Starting now, we’re entering a period of late nights and bleary-eyed mornings as the world’s premier cycling event grips our imagination and has bike riders around the nation wondering if they should upgrade their wheels. We will, of course, be watching Le Tour on SBS ONE, but we’ll also be eating our way around Le Tour courtesy of Gabriel Gaté’s regional French recipes. So, dust off your bike and turn to page 78 for our special Tour de France TV Dinner feature.

A slightly less strenuous form of competition is mahjong – the tile-based game that’s popular across Asia. We recently joined the Tan family and their friends for an afternoon of mahjong and Malaysian flavours, and came away equally enthusiastic about both. See the story and recipes on page 47.

As regular readers know, SBS Feast is all about celebrating the vast variety of cultures in Australia, and in our Homegrown travel story this issue, we visit Bonegilla, one of the original immigration processing centres. Operating in the NSW town of Albury from 1947 to 1971, Bonegilla was the first port of call for 300,000 new arrivals to Australia. Among the new experiences for them was a menu filled with mutton – no doubt a dubious pleasure. Thankfully, they retained the flavours and recipes of their homelands, and we discovered many of the dishes are still deliciously present in Albury Wodonga today (page 114).

Winter weather begs for warming dishes, so we’ve made sure there are plenty in this issue. Turn to page 66 for our rich spread of Pakistani recipes – perfectly spiced offerings that are sure to satisfy on a cold day – or to page 35 where Matthew Evans has stoked the woodfired stove to create meals guaranteed to banish winter chills. Enjoy!







Editor, Feast