to them – to represent those fantastic native products here that are less known in our society and certainly not well known internationally at all."
That, says Shewry, and the rarity of a country that grows most of its own fresh produce across a vast and varied climate and geography.
"There is a uniqueness to Australian cuisine on that idea alone."