Todd Eyre
You’ve just returned from overseas? I’ve recently been to a food show in Milan and visited Barcelona. In Barcelona I went to as many restaurants as I could. I spotted some pretty cool stuff – it gets the blood pumping. The restaurant I enjoyed most was Bodega 1900 – it’s a top-quality tapas and vermouth place run by famous chef Albert Adrià.
What products are inspiring you at the moment? In Barcelona they had a very cool product: these small cans – similar to the tuna or salmon cans we have here – but they are filled with crustaceans, which are beautifully laid out. In tapas restaurants they serve the can on a plate and you open and eat it – it’s a very high-end product. We looked at bringing it to New Zealand for my Sous Chef deli in Auckland, but they cost silly money. New Zealanders often perceive things out of a can as cheap, but over in Spain they are very high-end, beautiful products. It got me thinking we could do the same thing with our amazing Cloudy Bay clams, but we’d need to change the Kiwi mindset.
A new product I’ve got in at the deli is pure white buffalo butter – it’s a delightful, delicate-flavoured unsalted butter made in Italy from pasteurised water buffalo cream. It’s A2 milk, which is very good for you. People who have dairy intolerances can often handle A2 milk much better. We’ve also got some amazing imported flavoured creams, like gorgonzola cream, truffle cream, and five-cheese cream. They’re really good as a dip, or spoon over hot meat as it comes out of the oven, or you can drizzle gorgonzola cream over roasted cauliflower or potatoes.
Do you think there are enough interesting ingredients available here? At the deli I’ve specialised in bringing in new products from overseas for restaurants and producers to see and taste. We were the first to bring in buffalo mozzarella to New Zealand, but then local food producers saw it and learnt how to make a quality home-grown version. We still can’t match the quality of some of the preserved meats in Spain – things like Spanish serrano ham, which is cured in caves in walls of salt and is just beautiful. But the environment in Spain is different to New Zealand’s and the pigs are different, so you end up with a different result.
It’s often a case of local producers seeing what is being done overseas and using our produce to make something unique to New Zealand. Sometimes this is good for me, sometimes it’s bad. Years ago you couldn’t buy black garlic. I went and bought nine rice cookers, put a garlic bulb and a bowl of water in each of them, and six to eight weeks and a big electricity bill later I had my own fermented black garlic. Now you can easily buy it in the shops.
Anything new on the horizon? I’ve got a new restaurant in Auckland coming later this year or early next year. I’m looking at a few sites at the moment. It won’t be a twigs-and-berries health restaurant, but I won’t be using refined sugars in my cooking. After travelling around so much with the Nourish Group restaurants, it will be nice to just spend some time in a kitchen again. I’m doing cooking classes out at the deli too; I’m doing one on risottos tonight for nine people. I went into my garden and found some fennel, silverbeet and baby leeks so we’ll use them in the dishes.
Any gadgets that will be fun in spring and summer? Hand-held food smokers puts a natural smoke flavour into things like meat, vegetables or even cocktails. Take seafood – like scallops – put them in a bowl, cover in plastic wrap, make a small incision and fire in some smoke, close up the hole and cold-smoke your scallops. You can even choose the wood you put in the gun for different flavourings.
What’s good to eat as the weather warms? I like antipasto platters as they’re fun to assemble. We have amazing pancetta in the shop; as soon as we cook it, customers want it as their new bacon. Put it in the oven and roast it up and the fat on the outside turns almost like crackling. Semidried tomatoes, or cherry tomatoes marinated in good oil and basil, are good; or duck rillettes in a jar – the yummiest, meatiest duck pâté you can get. Cheese is a given – the likes of Spanish valdeón blue cheese, which is wrapped in sycamore leaves for added flavour, or award-winning local cheeses by Il Casaro.
Sous Chef Deli Shop is located at 84 Spartan Road, Takanini, Auckland.
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