Page 20 - foodservice magazine September 2018

PHOTOGRAPHY: TIM GREY
20
CHEFS’ CORNER
Chefs’ corner
RECENTLY APPOINTED HEAD CHEF OF THE YARRA VALLEY’S TARRAWARRA ESTATE, MARK EBBELS, SHARES HOW HE CAME TO CHAMPION PLASTIC-FREE COOKING AND PLANT-BASED CUISINE.
Mark Ebbels, head chef of TarraWarra Estate.
The desire to reduce waste stems from my desire to be responsible about my actions as a chef and as a human being. I’m aware that what I choose to do now can have a huge impact for future generations. It’s the same reason I like to cook with plants and don’t eat animal products.
I guess as you reach a certain age you start to question what you’re doing with your life, and for me that time came about three years ago. I realised I needed to positively contribute to the community, and I started evaluating both my personal and career choices. During this time, my partner Jo and I did a fair bit of research and my eyes were opened to the benefits of a plant-based diet.
We decided to commit to a plant-based diet but had concerns that my vocation would make this lifestyle change
challenging. I figured to switch careers would be a waste of the skills I had learnt, particularly as I do really enjoy cooking. So I wanted to work on how I could execute both.
My choices in the commercial kitchen are a reflection of our home life. While the road to reducing waste is long, at TarraWarra Estate we’re making meaningful changes to ensure we’re headed in the right direction, including composting food scraps and recycling glass and aluminium. Single-use plastic is the biggest issue and we’re still in the process of using up the sous vide bags and takeaway containers for storage that were in the kitchen when I started.
We are replacing sous vide bags with poaching in flavourful mediums such as stocks and oils using the immersion circulators, and cooking in marinates and
controlled humidity using combi ovens. This enables us to keep accurate control of the cooking without using bags. I believe that if chefs were supplied with an avenue to cook and store food that produced just as good a quality product without the baggage, it would be easy to get them on board.
Storage for me is probably the biggest hurdle with regards to getting rid of single use plastics, and whilst we are stocking up on gastro pans and silicon lids (which are very expensive) we do use takeaways to store food in as well because we can reuse them multiple times.
I imagine it will take us around six months or so to use up what’s here and fine tune our cooking and storage methods. But we’re all on board this journey and committed to operating as sustainably as possible.