(chef blowing)
- What we do here is very singular.
We cook incredible ingredients,
Australian ingredients, over fire.
I mean, it's quite a very singular matter of cooking.
(upbeat dramatic music)
Yeah, this just comes from
a two-and-a-half year old red kangaroo.
Probably the least gamey of all the kangaroos.
It's a very good introduction to people
to obviously the world of kangaroo.
Kangaroo needs really intense heat.
Obviously a very quick cook,
just the sear on the outside as a wild ingredient.
We give it a light misting of oil and we use grape seed
because it has the ability to have a neutral flavor profile,
but also very high temperature.
Little bit of sea salt.
We use sprays as opposed to brushes.
To envelope something in oil
you can just give something a very light mist.
Yeah, kangaroo obviously huge endemic protein in Australia.
It's a very large wild food resource
that we don't really tap into that often.
I think it can be awesome like any ingredient, well-handled,
well-hunted, treated with respect and love can be fantastic.
That's it, just enough to seal the outside.
A couple of these beautiful beetroot leaves.
Throw those on the coals.
The great thing about obviously cooking with fire
is it has this really intense heat.
The embers of the fire of the iron bar
burn about 900 to 1000 Celsius, and that gives you
a beautiful sear on things like the kangaroo.
You kind of using all your senses, you can feel the fire.
But something you can't quite capture on camera
is the smell, and I could smell the garlic
as it's like slightly charring and caramelizing.
Kangaroo we dress with a little bit of pepperberry dressing
so native pepperberry, ground,
just mixed with some grape seed oil
and a little bit of Australian vinegar.
They have this beautiful dark exterior.
Proper sear of the fire
and then just serve it just blood temperature like that.
Red is like super clean, very lean, but beautifully tender.
Need to move more wood for tonight.
- [Vendor] So what do you want, wheel barrow it in?
- [Lennox] Yes, please.
It's the good stuff, mate.
- No, that's the part of it, that's the secret.
- Fair enough.
- We don't tell anyone. - Fair enough.
As long as it gets here.
- We don't tell anyone where it comes from.
No one else gets it.
- So this is the ironbark we use here in the restaurant.
Obviously native Australian wood.
It's clean, it's light, it's intense, it burns really well,
burns quickly and it gives us what we need
to be able to do what we do in the restaurant.
It's the first ingredient we use,
it's the first ingredient we buy.
Every other ingredient is based around it.
So we typically sort of burn about three cubic meters
of the vine bark in a given week.
The wood itself is so critical
in terms of those characteristics,
whether it burns really hot and intense,
or whether it burns really sort of delicate
flavors and nuance.
I'm constantly looking at treating wood
as an ingredient part of a seasoning profile
because the wood and the types of wood
is what enables us to cook
a variety of different ingredients.
- [Shane] Hey Richard, how are ya?
- [Richard] Very good, thank you.
Yourself?
- I'm good. I'm good.
We've got some hand-dived queen scallops.
These are from Coffin Bay South Australia
and I'll just prep one up real quick
and show you what they look like inside.
Take it off the shell, clean up the skirt,
and we serve the roe as well.
So the purple means it's a queen scallop,
and when they're orange which is a bit more rare,
they're a king.
Really nice.
They're still alive too.
That's live produce.
These are gonna be on the menu tonight.
We're gonna serve them with a little garnish.
- We're just literally gonna take these
really gently over some juniper.
So just slice.
Buying that with a little bit of these
beautiful Japanese turnips.
They're literally just thrown into the embers.
They get all black on the outside
and when you push the skin away it's beautiful.
It's like a muddled shell color,
and they're already really sweet when they're raw
but they get even more sweet
when they're cooked over the fire.
Nice bite to it.
Little bit of juiciness but also super sweet.
And again, we'll just cut the roe.
This is obviously the fattier part of the scallop.
We're just gonna use juniper, some fresh juniper.
Few embers from the fires.
(juniper crackling)
Little crackle from the juniper.
Sits on top, dress with some native tamarind.
Native Australian fruit.
Little bit of the kimchi juice for a bit of heat.
Then we put the lid on, and it just warms
and smokes really gently.
Whilst we aren't the steakhouse in the traditional sense,
only 20% of our menu is actually encompassed
in terms of meat, we do do some pretty next level beef.
(upbeat music)
This is the loin.
You can imagine these two kind of being connected.
So you got obviously this is towards that rib end
going down to where, you know, your sirloin cut on this end.
We'll select the sides, dry 'em out for two weeks.
Essentially, you know, paint the beef around it,
the fat around the beef and it just embalms it.
It just hopefully preserves everything that's good about it.
And then what we coined the term fat-aging
'cause obviously we were kind of the first people
to do this about 11 years ago.
Probably 148 odd days on this one.
This one about 180, 190 days ago.
It looked amazing at the time, but it's always,
you know, it's always a little bit like Christmas.
You don't know what you're gonna get until you open it.
We'll break this one down into two sections each service.
(saw whirring)
Frozen in time.
It's that amazing combination
of all the flavor of those genetics,
but with that fat in there it's priceless.
But this is what we do in the restaurant.
We're essentially cutting meat to order,
and it's not only because of the high value
but also because that again when someone orders it,
then you start the process, then you cut it,
then you clean it, then you cook it 'cause again
it's a window when it's gonna be f****** amazing.
So I'll take the -- I'll remove the cap.
There's this whole section here.
Incredible cap here.
So when it comes to then cutting a steak.
(tool whirring)
Quite hard to see, it's got all this incredible fat
running through this one.
I mean, this is one of the best ones
I've seen in a long while.
They're always, I mean, they're always special
but this is definitely a cracking piece of beef
to get excited about.
I see your eyes light up so quickly.
It's all about the meat.
- Your menu tonight, Rory.
- [Rory] So we have kangaroo coming from Western Sydney,
fish today we have corral trout from Chris Bolton
in far north Queensland.
Single line.
- So our services are about hundred covers.
Essentially doing like two turns in the restaurant
with maybe a couple of tables in the middle.
(upbeat dramatic music)
Season immediately.
In case of steaks, season liberally.
The steak will only take what it needs.
The fat running down very quickly into the fire.
You wanna raise it just so the fire
is just licking the base of the steak itself,
not engulfing it.
Moving the steak so it doesn't end up
having lots of heavy bar marks.
Just want the surface of the steak
to caramelize evenly and form this really good crust.
But typically, it's about eight minutes
so about five or six minutes one side,
two or three minutes on the other side on the reverse.
Obviously steak is very personal,
you know, some people like red wines,
some people like white wine.
Same with the steaks, some people love
and they're used to sort of like grassed beef.
Some people love yeah they've only grown up
with grain fed beef.
We celebrate all of those things here.
General rule of thumb is that it rests
for as long as it cooks for.
So eight minute cook, eight minute rest.
It's such a quintessential Australian fish, coral trout.
One of the fisherman we work really closely with
is Chris Bolton in far north Queensland in Kurrimine Beach.
He handles each fish one by one
so it's like the freshest coral trout
we can get in Australia direct from the fishermen.
We grill it on the skin side first.
Most things we'll do skin side down,
which obviously protects the fish quite a lot,
and the fat's rendered down
and you get this beautiful relationship
with the fat and the fire.
Season generously.
Most people don't season enough.
Here suspended above the fire, and then moving the embers
opening up the embers a little bit to begin with.
The ember bear essentially matches the fish.
As you see, the fish start to change colors.
So slightly opaque around the outside, obviously
from the outside in.
Also we have a slight curl there
reacting to the high heat.
Just shrinking away, the skin shrinks low.
Then we give it a mist of oil.
Essentially just giving an ingredient what it needs.
That dry heat starts caramelizing the skin,
and then when we flip on the underside
we actually protect the exposed protein
with a sheet of paper bark,
which has this beautiful sort of way
of giving an earthy sweetness running through it
whilst protecting fish itself.
You'll see the paper bark starts to char and smolder,
which is transferring the heat really gently
through the bark itself.
It's the protection from the intensity of the heat,
but finished with this flavor of the bark itself.
Which is how you serve it to table.
Yeah, the idea kind of grilling a lettuce, it's great.
You can grill whatever lettuce you like really.
Always wanted the opportunity at Firedoor
to showcase a grilled salad.
So directly quick cook, sort of char the outer leaves
but basically wanna retain all that juiciness,
that like crunch of the lettuce.
See how quickly these sort of edges just lightly char.
Kind of profile.
They're removed, and the peas get a real quick treatment.
Beautiful colors.
Really fine basket to ensure we can still cook
directly on the embers quite quickly.
Obviously, it would fall through anything much larger.
You see the peas just start to pop up.
It looks like steaming.
That's when you know they're ready.
These are last minute, just a slight touch on the grill.
Again, just enough to warm those peas.
So you see the peas just start to inflate,
and they almost dance right before
you get any sort of like color on them.
That's when they're ready 'cause they're just like popping,
and they're gonna pop in the mouth.
It's such a basic thing.
And just dress with some new seasoned peas
and some strips of pork fat like cured lardo.
It's such a a simple salad that just speaks volumes.
The style of obviously grilling that we do here
tends to be very immediate.
Like, a lot happens during service.
We'll grill to order, cup, plate and serve.
There's this whole hand and glove effect
of requiring something that can be turned up
and turned down.
200 years ago, we were all cooking with fire
and somehow we've lost that technique, you know?
So if we don't continue practicing this technique,
we don't continue doing this,
we'll lose something part of us
that's intrinsically important
to what makes us specialists with heat.
(upbeat dramatic music)