Caitlin Koether

Conversation with a chef: Caitlin, I wanted to ask first up, because I've never seen this before, but Head of Fermentation, what does that mean? And is that a new position here?

Caitlin Koether: It is. I would probably say that it might be one of the first positions in Australia of its title. There definitely would be some small fermentation programs run in venues, but this position was created around me and my experience. What it means is that I focus on preservation, but the term that is applicable for the general public is fermentation. If you consider preservation as an overarching umbrella, fermentation is one aspect under that umbrella, which encompasses different techniques that basically just look at food in season and how to preserve it so you can use it throughout the year. It creates new flavours. It creates new textures. This role, which I'm really quite excited about, is to look at the produce from the farm and how to preserve it and provide it throughout the year. It also is really good for waste management as well. So if things are not perfect, they're imperfect produce coming from the farm, I can always do something with it. Or I can look at the large amounts of waste that we produce in the group from the different restaurants and cafes and see how to turn that into something that's a usable product. It really just closes the loop. It's a bit science based. It's a bit creative based, and it's born out of this interesting necessity that I don't think the group necessarily knew that they initially needed, but it's beneficial for everybody, I think.

The farm, Common Ground, is really impressive.

It's beautiful.

It's really great to be able to have access to that. I spoke to some chefs recently who talked a lot about working with a gardener who grows what they want him to grow as opposed to the gardener growing something and then the chefs having to use that. How does it work with the garden out on the Bellarine Peninsula?

I think they were ironing out some procedures in the last couple of years and definitely turning over some land to do some more sustainable farming, getting the soil really healthy. But now the chefs are giving input to the farmers before growing season, so that would be, at the beginning of winter, about what we would like to see them grow. With this position, we're initiating a non-alcoholic beverage program along with some condiments. So I know that I'm going to ask them for very specific products next year. Then they have got some experimental smaller growth stuff that they're playing around with to see how it grows. The beginning process starts with, how does it grow on this land and can we expand, so that the chefs can feature it on their menu, and be able to continue supply. It's a bit from both sides. I think that the farmers always have things they're interested in growing and then the chefs always have things they're interested in the farmers growing, so it's a bit of both worlds coming together.

And as you say, I think it's a really important point about what can you grow on that land. It's maybe not something we talk a lot about here, that idea of terroir and what actually functions in this location with this climate, as well as growing things that we're more familiar with. I think as a colonial country, some of the growing techniques have been imposed or have been dictated to by palates from the other side of the world where the soil is quite different. I think it's interesting to have that shift in approach.

Those products, as well, have really stripped nutrients from the soil and the growing techniques, and it happens everywhere, but what we're growing now in Australian soil isn't meant to be grown in Australian soil. Common Ground's one farm as well as other farms I've worked with in the past that just really focus on soil health at the base, at the foundation of being able to provide sustainable produce done in a responsible way.

Just to go back to what you started off saying about the title of Head of Fermentation, what does that look like on a menu, say at Little Molli, where do I see your stamp?

I have a mental landscape that in my mind, preservation is. I can see preservation through everything. When you brine chicken, it imparts salt, which is an antimicrobial. And when you smoke it and you cook the chicken, then it denatures proteins and changes the compound structure and deposits smoke on the surface of the chicken. So in a sense, the way that I approach food is about the ability to extend shelf life, but also impart really delicious flavour. But on a very basic foundation, Alex is buying some stuff from me to use on his menu at Molli, and it's really interesting when chefs use the condiments that I've been producing for years. I use them in a similar way on repeat because it's something that I'm familiar and comfortable with and something that guests generally really like. But it's interesting to see the way that other chefs use it. So, we're going to start expanding that program. On the Little Molli menu, you can see it in the form of vinegars, misos, we have tons of different types of condiments, black garlic HP, barrel aged Worcestershire sauce, and they're really gently woven through each dish.

I decided that when I structured this menu, I wanted to focus on doing stuff on bread in a really thoughtful way. We have tartines on the menu, which are just so fun. It's an open face sandwich, so you get 50% less bread, which means it's a better eating experience with the filling or the topping. We have smoked chicken folded with a really simple chickpea mayo and miso, it's really delicious. It has pickled celery on top, and salsa verde. Our rolled lamb belly lambchetta is dressed in a black garlic HP. I make the black garlic, and then I make the HP with my barrel-aged Worcestershire sauce. I make the Worcestershire sauce and then age it in a port barrel. That one is used to season a jus for a French dip that you dip the sandwich in. So it wouldn't be for your average consumer, that might be a little bit afraid of the term fermentation because they don't know what it is because the unknown can be scary, right?

And we can have this idea of maybe funky. And Kimchi.

Exactly. I love kimchi, and I actually think it's quite a clean flavour, if you break it down into its components. But for a person to smell it and it has age on it or they're smelling the fish, and fish and vegetables aren't necessarily associated with each other. So if you do it in such a way that it's done well and it is approachable and thoughtful, then you can train someone's palate, you can educate them. There are a lot of opportunities with what fermentation is because it always ties back to sustainability, waste management, and then ultimately flavour, but really good practices and techniques. When I incorporate it through the menu, I'm doing it, in this scenario, to enhance flavour, but the side that not everyone sees is when my vegetable purveyor calls me up and goes, Caitlin, I've got 9 kilos of yellow capsicums, which is a phone call I got today, we're going to throw them out. Do you want them? And I say, yep. I'll take them. I'll turn them into a condiment.

That's so great. As you say, that's waste management as well, and so great that they know to call you. How do you know about this? You mentioned it being quite sciency, and you have a chef background, but obviously have a huge interest, where did you learn about all the preserving and fermenting techniques?

I was lucky enough 10 or 11 years ago now, to start at a restaurant called Bar Tartine in San Francisco. Someone handed me the Wild Fermentation book by Sandor Katz, and I read it. And I thought it was really interesting. Prior to that, I had read a book called On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee, which is the bible of why things happen the way that they do and why things are the way they are. I just love to know exactly why something is happening so then you can build on that technique, evolve it, apply it, change it. And at Bar Tartine, they were a fermentation hub. They're now closed, but it was this couple named Nick and Courtney who started doing fermentation because Courtney's gut health wasn't great. She was eating in such a way that she had to, but imparting that knowledge in the restaurant, and it became a really impactful and important restaurant. We did everything from dairy fermentation to non-alcoholic fermented sodas to lacto-fermented pickles, to koji. So, a broad range of different fermentation techniques way before its time, and I just fell in love and then I never lost it.

It sounds like you've got a few things on the go. How long are you aging the Worcestershire sauce?

It really depends on the size and the surface of the barrel. Right now I have a quite small barrel, which means that because it's small, there's less liquid, which means there's more surface area, so it can go pretty quick. But it depends on flavour. In terms of ferments on a timeline, it could be anywhere from a week to six months. I have the daunting task of starting my gochujang, which everyone loves, the Korean pepper paste, and that takes 6 months or more.

Okay. So are you a spreadsheet person?

I am. But all of this is listed in my head.

Are you for real? That's impressive. At any given time, how many things do you have on the go?

A lot. Although it is listed in my brain, I also handwrite lists to check through every day. But I know that once a week, I'll have to go and look at and taste through my ferments. They're live and active. They're like the plants I have at home or the cat that I need to feed at home, where they need to be nurtured, and you need to have introspection into what's going on with them. So it's touch, taste, visual. Over the last 10 years, I would say every day for once a week, within reason, I've had different projects on the go that I have to monitor. Its just part of my daily activity, my weekly activity.

When you're touching, tasting, seeing, what do you want to feel and taste and see?

Generally, with fermentation, you're producing acid or ethanol, and that's what the preservation is. You're looking to make sure there's no surface mould, no growth on the surface, which does happen pretty frequently. And then there are some other things that grow on the surface, like COG yeast, and then there are certain procedures around that where you monitor it, but you taste it for acidity: is it producing sufficient lactic acid bacteria for your dill cucumber pickle, for example, or acetic acid for your vinegar pickles? Is it producing ethanol? Does it need to be burped? All of these different things. Is it too hot in the room? I actually had that problem up here the other day when it got quite hot on the weekend where it was 40 degrees. All of my carrot pickles pretty much exploded from the inside out because the liquid got so hot. And that was on my weekly check. I thought, cool, I started this the week before, it's time to look at them, and then they deteriorated. That just it brings me back around to realising that fermentation and decay are two sides of the same coin. Fermentation is on a journey toward decay. As fermenters, we are just manipulating and sculpting the micro-organisms' journey to produce the desired results, but linearly, that food would have gone down a similar biological process toward decay rather than edibility.

I used to listen to a radio show, and they had a weekly slot where they would say, can I SodaStream this? And they got various liquids and they SodaStreamed them. Can you ferment and preserve anything, or are there things that are better that lend themselves better to that process?

Oh, definitely. About six years ago when the Noma fermentation book came out, I went down a rabbit hole of how to preserve fruit besides lacto fermentation, because there's always trends in food and there are upticks in what chefs are interested in doing, but they often don't understand why that trend is happening. They just want to be a part of it. I learned that fruit can be preserved really well, but fermented really poorly. It produces ethanol quickly. It doesn't necessarily hold its shape. There are some fruitsthat have a natural outer protective layer like apples, which are better, but soft fruits like blueberries and strawberries, they just fall apart. And then they don't taste good.

No. So the aim is always that it taste good.

Yeah. And that texturally it will stay together.

What's your favourite ingredient to use?

My favourite ingredient? I am always in pursuit of umami. So I tend to use, although it's not the main focus, I use a lot of miso. I'm quite good at constructing vegan food without you knowing it's vegan. Plant-based stuff is really interesting and delicious for me. So what I'll do is I'll know that I want to take a nut or a seed and use it in a dish and do someforethought and planning, and then I'll make the a miso out of that nut or seed. So then when I'm making a really luscious cashew butter, then I have cashew miso to season it in place of salt. What you're getting is not just the salt element to season that puree or nut butter, but you're also getting umami without the consumer generally knowing that it's a miso. It's just extra delicious. I love fresh vegetables, especially in summer. There's quite a lot you can do with them. One of my favourite techniques is dehydrating and then rehydrating. It's about to be zucchini season or it's starting now on the farm. I like to peel the zucchini, take the skin off to dehydrate it, and set that aside. And then to dehydrate the zucchini itself to a certain percentage of moisture loss, so it's a little rubbery. And then you can boil it in a liquid, and you get this really meaty delicious zucchini steak like thing. Powder the skin, sift it over, and then you've reconstructed a zucchini. But it has more flavour.

Do you think about these things 24/7?

I think about them a lot.

It feels like a lot of thought went into that, that's incredible. You mentioned a few different things, and different cultures have different ways of preserving, Japanese and Korean and Scandinavian countries. Can you blend techniques or do you have to remain authentic to one?

Not at all. Kayla from Molli and I are doing a class for bartenders in the next month and I was just looking at different types of yeast in different cultures. One of my favourite things to do is understanding that in probably all cultures in the world, fermentation is very deeply ingrained, fermentation and preservation. Part of it is for nutritional value.Part of it is for preservation. Part of it is for just because it's good, because you produce alcohol. Within those cultures, they may be called different things, but they are very similar. For example, when I was looking at yeast earlier, there is something called Chinese qu, which is a certain cocktail of bacteria and yeast that produces Chinese wine. And then there's something in Korea that is called nuruk, which produces makgeolli, a cocktail of different types of bacteria in yeast. But then you have your SCOBY, which is kombucha, which is also a colony, a different symbiotic colony of bacteria yeast. So, across different cultures, there is a lot of similarities but with different nuances. Tying that all together and understanding how things produce slightly different flavours, but the same end result is really cool.

You need to put out your own book.

Eventually.

Where did it all start for you? Did you always know you wanted to be a chef?

Since I was 18. I was always quite creative, drawing, painting, creative thinking. And when they say you have to apply for college and choose your major, you go, what the fuck am I going to choose? I don't know. I was actually forced in my curriculum in high school to take a different type of elective because I was taking multiple languages, Latin, Spanish, all of that. I needed to cut one of those out and take an elective for world experience. I took a cooking class, and I loved it. And I thought, I think I'm going to be a chef. Then there was a turnaround time of about two weeks. I went to college for hospitality administration, hated all of the learning stuff, loved all of the cooking stuff. And here we are.

It feels to me like you're self-taught as well in terms of having a fascination, so you follow that in terms of research and so on, and you need that, don't you? You need that passion and excitement about things to keep you going in this industry.

Intrinsic motivation. You have to find what you love to be able to motivate yourself.

You've worked at some top restaurants around the world. Was it important to you to work at those places?

Absolutely. Going back to your previous question, it was really interesting going from California where everything's in abundance and a lot of stuff is available all year round, and not because it's being shipped from different parts of the country, but actually grown in California, to a Nordic country where even when you plant strawberries, they don't necessarily come to fruition in the summer, so a country of scarcity where growing seasons are difficult. The things that do grow, the flavours are really extraordinary. It showed me two different worlds. In Nordic cuisine, you have really beautiful potatoes and cabbages. They're really, really sweet and really juicy, which you don't see in California, I mean, you do, but not to the degree that it's so spectacularly delicious. But you need to put it through a rigorous process of testing it seven different ways to see how you can produce a different dish every year. But it also goes with preservation as well. Preservation is a necessity in Nordic countries, to preserve when things are in season. So Mirabelle plums, ramsons, which are a type of wild garlic, pine needles, different things like that. And then California, you have some really experimental beautiful produce. And when you marry those two things together, you get a really extraordinary dish that you can compose from those two different types of knowledge.

Was it a culture shock? Did you go straight from California to Copenhagen?

I did. I hate winter. I'm from the winter. I'm from the from the New York area, and I know snow, but, man, I just don't like cold weather. In summer, the days were long. The sun would rise at 4am and set at 10pm, and that sounds fun, but everyone would take advantage of it and really not stop. And then in winter, the sun would rise at 9am and set at 4pm. And it was quite dreary. It was definitely a culture shock, I would say, which is why I left Copenhagen and moved to Australia. I love it here.

I was just there, in October for 3 days, and it was quite mild. I actually had a beautiful sunny Sunday where I got up and had a coffee and a cardamom bun and just walked around everything, and as the sun was rising, I arrived at Nyhaven and just the colours of those buildings reflected in the water are amazing. But I imagine when you're there for longer than three days, there are other things that come into play.

It's a beautiful city to visit and the cultural heritage, you can just see it in everything that exists there. But California really holds my heart. I just loved everything about San Francisco.

So, you grew up in New York and you moved to California. How old were you when you were there?

I lived there twice between 22 and 25, and then I moved to Copenhagen for a year. And then I came back, and I was there between 26 and 29.

Melbourne was the reaction to Copenhagen?

I got the travel bug. I love traveling, moving around. Going to live somewhere is the best way to immerse yourself in a culture. I knew I wanted to come over here to do two things: travel Southeast Asia, which I did, and I loved it: before COVID and I've been back since, and then get certified in scuba diving, which I did on the Great Barrier Reef.

That's fantastic. I thought from my very brief glimpse of Copenhagen and I don't want to say it reminded me of Melbourne because Copenhagen has been there a lot longer, but, just that idea of coffee culture and smaller producers and people really caring about food. There were some overlaps, I thought. So there might not have been so much of a culture shock coming to Melbourne? I don't know that the weather's necessarily better in Melbourne.

I don't mind it. It's quite similar to San Francisco. It never gets that cold, but then sometimes it gets grey and windy in the winter.

It's nice to have four seasons in one day.

That's unique. That's unique to Melbourne.

When you are thinking of all these multiple ideas that you've got going on in your head, it seems like a bit of a moot question because you seem inspired by everything, but where do you get your inspiration? Obviously, from the ingredients and from the books that you're reading. Are there other places that you're looking, other chefs or Instagram? Where do you look for that spark?

This is an interesting question because on the way over to work today, I was thinking I actually haven't done much innovation recently. It's been a lot of research to understand fundamentals to fill in gaps in knowledge. But where does that come from? My thought process was, okay, the computer was invented whenever it was invented. And then it was perfected, let's say late eighties, where there's a screen and a keyboard.

Now it has evolved to tablets, which you can write on with a pen. But most of the time, you're sitting there typing away. So what's the next innovation? Do we remove the keyboard and there's something different? Where does innovation come with computers? Then I thought back to food. How do I go back to the thought processes I used to have where I really thought about food in a way that was quite unique? And a lot of my inspiration comes from other cultures, to understand what other people have tried and tested in fermentation, because they are ancient techniques. There's not a lot that are new, but there are new things that we can discover from the Western world toward Asian or Southeast Asian ingredients, or, let's say Eastern Europe, just things that get less traffic by social media. I get a lot of inspiration from that: tradition, heritage, things that are passed down and done really well, and preserved in such a way that we also need to continue preserving them for the future. I get a lot of inspiration from that.But sometimes I just think about an ingredient and go, alright, what do I want to do with this that's weird? And how do I make that happen? Sometimes it doesn't work, but sometimes I go back to some of my old projects, and I think, wow. How did I think of that? That's wild.

Well, that's the thing. If you're a trailblazer, you're inspiring others, so you're getting inspiration from your own imagination, which is amazing. Can you still be surprised by flavour?

Yeah. Every time I taste a ferment, it tastes different. It's really frustrating, but also really interesting because it's transformative in a way that is sometimes chaotic and the micro-organisms produce erratic results that you will never necessarily expect. Sometimes they're pleasant. Sometimes they're not. But even more than that, always when you taste a single ingredient and it is the best version of itself that you've ever had, it's always surprising. Like those new potatoes in Denmark or like the first time I had a mangosteen in Thailand, I'm trying to chase that that experience again. Every time I taste them, I'm so stunned by how delicious they are. Have you had them? They're a type of fruit that has a hard outer shell, but you can crack it in your hand. And when it splits open, there's little pods and they sometimes encase around a seed, but they're all kind of attached in a little circle. And then you pull them off like an orange segment and eat them, and they're floral and sweet and delicious. They have acidity. It's so beautiful.

I only just discovered finger limes very late in my life journey, and that was here, because I just don't feel like I saw them at all in New Zealand. I've been here 13 years.

Finger limes are a cultivated hybrid grown in Australia.

I find them astounding.

We used them as a novelty when I was very young in Boston. Vegetarian caviar.

Yes. And they just pop and they look beautiful. Now, with all that in mind and your vast experience and the way you see the culinary world, what would your advice be to a young person starting out as a chef?

I think that when you choose the life journey that you want to go on, if that's a chef, but this can apply to other careers as well, when you're on your autonomous journey, make decisions based on what you want to achieve. Let's say we're talking about fermentation, and this is the advice I give to young chefs with fermentation. Don't do something because it's cool. Do something because it's something that you want to learn, and understand what you want to achieve. If you're fermenting something, understand why you're fermenting it. Understand the final product that you want from it. That can be applied to a lot of other aspects in life as well. Being a chef is extremely rewarding and very difficult work. When you do put in that hard work and you do a little bit of life journey and research on your own, you take what you've put into it, but always do it based on who you are and what your identity is. Because if you're not giving yourself what you need, then they're not you you're not going to get what you need from it.

That's amazing. Thank you. You're my first conversation for the year, and I think you've set the bar really high. I love it.

Little Molli,66 Nicholson Street, Abbotsford