A Fresh Look

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A Fresh Look

Your great-grandparents wouldn’t recognise the food you’re eating.

 

It can be easy to forget how quickly food preferences change and new ingredients become popular. If you motioned kale and quinoa to someone ten years ago they would have probably thought you were talking about an exciting new band. That’s why we thought we would take a deep dive into one of our dishes to try and understand how it came together.

 

Moreton Bay Bugs with grilled broccolini and lemon caper butter – Black Hide by Gambaro

 

Moreton Bay Bugs

 

Until the early 2000’s, if you didn’t work in the fishing industry, you probably wouldn’t have hear of a Moreton Bay Bug. It actually started its life in the marketplace as a weird looking by catch that prawn and scallop trawlers used to pick up. Over time the bug became a must have from everyone in the marketplace as its delicious, lobster like flavour was discovered. This sudden popularity created an overfishing issue, this was corrected by commonwealth management plans and a raise in price in the marketplace, creating a product that is now more elusive and exclusive. For this reason Black Hide only uses locally sourced varieties, where they know the Bugs have been caught sustainably.

 

Broccolini

 

The delicious baby brother of Broccoli has been around for ever right? Wrong. Broccolini first started being sold in 1994. This ingenious creation was developed in Japan to bring together the delicious florets of broccoli with the tender stems of asparagus (it was even originally called Asparation!). It’s a natural hybrid of broccoli and gai lan, Chinese broccoli, that took 8 years to develop. Next time you bite into one of those succulent and sweet stems, remember to be grateful that you’ve lived in the 25 years of human history in which it has existed.

 

Capers

 

Don’t worry, capers weren’t invented by a mad scientist last week, they’ve actually been used in cooking for about 3000 years. The Ancient Greeks used them as a cure for flatulence and in the Bible they are mentioned as an aphrodisiac (we speculate the two things are related). It wasn’t until the 1980s that they became really popular though. Now you can find them everywhere from Italy to Adelaide.

Perhaps we’ve finally found the secret of how Black Hide makes all its food taste so good, they only use ingredients with the richest history. Whatever the case, we know we will take a moment to think about our meal before we tuck into it next.

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