Source: Sydney Morning Herald
A TUBER root refined to an intensely fragrant essence reminiscent of marijuana. Giant clam-like molluscs that inhabit rotted logs in brackish waters. The fermented juice of manioc, boiled for hours to remove the cyanide then used to sauce the flesh of the gigantic fish known as pirarucu, a living fossil.
You won't find any of these foods - all indigenous to South America's Amazon rainforest - in any restaurant in Australia. But nor could you find them in any notable restaurant in Brazil until chef Alex Atala opened D.O.M. in Sao Paulo several years ago.
As a young chef looking to make his name in Brazil's biggest city, Atala didn't want to emulate the French and Italian chefs with whom he had trained while travelling in Europe, and nor was he satisfied to serve up rice and beans, Brazil's homely staple meal, to Sao Paulo's 20 million hungry souls. Rather, he sought to combine European haute cuisine with native Amazonian ingredients and so forge a new, uniquely Brazilian cuisine. In a country that mostly equated fine dining with European traditions, this would not be easy.
''I realised that the first step was to subtly educate my Brazilian customers into appreciating their indigenous produce,'' Atala says. ''I try to do this by taking native Brazilian ingredients, which are not used widely in restaurant cooking and heightening their taste by using classical techniques.''
His signature dish, palm heart ''fettucine'', neatly exemplifies his method. The fresh heart of a palm tree is sliced into strands and boiled for a minute until tender, then combined with prawns and prawn ''coral'' (the sweet-tasting liquid released from prawns' heads during frying). The dish is such a hit it is now sold in Brazilian supermarkets, and D.O.M was last year ranked 24th in Restaurant magazine's list of the world's 50 best restaurants.
Atala is in Melbourne this week for the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, where he is being touted as a ''one-time DJ and punk rock musician'' bringing the ''born-to-be-wild flavours of the Amazonian rainforest to the world''. He insists ''there are no similarities between being a rock star and being a chef''.
So he says, but observers might quibble.
Atala will hold two masterclasses this weekend at the Langham Hotel, to be moderated by leading local chef Jacques Reymond, before the chefs combine for two lavish dinners at Reymond's restaurant in Prahran on Monday and Tuesday. All four events are sold out.