Rumors of my death are exaggerated

Just to let my visitors know, I am still very active in the authentic Australian food industry. I just tend to use my own website for blogging more than this Blogger site. So to keep up with happenings on Australian wild foods, check out my homepage.

Incidentally, I am looking for a General Manager/Business Development Manager for my growing food business in Sydney. It's a busy operation as we head into the USA with licensed products, another book and a TV show all in development. If you are or know of anyone who could handle stellar growth, please contact me.

Affiliate program Australia

Recently I launched an Affiliate Program Australia for my online store at http://www.dining-downunder.com/idevaffiliate . This gives my many contacts in the industry the opportunity to benefit financially from our shared interest and promotion of Australian native ingredients.

My online store retails Australian native ingredients and products which form part of an Australian cuisine. The gourmet herbs, spices, sauces, syrups, seasonings, infused oils and cosmetic items available online at the online store are manufactured from authentic native Australian ingredients with a long history of use by our indigenous Aboriginal people. The online store website is at http://www.dining-downunder.com/shop/

After you join, you will be supplied with a range of leaderboards, banners ads, title ads and text links that you place within your website, food blog or email campaigns. When a user clicks on one of your affiliate program links to my store, their activity will be tracked by our affiliate program software. You will earn a commission ranging from 10% to 20% based on previous transactions. For your information, the current average affiliate order is over US$85 and rising.

If you are interested in joining, simply visit http://www.dining-downunder.com/idevaffiliate and apply.

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Affiliate program Australia, native Australian, native Australian foods, food, online store, Australian food, Australian native ingredients, Australian cuisine, food blog, herbs & spices, infused oils

Blogging with Benjamin Christie and Vic Cherikoff

I know I get a lot of visitors to this site so I'm going to keep adding to my blogs by referring to two other websites with which I am associated. My main website is where I have recently added blogs on the following:

ANZAC biscuits on Anzac Day

We are now seeing what a foolish effort the attack on Gallipoli really was from a military standpoint and in order to shift blame from the generals who should be despised and publicly damned. Instead, we applaud the heroics of those soldiers they condemned to certain death and of those lucky enough to have survived. To me, it's just twisted that our government promotes a cute recipe for Anzac biscuits in honor and remembrance of those that died and legislates that the recipe can't be changed.
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Unnatural Acts at The Natural Products Expo

The Natural Products Expo West saw record-setting crowds of up to 43,000 retail buyers, media and industry members who were barraged by more than 3,000 exhibits at this year’s wall-to-wall industry event, the top healthy food and lifestyle products. And I can assure you that the bull-sh_t meter went wild on numerous ocassions.
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Wattle We Eat Now? (that's the Royal 'We')

Queen Elizabeth and many of her household are no strangers to authentic Australian flavours. Like many official functions for all types of heads of state, politicians, royalty, sheiks, religious leaders and so on, this week’s event featured Cherikoff ingredients …
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Some recent NPD - not just a big cheese

Part of supplying the best authentic Australian ingredients available is my new product development (NPD) for companies wanting to gain a significant competitive edge in their market.

There’s a strategy of pre-eminence in what Cherikoff Rare Spices does in that new products introduced to market by most companies are merely more of the same.
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The other site is that of my good friend and colleague, Benjamin Christie. Benjamin has just started a subscription drive for his e-zine and I strongly recommend subscribing to it if you are at all interested in any or all of the following: building networks and contacts, restaurant marketing, good food, Australian recipes, happenings in the global food industry and more.

Benjamin and I have run our Dining Downunder , Australian cuisine promotions together for some years and I know many chefs and food writers around the world, often refer to his blog, which is also his website.

The topics Benjamin addresses are very broad and will help chefs, restaurateurs, foodies, student chefs and food marketers along with hotel GMs, F&Bs and manufacturers keep their fingers on the pulse of food issues.

Benjamin also loves to cook and write about his creations and so there are a plethora of recipes. Take these as an example:

▪ Kangaroo fillet with Yakajirri rosti, aniseed myrtle mushrooms, quandong confit and crispy enoki
▪ Lemon Aspen Sorbet
▪ Cauliflower soup with marron scented with Ferguson’s lobster oil and Oz Lemon
▪ Petuna ocean trout with riberry confit and macadamia cream sauce
▪ Australian Wildfire Clam Chowder - Bulk
▪ Sydney Rock Oysters with Glacé Wild Limes
▪ Gumleaf Scented Crème Caramel
▪ Grilled barramundi with Oz Lemon mash and quandong confit
▪ Australian Wildfire Spiced Wontons
▪ Squid, corn and asparagus cakes with rainforest herbs

Sure, they are all Australian and come with a good story to entertain, edify and entice. For example, imagine slicing easily through the marla steak (kangaroo if you will) knowing the rare-cooked meat will be tender and juicy. The morsel of game on my fork is accompanied by a portion of rosti with its rich tomato seasoning made even richer by the spices in the Yakajirri, one being the bush tomato spice the Yunkatjatjara call akudjura. This more than makes up for the low fat of the meat and the spice notes complement the Maillard products in the seared protein expanding the 250 tastes to probably half as much again.

Then come the highlights of aromatics and soft textures with the earthy mushrooms enhanced naturally by the aniseed myrtle or forest anise as its heady kaleidoscope of essential oils, from a delicate, slightly fruity aniseed to green tea and cut grass provide for the mid to late palate. There happens to be more roasty toasty notes from the splash of Wattleseed extract in the mushrooms for those attune to the chocolate, coffee, hazelnut of this incredible flavour enhancer. Benjamin left this ingredient out to simplify the dish but I always use the combination of forest anise and Wattleseed for stir-fried mushrooms. Try it and be amazed. It leaves your taste buds begging for the next mouthful and almost cleans the tongue's receptors and heightens the organo-leptic experience of this meal. And still, there's more...

To make the dish even more addictive, a hint of sweetness tempered with the peachy, apricot and caramel characters of the slightly chewy strips of quandong confit along with some extra textural crunch and character from the crispy, coated enoki.

If only all experiences in life were so rich and rewarding, there'd be no time for war, terrorism or other of society's vulgarities.

New Cherikoff Australian Ingredients Website - you're invited to drop in

It has happened as a New Year venture.

The new Cherikoff Australian Ingredients website is up and running and while there's still a bit of migrating and up-dating to do, the site if fully functional as is.

Andrew Wong from Randomblowup: Unrestrained Expression P/L did a fantastic job with the new design so pop by and drop me an email with your thoughts.

A few of the blogs appearing on these pages will soon be moved over to the News site on my home page and ultimately, this Blogger site will disappear altogether. But such is life.

I hope you will follow my future, on-going blogs from my Home page and remember to grab the RSS feed there (coming soon) or subscribe to my newsletter to get reminders of blogs, information on developments in food, my TV show, our Australian cuisine promotions and a whole lot more.

From Business Strategy to Bottled Stupidity

There are some interesting developments afoot in the authentic Australian food industry and some marketers hoping to ride the trend.

Some strategic alliances building business

In January, we roll out a promotional campaign announcing one new strategic alliance with an Australian family restaurant chain. The early menu testing has had fantastic results so we are expecting a huge response on the full roll out. We also plan to launch the rolled Wattleseed pavlova as a frozen dessert and begin to ensconce it as our national dessert. For a recipe to make your own and a reminder of Australia Day 05, have a look at my past blog. I won't get into the argument as to if we or the Kiwis invented the pavlova but I am happy with leaving our neighbours with the cow-pat pav (pavlova) while we exploit the sophistication of a roulade-style pavlova dessert.

A second strategic alliance is with Descendance and we are very excited to have the major Aboriginal performance troupe in Australia associated with our global Dining Downunder™, Australian cuisine promotions schedule. Our collaboration of authentic Australian food and Aboriginal dance and didjeridu (yidaki) was extremely successful in Moscow this year and we look forward to our joint promotions during 2006.

Another go at the supermarkets

Last week saw a major Victorian food manufacturer embrace several ingredients from a group of desert Aboriginal communities and wave the flag for authentic Australian foods. They are targeting the supermarkets with a stated aim of having authentic Australian foods an everyday part of Australia’s diet as well as hoping to build export markets.

This is great news as the existing range of sauces, dressings and seasonings is not doing big numbers in Coles and really needs a shot in the arm with the injection of some food technology from a company with some manufacturing expertise. One company makes an Illawarra plum chilli sauce which is clear in colour when everyone knows that Illawarra plums are a deep purple from the anti-oxidants in them (highly nutritional ingredients and all the more reason for using the plums).

I also saw that the seasonings by the same company are currently being dumped at 50c a pack and hope that this heralds their re-development to also address quality issues.

When will manufacturers learn that you can’t dupe the market? It will always sort out the quality products from the rubbish, given enough time.

More on this later …

Cherikoff authentic Australian foods help more companies grow for another record year

I firmly believe that we need more high quality products on the market. From seeing what my own range does to build the authentic Australian food sector both for my own company but more importantly, for the many clients I supply, I know the benefits to be gained from products which are different, unique, invaluable and passionately desirable.

Just have a look at the products of companies I supply, including Dick Smith Foods' Bushfood Breakfast and two of his successful soups, McCormick's spices, Charles Sturt Uni and Tilba cheeses, SPC Ardmona (Taylor's) sauces and even Woolies' Australian pepper sausages. And watch the shelves for Quandong hair care products in the New Year along with at least 5 other new food and cosmetic product range launches.

Of course we can always come unstuck. For example, the two supermarket buyers in our major Australian stores decided they didn't want to stock the exceptional King Island Lemon myrtle and maple yoghurt and so no Australian can now get this product as a result. Even though it proved itself in food service and made the grade in the specialty stores and deli's, not scoring the supermarkets meant that the volumes just weren't there for a multi-national like National Foods (owned by San Miguel of the Philippines). This fantastic yoghurt has gone the way of the dodo unless consumers begin a campaign to the supermarkets encouraging the buyers to reconsider.

In the food service sector and for the manufacturers we supply, Cherikoff authentic Australian ingredients provide the tools the end user needs to build my clients’ businesses. Think about this as it is a difficult concept to communicate. As I supply the best ingredients available, the discerning, creative and innovative chefs and manufacturers who are my clients are able to make equally invaluable dishes and products which are then talked about by the ultimate consumers of the products. We know that the best promotion money can buy is the passionate endorsement by those who know first hand – diners, consumers, end users. However, it is interesting how so many chefs and manufacturers continue to do the same thing year after year and expect a different result. Isn't that a definition for insanity?

I am convinced that if everyone believed your marketing, everyone would be your customer. Having people who try my authentic Australian ingredients and love them, talk about, refer, recommend and rave about them is the best marketing strategy I can employ.

Bottled Stupidity

And now another marketing strategy which is practicing that adage; if you can fool some of the people some of the time...

A company which I predict will struggle is marketing bottled water with ‘bush flower essences’ – read this as marketing fluff. I have to agree with Neil Shoebridge from the Financial Review who perfectly described the range as Bottled Stupidity.

Unfortunately, they demean the real marketing substance of authentic Australian ingredients.

As Neil points out, consumers are not idiots but the marketers of this water obviously think they are. He goes on to say these guys take the concept of questionable benefits to a new level. They are co-opting naturopaths who seemingly do not care about their reputations and lend their endorsements to the product claiming it has calming properties; enhances well-being; or is particularly suited to women. What are women less able to judge the authenticity of a claim of benefit where there can be none or do they mean it's just the water which is good for you?

There is absolutely no scientific evidence that flower essences have any beneficial effects whatsoever. The marketers know this and make claims which cannot be tested such as improving your intuition, insight or creativity (sic). However, should their supplier of this snake oil choose the wrong flower (if they actually even pick a single blossom), they could extract an unhealthy concentration of compounds such as histamines (which could cause dramatic allergic responses) or equally worrying, chemicals called fluoroacetates, which are similar to the compounds in the bait poison, 1080. Do these marketers really know or understand the risk and consequences of what they are doing? I hear that the supplier ‘discovered’ the ‘remarkable’ qualities of the flowers by “meditating in the bush” and then made infinitely dilute solutions of the flowers to make his snake oil. Spare me. I actually know that he simply wrote down the names of plants I presented at a short course on Aboriginal foods years ago at Sydney University. Who could really think that there's any substance behind this product despite the full colour advertisements in the glossy magazines and stands of the water in retail stores. I know I'd be wanting my money back if my purchasing manager bought the stuff in to retail.

I fully endorse Neil’s comments, “If the people (behind this water) think that anyone will buy this hogwash, they are delusional.”


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authentic Australian ingredients,authentic Australian food, authentic Australian foods, chef, bush flower essences

MSG and obesity - If it tastes good it probably makes you fat

I saw an interesting note on www.just-food.com about the link between MSG and obesity and thought I’d read the article. Unfortunately, it was for members only but a quick copy and paste of the title into Google yielded not only the background article but it opened up a Pandora’s Box.

If the topic of MSG interests you, have a look over this site for some really disconcerting information. But as to the topic of this blog, the gist of the just-food.com headline is a quote from the Spanish scientists who did the research:

A team of scientists in the Faculty of Medicine at the Complutense University of Madrid has discovered that when given to rats, E-621 (monosodium glutamate) produces a massive 40 percent increase in appetite. The scientists think the additive affects the arcuate nucleus area of the brain and so prevents proper functioning of the body's appetite control mechanisms. According to this hypothesis, people (and children) who consume foods with large quantities of E-621 just feel more and more hungry the more they eat.

I guess this explains why we often over eat what Westerners accept as cheap Chinese food (moreoften found in rural towns and RSL clubs and nothing like traditional Chinese fare) and find that we are hungry about a half hour later.

Now, of course, the problem of obesity cannot be blamed on just one chemical as there are a huge number of differences between the hunter/gatherer diet of wild foods and our modern intake of highly refined, agriculturally selected, industrially modified edibles which are more adapted to the market supply chain than human nutrition. See my previous blog on this topic.

But it is certainly more grist for the mill.

Oz lemon - more than just lemon myrtle

This is my first product blog which is on Oz lemon, my lemon myrtle sprinkle and I hope to look at one of the Cherikoff authentic Australian ingredients in a two weekly post. My intention is to create a collection of short reports as a close look at these still new, exciting and uniquely Australian foods and flavours. I hope it inspires you to track down a local source or use our on-line store and experiment in your own cooking. Anyway. Onto my feature product:

Oz lemon, my lemon myrtle sprinkle

The use of the authentic Australian food industry's best quality ingredients and their state of the art formulation in Oz lemon (lemon myrtle sprinkle):

saves you money (high economy of use)
gives a better result than just ordinary lemon myrtle (far stronger and flavour-balanced) and is a lot more versatile (because of the complexity of flavour).

Oz lemon is a unique blend of lemon myrtle, encapsulated lemon myrtle essential oils, forest anise, lemon aspen and rainforest lime pulp along with some of their encapsulated juices as well. Compared to lemon myrtle alone, it can be up to twice the flavour impact because of the unique formulation of Oz lemon.

Another feature is that our brains compare new flavours (in fact, any new experiences) with a set framework of past 'accepted truths' and lemon as a taste is generally linked with acid. Try to think of a sweet lemon and it confuses rather than being immediately logical like sweet honey. To address this initial reaction to the 'lemon' in lemon myrtle, I added two indigenous sources of acid or tartness - the two rainforest fruits; lemon aspen and rainforest lime. An advantage of these fruits is that they also add complexity to the final product.

Just try my new Oz lemon mousse mix or get it already made up as a freeze-thaw stable, exceptionally high quality, scrumptious dessert from Sticky Foods in Mortdale. Here's one made up and ready to eat:

So when you next think of grabbing for the lemon juice, try some Oz lemon instead. It is far superior in any of the following where I have also suggested a range of pseudonyms to add interest to a menu:

Wild lemon and lime tart
Oz lemon sorbet
Rainforest lemon bavarois
Lemon myrtle cheesecake
Oz lemon brandy butter over Xmas pudding
Lamb shanks with garlic, rosemary and Oz lemon gremolata
Stir-fried chilli prawns on Oz lemon fettuccine
Grilled snapper with a mango and aromatic lemon myrtle salsa

and offer a revitalising Oz lemon tisane

There's a myriad of uses for this enhanced lemon myrtle formulation in menus featuring authentic Australian food, far more than for just ordinary lemon myrtle. Check out my food service pages or subscribe to the e-zine for occasional recipes you can cook and of course, Oz lemon is available through our on-line store. In addition, check out Benjamin Christie's Oz lemon recipes here.

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Technorati tags: lemon myrtle, Oz lemon, lemon, authentic Australian ingredients

Native Australian foods? You must be crazy.

A lot of people ask how I've stuck at developing Australian native foods for the two and a half decades from when I was introduced to the wild food resources of Australia's Aborigines and recognised that we could not afford to lose this knowledge as Aboriginal culture changed and I knew there was an industry in commercialising these amazing ingredients. Well, with 20:20 hindsight, I must have been crazy.

To create the native food industry meant working with suppliers, collectors, chefs, caterers and small manufacturers and moving into export markets as well. As I created demand for any particular food other entrepreneurs, often those who I trusted and with whom I worked closely grabbed a piece of the market and carved out a niche for themselves in competition. That's business, I guess and it isn't in our Australian nature to collaborate too much and it did force me to run that little bit harder to stay out in front.

So I used my science background to develop leading edge processing ingredients for larger manufacturers who needed more than just simple herbs, spices, fruits or juices. This included:

encapsulated essential oils, fruit juices and extracts
sub-critical carbon dioxide flavour extracts
juices, purees and concentrates
special formulations and blends

and on to support documentation of:

specification sheets
certificates of compliance
material safety data sheets
application information and more

The science of turning wild Aboriginal foodstuffs into ingredients for the modern food, beverage, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries has the potential to keep an army busy for several lifetimes. I know it is what keeps me interested and forward-thinking (and way out in front of the industry).

But now, even I think that I must be crazy.