Cuisine Hub

Do you have a property around Balcatta or Malaga fitted out with a commercial kitchen and cool room that you would like to rent out?

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If you’re a hospitality consultant, start-up specialist, marketing or social media expert, successful dark kitchen operator, café or restaurant owner and passionate about sharing your knowledge, wisdom, and expertise, we’d love to hear from you!

https://cuisinehub.com.au/

Home - Cuisine Hub We partner with purpose-led hospitality experts and commercial kitchen operators to enable passionate and ambitious home cooks, bakers and chefs to realise their dream of building a thriving food business by reducing the barriers to entry and minimising risk.

After the Second World War, Europe was in chaos. In Italy, people were starving and many decided to leave family and everything they had ever known behind and start a new life in Australia. Because money was scarce, often the men left first, worked hard to establish themselves, and then sent for their wives and children when they could afford it. Single men often wrote home to their families asking them to find a suitable wife for them, so many young women were married by proxy before they boarded a ship and headed for the other side of the world. They came with high hopes for a better future, and of course brought with them their culture and traditional recipes.

Early Italian migrants predominantly settled on the fringes of metropolitan areas where many were employed in market-gardening, poultry and pig farming, horticulture, and viticulture. For most, the priority was to save enough money to buy some land, where they quickly established productive kitchen gardens to feed their families and often their wider community.
Because many people came from impoverished agricultural areas of Southern Italy, they knew how to work the land, feed their families, and importantly how to preserve food for the colder months. Italian migrants did really well in the Mediterranean climates of Perth and parts of South Australia, and with their Greek counterparts, helped to develop the commercial fishing industry in Fremantle.

Even though they had lived through the war, life in post-war Australia must have been a huge culture shock. For everyday Aussies, the diet was predominantly boiled or fried meat with damper or bread washed down with vast quantities of tea. Common staples like olive oil was only sold for medicinal purposes and purchased in tiny bottles at the pharmacy. This is why self-sufficiency was the key.

New migrants brought seeds, plants and cuttings with them and established olive trees and grape vines. Every garden had fruit trees, plus Italians grew fresh herbs, chilli’s and garlic, and vegetables like eggplant, zucchini, beans, and tomatoes. Food was highly respected and never wasted. Beans were dried and stored for future use. Tomatoes were bottled or made into passata, the base for so many delicious Italian dishes. Green tomatoes were pickled, artichokes, capsicums, and other produce were preserved in oil and of course people preserved meats and made their own sausages and salami’s. It was said the only part of the pig you couldn’t eat was the squeak!

The ABC’s War on Waste program recently identified bread as the most wasted food item in our kitchens today. This would never happen in a traditional Italian kitchen where stale bread was transformed into tasty breadcrumbs to top pasta and other dishes. You simply pulse stale bread in a food processor, fry it off in a little bit of extra virgin olive oil in a hot pan, and season with salt.

Add torn up stale bread into a bubbling pot of country-style soup like pappa al pomodoro, or use it to make Ribollita, a hearty peasant dish which replaces meat with soaked bread to become a delectable mishmash of vegetables, beans, cheese… it’s the perfect way to use up odds and ends to make a thrifty and nutritious meal.

The Italian’s are also credited with introducing coffee to Australia, but that’s a topic for another day.

Did your mother or grandmother share their tips with you? We would love to hear them!

Share with us at Cuisine Hub Forum!

Which are your 3 most used spices and how do you incorporate them into dishes/beverages?

Come join us at the Cuisine Hub Forum where you can share your passion in food!

Do you have a secret quick dessert recipe to share?

Never thought making a chocolate cake can be so easy!
Try this recipe from FitwaffleKitchen👉
https://youtube.com/shorts/9ksFZpWSY0o?feature=shareMid-night

Amazing 10 minute microwave chocolate cake! #easyrecipe #chocolatecake