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Charting a course for the best Kiwi cuisine on New Zealand’s South Island
Started in 2003, the Otago Farmers Market in Dunedin is one of the oldest authentic farmers markets in New Zealand. Locals and visitors turn out Saturday mornings to stock up on food and chat with vendors. (Otago Farmers Market)
Food isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when most people think of New Zealand. Its rugged good looks, pristine wilderness areas, thirst for thrills like bungee jumping and indigenous Maori culture overshadow anything culinary. So it might be a surprise that in the remotest gas station in the South Island, a barista poured espresso in a heart shape atop the frothy milk in my latte.
The Kiwi coffee culture — so ubiquitous you can find espresso machines in rural Mobil stations — is just the tip of the local culinary spear honed by indigenous culture, the island country’s remote geography and a pervasive interest in conservation that includes sourcing food locally.
“New Zealand’s prevalence of fresh food is uniquely bound in its indigenous history,” said Angela Clifford, the CEO of Eat New Zealand, a nonprofit group promoting culinary tourism in New Zealand. She explained that when English colonizers signed the Treaty of Waitangi with the indigenous Maori in 1840, they and the tribes declared peaceful coexistence and equal access to resources, including “the right to gather resources and food from the natural environment. It underpins everything about the New Zealand food story. It said people are connected to their land through food.”
Modern commercial bungee jumping got its start on New Zealand's South Island. (AJ Hackett Bungy)
While the North Island boasts the thriving restaurant scene of the nation’s biggest city, Auckland (newly a nonstop flight from Chicago on Air New Zealand), I ventured to the wild South Island to explore the unique terroir influencing a thriving and underexposed culinary culture. Sample it for yourself via the following road-trip stops recommended for foodies.
Defining geogastronomy
Like a lot of New Zealand, the Waitaki region is better known for its geology than its grub. It begins about 150 miles south of Christchurch and runs inland along the braided Waitaki River almost all the way to Aoraki/Mount Cook, the tallest mountain in New Zealand. Here, perfectly spherical boulders cluster on the beach, karst limestone formations resemble elephant herds among the sheep pastures and a series of Badlands-like cliffs reveal ancient fossilized whale skeletons.
The Moeraki Boulders are part of the geologically distinct Waitaki region, home of "geogastronomy." (Miles Holden)
Over 40 unique geological sites form the roughly 2,800-square-mile Waitaki Whitestone Geopark, which has been nominated as a UNESCO Global Geopark, defined as a region of international significance. In a parallel campaign, local culinary leaders have coined the phrase “geogastronomy” to express not just the concept of terroir as it applies to wine, but to the effect that the limestone bedrock has on all growers, brewers, winemakers and chefs.
“If you look at a cliff face, you can see different layers of soil,” said Clifford. “The geology of a place affects the flavor of the food.”
Fleurs Place is among the restaurants serving "geogastronomy," dishes that express the Waitaki region's distinct geography. The waterfront eatery specializes in fresh fish plucked from Moeraki Bay. (Tourism New Zealand)
Geology tours of the area sync up with geogastronomic restaurants. In coastal Oamaru, known as Whitestone City for its parade of limestone Victorian buildings, Cucina translates this hyperlocal focus into Italian pasta with housemade sausage and local grass-fed steaks. Near the Moeraki Boulders, those unusual spheres on the beach, Fleurs Place showcases local Moeraki Bay seafood and heirloom vegetables in a seafront, corrugated metal shack. The rural Waitaki Braids Lodge, along the park’s Vanished World Trail in Kurow, serves as a coffee shop by day and a restaurant by night, with set menus highlighting local orchards, cheese dairies and charcuterie makers for guests of its seven rooms.
Market fare
About 70 miles south of Oamaru, on the southeast side of South Island, New Zealand’s oldest university, the University of Otago, resides in Dunedin, gateway to the nature-blessed Otago Peninsula, where endangered New Zealand sea lions rule the beaches, royal albatross have their own nature reserve and tours visit colonies of little blue penguins and the habitat of the rare yellow-eyed penguin.
Those activities are available anytime, but the day to eat in Dunedin is Saturday, when the Otago Farmers Market takes place from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. The market, set up beside the 1906 Dunedin Railway train station, features full coffee shops housed in vintage trailers where locals bring their own cups or borrow one from the “cup library.” Venison sausage makers, cheesemongers, root vegetable chip dealers, nut butter grinders and seafood sellers line up next to bakery booths, a Chinese crepe chef, a brewer using rainwater to make beer and a winemaker selling pinot noir in refillable bottles.
“I love the idea of showing people the winemaking process and engaging directly with the people who drink my wine, as opposed to just the wine trade,” said that winemaker, Brendan Seal, the owner of Urbn Vino Dunedin. “It was always a dream of mine to have my own winery one day. It just happens to be in one of the best small cities in the world.”
Southernmost wine
Urbn Vino gets its grapes from the Central Otago, about a two-hour drive northwest. At 45 degrees latitude south, the Central Otago wine region champions pinot noir, the notoriously finicky grape that benefits from the nearby mountain range, ensuring daily and seasonal temperature swings the vines love. While some growers in Patagonia in South America are a few degrees more southerly, Central Otago vintners say they are the southernmost commercial wine district in the world.
“The Central Otago has hard slate bedrock and the Alpine territory makes vines struggle a little longer, and that creates flavor in grapes,” Clifford said.
Ostler Wines' vineyards are in the Waitaki area, an under-the-radar food destination on the South Island. (Tourism Waitaki)
Most of the Central Otago wineries are day-trip distance from Queenstown, the adventure capital of New Zealand. Many, like Amisfield, run destination restaurants. More casual Kinross offers meals in a wine-friendly cafe next to a tasting room pouring the goods from five area wineries, including Valli, that are hard to find stateside. Some require a reservation — worth it, we found, at Felton Road, where the pinots were velvety.
“The Otago doesn’t get super, super hot compared to the rest of the world, and it’s such a unique landscape ... to deliver terroir,” said Clifford. “The Maori word is ‘turangawaewae,’ which means ‘a place to stand.’ It means there’s something unique about that place expressed in the food and place.”
Carnivore central
Queenstown offers access to four major ski areas, bungee jumping adventures, jet boat tours that fly inches from canyon walls and heli-everything, including heli-mountain biking and heli-golf. The Aspen of New Zealand — combining year-round mountain appeal and attracting upscale visitors — has a stellar dining scene that out punches its weight across the spectrum, from high- to low-end.
Locally sourced meat is just one of many offerings at the popular Otago Farmers Market in Dunedin. (Elaine Glusac/for the Chicago Tribune)
If there’s a place to indulge your carnivorous appetite, it’s Queenstown, home to acclaimed steakhouses including Jervois Steak House, serving locally raised Wakanui and Wagyu breeds as well as New Zealand lamb and venison. Botswana Butchery elevates its surf and turf menu with wild boar, Fiordland venison loin and goat curry.
Local beef, lamb and deer show up on the other end of the price range at Fergburger, a cult burger joint. It’s open 21 hours a day and almost always has a line of customers clamoring for its big, juicy and creative burgers — the tofu version comes with spicy satay and the venison edition is known as Sweet Bambi. They’re a relative bargain (about $8 U.S. for the original Fergburger) in an expensive resort town.
Queue up in Queenstown for the cult favorite Fergburger, a bargain at roughly $8. (Elaine Glusac/for the Chicago Tribune)
Fergburger’s success has spun off the bakery next door, which makes the burger buns as well as its own intriguing sandwiches and pastries, and a nearby gelato shop. But the only place to get a Fergburger — which has refused to replicate elsewhere — is Queenstown, in case you needed another reason to visit.
Elaine Glusac is a freelance writer.
- foodies for food Lovers
In Australia, Advocates Call for Improved Health Rating for Olive Oil
An independent report commissioned by the Australian government recommended that olive oil's health star rating should not be improved due to its saturated fat content. Opponents said the report misses the bigger health picture.
The issue of whether or not olive oil should receive special treatment in Australia’s national Health Star Rating (HSR) system will be brought up at the next meeting of the Australia and New Zealand Ministerial Forum on food regulation.
Currently, olive oil is ranked as less healthy than canola or sunflower oil by the system due to its saturated fat content and without taking into account healthful content, such as polyphenols or omega-3 fatty acids.
There will be no perfect system for every single food but, once you've taken account of all the evidence, it has to have some sort of logical consistency.
In the run-up to the regulatory meeting, the Australian government hired a consulting firm to audit the HSR system and to determine whether olive oil’s rating should be changed based on factors not currently taken into consideration by the system.
“The review acknowledges the evidence submitted by stakeholders regarding the their report. “However, the review is mindful that the HSR calculator can only draw on a finite set of factors to determine a product’s HSR.”
SEE MORE: Australia and New Zealand Olive Oil News
“While olive oil has certain health benefits, it is also higher in saturated fats than some other oils,” the authors of the report added.
The HSR system, which gives all packaged foods in the two countries a grade ranging from one star (least healthy) to five stars (most healthy), takes calories, sodium content, saturated fat, total sugars, protein and fiber into account when determining the rating.
Several health experts have warned that the narrow scope of the HSR system undermines the idea of the rating system.
“There will be no perfect system for every single food but, once you’ve taken account of all the evidence, it has to have some sort of logical consistency – otherwise it gets undermined and people don’t understand what’s right and not right and why,” Anna Peeters, the director of the Institute for Health Transformation at Deakin University, told The Sydney Morning Herald.
Peeters has asked Australian politicians not to discount olive oil’s unique health properties and instead suggested that the HSR system should align more closely with “what consumers logically understand about healthy food choices.”
In its report, MPS Consulting insisted that olive oil could not be differentiated from other cooking oils “on the basis of factors not considered for any other product.”
Other advocates for a change in olive oil’s health ranking argued that instead of scrapping the whole system, the amount of saturated fats allowed in foods with an HSR score of five (the healthiest) should be increased.
At present, packaged foods are required to have a saturated fat content of less than 12 percent to be considered for the five-star rating. Olive oil has a saturated fat content of 14 percent and receives an HSR of three to 3.5 (depending on its grade).
“Some stakeholders suggested that all edible oils with less than or equal to 15 percent saturated fat should automatically score an HSR of five,” MPS Consulting wrote. “However, this result cannot be achieved through the HSR calculator without equally increasing the HSRs of margarines and non-dairy blends with saturated fat less than or equal to 15 percent, significantly reducing discrimination between products in this category.”
Joanna McMillan, a nutrition scientist and dietician at Latrobe University, in Melbourne, and scientific advisor for Boundary Bend, thinks that the HSR system is too narrowly focused on single ingredients and should instead focus on entire diets.
“Nutritional science has moved away from single nutrients like saturated fat and more into dietary patterns,” McMillan told The Sydney Morning Herald. “Eating a party pie is not the same as eating a piece of cheese even if they have the same saturated fat.”
Other advocates for changing olive oil’s health ranking have called for edible oils to be exempt from the HRS system, similar to single-ingredient foods such as salt and sugar.
However, MPS Consulting responded that other single-ingredient packaged food items, such as fruits, vegetables, meats and rice all received a rating, which helps customers make informed decisions.
“Removing edible oils from the system would limit the information available to consumers to make healthier choices in this category,” the authors of the report wrote.
State and federal ministers from both countries are expected to make their final decision on the issue at the food regulation meeting in November.
- Claire Be
EVOO Absorbs Polyphenols From Veggies When Cooked Together, Study Finds
Researchers from Spain and Brazil have found that cooking vegetables with extra virgin olive oil can improve the extractability of their polyphenols, increasing the amount of the compound that is absorbed by the oil.
The study examined the inner workings of the traditional methods of Mediterranean cooking, attempting to shed light on how extra virgin olive oil interacts with the ingredients of the local cuisines. Along with polyphenols, various other bioactive compounds from the vegetables were also found to be absorbed by the oil when cooked.
There is an exchange of polyphenols during cooking, some more apolar from vegetables go to the oil fraction, while some from the oil are absorbed by the vegetables.
The researchers focused on the sofrito method, a popular Mediterranean cooking technique for preparing a light sauce with tomato, onion and garlic. Sofrito reportedly contains 40 different phenolic compounds and a high content of carotenoids, while its consumption is associated with reduced cardiovascular risk and insulin sensitivity.
After the cooking process, an analysis of the olive oil showed that it was infused with polyphenols from the vegetables in the sofrito sauce; specifically with naringenin, ferulic acid, quercetin and Z-isomer carotenoids, none of which are typical compounds of extra virgin olive oil.
SEE MORE: Olive Oil Health Benefits
The migration of bioactive compounds such as polyphenols and carotenoids from the tomato to the olive oil also explained the findings of previous work of the researchers, which had concluded that the specific type of sauce demonstrated increased anti-inflammatory properties.
“In intervention nutritional studies we have observed that polyphenols from tomatoes were better absorbed when the tomato was cooked as a sauce with extra virgin olive oil,” Rosa Maria Lamuela-Raventos, a food science professor at the University of Barcelona and a researcher at Ciberobn (the research center for obesity and nutrition of Spain), told Olive Oil Times.
“For this reason, we wanted to evaluate why this was happening, so we performed an in vitro assay where we separated sofrito in three fractions or parts: solid (insoluble part), water fraction and oil fraction,” she added. “In this paper we observed that some of the polyphenols from the tomato, onion and garlic were moving to the oil fraction, being more bio-accessible, so easier to be absorbed.”
Additionally, the researchers noticed that the polyphenols in the olive oil were also reduced, by degrading or by migrating to the food matrix.
“There is an exchange of polyphenols during cooking, some more apolar from vegetables go to the oil fraction, while some from the oil are absorbed by the vegetables,” Lamuela-Raventos, who was also the main author of the study, said. “However, the temperature is important while cooking, because high temperatures over 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit) oxidized polyphenols.”
Having used science for years to assess the qualities of different edibles and food ingredients, Lamuela-Raventos regards the Mediterranean diet as one of the healthiest.
“[The Mediterranean diet] is one of the healthiest diets in the world,” she said. “As a scientist, I observe that the results with the traditional Mediterranean foods and dishes – such as extra virgin olive oil, sofrito, wine and more – give really very good results in intervention nutritional studies.”
However, science and good health are not the only parameters to be taken under consideration when it comes to the Mediterranean diet, Lamuela-Raventos added.
“As a consumer, I try to follow a Mediterranean diet not only for health reasons but also because of the way cooking and eating habits with family and friends are good not only for health but also for sociability and happiness,” she said.
“We are continuing our research about cooking with extra virgin olive oil with other food rich in proteins such as chicken or in carbohydrates such as potatoes,” Lamuela-Raventos added. “We want to evaluate if extra virgin olive oil polyphenols are absorbed in these foods while cooking.”
The health effects of the Mediterranean diet have been difficult to reproduce in non-Mediterranean populations, the researchers noted, in all likelihood due to the different cooking techniques used.
The researchers’ work established that, apart from consuming the ingredients and staple foods of the regime, traditional cooking from the Mediterranean can also play an important role in taking full advantage of the benefits of the Mediterranean diet.
- foodies for food Lovers
The best olive oils are culinary wonders!
Photo: Olive Oil Times
Fresh olive oil binds with the flavors of foods and forms a bridge to your taste buds, amplifying and elevating the deliciousness of your creation to heights you never imagined.
That fresh, fruit-kissed, astringent quality has made high-quality extra virgin olive oils the miracle ingredient and best friend of celebrated chefs throughout the world.
Read full article here: https://www.oliveoiltimes.com/best-olive-oils
- Foodies For Food Lovers
Study Suggests Mediterranean Diet Benefits Pregnant Women
A study published this week in PLOS Medicine suggested that the Mediterranean diet may offer some health benefits to pregnant women.
The study was conducted by Shakila Thangaratinam and a team of researchers at Queen Mary University of London. The 1,252 women involved in the study were chosen from five separate English maternity wards and of diverse backgrounds.
The study results showed that the Mediterranean diet may offer benefits such as reducing pregnancy-related weight gain and lowering the risk of developing gestational diabetes for expecting mothers.
- Foodies For Food Lovers
