20 Apr Dining Down Under
by Vic Cherikoff
Vic Cherikoff is an ambassador for the native tastes and spices of Australia, and the host of the Australian television series Dining Downunder. He shared his passion for native Australian foods with us, and his desire to teach the world about the oldest cuisine still in use today.
My commitment to the native Australian food industry goes back to the early 1980s, when I began trading those indigenous foods; but the story goes back to well before then.
I was in the habit of driving a lot and going places to bush-walk, look around or just enjoy this amazing country we call home here in Australia. But to get to the spectacular places you had to pass hundreds of kilometers of damaged farmland, cleared bush, ruined ring-barked forests and weed-infested grasslands; it was obvious we had learned nothing from the original inhabitants of this land, the Aborigines. Gone were the herbs, spices, fruits, nuts and seeds – gone forever from vast tracts of ‘improved’ pasture and agricultural wasteland.
It depressed me that along most country roads I’d see thin strips of bush no more than twenty meters wide, and behind them vast distances of cleared land or single crops. Often the topsoil was easy to see because it was blowing around in the air, in willy-willies like mini-tornadoes. I knew that a lot of this fertile soil, severely limited in Australia, ended up in our rivers and creeks, and eventually in the oceans.
I’d often see farmers sitting in their air-conditioned tractors ploughing land from which they or their predecessors had bull-dozed away healthy eco-systems: a huge number of edible fruit trees and bushes, vegetables from forbs, creepers and other plants, herbs, spices, nuts and seeds. They bulldozed habitats, killing native bees and dozens of other gourmet delicacies including lizards and other reptiles, tortoises and terrapins, kangaroos and their relatives, a wide array of birds from emus, turkeys, bustards and pigeons to cassowaries, geese and ducks.
My thoughts often turned to considering that there must be a better way to grow our food. I had made a study of the foods native to Australia since my teenage years, and even studied environmental biology to learn more about botany and ecology. After five years of study and a triple major (environmental biology, biochemistry and industrial microbiology), and another six in clinical pharmacology, I undertook scientific analytical research into the nutritional value of native foods at the Human Nutrition Unit at the University of Sydney. My teenage passion, finding and eating native Australian foods, then popularly known as bushfood, and now referred to as authentic Australian food, was now my professional pursuit.
Having access to over 450 different foods for analysis – and the ability to nibble on thousands more – gave me a unique insight into Australia’s undiscovered wild food and medicine resources. Tasting the fruits, tubers, vegetables, herbs, spices, seeds and nuts made me realize that there was an industry waiting to be commercialized. What started with a single customer in Sydney is now Vic Cherikoff Food Services, and my company exports plantation-grown, organic native foods as well as Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal wild-harvested ingredients to over twenty-eight countries and to countless chefs, manufacturers and online consumers each month.
Our selection of products comes from around the country, predominantly supplied by Aboriginal communities and my own collections. In 1983 some of the products were supplied to chefs, and although I didn’t recognize its potential impact at the time, the possibility of an Australian cuisine had begun. I started my first wild food trading company, Bush Tucker Supply, in 1987. After various name changes and incarnations, I now run a start-up business with a small but growing and highly capable team that keeps Cherikoff Rare Spices leading the way for the future of Australian cuisine.
As the author of two books on native foods, The Bushfood Handbook and Uniquely Australian, A wild food cookbook and co-author of the Dining Downunder Cookbook with chef Benjamin Christie, I hope I’ve spread my enthusiasm for native foods to gardeners and professional growers, foragers and food lovers, cooks and chefs. Through the school and trade curricula I have written, Australian native cuisine is being taught to both qualified and apprentice chefs. I have personally trained over six hundred chefs in my scientific approach to the incorporation of native flavours into other, more conventional cuisines – and I hope I have inspired many more.
The motivation and untiring commitment behind Vic Cherikoff Food Services embraces a vision that anyone who appreciates good food will soon learn to seek out and appreciate wild and unique flavours; those that make our modern and distinctive Australian ingredients the one influence unifying the many food fads of contemporary, multi-cultural Australia.
And finally, I see the spread of Australian native flavours around the world as simply the result of a Twenty-First Century spice trade: one that explores the new and exciting flavours this ancient continent has to offer the culinary world.
I am proud to have initiated it.
Don’t miss Chef Benjamin Christie’s recipe for Lamb Loin with Baby Spinach, Sun-Dried Tomatoes and Bush Tomato Chutney, adapted from Dining Downunder with Vic Cherikoff.
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If you visit Vic’s site and use discount code “gildedOz”, you will receive a special 10% discount as a Gilded Fork reader. For more information about Vic and these special products, listen to the ReMARKable Palate Podcast Episodes 32 and 33 for his interview with Chef Mark.