Chefs explore water-based techniques for Melbourne Food and Wine Festival

• Melbourne Food and Wine Festival: a guide to free events

‘‘I can’t even boil an egg’’ is a pretty common way to describe the very lowest level of cooking prowess.

At Press Club - Project, a new experimental cooking space at George Calombaris’s flagship city restaurant, the question is not whether the chefs can boil an egg but rather how many different techniques, besides boiling, they can use to prepare the egg.

Next week Project - a small kitchen space next to the main Press Club kitchen - hosts one of the 2014 Melbourne Food and Wine Festival’s more elaborate events: a 12-course dinner for just eight people where each dish will showcase different methods of preparing food with water.

Despite the $295 price, it was one of the first dinners to sell out at this year’s festival, which begins today and runs until March 16 incorporating over 200 food and wine events.

The theme of this year’s festival is water, but just how many under-appreciated ways are there to use it in cooking?

Press Club head chef Luke Croston reels off the methods being used at Tuesday’s dinner: steaming, blanching, distilling, freezing, pressure cooking, freeze drying, sous vide and, of course, boiling.

Croston will even present dishes where dehydration and a centrifuge are used to remove water from ingredients.

Press Club - Project looks more like a laboratory than a kitchen but experimental kitchens represent a fledgling trend on Melbourne’s fine-dining scene; Ben Shewry will use Attica’s test kitchen for the first time on Tuesday, while the owners of Lee Ho Fook have said they may reserve their current Collingwood site as a test kitchen with possible plans afoot to relocate their new-wave Chinese restaurant to the CBD later this year.

Melbourne Food and Wine Festival CEO Natalie O’Brien said she was impressed by the creativity and eagerness with which the industry had run with this year’s watery theme, which follows on from fire (2012) and earth (2013).

‘‘It has really resonated,’’ she said. ‘‘Of course there’s lots of events focusing on seafood, or where water features as a location but many have chosen to focus on aquaculture and how vital water is in producing our food.’’

Last night saw the launch of festival hub, the Immersery Bar and Kitchen, a temporary construction centred next to and over the Sandridge rail bridge on the Yarra at Southbank.

Ms O’Brien said her pick of ‘‘hidden gems’’ of this year’s festival included a ‘‘nostalgic catch and cook’’ yabby expedition at Goornong near Bendigo (March 15).

For diehard foodies (or early-birds) there’s Melbourne’s ‘‘Fish Mongrels’’ tours, a rare opportunity to visit the wholesale fish market in Footscray as it comes alive about 3am.

Ms O’Brien said most of this year’s events featuring international chefs had sold out as had all four ‘‘Crawl ‘n’ Bites’’ where diners move between popular restaurants, such as Huxtable, Easy Tiger and Anada, for each course.

Those splashing out nearly $300 for the Press Club dinner won’t have the opportunity to walk off their 12 courses, although one course consists of a drink, Press Club’s signature saganaki-flavoured margarita; served in an icy sphere.

The Age is a sponsor of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival.