How to use this book

Cooking for me is not about what’s written on a piece of paper. A recipe can only ever be a guideline; a platform from which to create. Cooking should be a sensory experience that evokes curiosity; a place where we can let loose and discover. If you are cooking to the season, that means adapting on the go. No recipe can ever be cooked exactly; our seasons change every year and our ingredients change every year. A season is simply a time during the year when some things are usually ready to eat and others aren’t.

Spend some time reading through this book. You will see the recipes are built of several different components on the plate. I don’t include specific instructions on how to combine, plate or present these components: you might be from another part of the world, living in another biota that inspires you as a cook, or have different ingredients to hand. It would make me happy if you used these recipes as a starting point to discover your own dishes and flavour combinations. You might choose to make the burnt pears with the ingredients from the roadside apples recipe because you have nice apples in your part of the world at that time.

We don’t ‘garnish’, but we do add wild plants and flowers from our gardens to the plate: they are visually pleasing, add different textures and flavours and, most importantly, are always chosen in the context of the story of that dish. They might be the fat hen buds that flourish in the fields where Norm grows his potatoes or the elderflowers from our gardens that are also fermented into vinegar and elderflower water. There is a glossary to help you reference these plants and any unusual ingredients; where possible, we’ve listed alternatives that you could use in their place.

Please follow the advice on the types of plants that we use – they need to be properly identified, edible, organically grown and free from pesticide sprays. If you are in any doubt about varieties of plants, especially mushrooms, please don’t take any chances with them.

The salt we use is flake salt from the Murray river. You can use any similar salt that is not iodised – I always use single origin, natural salt rather than a mixture containing iodine.

The oils we use in the restaurant are all produced here in Australia, rather than being imported. We use free-range eggs and birds in all our cooking. The flours we use are organic and unbleached. We also mill our own single origin grains in the kitchen.

Sugar in the recipes is unrefined cane sugar, unless stated. Cane sugar contains a higher proportion of natural molasses for great flavour and colour. It’s important to think about where your milk has been produced and buy the best quality you can. We use organic, lightly pasteurised dairy products whenever possible and also cook with sheep’s and goat’s milk – it’s local to us and, depending on the recipe, has more fat and flavour. When the recipe requires sheep’s milk, if it’s not available use best-quality, full-fat cow’s milk. Similarly, sheep’s cheese can be replaced by good-quality ricotta.

In our dishes we use a variety of different thickening and gelling agents, such as iota carrageenan, gellan gum, xanthan gum and kuzu. These are all widely available in supermarkets.

Some of our restaurant dishes make use of equipment that might not be in every household kitchen. We have adapted these to make them suitable for cooking at home.

We dehydrate ingredients by drying them for many hours at a very low temperature in a dehydrator. This maintains the structural integrity, flavour and texture. You could use your oven set to its lowest temperature instead of a dehydrator, but these machines are useful and are now widely available and inexpensive, so you might find it worthwhile investing in one.

Another technique we use is to vacuum seal ingredients inside vacuum bags and then cook in a water bath which is held at a set temperature. This type of cooking is very gentle and helps maintain the flavour and structure of the ingredient, giving a precise and consistent result. It might sound very technical for the home kitchen, but you can buy cryovac machines in kitchen and department stores and they aren’t overly expensive. If you don’t own a machine, you can usually take your ingredients to a local butcher who will vacuum seal them for you. (Don’t be tempted to use an ordinary household ziplock bag or water will seep in during the cooking.) You will need a good digital thermometer to maintain the temperature of the water bath (and for many other aspects of cooking). After cooking, plunge the vacuum bag into a sink of ice to chill.

We smoke many ingredients at Biota Dining, using an offset smoker that I built from an old stainless steel refrigerator when the restaurant opened. To build a smoker fairly easily at home, take a deep oven tray and make a small fire of twigs or cuttings in it. Smother the fire by putting a flat tray on top of the deep tray, locking in all the smoke. Put the ingredients for smoking on a wire rack (in a bowl if necessary), lift off the flat tray and put the wire rack on the smothered fire. Replace the flat tray to lock in the smoke. Leave for about an hour (or however long is specified). Remove the rack and ingredients and build another small fire in your deep tray. Repeat the process twice more, until the ingredient is smoked to your taste.

We also enjoy cooking on the firepit. Sometimes there is no alternative that will give the same results, but, when specified in the recipe, you can use a chargrill pan to create the same flavour of timber and black charring on the food.

So, cook from your heart and from your biota, use these recipes as you wish and combine them with whatever you have. Present the dishes on whatever plates you own and in a manner that is natural to you — don’t force the presentation or the cooking and you will have a tastier, more honest dish; a dish you can be proud of. Cooking from nature is pure and easy; it’s not about rules. Enjoy the process.