The food critic-turned <i>Gourmet Farmer</i> shows Stephanie Clifford-Smith inside his kitchen on his Tasmanian farm.
Five years ago chef Matthew Evans abandoned a successful career reviewing restaurants and moved to Tasmania to be closer to the source of his food. His original aim to own three chooks for fresh eggs has been surpassed by two substantial farms with fruit trees, vegetables, pigs, cows and more. His third series of Gourmet Farmer is screening on SBS.
My pantry Coronea Grove olive oil from Launceston. Cygneture Chocolate's burnt caramel hazelnut and almond clusters. Ferron rice (sometimes you just have to have risotto, even if you don't grow the rice yourself).
My fridge Tongola goat's cheese, unhomogenised milk (homogenisation not only kills the golden colour but also changes the way the milk tastes, smells and feels in the mouth), always some kind of cured pork, olives, pork fat rendered from our pigs in the absence of actual pork, which we use in pasta sauces and to fry up pancakes and roast potatoes in.
A pasta using heirloom tomatoes, purple garlic and a meatball mix using mince from a three-year-old Wessex saddleback pig, sage and home-cured nine-month-old pancetta (redolent of nutmeg, sage and rosemary). We finished with Bramley and St Edmund's Pippin apple crumble as pud, made with our home-grown apples.
A meal with everything grown in the minerally soil of Puglia, in Italy's heel, cooked wholly on coals and in a wood-fired oven. There was lamb, fennel, scamorza (smoked mozzarella), eggplant and capsicum. Everything tasted so much of itself, especially the vegetables, unlike the ones we often get here, which seem watery and bland by comparison.
George Biron, the original Aussie farmhouse cook doing paddock to plate, who opened his home, Sunnybrae, to punters in country Victoria a generation ago. Michael Pollan, for putting the spotlight on the abuse of nutritional science to sell us stuff we don't need and often shouldn't ingest. Keith Floyd, especially in Floyd on Fish, for proving to an apprentice trapped in a dodgy restaurant in Canberra there was great food out there - I just had to go and find it. Peter Cundall, because he's forgotten more about gardening in Tasmania than I'll ever know.
A few old cookbooks, like The Cookery Book of Lady Clark of Tillypronie, which has gems of old British cooking, which has been so debased the past hundred years or so.
A cast-iron ridged pan for making toast that smells a little like it's been near a fire. Le Creuset pots for winter stews. A range of knives, including one made by blacksmith John Hounslow from an old hand shear, and a boning knife made by Tim Lowry, another local artisan knife-maker, with a gorgeous wooden scabbard.
Apple juice from Mark Duggan, who runs an orchard a few clicks from our farm. Cloudy cider from Willie Smith. Clear cider from Lost Pippin, both recently opened cideries just up the road and still in the Huon Valley. Elsewhere riesling from a neighbour, which is so good I can almost forgive his sheep for coming through the fence to my place. Coffee from a roaster in Hobart. Lots of whisky, from Tasmania and beyond. Gin from Bill McHenry and Sons.
Saturday night tipple I drink whisky on nights when I don't have to rise too early or do too much the next day. Sometimes that's a Saturday, sometimes midweek, as our work week is seven days.
Two coffee machines - the Atomic for times without electricity, and my 13-year-old Saeco Via Venezia because it froths the milk better than the Atomic.
White chocolate. Even the good stuff is bad. But when I'm low, the flavour of condensed milk transports me back to my childhood.
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