Congratulations on the second season of Kriol Kitchen! What can we expect this time around? In the second series, we had quite a few young people join the show, so for us that was really exciting! It cemented what our show is about – passing on family traditions. Some of the older guests shared dishes we haven’t had since childhood. It was really quite emotional!
Were you a diligent kitchen helper as a kid? We spent lots of time in the kitchen with Mum and Dad because they had a fierce cooking rivalry. It was, “Who can cook the best chilli fish or blachung, or make the nicest curry?” They had this really sweet competition where they’d always try and out-do each other.
Speaking of friendly rivalries, what’s it like sharing a kitchen – and cooking show – with your sister Ali? When we first decided to do the show she told me I’d have to do all the talking and I said, “But Ali, you’re a trained actor!” We didn’t really plan it, but she’s like the back-up or sidekick. The feedback we get from the community is they just love Ali’s quietness.
We’ve heard home cooks in Broome can be tight-lipped about their secret family recipes, was it difficult convincing your guests to spill the beans? Some of them said, “Yeah, I’ll do it, but I won’t give you my top-shelf recipe, I’ll give you the second one below!” In our community everyone knows about that. It’s a humour thing. I think it happens everywhere, so we just thought let’s not pressure the home cookies to divulge their secret ingredients.
Kriol Kitchen features plenty of unusual ingredients – stinky pearl shell meat springs to mind! Do you cook with native foods and local proteins on a regular basis? I would say throughout the year, we live off the country for a good 60 per cent of our dietary intake. We fish every weekend and go crabbing. It’s a really high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet. If I could live off it 100 per cent I would, and I would do away with [farmed] meat like chicken and pork.
How does seasonality affect your diet? Each of the seasons produces a different batch of foods that have different values for your wellbeing. [Living off the land] is very sustainable and seasonal, and a lot of families do still do it. It’s always in the back of my mind: do not overfish, do not overkill, do not take too much. We take enough for a meal, two days of meals maybe, and we still practice the protocol of sharing with old people who can’t get out to country anymore.
Kriol fare draws on elements of Malaysian, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Aboriginal Australian cooking. Tell us about the fusion cuisine. There’s a staple foundation [in Kriol cooking] that starts every dish: ginger, garlic and onion. Then we add to it with sauces, chillies and curry spices.
Lots of Australian chefs are experimenting with native ingredients. Kylie Kwong in Sydney puts warrigal greens in traditional Chinese-style dumplings, lemon aspen is flavouring ice-creams, muntries alongside pavlova at Sydney’s Bar H, saltbush is the new green, and there’s even a Scot in Adelaide by the name of Jock Zonfrillo who’s serving traditional indigenous foods in a fine-dining context at Orana. What’s your take? I think it’s wonderful, but it would be great if more of our indigenous chefs started to do that so they could come up with their own unique cuisine stamped with skill and authority. I think Mark Olive does it to a degree. He sort of spear-headed that for native foods.
Kriol Kitchen (season 2) starts Wednesday 4 February at 7.30pm on NITV. Find out more about the show here.
More about traditional bush foods
