February 2012

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Tasmanian saffron

Nicky Noonan looking at about $7,500 worth of her Tas-Saff saffron.

Had another great dinner at Henry’s in the Henry Jones Art Hotel. A lovely, fragrant seafood soup made with lots of local fish and mussels and flavored with saffron. After dinner, Andre Kropp, the executive chef, came out and we talked about the meal over a glass of wine. I told him that, for me, what really made the dish, besides the fresh assortment of seafood, was the saffron. It seemed particularly delicate and flavorful. I asked him if it was from Spain.

Nope, he said. It’s local.

I thought he was joking. Or that he meant it was “local” in the sense that he had picked it up from a local restaurant supplier. But he told me there was a crazy couple who had a saffron business up in the Huon Valley. I called up my buddy Sally Legosz of Herbaceous Tours and asked her if she knew anything about them. Of course, she knew them. Said she was planning on taking a cake out to the owner, Nicky Noonan, the next afternoon since it was her birthday and asked me if I wanted to join her.

Hell yes.

When we arrived at Glaziers Bay, which is where the Noonan’s Tas-Saff farm is located, Nicky, who looks a bit like Penny Marshall’s younger sister, was somewhat frantically running about the place. She’d just gotten a call saying some Australian food inspector was coming by for an impromptu visit. The Tassies are crazy about quarantine laws and the like and since a big part of what happens at the Tas-Saff farm is the sorting and packaging of crocus bulbs, which are then parceled out to some 50 bulb growers throughout Tasmania, these inspectors, she explained, are very concerned about how clean your facilities are and making sure there’s no contaminated soil on the bulbs.

Anyway, Nicky took us inside the tiny little room where the spice is measured on carefully calibrated scales that are so sensitive that they can be affected by people just walking across the room, where she made tea while Sally cut into the cake she’d brought with her. I asked Nicky what made her decide to get into the saffron business.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think we were crazy.”

Like almost everyone in Tasmania, she and her husband, Terry, were living a much different life elsewhere in Australia when they decided, as Nicky says, “To get as far away from Sydney and that life as we could. So we headed south to Tasmania with this vague notion of leading some sort of subsistence farming on a little handkerchief of land we’d bought.”

Then one day Terry, an accomplished cook, decided to make some paella and went shopping for saffron. “All he could find was a tiny little bottle of Spanish saffron for $15,” says Nicky. “We both wondered why on earth it was so expensive.” Terry wondered if they couldn’t just grow their own saffron. “We didn’t know at the time that saffron came from the dried stigmata of the crocus flower and that each flower only produces three tiny little stigmata. Or that it takes the stigmas from almost a quarter of a million flowers to extract one kilo of saffron.”

Twenty years ago, the Noonans imported 5,000 corms from Europe. It took three years before they got their first flowers. Which they harvested by hand. A decade later, they were harvesting nearly 120,000 flowers from their little plot and getting about a pound of saffron for the effort. “Crazy, right?” says Nicky. Which is why they developed a growers network throughout Tasmania to grow the flowers for them. Still, all the saffron ends up here at the Noonan farm where two seasonal workers carefully weight and package it before shipping it off to food geeks who clamor for it—like Chef Andre Kroop.

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How to make whisky

Bill Lark at his whisky distillery in Mount Pleasanton. Photo by David Lansing.

Late yesterday afternoon I stopped in at Lark Distillery which is just a two minute walk from my hotel. It’s not really a distillery; it’s just the storefront in Hobart where Bill sells his whisky (along with Moo Brew which, funnily enough is a brewery owned by David Walsh, the math savant and owner of the Museum of New and Old Art). It was just about five in the afternoon and the place was packed. A local bluegrass group was playing. Bill was sitting at a table near the back door, drinking whisky and beer with his wife, Lyn, and one of the young guys who works at the real distillery out in Mount Pleasanton. They were listening to the music and sampling various Scottish single-malts (Bill has recently been hired to act as a consultant for a new whisky distillery in Fife in Scotland, so he said he was “doing my homework”).

Bill has a real love of bluegrass music. He told me the story of how last year he’d been asked to give a presentation at a whisky symposium in Louisville, Kentucky, and one of the main reasons he agreed to go was so he could listen to some authentic bluegrass music.

He says: “Well, I asked the guy at my hotel where I could go to hear some bluegrass and he said, ‘Darned if I know.’ I never did hear any bluegrass in Louisville because there wasn’t any.”

So now he hires a Tasmanian bluegrass band and has them come in to the distillery and it gives him an excuse to sit around with his friends and listen to the kind of music he likes and drink a little whisky and beer.

I had a dram or two with Bill and afterwards he invited me to join him this morning out in Mount Pleasanton to tour the working distillery. We met back up at the Davey Street store around ten and Bill drove us out to the distillery which is about 15 minutes from downtown Hobart. I’ve been to any number of distilleries in Scotland, including some the biggest brands in the industry, and they’re all pretty modest affairs. But Bill’s place takes the cake. From the outside, you’d think it was just a large storage barn. From the inside, you’d think the same.

There was a big industrial-looking pot where the “mashings” for that day’s whisky were being slowly turned, and a couple of miles of piping along the walls where the mash was cooled and transferred to a copper still, and a few other gizmos but that was about it. What you learn from touring a whisky distillery is that it’s a pretty simple process. You get some malted barley (Bill gets his from Cascade Brewery in Tasmania), add water and yeast, brew it just like a beer, ferment it, and then distill it. That’s about it. Oh, and then you age it in oak barrels and put it in a bottle.

It seems so easy that I’m thinking of making my own whisky when I get home. I just need to come up with a good name for it. Any ideas?

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The girls at Grandvewe

The girls at Grandvewe Cheeses getting drained. Photo by David Lansing.

The local cheeses Sally and I enjoyed at the Red Velvet Lounge in Cygnet were really luscious, particularly the Blue which was softer and creamier than a traditional Roquefort. As we were leaving, I mentioned to Sally how much I’d enjoyed it and she said, “Would you like to stop by the cheesery? They’re friends of mine.”

Sally’s friend is Diane Rae who, along with her husband, Alan Irish, and their kids, own and run Tasmania’s only sheep milk cheesery, GrandvEWE (get it?). Sally told me as we drove along from Cygnet to Birchs Bay, where the cheesery is located, that Diane used to be a financial planner in Queensland before moving to Tasmania ten years ago.

“I think she got fed-up with the whole corporate world,” Sally said. She told me that it was her husband who rescued “the girls.” I asked her who “the girls” were and she laughed and said, “Oh, that’s what they call their sheep. They’ve got names for all of them.”

Anyway, when we arrived at the cheesery, there was a bit of a stir. It seemed it was milking time at the cheesery. We followed a half dozen other people into the barn where dozens of ewes were lined up single file waiting to get on a shoulder-high platform to have their udders relieved. The girls were actually pushing and making loud noises trying to hurry the process. “It’s probably a great relief for the girls to get milked,” said Sally. “Must be uncomfortable for them.”

According to the young woman with multiple ring piercings in each ear who was draining the girls, they get one to two liters of sheep’s milk from each ewe from September through March, and it takes about six liters of milk for a kilo of hard cheese (they are known for their fine Pecorino) and about two or three liters for softer cheeses like the Blue Sapphire we’d enjoyed at the Red Velvet Lounge.

Diane wasn’t around but I did chat with her daughter, Nicole, who is the farm manager and wine maker. She said the cheese making business was a bit of an accident. Originally the family intended to start a winery at Birchs Bay (she started her career as a wine wholesalers in Queensland) and they were looking for a way to organically control the grasses between the rows. “We figured sheep would be best and then my dad heard about a flock that was being sold and shipped to the mainland. He rang the owners and said he’d buy them. ‘They’re Tasmanian sheep and they should stay in Tasmania.’ So that’s how we ended up with the girls. And then we had to start milking them and doing something with the milk. That’s how we ended up owning a sheep cheesery. It was just circumstances. Now I spend more time running the cheesery than making wine. Such is life.”

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She wore Red Velvet

The Red Velvet Lounge in Cygnet, Tasmania. Photo by David Lansing.

I was telling you the other day about the Huon Valley which used to be the center of thousands of surrounding acres of fruit trees and berry farms, all growing the stone fruit and raspberries and such that went in to IXL Jam (from an early story on the jam factory, which is now my hotel in Hobart: “The raspberries were brought up in kegs, and inside the yard is a pile of these vessels, which were nearly all afloat during the raspberry season. The currants, gooseberries, and stone fruit were all brought up in cases that went as far as the eye could see…”).

Anyway, Sally and I were driving around the Huon Valley and just passing by all the little roadside stands selling strawberries and blueberries and cherries was making us both hungry so she suggested we drive into Cygnet, long the center of the Huon Valey, for lunch. She took me to the Red Velvet Lounge, a funky, eclectic brick restaurant that is the heart of little Cygnet. It’s the sort of place that’s almost too popular for its own good (even though it was well past one, the place was jammed and two young women were going crazy trying to keep up with all the orders).

The lunch menu was fascinating. They had smoked eel croquettes and quail saltimbocca and cold English pork pie (which, our waitress told us, they were out of), but in spying on the other tables, it seemed the most popular item was their cheese board: several different types of local cheeses (Heritage Double Brie, Grandvewe Blue, King Island Surprise Bay Cheddar), plus grilled fruit bread from their bakery, crackers, and apple slices. So that’s what we ordered.

The other cool thing about the Red Velvet Lounge were the shelves lining the brick walls that were filled with the restaurant’s own preserves, all made from goodies grown in and around the Huon Valley: preserved apricots, peaches, cherries and well as some exotic jam combos like plum and vanilla or apricot and saffron. They also make (and sell) their own mustards, sandwich pickles, olives, and something called Gentle-woman’s relish. I’ve heard of gentleman’s relish in England which is either a) a spicy anchovy relish or b) slang for jizz (take your pick), but have never heard of Gentle-woman’s relish. Which is why I had to buy a jar.

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The poo machine fails

Wim Delvoye's "Cloaca," better known as the "poo machine." Photo courtest of MONA.

I was going to get a tour of MONA from Delia Nicholls, a delightful research curator, but when she came to greet me she told me that she only had an hour or so and then had to go to a funeral for an old friend, another art patron. So instead of walking around, we sat down at the museum’s wine bar for a light lunch and some conversation. I like Delia. She’s very up front. For instance, when I originally talked with her, I asked if I might be able to meet the museum’s owner, David Walsh.

“Not possible,” she said. “David doesn’t particularly like people.”

Since I don’t particularly like people either I was sympathetic.

Over lunch Delia told me that working for David could be “challenging.” She said David personally hired her for her job as curator but then would never say hello when they passed each other. After several months of this she stopped him and asked him if she’d done something to offend him. “He had no idea who I was. He told me he didn’t pay any attention to people’s faces. He doesn’t relate to people that way. He’s a mathematical savant and everything to him is numbers…and he sees numbers as colors.”

She also said David built the museum to follow his passion. “It’s not a museum where you’ll be talked down to or expected to feel a certain way about the art. You’ll just either like it or you won’t. And it doesn’t make any difference to David one way or the other. He’s not trying to convert you.”

She then hurried off to her funeral and I hurried off to see what she and others call the “poo machine,” an installation by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye properly titled “Cloaca,” that simulates the human digestive system. Regular food is shoveled into a long, transparent mouth, travels through a number of agitated glass bowls, and ends up as turds which are pushed through a cylinder and onto a plate promptly at two every afternoon.

Delia told me that the poo machine was at the very bottom of the museum, three floors below ground level, so I hurried down the stairs, through several dark galleries, having no idea where I was going, until I realized I was lost. “Excuse me,” I asked one of the attendants, “can you tell me how to get to the poo machine?”

Never thought I’d be asking that question.

Two minutes later, I found it. Several people were standing around the end of this odd contraption, waiting for the turds to fall. We all waited and waited. About fifteen minutes after two, a tall, blond attendant came into the gallery to have a look at the machine. “I’ve never seen this before,” he said. “It always poos at two o’clock. This is very unusual.”

The attendant got on his two-way radio and reported to someone upstairs that no turds had come from the poo machine. A crackly voice on the other end told him to stand by.

A few minutes later, two middle-aged women in museum uniforms turned up. Everyone, including me, stared at the poo machine. “It didn’t poo at all?” asked one of the women.

“I don’t think so,” said the tall blond attendant. “Did anyone see any poo?” he asked those of us standing around. We all shook our heads.

“Very unusual,” said the woman.

“I’ve never seen this,” said the tall attendant. “It always poos.”

But evidently not today. Seems the poo machine was just a little backed up. I patted the stricken tall blond attendant on the back. “It’s alright,” I told him. “It happens to the best of us.”

And with that I went off to see what else was of interest in the museum.

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