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.
