Recipes from the pantry

Cole River Valley Rosemary Salt Blend January 22 2015, 0 Comments

Uses

Sprinkled on fried, baked or grilled fish our Coal River Valley Rosemary salt blend imparts a maritime tang. Use it with lemon juice on oysters — just sprinkle and allow them to stand for 10 minutes in the fridge.

Coal River Valley marinade.

Process the juice of a lemon, two tablespoons of olive oil, a clove of garlic and 5-10 grammes of Coal River Valley in a blender. Pour it over fish fillets in a shallow dish and allow to stand for 15-20 minutes, turning the fish once or twice. Then grill and serve.

With frozen fish.

Freezing can remove a lot of flavour from fish, scallops and prawns. Coal River Valley can help to reclaim the lost taste. When the fish is thoroughly thawed, place it in a bowl with one litre of water and 10 grammes of Coal River Valley Rosemary salt.

Let it stand for 10 minutes or more then remove the fish — do not rinse, just pat fillets or peeled prawns dry with paper towel and brush with oil and a tiny quantity of light soy sauce.

Prawns in the shell should be left to drain in the fridge


Mountain Pepper's amazing after-burn! September 10 2014, 0 Comments

Tasmania’s wild mountain pepper can be up to five times hotter than ordinary black pepper – and it has quite a different taste sensation to chilli.

It’s rather like the Sichuan pepper used so widely used in north-east Asia to produce the famous tongue-numbing hot dishes of the region.

What makes Tasmanian pepper so prized by chefs for its lingering afterburn is a compound called polygodial (the experts say it’s a dialdehyde with a bicyclic sesquiterpenoid backbone, in case you really wanted to know).

It’s found in both the berries and the leaves of this attractive wild shrub which grows wild throughout Tasmania. The pepper bush is a Gondwanaland plant which evolved before that huge prehistoric continent broke up; that is why it has relatives in South America.