HYBRID LONGING

What is Australia’s gift to the food world? I have been thinking about the answer to that question since I returned home from New York. It is obviously multiple, but I do not mean what dishes can handle being placed on the international stage next to the high-end greats from Ferran Adria’s liquid olives to Heston Blumenthal meat fruit, but what do ‘the people’ eat? What is our contribution to popular taste? This is a question about identity like when we debate the relative merit of Ken Done, Brett Whitely and Papunya Tula; or ACDC, Nana Mouskouri and Yothu Yindi; or Tatiana Grigorieva, Michael Diamond and Cathy Freeman. When I ask what is our gift to the world I want to know what is an everyday food that has travelled all over and resonates in a great many places.

The most curious candidate for this might belong to the television series Masterchef. When I lived in India in 2009, people were obsessed with it there, something my sister corroborated when she put on an art show at the embassy in New Delhi in 2013. At that event, intellectuals, diplomats and everyone else mobbed the judges Matt Preston, Geogre Calombaris and Gary Mehigan. They pushed aside artists, politicians, musicians, just to have a photo with these stars. This love for the show still holds up as of 2017, when friends of ours were able to offer careful analysis on why Ben Ungermann deserved to win. People there know and love the show, and when we asked why they preferred it to other nations, there were two main reasons. This was because of the food people cooked, which was a higher calibre than anywhere else and covered a wider variety of cuisines, and the fact that people were genuinely fond of each other. It was a good competition with the right values and a desire to make delicious food. Masterchef is our soft power.

To my mind however, the peak of volk cuisine in Australia is to be found in cafes. We do brunch the best of anyone, anywhere, and our coffee culture has made its way to every corner of the globe. Think of the humble flat white, which came out of Sydney in 1985 at Moors Espresso Bar. And, if we ever needed to question whether it was really Australian, we have people in New Zealand claiming it as their own just like pavlova, Manuka honey and Russell Crowe. Shared provenance is one of the things that makes it Australian in the first place just like Kiwis like to remind us that they are the real home of Chinese gooseberries, the kakapo and rugby. The competition helps us and in arguing for the flat white as ours, we know that the dish is truly from the antipodes even as you get it now in London, New York and Los Angeles.

Thinking about Australian taste, about Australian dishes for the everyday diner, does not mean thinking about ingredients that only come from here. In France, I have eaten wonderful kangaroo. In Singapore, I have drunk gin with pepper-berries. In Canada, I have had a red hot go at dried quandongs. All these matter when we are talking about ingredients, but to my mind, the dish that represents Australia is avocado on toast. My reason for this is not only because of the furore kicked off by Bernard Salt in regards to home ownership. It is because of what the dish is and represents, and how that matters for the imagined community of our nation in the global consciousness.

Avocado on toast is young, sunny, vibrant, yummy, accessible, democratic, and its proliferation speaks back to how people love a coastal lifestyle that reminds them of summer. It comes without the ocker jingoism of Fosters or the depression era taste of Vegemite. It can be made at home easy as you like or elevated to the height of cultural expression. It really is the taste of a new generation, and, in any brekkie competition, avocado on toast will surely win the votes.

Where does avocado on toast come from? Speaking historically, that is debatable, but there is good reason to think that it is from Mexico. When I was travelling there in 2003 for an extended period, I ate it everyday for breakfast and the ingredients were as good as I have had them anywhere. In between hiking in the Lancandjon Jungle and lounging by the coast at Puerto Escondido, I ate many an avocado on toast. This is to say nothing of a good torta, the likes of which you can find everywhere in Latin America – frijoles, feta, avocado in a bread roll together. This was before the bourgeois hipsters got their hands on simple ingredients and claimed it as their own.

In this latter setting, there is good argument to be made that Sydney’s Bill Granger was the point of origin. Avocado on toast first appeared on the menu at his café in 1993. With a vegetarian mother, a butcher father, he studied art before being drawn to food. His cooking is unpretentious, upbeat, optimistic, open, generous. All qualities that should be lauded, and the accolades have come his way across an ever expanding restaurant empire. After all, the United Kingdom’s Jamie Oliver is sometimes called the Bill Granger of Britain.

Since then, avocado on toast blew up in the Instagram era with Americans getting on board with Chloe Osbourne at Manhattan’s Café Gitane helping to promote our humble dish before Gwenyth Paltrow took it into the heartland in her 2013 book, It’s All Good. Middle America was on board, preferring that avocado on toast came via Sydney, New York and celebrity tastemakers rather than looking south of the border. Now, it is the only thing they eat in California and as we know from Frederick Jackson Turner, the West is what defines American national character. You find it everywhere, including at former footballer Jobe Watson’s Hole in the Wall café in Manhattan (it is not bad) and at diners all through the suburbs. Avocado on toast makes sense here and there, and is, surely, part of surf culture given its origins and points of co-ordination. What could be more Australian?

But, if that is the case for avocado on toast, how do I like to make mine? Of course, I am capable of making it at home though I must admit I do not always bake my own bread. My father has some recipes of his father, who was a country baker, but these are for 100 loaves, 200 hot cross buns, 300 jam donuts. I never have that many guests and it would not fit in my oven to begin with. For the most part, I buy my bread. At Redgate, it is woodfired sourdough from Yallingup Woodfired Bread. They have two branches – one at the other end of the cape in Yallingup (you guessed it) and the other just up the way on Boodjidup Road, round the corner from our place. They bake during the day, which means the bread comes out warm around 3pm, or just when you have picked the kids up from school or are heading out for an afternoon surf.

I get my avocadoes at the farmer’s market, but there is an orchard across the road that sometimes sells them also. The avocado is key here too and you have to take advantage of when they are perfect, otherwise you pay too much and it is not worth it. Sometimes, I slice, sometimes I mash, sometimes I will just plonk a whole half down.

You could be forgiven for thinking that this was all there is to avocado on toast, but the variations are multiple – do I butter the bread, do I spread a layer of white miso or hummus or mayonnaise (Japanese preferably), do I squeeze a bit of lemon, do I top it with feta and basil, do I go all out and poach an egg. You can do it so many ways, but the bread and avocado are what matter, which means you need unsurpassed ingredients.

When I go to sit down at a café I never get avocado on toast. It seems like a wasted order to me when I can get something I cannot make at home. I stick to the same rules when it comes to spaghetti carbonara, though sometimes I am persuaded by fresh pasta and imported guanciale. For breakfast, brunch or lunch though, I will always reach for the farmer’s omelette, the ricotta hotcakes, the multigrain waffles with berries, maple syrup and mascarpone; never the avocado on toast even though I love it so.

The other reason for this, the reason over and above the fact that my own one at home does the job, is that I have found the best avocado on toast that there is, in the world, hands down, no questions asked. To know that it is the best in the world, I did what every good millennial would do, and spent my accumulated savings on avocado on toast. I did this rather than buy a house because I knew, deep in my heart that I would prefer to know what is the best in the world rather than have a roof over my head.  And now, luckily for you, that taste test is about to payoff. Drum roll, please.

The best avocado on toast is at Chu Bakery in Perth. You cannot sit there, you cannot tweak your order, you must take what you are given, but this is no soup Nazi kind of place. They are welcoming and warm, they smile a lot and their coffee is unrivalled from filter to flat white to soy matcha mocha turmeric cocoa almond skim latte (which they might actually make given how they are so accommodating). They are a twenty-first century bakery on the edge of a park and so you can get your food and sit on the grass. Everything is delicious and they are inventive, combining the best of the Swiss patisserie with a palate that is South East Asian – think kaya croissant; passionfruit and chilli donut; banana and coconut on bread. They are a higher synthesis of tradition, a hybrid that is the second, or third, generation of fusion cooking.

And so, as you might expect, they know how to make avocado on toast. You can choose your bread there, but I get the seeded loaf. They cut it thick before spreading a roughly mashed avocado on it then crumbling some feta and squeezing some lemon. So far, so good, maybe even what you are used to and have come to love. What happens next is where they make it the best – a drizzle of sriracha and a handful of toasted nuts and seeds. The texture, the flavour, the combination. The size is perfect at a single slice and priced at $8, no one can deny that it is a good deal that allows you to save for a little home of your own in the outer suburbs.

If you choose to make the Chu version at home, you will have to solve some problems for yourself if you have not had the original. I would recommend buying your bread unsliced so you can get the perfect thickness – about an inch is my guess. Be generous with the avocado – use almost a whole one with only a spoonful that your eat before to whet your appetites. I think the key is the feta, sriracha, seeds combination – I would be tempted to go with feta that is creamy not crumbly, smooth and less goaty; the sriracha I like is the rooster brand you might know from your trips to Vietnamese restaurants; the seeds here must be toasted with sesame and pumpkin featuring. You do not need to get ‘funky’ with this –no gomasio, no eggs, no pesto, no pumpkin, no vegemite because we want to be taken seriously when we leave this place. If you wanted to push it, you could try a little green tree ant instead of the lemon. In any case, in today’s Australia you can get the very best of it without having to jump on a plane.  And that is what I love about making breakfast this way. It is the perfect start to the day.