Tasting AustraliaBy Carole Kotkin
Don’t look for any bloomin’ onions in the Australian Outback—in fact, don’t look for much of anything bloomin’. To see the sun-baked Flinders Range, about 125 miles north of Adelaide, is to glimpse the dawn of the Earth. Parachilna is a tiny settlement on the edge of civilization with a population of seven. To the north, west, and east stretch hundreds of miles of nothing. The Outback begins here. The life and soul of Parachilna is the 12-room Prairie Hotel, which dates from 1906 and is one of the most incongruous places imaginable, an oasis of civilization in the middle of nowhere. Here you can tuck into typical Flinders food—kangaroo yiros (kebabs); and antipasti of camel, emu-liver pate, goat’s milk curd, and bush tomato relish; and delicious quandong pie. Getting There:Quantas from Los Angeles or New York. Where to Stay:Hilton Adelaide, 61-8-8217-2000 What to Do:Barossa Wine Tour: info@barossawinetrain.com.au National Wine Centre of Australia, 08-8222-9200, www.wineaustralia.com.au Where to Eat:Adelaide: Red Ochre Restaurant, 61-8-8211-8555 The Penfolds Magill Estate Restaurant, www.penfolds.com.au The Grange, Hilton Adelaide, 61-8-8217-2000 For information on Tasting Australia: www.tasting-australia.com.au Images by Carole Kotkin |
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Chances are, no matter where your vacation plans lead you, your travels will involve much time and effort dedicated to everyone’s favorite pastime—eating. So why not make things simple and book your time away at a fabulous food festival? If a trip to Australia is in your future, a good way to sample the local cuisine would be to attend Tasting Australia, one of the best wine and food festivals in the world. Adelaide is the perfect venue for this culinary extravaganza, held every other year in October. A seaside city ringed by harsh desert, Adelaide, South Australia’s state capital, is modern, prosperous, and one of Australia’s culinary and wine centers. The event encourages chefs, restaurateurs, winemakers, and wine and food writers to come together for cooking demonstrations and educational seminars given by world-renowned chefs and writers. During the space of a very crowded ten days, the organizers put on a major wine competition and a major culinary competition (sponsored by Australia’s LifeStyle Channel). The more than 200 international food and wine writers who attended were invited on jaunts to Clare Valley, Adelaide Hills, McLaren Vale, and Barossa (the state’s principal wine and food producing areas) and to Kangaroo Island, famous for its marrons (freshwater crayfish) and its free-range chickens. On Saturday night, the “Jacob’s Creek World Food Media Awards” were given to winners selected from 350 entries from more than 30 different countries. For the general public, a huge “Feast for the Senses” was held over the weekend in the Botanic Gardens, where each of the Australia’s states showed off its culinary delights to the 40,000 people who attended.
The Adelaide Hilton, which hosted the event, is next door to the Central Markets, Australia’s oldest market. During the week it quickly became the second home to the visiting foodies. Established in 1869 by German and Polish Immigrants, 95 percent of everything sold there is produced within 30 minutes’ drive of the city and 98 percent is sold the day it arrives. Here you can find oysters, yabbies , fresh and smoked fish; free-range game birds, duck and poultry; prime beef, venison and lamb; cheeses; and every kind of vegetable, fruit, herb and spice imaginable. 
Australia grows it all--from the tropics to the temperate zones. Top-quality virgin-olive oil comes from trees first planted by Italian immigrants in the 1950’s. There is an increasing move toward organic fruits and vegetables. And, more recently, a surge in the quality and quantity of Asian produce has taken place as Thai, Vietnamese, Malays and Japanese have settled in Australia over the past decade. Adelaide is flanked on three sides by some of the finest vineyards in Australia. Also produced here is Coopers, Australia’s greatest beer. Food is as important a part of the South Australian scene as the nature parks, beaches and island studded harbors. The Australian population (over 130 different nationalities with 90% of the population living on the East coast), have established a food culture that embraces the food styles of Asia, Italy, Greece, France, and the Middle East. The restaurants are astonishingly good and plentiful (Adelaide has about seven hundred of them). South Australia is the country’s undisputed capital of wine, with 275 producers making almost half the nation’s wine. Chefs became in sync with the increasingly sophisticated wine industry around them and mirrored the wineries’ focus on raw materials and professionalism. The most exciting chefs in South Australia are inspired innovators who take ideas from the multicultural environment to create dishes that are uniquely Australian and the ideal complement to native wines. There are unique Australian ingredients: Kangaroo, local caviar, rock oysters, yabbies (crayfish), barramundi (similar sea bass), sea urchins, papayas, mangoes, passion-fruit, and, of course, kiwis. There’s excellent artisan cheese, farm-raised Tasmanian salmon, and free-range Kangaroo Island chicken. French and northern Italian restaurants dominate just as they do in America, but scores of Japanese chefs have fanned out all over the country, too, and as result, some cutting-edge Asian fare can be found in Adelaide.
The most daring restaurant in Adelaide, if not in all of Australia—the Grange-- sits in the lobby of the Adelaide Hilton Hotel. It’s consulting chef, Cheong Liew, is regarded as a food-world icon for introducing refined Asian-Australian cooking to Australia in 1975. Liew, a Mayaysian-born Chinese, took Asian cooking techniques and applied them to Western ingredients. The Grange recently received Australian Gourmet Traveller magazine’s Restaurant of the Year award. Chef Cheong Liew’s cooking is skilled and sophisticated, as evidenced by his red snapper with leek fondue. Magill Estate, run by Penfold’s winery, is a glassed-in-restaurant set in Penfold’s original winery. It combines stunning haute cuisine with panoramic all-weather views of the Adelaide skyline and across to the Gulf of St. Vincent. Executive chef, Chris Matuhina focuses on French/Mediterranean techniques and flavors. For the trendiest cuisine from Oz, try some aboriginal delights at The Red Ochre, Adelaide’s premier waterfront restaurants, acclaimed for capturing the taste of Australia in dishes like lemon myrtle fettuccine; sundried bush tomato chutney, chargrilled kangaroo steaks, and wild mint chocolates. 
Kangaroo Island is an eighty-mile hop from Adelaide. Here farmers produce eucalyptus oil, sheep dairy products, free-range chickens, olive oil and marron . Stay at Stranraer Homestead, a working sheep farm on 1,300 acres, for a delightful bed and breakfast accommodation. As one would expect, kangaroos run between the eucalyptus trees along with the gamut of South Australian wildlife: koalas, penguins, seals, giant lizards, wallabies, and 243 species of birds. PHOTO 6 Step aboard the Barossa Wine Train to take a relaxing trip to visit this famous wine country, thirty-five miles northeast of Adelaide. Fifty of the valley’s 60 wineries are open for tastings, so plan accordingly. The Barossa has the right soil and Mediterranean-like climate to produce some of the finest grape varieties such as shiraz, Grenache, Riesling, Semillon and chardonnay. Its hilly landscape is dotted with small towns and villages, vineyards and sheep. In many ways the Barossa Valley is South Australia’s answer to California’s Napa Valley, although it has fewer tourists and is a wider valley. PHOTO 7