We had an amazing day for lunch at Josef Chromy Wines with Lunch by Alain Passard. It was wonderful to see how many guests had come over from Melbourne for this much anticipated lunch including food writer Dani Valent who got me an in to take photos in the kitchen to go with her interview here. I’ll let you read all about it on her site but here are some more of my photos of the delicious day that I hope you will enjoy.
The Agrarian Experience is something I have wanted to do for years, so when a group of girls put in for our friend Charlie to go as a special gift for her special birthday I just knew I had to go along just to make sure she had a good time 😉
The Agrarian Kitchen is located about 45 mins drive from Hobart. It was a beautiful sunny day & the drive there was very nice – we were both so excited.
We were off to a good start to our day with cake & coffee on arrival 🙂 The dining room had 2 massive book shelves filled to the brim with cookbooks, so I felt right at home.
Next we had a tour & taste of the garden, starting with herbs.
We got to see the animals too 🙂
We had each been given a basket & clippers to pick the food as we toured through the garden.
Our classroom for the afternoon 🙂
Charlie & I choose the oyster blade dish to make – So Rodney showed us how to trim & cut the meat. Ours didn’t look quite as good as his, but it still tasted great!
Charred spring onions – only a few moments before had been picked from the garden.
Chickpea Saffrito
We learnt how to roll out the pastry & each made our own pie for dessert – one of the couples had made the sweet shortcrust pastry by hand & the delicious rhubarb & elderflower filling. It may have got a bit competitive to see who was going to make the best looking pie 🙂
Then we all rolled out the pasta dough & made our own ravioli, filled with homemade ricotta.
Goats curd
After our big day – it was finally time to serve up our first course 🙂
And they have Ridgeline Pottery too!
And some Stefano Lubiana wine too!!
Time to cook our marinated oyster blade YUM!!
WOW!! What an amazing day, we absolutely loved it all. It was such a relaxing day & so much delicious fun, I would definitely recommend it to anyone. I look forward to trying another class again soon. Thanks so much to Rodney & Séverine for an awesome Agrarian Experience.
Cheese is one of my favourite ingredients & so I have wanted to make this recipe from current top chef in the world Massimo Bottura from his restaurant Osteria Francescana. I loved watching the Netflix series Chef’s Table & the episode with Massimo was great. (Watch it here) And another reason to get excited for me is that I will get to eat a dish prepared by Massimo himself when I am in New York in early October – the foodie stars have aligned & I am booked into a progressive dinner cooked by 6 top chef’s including Massimo Bottura!! Yes I am extremely excited I wonder which dish he will be making it may even be this one? This is a recipe from Dani Valent’s cookbook In the Mix 2 cookbook it has been adapted for the home cook. Normally featuring not only 5 textures of parmasean but 5 ages of parmesan. I decided to use 5 different types of parmesan instead, making the best I could with what I could get & I was very happy with the results 🙂 Apart from my domestic cream siphon not working very well that is!
I even made homemade ricotta for one of the elements to the dish – see my cheese making post here.
One of the elements even called for making a parmasean stock out of the rind of the parmasean 🙂
This is a Ben Shewry recipe from Dani Valent Cooking, Elaine was Ben’s Grandma – what a delicious fun cake to make & photograph 🙂 YUM!! thermomix ganache is so easy & amazing!!
I may have had a little shopping “accident” after going for another visit to Ridgeline Pottery, some of these pieces are seconds, leftover from orders from top chefs such as Peter Gilmore, Tetsuya Wakuda and Ben Shewry. Need I say more? You can put them in the dishwasher & the oven plus they look amazing!! There are a number of local Hobart restaurants that use their pottery too; Templo, Aloft & Pidgeon Hole Cafe just to name a few.
Ellie used this gorgeous set for a photoshoot of her Seafood Risotto – I brought my Thermomix in & whipped it up for her while she was setting up the shot 🙂
How delicious does that look? Great styling as always by Ellie – the recipe will be in her new cookbook Seafood Everyday due to be released later this year.