Guest post - dejustation

This weeks post is a guest post by my mate Justin McPhail.  Justin is a man of many layers.  He co founded and is President of Bendigo Beer - an incorporated body that promotes craft beer.  He started and runs dejustation, co-ordinates many food events, loves to cook and is an all round nice guy.  AND he does all of this in his spare time!

Enjoy this weeks guest post.  You can catch Justin over at www.justinrhys.wordpress.com and www.dejustation.com and follow him on twitter @justinrhys

"The thrill in recipe development and the reasons why I created dejustation".

I’ve always enjoyed the moments in life where people go “ah-ha!” and look around for people to share the moment with. I’ve had more than a few of these moments during my time with Bendigo Beer with our beer and food matching dinners, whole beast feasts (with whole pigs heads in the centre of a table for people to nibble on), beer vs wine pairings (rating one vs the other with the only constant element being the food as a comparative), etcetera.

For me, to do something in life is to seek out this experience, a combination of this emotion of surprise, searching for flavours, the conversation. What I seek to create is the perfect storm of food, company, beverage and place.

I created dejustation to share this experience.

Experiential dining is something that first piqued my interest seeing Heston Blumenthal on one of the first series of Master Chef. Sitting on a couch in Adelaide (where I was living at the time), I immediately searched for more info, and within 15 minutes had purchased the Fat Duck cookbook. I read his story with reverence. Here was a man who hadn’t trained as a chef, taught himself, and created his own mark on the culinary world. I saw great parallels with myself. Interested in learning all culinary styles, ingredients, matches to beverage, I began a period of complete and utter devotion to reading and tasting anything and everything.

The culmination of this is a way of thinking outside the norm, using blueberries with star anise to create a sauce to match to a beer, making a lamb based dessert styled from the classic Aussie lamington, ‘lambington’, creating a sweet and savoury dirt for my last event ‘dig it’. It’s all in drawing from influences learned the past few years and ones I continue to learn. 

I hope to amaze, excite, wow, and hopefully, awe, my guests. From things as small as how the light shines, the music playing, the (hopefully unnoticeable) service, smells, sight and taste.

I have included below a taste of things to come for the next event. I’m working on recreating the classic Australian Milk Bar with dishes that include elements of paperbark, redskins, Big M’s, chiko rolls…the list goes on. For this test, I pictured a rich and sticky sweet beef sauce that draws on the unique sweetness of redskins with the stickiness of a classic beef rib. The results are great, but not something that will amaze people, so the testing continues… stay tuned.