Urban Tucker
Bush Tucker Chef Mark Olive has married his indigenous roots, culinary skills and a film and television background to launch his Outback Café traveling cooking show to the world
Like so many of Australia's indigenous people, Mark Olive's own tribe, from the Bunjeling region of northern NSW have long known the value of bush tucker. By creatively fusing traditional recipes with indigenous flavours, Olive has used his culinary experience to celebrate and promote the native meats, berries, nuts, seeds and flowers which spawn from Terra Australis. "I was trained by a European chef, so I was able to translate a lot of things and add something indigenous to it all," says Olive. "You might have a crocodile or a wallaby lasagna thinking it was a normal lasagna or have a fillet mignon instead that would have a rat in it."
For those not enticed by meals where French classics meet local rodents, Olive has a roo pouch full of recipes which appropriate European classics by injecting local ingredients like crocodile, wallaby, emu and kangaroo.
"We're probably the only country that eats its own coat of arms," Olive notes. Bush tucker grows in a number of our most common plants, bushes and trees. "The wattle and the wattle seed and the lemon myrtles and the aniseed myrtles - all these indigenous fruits have been growing here forever and they're very unique in their flavours," says Olive. "The muntreeberry looks like an apple but once you start eating it, it has a lovely cinnamon aftertaste. Then there's the river mint which is a lovely mint but has a eucalyptus aftertaste." It seems as a nation we have been seduced by the introduction of European and Asian cuisine into our culture and neglected to embrace our own. But in recent years Bush Tucker has come into its own, popping up on supermarket shelves.
Olive himself is a partner in a café creating up to 250 jobs to 20 communities and is reaping the rewards of homegrown foods. "It's really exciting how chefs are discovering these new flavours. I take it around the world and promote it as our national food - that's the way I see it." says Olive. "People still think it's a Fosters and a meat pie or a shrimp on the barbie but those days are gone."
Catch Mark on Outback Café on Sat 24 May at 6pm on The Lifestyle Channel.