LATE WINTER TO SPRING // Recipe for four
Raw peas, Jersey milk cheese and toasted oats
The harvesting of peas at Biota marks the change in the season and the weather. We plant trays and trays of seeds in the polytunnel, some for fruit and others just for their tendrils and flowers. When you’ve made the Jersey milk cheese here, keep the whey in an airtight container in the fridge for up to four days and use it to cook with spent vegetables.
JERSEY MILK CHEESE
260 ml (9¼ fl oz) full-cream Jersey cow’s milk (unpasteurised, if possible, or lightly pasteurised)
25 ml (3/4 fl oz) buttermilk
3 g (1/8 oz) rennet
Put the milk and buttermilk in a saucepan and heat to 30°C (86°F). Add the rennet and stir gently. Pour into four 100 ml (3½ fl oz) dariole moulds or plastic containers, filling to about 1 cm (½ in) from the top of the moulds. Put the moulds in a baking tray and fill the tray with warm water. Cook the cheese in a 36°C (97°F) oven for 4 hours. Leave to cool in the tray.
Line a perforated tray with a clean cloth and put another tray underneath. Pour the set curds onto the tray and keep the whey that collects underneath.
TOASTED OATS
100 g (3½ oz) organic rolled oats
30 g (1 oz) butter
salt, to taste
30 ml (1 fl oz) toasted garlic oil
Toast the oats in a dry frying pan over medium heat, shaking the pan regularly, until fragrant and golden. Remove from the heat and transfer to a bowl.
Put the butter in a small pan over medium heat until starting to colour and foam. Remove from the heat and add to the toasted oats. Add salt and the garlic oil.
FLOWERS AND LEAVES
12 pea blossoms
12 pea shoots
Pick all the flowers and leaves, wash in chilled water and arrange on the plate over the cheese.
RAW PEAS
160 g (53/4 oz) sugarsnap peas
20 ml (½ fl oz) linseed (flaxseed) oil
Juice of 1 lemon
1 teaspoon salt
Pod the sugarsnap peas and keep them raw. Mix with the oil, lemon juice and salt when ready to serve.
BUTTERMILK DRESSING
100 ml (3½ fl oz) buttermilk
30 ml (1 fl oz) olive oil
2 teaspoons salt
Whisk together the buttermilk, olive oil and salt until emulsified.
The bees of Biota
Our bees are European honey bees. They are the busiest workers and play a very important role in the life of Biota by pollinating our plants. Australia’s early European settlers introduced honey bees to ensure a good supply of honey. Naturally a few escaped and they are now wild throughout most of Australia’s southern states, pollinating our crops and wild flowers.
At Biota we have Langstroth hives that sit among the elder trees. These hives are easy to manage, having frames that sit inside each box in which the bees build their honeycomb, and are commonly used throughout Australia. We also have a lot of fun with the Warré hive. The Warré hive is also known as the ‘people’s hive’ and was developed in France by Emile Warré in the early twentieth century. Warré experimented with over 350 designs – it was his goal to find a system that was simple, natural, economical and bee-friendly. I first heard about this from a family friend who is very passionate about beekeeping and I was intrigued, as it seemed like a more natural way for these busy little creatures to work. It is a good solution for those who are interested in keeping bees simply and naturally without harsh chemicals or medications.
The Warré hive is a vertical tiered hive with no frames that is simple and cheap to build and easy to manage and maintain. The bees draw down their own comb from top bars fixed to the box. The new hive boxes are added to the bottom and not the top of the hive – bees prefer to build down so this gives them a hive environment that is healthier and better suited to their natural tendencies. The quilt provides a layer of insulation and sits under the roof on top of the uppermost box.
‘The hive is managed with organic principles, using no chemicals, and careful effort is made to keep the hive strong so that the bees control pests and disease with their own resilience and good hygiene habits.’
Bees are wonderful engineers, who have a precise team approach to everything they do. There are around 20,000 dedicated workers doing their best to make sure each flower is pollinated. They don’t do all this work for free, of course. They collect some pollen for themselves and nectar is also collected to be made into honey. The bees forage up to 5 kilometres from the hive, likely visiting all the best gardens of Bowral and Burradoo, and return with the nectar for making honey. The bees put in an amazing effort, with each bee making just one-tenth of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.
Biota’s bees are looked after by bee man John Scott, who is extremely passionate about the bees and takes great pride in the movements and routines of the hive. The hive is managed with organic principles, using no chemicals, and careful effort is made to keep the hive strong so that the bees control pests and disease with their own resilience and good hygiene habits. This keeps the honey clean and pure. There is always enough honey left with the bees at the end of the season to get them safely through to spring.
With nectar collected from all the flowers in the gardens of Biota and surrounding Bowral, there should be plenty of honey for the bees and enough left for us to enjoy in desserts and on the breakfast plates of Biota’s guests. We pay our respect to these wonderfully diverse little creatures with a very humble fragrant dish of honey, mead, native flowers and garden lavender on our menu. It is served with frozen floral Jersey milk.
