Hi I'm Lisa Margan and welcome to Margan.
We are based in the Broke Fordwich wine sub region of the Hunter Valley which is Australia's oldest
wine growing region. Margan was established by my husband and business partner Andrew and myself
in 1996. Ostensibly we are a wine brand so that's how we established the business and then 10 years
after that we developed all of our wine tourism operations so what that means is our tasting room,
this lovely space that we're sitting in right now which we use as a PRD, private dining, and
as a lovely event space and our restaurant. And part of that restaurant offer is also our one acre
kitchen garden. Orchard, free range chickens, beehives, olive groves and estate reared lambs. They are
all grass-fed here and we rotate the paddocks around. We have a nose-to-tail approach here,
we try and use as much of the animal as possible. We basically write the menu around whatever
we're harvesting out of the garden or the estate this week. I've been the head chef at Margan for
a little over a year now. The style of food here is what we call agri-dining so it's based
all around our one hectare garden. We grow pretty much 90 percent of what we serve in the restaurant
is grown just here in the garden. Yeah the advantages of using our own lamb that we rear here on the
property is that it gives a real connection to the restaurant, the dining room and I think that the
guests can see that connection. Definitely one of the challenges of using your own livestock is
how to properly respect it and to to make sure that every bit of it gets used because it was a
a live animal here you know, that we've cared for. So we try to offer a whole range of different cuts
coming into the menu at different parts. We try to always be preserving as much as we can,
curing, whatever we can. We'll generally hang them for anywhere from seven to ten days
in our custom built dry aging room. From there we can begin to break it down as we need it and
try to get a good amount of each part of the animal through the dish.
So we did a rack of lamb, we French trimmed it, rendered the fat, roasted it
and we sauced that with a jus that's been made from the lamb bones and the red wine lees.
A crispy salad of lamb breast with preserved lemons, yellow squash and a pounded mint dressing.
Lamb spare ribs braised in a green tomato juice and then they were glazed
in a tomato passata and we just seasoned that simply with some fennel pollen salt.
A chopped tartare of the leg meat, so we just took a small little fillet near the top of the rump,
chopped it up with a meat cleaver and then we made a dressing with that out of anchovy,
horseradish and egg yolk, mixed through some pickled baby cucumbers from
the summer and then we just grabbed some lettuce cups from the garden to scoop it all up and eat it.
So the last dish is the main course. So it's a rolled saddle of lamb with
all garden herbs through the middle of it. Basically any herb that's
growing we blanch it, squeeze it out, chop it up and roll that through the middle of the saddle.
That's trussed, roasted and then we're gonna carve that with sauerkraut that we preserved
in the winter and a little mustard sauce that we've made from the whey of our cheese making.
The key advantage really for us having our own lambs here, apart from the fact
that they are lovely to look at, they also go through our vineyard, great little lawn mowers,
they manure as well so you've got a nice closed-loop environment there.
Our carbon footprint is so much less. They've got a very happy life and the end is swift.