Flight of the Gourmands

(Originally published in Australian Gourmet Traveller, 16/11/09)

From the air, the world seems to fit within a single, sprawling eyeful. Sloping ranges and folds in the landscape reveal patterns unseen from the ground. You are not an ant, crawling through dusty crevices, but an osprey, an eagle, a broad-winged sea bird, flying high in the sky.

Or so it seems, from the porthole of our Beechcraft King Air twin-engine turboprop jet, a three-ton, steel and duralumin, realization of man’s noble inclination to fly. We’re climbing 12.5 metres per second to cruise at 20,000 feet, on an Outback Encounter ‘Flying Food Safari’, a meet-and-eat tour by private jet of three of South Australia’s prime food producing regions – Kangaroo Island, Port Lincoln and the Barossa Valley. We will spend the next five days slurping, swilling, guzzling and gorging the fresh produce we encounter.

Nothing will be shot, at least not by us. But we will stick our hands inside beehives, sucking honey from wax peeled with our fingers, stand waist-deep in pale blue Coffin Bay waters, eating oysters shucked so fresh they don’t have time to know they’re dead, and swim with giant, blue-fin tuna, delicious forebears of sashimi, and fresh grilled tuna steak.

From this reinforced vantage at the top of the food chain, the fact we were born without wings will seem merely an evolutionary oversight.

Our ‘Safari’ guide is Mark Gleeson, a Canberra-born chef and adopted South Australian who runs The Providor at the Adelaide Central Market. If South Australians are known for their foodie stripes, there’s no better expression than this: rows of sausages hang like beaded curtains, smelly cheeses arrive weekly from France, and you can buy artichokes grown from the original seeds brought from Italy before the war. Amid the gourmet produce, little old ladies sort through piles of tomatoes like prospectors panning for gold.

“Doesn’t it make the heart beat fast?” Mark says, pale blue eyes darting around the 140-year-old, 80-stall cornucopia. That, or the super strength latte I’m gulping from Lucia’s Spaghetti and Pizza Bar, an Adelaide institution.

Mark whizzes us through the market like a boy showing off his toys, dangling truffles under our noses at the Mushroom Man stall, thrusting transparent pink proscuitto slices at us at San Marino’s Small Goods, and ushering us into the cool room at O’Connell & Sons Market Meat, where Tony O’Connell explains the finer points of a Suffolk lamb: “She’s a nice little lamb that one – good shoulders, good legs. A good rump with a nice cap of fat. She’ll be good to feed 30 blokes off the spit this afternoon.” Better her than me.

After our rapid market immersion, carrying a cheese esky and Fuji apples for snacks, we board the King Air and head for Kangaroo Island, crossing the 110 km stretch southwest from Adelaide in 20 minutes. Below us, waves that could break the hull of a 6,000-ton ship—and did, as numerous wrecks off Kangaroo Island’s coast attest—look benign as those in a paddling pool.

Legend has it that when Matthew Flinders arrived in 1802, the kangaroos were so tame his men simply walked up and clubbed them to death, killing 31 in a single day, and serving up a kangaroo stew made from "half a hundred-weight of heads and tails and forequarters". Hence the island’s name.

We didn’t eat kangaroo on Kangaroo Island, but we did sample some of the new foods being produced. Until the last decades, most of the 4000 inhabitants survived on sheep farming, but the wool price collapse in the 1980s forced enterprising islanders into other pursuits: abalone farming, Ligurian beekeeping, rare animal breeding and wine growing.

Our plane touches down amid green fields of unripe wheat and bright yellow canola, and we’re whisked off in succession to the Island Beehive, Island Pure Sheep’s Dairy, and KI Fresh Seafood. At KI Abalone, general manager Justin Harman, in gum boots and khakis, leads us through a darkened, undercover ‘lab,’ where 90 tons of pink-fleshed mollusc feed on algae in disc-shaped trays that look like giant Petri dishes.

It’s a brand new industry, just over 15 years old, and experimentation is key. “We’re constantly finding out new things and changing our system of growing,” Harman says, above the sound of rushing water, pumped from the adjacent sea to simulate natural conditions. To transport the abalone from one place to another, for example, Harman adds cough medicine to their water to make them woozy enough to loosen their grip.

Most of the abalone is snap frozen in nitrogen at minus-40 degrees, and shipped to lucrative Asian markets, where it retails for $100 a kilo. Australia’s appetite for the dense-textured sea snail is still nascent, though Tetsuya’s and Quay in Sydney are customers. “The thing is a lot of chefs don’t know how to cook it,” Harman says. “It’s similar to squid, you either have to cook it fast at very high temperatures or very slowly at low temperatures.”

After trudging through sheep farms and muddy abalone sheds, arriving at the Cliff House, one of Lifetime Private Retreats’ three luxury houses overlooking the sandy curve of Snellings Beach, feels like stepping onto a seduction set in a movie. There’s an open fireplace with roaring blaze, soft music playing, drinks laid out, and a spa heating up outside.

Collapsing on the shag rug seems a good option, but owner Nick Hannaford is hosting dinner in the converted shearing shed on the hill. Not wanting to go into farming, Nick and his sister Rachel decided to turn the family property into a resort five years ago. A former chef at Jolley’s Boathouse on the Torrens, Nick caters all guests’ meals. On this night, he serves local produce including KI marron in vanilla aioli, olive bark smoked KI salmon, Southrock lamb shoulder with semolina gnocchi, and slow-cooked large black porchetta on fennel bulb, pear and mint salad.

The latter is provided by fellow dinner guest William Marshall, who runs Will’s Rare Breeds Farm, where he painstakingly raises 27 rare varieties of pig, sheep, cattle and poultry, in a bid to keep them from extinction. “They call me the Indiana Jones of rare breeds,” he says, for his ability to track down unusual animals. As for the pigs, “They’re all called Harry Trotter.” Doesn’t it feel strange to eat animals you’ve named, I ask? “Eating them will be what ends up saving them,” he replies, “thanks to consumer demand.”

The pig we’re dining on is a Wessex Saddle-back, of which there are less than 100 registered sows on the planet. “The older breeds are slow growing, with lots of intramuscular fat, which carries more flavour, and more texture,” Will explains. “You won’t get this sort of thing in a supermarket.”

Islanders can be a quirky bunch – maybe it’s the enforced isolation – but it seems entirely within the spirit of the place when, shortly after mains, the guitars and tambourines come out, followed by a box of colourful wigs, the full adornment and appreciation of which is aided by the KI wines we’re drinking.

The following blurry morning, we go walking along Snellings beach to the mouth of Middle River, past the shack where Nick’s grandfather, Sir James Holden of Holden Cars, and his mate Jack Tolley, of Tolley’s Wines, used to pull in brim from the river off the deck.

We gather tetragonia, a type of native spinach, and sandfly, native ‘asparagus’, which Nick cooks for lunch in the Taverna – a shack on the beach. We spear periwinkles with sewing pins and swirl them in Girgar butter sauce, and devour barbequed King George Whiting and calamari skewers, as the waves crash gently behind us.

Back on board the King Air, we head for our next stop, Port Lincoln. While Kangaroo Island is full of down-home, rural charm, this small coastal city at the southern edge of the Eyre Peninsula is all flash, cash and Big Fish – southern bluefin tuna, to be precise, the business of which has created more per capita millionaires than any other part of Australia.

Twenty years ago the town was struggling, after over-fishing slashed the annual catch from 25,000 tons to barely 5,000. Then in 1993, Japan, Australia and New Zealand devised a quota system that allowed trawlers to catch a set amount of southern bluefin in the wild. That, combined with a system of fattening the tuna on California pilchards in underwater cages – to maximize oil content and bring out a pink-to-red color so loved by wealthy Japanese buyers – has translated into big bucks, and the place has a definite, new money feel.

Shiny, Dallas-worthy homes line the marina, overlooking million-dollar boats. Our host, David “Lunch” Doudle, points out a statue of Makybe Diva, local tuna king Tony Santic’s Melbourne Cup-winning mare, bought from proceeds of his lucrative fishing licence. (Santic made headlines again in 2008, when his ex-wife Christine, on leaving him, allegedly poured a $1000 bottle of Grange into spaghetti bolognaise sauce.) Every January the town celebrates its good fortune with a three-day, Tunarama Festival, the highlight of which is the tuna-tossing competition—whoever tosses a rubber tuna the farthest wins.

Next stop is Coffin Bay, where Lester Marshall of Coffin Bay Oyster Farm hands out rubber waders, and leads us Moses-like into the sea. He pulls a pillow of shells from the water, and shucks an oyster as big as his hand. “This is the King size,” he says, “for the really mad oyster lover”.

Coffin Bay oysters are different to their Pacific cousins because their large abductor muscles give them a sweeter flavour, while the salty waters of the Bay make for a distinct “marine” taste, Lester explains. Back at his shack overlooking Kellidie Bay, he serves oysters in four different sizes, which we eat with antique silver oyster forks he’s collected off eBay.

Meanwhile, Lunch has prepared lunch (at first his nickname seemed so mysterious, but now it makes so much sense): a heaving trestle with marron, prawns, yabbies, Moreton Bay bugs and a massive, cooked crayfish. Until now I’d been pacing myself, but something about the zippy enthusiasm of the place grabs me, and the seafood surplus brings out a feeding instinct that suggests a bloodline to a seagull. I’m gulping down oysters faster than a half-ton, bluefin tuna fish snapping up California pilchards.

I’d better gather some decorum before for the next and final stop, the refined Barossa Valley, 40 kilometres north of Adelaide, where centuries-old traditions of fine wine and food, Lutheran temperance and grape-growers’ patience make this one of the most civilized places in Australia.

What better place to start than stately Seppeltsfield, one of the Valley’s oldest wineries, founded in 1851 by Joseph Ernst Seppelt, a tobacco and snuff merchant who migrated to Australia from Silesia, in what is now Poland, in 1849. Date palms, European elms, and bluestone buildings surround the old homestead, on what was once the largest family-run vineyard in the country.

After falling into the corporate hands of Fosters, who sold it in 2007, new owners Nathan Waks and Bruce Baudinet are keen to return Seppeltsfield to its former glory, including a plan to restore the winery’s original, open-air fomenting vats for wine production.

“When Fosters took over the wine making they decided they’d treat it like beer. It became more about chemistry and much less hands on, which makes a completely different style of wine to the corporate wines,” says our guide, Travis O’Callaghan, who runs his own artesenal winery with his brother Tim, on the side. To prove his point, he pours a slug of dark, sticky, 100-year-old tawny port into our glasses. “You’ll go away and 20 minutes later you’ll think: “Cove”. It just keeps going for ages.”

Longevity is key at our next stop, Henschke’s Hill of Grace vineyard, where gnarled, knotted, 140-year-old vines with trunks as big as limbs, yield intense Shiraz grapes, that go into making Hill of Grace a serious competitor for Penfolds Grange. Now in their fifth generation of winemakers, the Henschkes still supply altar wine to the Lutheran church over looking their vineyard, in a field surrounded by river Redgums, jack sprats, peppermint and sheoak trees.

Breaking with tradition, sixth generation vigneron Damien Tscharke is one of a new breed of winemakers experimenting with grape varieties. He was the first producer of Albarino and Montepulciano in Australia. Still, in a place where blood runs thicker than water (if not wine) his eyes are firmly on the past. His award winning, 2004 Lumberjack Touriga Nacional fortified port is named for his grandfather, a lumberjack by trade.

“He used to come down every vintage to help out. I called him my voice-activated pump, because he’d be sitting there with his cane at the pump switch and I’d be yelling “On! Off!” He’d be there from daylight till dusk. One day he said to me, “Why are you making all these sour wines? Every vineyard needs a port.” So I decided to make a port because of my Pop.”

We leave Damien as the light fades, and head across the road to The Louise, where five-star suites with outdoor showers and in-room cappuccino machines await, along with dinner at the acclaimed, on-site Appellation restaurant, where we sample a degustation menu that includes a tasting plate of duck rillettes, gum smoked breast and liver parfait, South Australian snapper, and local lamb cooked three ways, with root vegetables and lentils.

The rest of our time in the Barossa is spent ploughing our way through various local goodies: Washington Washrind from The Barossa Valley Cheese Company, Maggie Beers’ chef Gill Radford’s five-course tasting lunch made with home grown organic vegetables and served with crisp, 2008 Radford Eden Valley Riesling, and a sampling of legendary Grange at Penfolds winery.

Our final stop is Hutton Vale, home to seven generations of the Angas family, a South Australian dynasty. We climb Mount Edelstone, a windy patch of hill, dotted with the remains of a pear and apricot orchard planted by John Angas’ grandfather.

“Up here I’m master of all I see,” says John, standing tall in his farmer’s uniform of RM Williams boots, jeans and woolly jumper. He surveys the surrounding 2000 acres of vines, sheep and rolling countryside at the northern end of Eden Valley. Magpies sing from the trees and the wind whips our ears.

We head back to the 1850s farmhouse for dinner, warmed by an open fire and several glasses of Hutton Vale Shiraz. After so many days of eating fine fare, all I want is good, simple grub, and that’s exactly what we get: lamb pie, home made bread and foccaccia, sliced cold cuts served with Jan Angas’ Farm Follies brand of homemade chutneys and pickles. That leaves just enough room for the homemade apple pie that follows. But only just.

While technically I’m the huntsman on this Flying Food Safari, I leave feeling like a lamb that’s been fattened for slaughter. Heading back to Sydney, liver in tatters but belly content, I’m grateful it’s my luggage, not me, that’s weighed. As our Qantas jet rises over the clouds, leaving South Australia and its inventive producers behind, memories rush like forgotten tastes. “Clove,” I think, before drifting off to sleep.