Matt Stone rocks Perth
– and the world – in his affair with sustainable
food and Australian
native ingredients.
TAKE a 26-year-old man from Down Under, rock some tattoos on him, and hand him a crank-handle spatula. You'll get Matt Stone, not the average chef. He's a good looker with a passion for respecting the environment and working with ethical producers.
"I let the environment and the world of sustainability dictate the food that I cook," says Stone in a phone interview from Australia.
Stone is one half of the duo starring in Recipes that Rock, the TLC cookshow premiering tomorrow on Astro Channel 707. The executive chef of Greenhouse Perth, an eco-friendly restaurant, he won the 2011 Good Food Guides Best Young Chef while his restaurant was named Best Restaurant; in the same year, he was crowned the Gourmet Traveller Best New Talent.
The string of achievements is quite a feat for a young man who didn't finish high school. Being a young chef – and not having paper qualifications – it took a while for Stone to get respect from his peers.
In 2003, at the age of 15, Stone started work in the kitchen at the Leeuwin Estate Winery in his hometown of Margaret River. After two years as a kitchen apprentice, he moved to one of Perth's most highly regarded restaurants, Star Anise, where he developed his skills and passion for cooking under head chef David Coomer. Coomer was his inspiration and at the age of just 20, he was appointed sous chef of Star Anise.
Two years later, Stone was approached to lead the kitchen of Greenhouse Perth. Here, he embraced the Greenhouse by Joost philosophy of preparing fresh, sustainable, locally-sourced, whole foods. He did not consider himself a qualified chef, but that did not stop him from being a champion for sustainable dining.
Stone (left) and James catch and cook their own dinner in the show.
Greenhouse was started by Joost Bakker, a self-taught, discipline-crossing, boundary-pushing florist, furniture and lighting designer, artist and environmentalist who works with recycled materials and plants and has been creating media headlines since the 90s. In his element in this environment, Stone made a name for himself as a progressive cook and put Greenhouse at the front of Perth's dining culture.
"Australia has a massive amount of fruits, spices and herbs that we're only just discovering," says Stone. Taking this as his chance for a cooking experiment, Stone adds that he wants to try cooking exotic dishes like crickets, green tree ants and Australian native products like wallaby and kangaroos!"
Kangaroos? One might be shocked, but Stone says it's all in the name of sustainability. "In Australia, there are three (wild) kangaroos for every person. They don't take up man's space; we don't have to grow and produce grains and feed for them. So in my eyes, it's a no-brainer to be eating them.
"Consuming insects is definitely common in Asia. It's really an ethical way of consuming protein, vitamins and nutrients," says the chef who finds Copenhagen a fantastic city teeming with the best restaurants.
For a chef with a tattoo of a pizza slice, Stone is a superb master of wines. Stone recommends the Leeuwin Estate chardonnay, which he says is really delicious; the Picardy pinot noir, because Picardy is a great producer in the Southwest of Western Australia and they consistently make really lovely pinot noir wines which lend to a lot of his food pairings; and Dom Perignon, because he just loves drinking champagne.
Stone is described as the chef with tattoos. Why has tattoo come to define him? Stone believes that being a skater and a punk rock lover had influenced him into getting seriously tattooed. "If I could spend a heap of money buying artwork and putting them on my wall at home, why not get them and put them on myself!"
Food is often said to bring people together; for Stone it reflects the environment which is in itself, art. Art on his body and art in the cooking pot.
The show
In the six-part series Recipes that Rock, Stone teams up with 45-year-old Alex James, a British rock star-turned-cheese maker, to embark on a gourmet journey around the Margaret River region of Western Australia.
In each half-hour episode, the duo dove into the culinary delights and freshly-picked produce across Margaret River, once a chilled-out surfing town known also for its wines. More recently, artisan cheese, chocolate and olive oil producers have made it their home alongside outstanding microbreweries.
Inspired by the high-quality Asian dishes and Pacific Rim cuisine, Stone and James cook up feasts like sticky Vietnamese pork, Mexican spiced abalone with avocado and mango salad, barbecued marron with grilled asparagus and beach herbs, and delicious desserts like a liquid-centred chocolate cake and sheep milk ice-cream with fruits, pistachios and rose petal syrup.
Not only do the boys cook up a storm in the kitchen, they get down and dirty hive-hunting for gooey golden honey, scouring the aqua-blue beaches to pick abalone and play catch with piglets stuck on an island off the mainland of a free-range pig farm.
The boys continue ticking off their food lover's must-do list: hunting for black truffles, touring the local wineries, catching their own dinner and meeting with experts who share special tricks of the trade while rubbing shoulders with renowned chefs from around the globe – Alex Atala, Alvin Leung, Heston Blumenthal, Rene Redzepi and Tetsuya Wakuda to name a few – as the gourmet world descends on the region for Margaret River's Gourmet Escape.
Recipes That Rock is on every Monday at 7pm on TLC (Astro Channel 707), starting April 28; encores every Tuesday at 10am. Visit Matt Stone's restaurant Greenhouse Perth here: http://greenhouseperth.com/ To find out more about the interesting work of Joost Bakker, http://byjoost.com/
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