Kitchen spy: Brian Schmidt

Brian Schmidt, ANU astrophysicist, won the Nobel Prize in 2011 for his discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and he posited the existence of mysterious dark energy to account for it. When he's not looking to the stars, Schmidt's gaze is on the ground, at his vineyard near Canberra, where he lives with wife Jenny Gordon and 16-year-old son (the other, 18, is at university), and where he makes Maipenrai and Amungula Creek pinot noir and has planted a trufferie (no truffles to date). To relax, he cooks, and sometimes makes his own smallgoods.

Last night's dinner

Pizza. I've learned to go Italian style and keep it really simple - great fresh tomatoes, salami on one, prosciutto and basil on the other.

I also make onion and pear pizza, and gorgonzola and fig, using figs from my trees. The oven takes an hour-and-a-half to heat up, which gives us time to head down and feed the horses. When I got the call from Sweden that I had won the Nobel Prize, I was making green chicken curry, which is still a regular fall-back meal.

Most memorable meal

It was 1998 in Paris. I remember the date because when I got back to the hotel after dinner I found out I had won Science magazine's ''breakthrough of the year''. I had never had a decent meal in Paris, so I had asked the concierge [where to go]. When we got to the restaurant, the chef said, ''So you're interested in food and wine? Here's a wine from where I grew up.'' It was a nice chardonnay and clearly wasn't Burgundy, so I said, ''Is it a Macon-Vire?'' It was a lucky guess but he was extremely excited.

He looked kind of dubious when I got there but as soon as I guessed the wine I could do no wrong. We started with crayfish salad with truffles, then duck. It was an amazing meal, partially because of the theatre but the food was superb. I can't remember the name of the place. I looked for it once, but when you have a great meal like that you don't ever want to try to repeat it because it will never be the same the second time.

My toolkit

I nearly electrocuted myself modifying my Rancilio Silvia coffee machine. I wired in a PID [proportional-integral-derivative], so I could control the temperature to extract coffee at 92 degrees. I've had the machine for 11 or 12 years but I'm restricting myself to coffee on the weekends now. I love my food processor, a Cuisinart I brought with me from the United States when I moved here in 1994. The food processors in Australia suck, they really do. The Cuisinarts are just really brilliant, really heavy duty. The thing is built like a Russian tank and it does not stop for love nor money. I use my KitchenAid mixer all the time, for when I want to make a cake or genoise, meringues, when you really need to beat for a long time. It has a dough hook, which I use for making sourdough, but breadmaking is one of the things that's suffered since the Nobel Prize. I make pizzas once a week in my wood-fired pizza oven [a Beech oven, a $6000 present to himself when he won one of astronomy's most prestigious prizes]. I smoke chillies for Mexican dishes in the oven, too, when I get time.

My vices

Almonds or cashews are one of my vices. I am, like almost every other person in Australia, addicted to Tim Tams, but I try to keep them out of the house. I tend to eat too much and I don't exercise enough.

I'm cooking

We eat almost no prepared food.

We make our own jam, we have our own chickens. I have a sourdough starter in my fridge. I love to cook, that's one of my outlets, so I typically cook Friday, Saturday and Sunday and then I might cook one meal during the week if I'm around. I'm probably gone a third of the time. We have an orchard that produces a fair bit of fruit and we're very good at growing raspberries - we probably picked 10kg to 15kg last year. We make little custards with raspberries in the bottom, a roll with raspberries, bombes, raspberry ice-cream.

I'm drinking

Right now, I'm drinking Rockford 2001 Basket Press Shiraz from my cellar. It really is the pure expression of Barossa shiraz; not a subtle wine, rich but not overpowering. I'm a fan of Curly Flat pinot noir in good vintages.

I don't get to drink my own wine because I don't have any - it sells too fast.

The staples

My pantry

I always have dried wild mushrooms (porcini, morel, chanterelle), which are useful for risotto and Italian dishes. I have virgin olive oil - typically I stick with Australian but I mix it around a little bit. I always have good quality parmesan and prosciutto on hand - Parma ham or San Daniele - and a good balsamic vinegar. I make my own balsamic but at this point Modena wins. I also make my own prosciutto and bresaola when I have time. The first time I made prosciutto it scared me, because it seems like a big leap of faith to take a cut of pork, add salt and not expect it to kill you after you leave it for eight months. The second time I was over-confident and I screwed it up.

My fridge

I usually have a freezer full of high-quality meat so I can do a steak whenever I want and I always have home-made chicken stock - I just boil up whatever leftover chicken we have and reduce it to hell. I add aromatics later.