BRAE’S DAY OFF

Anyone who has experienced Brae, this year’s winner of GT’s Regional Restaurant of the Year, won’t be surprised that the recipes created by chef and owner Dan Hunter for this issue require at least a medium level of kitchen skill. Hunter is an uncompromising chef and his food is not only delicious, it’s also complex and often highly technical.

But these recipes are all about Brae on a day off and so represent a more relaxed version of the dishes that land on the tables of Hunter’s country Victorian restaurant.

“I’ve done versions of some dishes from the menu at Brae with the same flavour profiles but in a simpler form than how we present them in the restaurant,” says Hunter. “There’s a level of skill required – things like the croissant dough require a bit of concentration – but I’ve made them so people will be able to successfully cook these recipes at home, which is what these dishes are all about.”

The food here work as a menu for a long weekend lunch with friends, starting with snacks, then moving through to shared dishes. But each dish can stand alone in its own right, too.

“The dishes like the kohlrabi taco and the raw scallops served on a croissant are good as cocktail food,” Hunter says. “They’re easy to eat and fresh and lively with raw seafood and ingredients like finger lime.”

The food does require some forward planning. The fermented vegetable salad, for example, needs to be prepared at least three weeks before you plan to serve it. But it’s worth getting it organised, not just because it tastes so good but also, Hunter believes, because fermented flavours are becoming increasingly essential to the Australian palate.

“Twenty years ago, if you put fermented flavours on a menu in a Western kitchen, people would tell you that the food was off,” he says. “Now, as people have a broader understanding of the flavour profile and a wider