Passion for food finds a home in Port Douglas
Shire events
Celebrity chef Matt Preston says Taste Port Douglas has a national reputation as a premier food festival, while also having a focus on fun.
And he is in a good position to know - Preston writes a food column read by more than two million people each week and has an impressive resume as a former judge of MasterChef and My Kitchen Rules who has been cooking and writing about food for decades.
Preston told Newsport this week he still feels excited about the thought of inventing new dishes, with the humble Vietnamese rice paper one of his latest infatuations.
“I’m mildly obsessed with this idea: Can you take an ingredient and use it to create different things?” Preston says.
“(Rice paper’s) got these amazing properties in terms of when you fry it, it will crisp up like a prawn cracker.
“You can use it dry, it will behave in one way, and you use it wet, it will behave in another way.
“You can use it in the air fryer and you can kind of use it wrapping anything super quickly to get a really good crispy crust.”
He has been experimenting with using this single ingredient to help evolve a range of global dishes - including spanakopita, jalapeno cheese rolls, roti bread, burger rolls and quesadilla, all of which he will explain more fully tomorrow in his cooking masterclass “The Preston perspective: Culinary stories that inspire”.
If this seems like many of the latest food trends are gravitating towards blending different regional ingredients all together to help create some sort of global super cuisine, you may not be too far off the mark.
“You take an ingredient and you see how you can work it in, just like the Italians originally did with tomatoes,” Preston says.
“They worked tomatoes into pizza, or into pasta sauces, and it fits naturally.
“So constantly there are new ideas or people reinterpreting ideas or finding different ways to do things, and that’s how you tend to find things."
Preston uses the example of Dubai chocolate, which was invented when a Dubai chef took fine Greek kataifi pastry, toasted it in butter, chopped it up with pistachios and tahini, and put it inside chocolate bars.
“It’s delicious.
“And that’s a really new idea, kataifi pastry’s 100 years old and he’s taken something and made something totally different.”
But Preston says not all food blends are necessarily good, and more than two-thirds of new ideas do not work - another concept he explores in his workshop.
“We’ll identify the terrible ones,” he says.
“I saw something the other day, a ball of icecream, frozen hard, into soaked rice paper, you kind of squidge it up, cut off the top, you make a mochi, you know those Japanese chewy balls.
“Sounds great, taste it, terrible.
“So we’ll shoot down some of those sacred cows.”
Matt Preston is one of about 20 chefs appearing at Taste Port Douglas across the next four days, as well as a host of other foodie events.
"The Preston perspective: Culinary stories that inspire" is on at Taste Port Douglas, Friday, August 8, 1pm. Details: tasteportdouglas.com.au.
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