The finest food? Southlanders, it has us surrounded

A stellar chef wants a word with his home province, writes.

A‘‘You don’t have to fluff around with it too much if it’s quality product, and that’s what we’ve got here.’’ Ethan Flack

fter honing his skills in Michelin-standard restaurants in the northern hemisphere, top chef Ethan Flack has found the perfect market for world-class Southland produce.

It’s you guys.

It’s Southlanders.

A decade in some of the most exquisitely demanding kitchens in the UK has developed in Flack a fresh appreciation for food of his home province.

Now returned to Southland, which is also the home of his wife Josie, he wants to showcase not just our own produce but the stories behind it.

The growers, the producers, the people whose very lives reach deep into Southland soil. Knowing their stories is part of the joy of appreciating the food they are able to offer us, he says.

As part of this mission he will soon be launching a series of columns in The Southland Times, encouraging us to make the most of what’s available, ready, ripe and inseason.

It can be easy to underappreciate the sheer quality and range of produce around us ‘‘but it really is next-level’’ Flack says. And he should know.

Since graduating from Southland Boys’ High School in 2007 Flack’s career has proven spectacular.

He honed his skills at French chef Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir Aux Quat’Saisons in Oxford, and was executive sous chef for for Britain’s youngest Michelin-starred chef, Tommy Banks whose Yorkshire restaurant The Black Swan was rated TripAdvisor’s best restaurant in the world in 2017.

Add his work with chefs including New York’s Dan Barber and Copenhagen’s Christian Puglisi and . . . actually if we’re not careful we could make the recipes he plans to suggest to us sound daunting. He laughs at the thought. These will be homely recipes, he says. Sophisticated technique has its place but he respects – and thoroughly enjoys – rustic home cooking.

It’s what he did in his days off from those restaurants.

And the chefs who taught him so much also taught him the difference between cooking it right and getting too clever-clever.

‘‘You don’t have to fluff around with it too much if it’s quality product, and that’s what we’ve got here.’’

In recent times Flack has been developing his relationships with a host of often small Southland producers, many of whom chip away drawing little-enough attention to what they’re achieving.

Quick – a starter for 10 and no conferring . . .Where, apart from the Hokonui moonshine product, can you get Southland-made whisky?

Auld Farm Distillery, Waikouru, in case you didn’t know. Where the motto is ‘‘from first seed to first sip’’. And Flack becomes animated when he describes a malt-based spirit they provide that can infuse Christmas mince pies and Christmas cake with a particular charm.

Getting to know the growers and their stories is not only rewarding in itself – they do tend to be good company – but their insights ,and their values, are part of the story that can enhance our enjoyment of what’s on the table in front of us.

Having genuine conversations about food is massively important, Flack maintains.

‘‘If someone enjoys what they’re doing, they do a better job of it. Cross paths with them and they generally want to show it and share it. And that helps your understanding, your perspective on it.’’

Flack is also part of the Eat New Zealand Kaitaki Collective – a group of food story-tellers chosen from across New Zealand. (Ruapuke Island a beekeeper-hunter Daniel Tarrant is another).

Southland has an array of microclimates combined with emphatically distinct seasons. Right there you have the elements for a great deal of product variation throughout the year. ‘‘That’s empowering. Nature at its best.’’

It also means that change is a constant.

Consider the approach of asparagus season. For a few months – yum. Then time’s up. Wait your patience for another 10 months.

What’s not to love about variation?

Flack loves his fresh strawberries. Seriously. It does tend to come up in conversation.

‘‘But how boring would it be if you could eat strawberries all year round? Or new potatoes? You’d get sick of it.’’

Flack is ardent in the cause of eating the right food at the right time, and working with the seasons, not in defiance of them.

Okay, we all have at least occasional use for that supermarket bag of frozen veges in the freezer. But if we’re paying attention to what Southland’s producing at any given time, we won’t lack for fresh alternatives. Enough for a varied, nutritious, and damn-it-delicious lifestyle. As part of his back-home development, he’s been hosting dinner parties, home-cooking seasonal produce. And, okay, those recipes may be a tad more technically complicated than those he’ll be putting to Southland Times readers.

But what won’t be different is that the essential quality of the food is paramount.

How did our chef feel when the end of lockdown brought about a stampede to fast-food outlets?

‘‘I don’t find it frustrating,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s easy to get. It’s relatively cheap. And some people don’t have the confidence, or haven’t had the encouragement, to cook much.’’

He isn’t inclined to hector anyone to repent of their fast-food habits. Just to help connect his own people with an awareness of how much of the food being grown around them is, seriously, as good as it gets.