Martin Bosley's new cookbook means his incredible dishes are yours to sample from the comfort of home.
Featuring over one hundred recipes, award-winning chef and restaurateur Martin Bosley's newly released cookbook is all about the democratisation of food. Here he makes the dishes served at Martin Bosley's, his high-end seafood restaurant on Wellington's Oriental Parade, accessible to the home cook.
Bosley sees no reason why his refined and spectacularly presented cuisine can't be available to the masses. "That's what I've always said to people who thought my food is complicated. This is a way of showing that actually, look, it's not. It's really not," he says. "You can make this food and eat it yourself. It doesn't have to be eaten in the context of my restaurant."
It's an inclusive attitude the 45-year-old puts into practice every Sunday morning when he mans a stall at the Chaffers Dock Building's market and sells items such as the spice rubs and palm sugar dressing he uses in the restaurant. And somewhere between the groper and smoked eel terrine with cauliflower puree and the banana-macadamia-miso cake on his well-considered and minutely planned dinner menu are the comforting words: "Should you prefer your fish or steak simply grilled with a salad or vegetables and mash potatoes, please do not be afraid to ask."
This is the mark of a chef who puts the desires of his guests ahead of his urge to impress with creative, inventive dishes.
The process of devising new menu items is organic and interactive. An idea will often have first been expressed in the moleskin notebook which resides permanently in Bosley's back pocket. Words and sketches will then be scrawled with a whiteboard marker on kitchen walls and stainless steel bench-tops as the idea is further developed and fine-tuned. "I've been cooking a long time, 25-plus years, so you have a catalogue of tastes and a memory bank of flavours to draw from, and experiences that you can make reference to," he says. "And while the food's one hundred per cent mine on the menu, it's done in a creative, collegial atmosphere." Ideas that survive the brainstorm process will then be road-tested in the form of an amuse-bouche served to diners.
"Eat what's in season, what's local and what's fresh" is the uncomplicated food philosophy reflected in all Bosley's work, including the columns he writes for The Listener and Kia Ora magazine. Looking back he realises the foundations for this approach were first established at Brasserie Flipp, the fondly remembered Ghuznee St restaurant where he cooked in the early 90s.
At first Bosley is reluctant to name a single dish that particularly stands out in his mind from over the years. "They're all old friends to a certain extent. The favourite recipe is whatever I'm cooking at the moment, really," he says. "But what I love is probably our trio of tartars which we've had on the menu for eight or nine years now. Just three cubes of raw fish. It's so simple but it's an incredibly dramatic looking plate. I love it. I return to it. Because when you put raw fish on your menu you have got to absolutely stand behind the quality of it."
So what does a passionate chef who's received rave reviews from the restaurant critics eat in the privacy of his own home? "I'm a big fan of canned sardines on buttered Vogel's bread as much as the next man, as a late-night supper. Breakfast is tomatoes on toast. I don't get up in the morning and go: 'I think I'll just make a little apple puree and hand-grind some black pudding' - or anything like that."
Bosley says 60 to 70 per cent of his diners opt for the $150-per-head degustation menu. It's a "progression of tastes and textures - from the 'daily shot' which is a little cocktail in a shot glass and then you'll receive the amuse-bouche and then you'll move into the tartars ... In the same way that our menu goes from light and raw through to light and cooked to slightly heavier then drops away again, down towards desserts, so the book has been organised in the same fashion."
Over the course of about year, accomplished photographer Jane Ussher shot the food in its unadulterated form, exactly as Bosley and his team presented it. No stylist tweaked the scene or added an extraneous prop. In many of the shots even the white plates are indistinguishable from the white of the pages of his eponymous cookbook. "It was about stripping everything away. I regard everything on the plate as a hero ingredient," he says. "Everything is there for its own individual reason as well as for the role it plays within the dish."
Although Bosley suspects this handsome 320-page volume will probably grace coffee tables in homes throughout the land, he hopes it will be well-used as a recipe book too. "The more splatters and stains you see on a cookbook the more rewarding it is. Food is my life. There are stories to be told in restaurants and I wanted to show the food at the restaurant in the last 10 years."
Prawns a la Plancha with Nam Jim
I love cooking on the plancha - Spanish for hot metal plate - for the searing heat and golden crust you can get on seafood. The aromatic and spicy Thai sauce nam jim is the hottest condiment we use in the restaurant and is perfect with the prawns.
Serves 4
Nam Jim Dressing
10 small red chillies, halved lengthwise, seeded and roughly chopped
3 stalks coriander, roots attached
2 cloves garlic
3cm piece fresh ginger, peeled
50g palm sugar, grated
60ml fish sauce
250ml lemon juice
Place the chillies in a blender with the coriander, garlic and ginger. Pulse to a thick paste, then add the palm sugar. Continue to blend until the sugar has dissolved before adding the fish sauce and lemon juice. Season to taste with more fish sauce if required. The dressing should be hot and sour.
Prawns a la Plancha
12 king prawns, peeled with heads left on
1 teaspoon coriander seeds, crushed
1 teaspoon curry powder
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
Salt to taste
Juice of 1 lemon
1 De-vein the prawns by cutting down the back with a sharp knife and removing the thin black intestine. Rinse the prawns briefly in cold water. Mix the coriander seeds with the curry powder and oil, and marinate the prawns in this mixture for 20-30 minutes.
2 Then insert a wooden skewer from the base of the tail towards the head of the prawn. Grill the prawns on a hot plancha or sauté in a hot frying pan. Season with salt and a squeeze of lemon juice. Serve the prawns with the nam jim in a shot glass alongside.
