GOURMET TRAVELLER 87PHOTOGRAPHY YU-CHING LEE. ILLUSTRATION BILLIE JUSTICE THOMSON
B
reakfast lunch and tea? Chefs in Australia
have played with Vegemite on and off
over the years, but right now everyone’s
favourite yeasty spread is really having a
moment in the kitchens of our leading
restaurants and cafés.
Followers of Ben Shewry’s Instagram feed will notice
that he has just doubled down on Attica’s commitment
to Vegemite (first made three years ago with Gazza’s
Vegemite pie), experimenting with that mum-lunch classic
Salada crackers with tomato and Vegemite. This being
a restaurant that charges a cool $275 a head for dinner,
of course, the tomatoes are grown by the team, the heavily
buttered Salada ain’t Arnott’s and the “Vegemite” is
made from scratch using black garlic and other bespoke
ingredients that aren’t known to be part of Cyril Percy
Callister’s original 1923 formulation.
Melbourne is Vegemite’s hometown and Shewry’s
fellow chefs over at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal made
headlines in 2017 when they débuted a Vegemite-driven
dessert. It was months in the making, and the kitchen team
felt the pressure. “It’s Vegemite in Australia – we have to
get this right,” said chef Ashley Palmer-Watts at the time.
“If it’s not great, we’ll be nailed for it.”
The dish remains on the menu today, listed at $30 as
“ice-cream with Vegemite”, incorporating toasted barley
cream, yeast caramel, macadamia, puffed spelt and, to really
drive the toast connection home, sourdough crumble.
At Anchovy in Richmond, meanwhile, Thi Li dips into
the school lunches of yore for inspiration and comes up
with “tempura Vegemite, Laughing Cow”: a deep-fried cube
of cheese custard infused with Vegemite and served with
whipped cheese. At Kensington Street Social in Sydney, the
Vegemite is on the drinks list, appearing in the Vegemitini.
In Canberra it’s whipped through ricotta for breakfast at
High Road, and a similar approach is taken at Smoke, atop
Barangaroo House, where Vegemite ricotta joins padrón
peppers and crispbread on the bar menu. At the brand-new
d’Arenberg Cube in McLaren Vale, Vegemite mayonnaise
accompanies “bush coals” of hot-smoked barramundi
blackened with onion ash, wattleseed and mountain pepper.
Why so much Vegemite right now? Its very ubiquity
makes it an easy go-to – the miso of Australia, ready to add
a dash of dark-brown complexity to anything it touches.
Yu-ching Lee, a chef who makes pastries for Paper Bird
in Sydney, recently started putting cheese and Vegemite
twists in the cabinet, and says that she started using it
simply “because it’s there”. “I’d been making delicious
XO cheese sticks, but the Paper Bird kitchen changed themenu and stopped making XO sauce,
so I switched to Vegemite. It’s also
vegetarian-friendly, which is a plus.”
But Vegemite has been a staple
in an awful lot of kitchens for an awfully long time
without ever really jumping onto restaurant menus in
a big way. You could point to an intersection between
locavorism, nostalgia for Australiana and a fascination
with all things fermented. Where else (apart, perhaps,
from a can of Fosters) are you going to find all those
things in one handy jar?
Chase Kojima, the American-born chef of Sokyo in
Sydney and Kiyomi on the Gold Coast, says Vegemite had
him stumped when he first arrived in Australia seven years
ago, but thinking of it as Australian miso (a “harsh” miso,
admittedly) has unlocked its possibilities in the kitchen
for him. It appears everywhere in his cuisine, from the
Vegemite and shichimi roasted almonds at the bar to the
lamb chops grilled on the robata and served with charred
eggplant purée in the restaurants. He’s even used it at the
sushi counter, making tiny Vegemite-toast croûtons as a
complement to poached Moreton Bay bugs. It’s the perfect
intersection, he says, between the Australian flavour profile
and the Japanese. “Youcan’t get this taste just from normal
red or white miso.”
Back at Attica, Ben Shewry says it’s the kitsch, playful
aspect of serving Vegemite in a fine-dining restaurant, and
the passion Australians have for it that appeals to him.
“To be honest, I don’t even like Vegemite much myself.”●“It’s the miso
of Australia,
ready to add
a dash of
dark-brown
complexity
to anything
it touches.”Yu-ching Lee’s
cheese and
Vegemite twists
at Sydney’s
Paper Bird.