Sean Judd has a voracious appetite for knowledge. He loves finding out more about food, cooking and all sorts of other things. Get him talking about the man knocking on the door selling pine mushrooms or the one month window he has to enjoy Apollo Bay truffles and then you will see the epitome of a passionate chef.
Hi Sean. You’ve been a chef for a while now, haven’t you?
Yes, a long time. About 18 years. I started cooking in the UK.
Are you from the UK?
No, I started high school there and started working in kitchens there, I’ve been in Melbourne for 14 years and worked in various places around Melbourne.
You seem to be known for a more Asian or Thai inspired cuisine. I read that you learned that under David Thompson at Nahm in London.
I worked at Nahm a long time ago, in 2002. Obviously that was where I started learning about Thai. To say that I learned everything I know from David Thompson in that time would be untrue because nobody knows everything and it’s a lot to learn.
Thai is quite a complicated cuisine so there is always more to learn and different tricks and techniques and eve ingredients. I’m still finding that I come across ingredients I haven’t heard of before.
It’s funny because sometimes we think, or diners can think, that it’s an easy food because ether are so many Thai takeaways and even supermarkets have packs so we can make our own Thai curries so it’s presented as fairly simple. What are the complexities?
Well if you were just doing what the average Thai takeaway does, yes it is easy because you would just buy some green curry paste and get some carrots and broccoli. That kind of Thai has been dumbed down. There are all kinds of vegetables and herbs that are native to Thailand or to that part of Southeast Asia that you don’t really see here. In the last few years more and more people are growing them here so you can get them fresh, but it has always been difficult.
Even as far as making curry paste, there’s no one all purpose green curry paste that you can use for everything and it tastes great. In Thailand they literally make a different green curry paste depending on what they’re putting into the curry. So there’s one that works for pork and another one that works for chicken and there’s one that works for fish. If you’re using prawns, for example, you might put in some krachai, that’s a wild ginger that has a very interesting, earthy camphorous flavour to it. A little bit of that in there is actually really good. Especially seeing as they tend to use fresh water prawns there.
A lot of cuisines have sauce as their base and you have to learn the sauces and how they enhance the food, so French cuisine and Mexican has it, Indian, and everything matches and works in together if the base sauces are done well. I hadn’t really thought about that with Thai.
It’s massively regional as well. People don’t really take that into consideration either. They just think of Thailand. Thai people don’t think of Thailand as one country. They identify as being from a region or a particular place. The cuisines of the north-east and the north-west are distinctly different. Then there’s the north that fits in between them like a bridging zone. The southern Thai on the Malaysian side is very different to southern Thai on the Vietnamese side. Then there’s the Central Plains Thai; all the stuff that we think of as Thai pretty much comes from there. Pad Thai, red curries and green curries and those sorts of things are from the Central Plains and Bangkok.
Where do you begin with what you dip into?
I try and get around it as much as possible because it’s always interesting to try different things and to challenge yourself as a chef. If you go from restaurant to restaurant always doing the same dishes, that’s really boring. Not just for you, but for the diner as well. That’s the way I see it, anyway. I certainly wouldn’t be in a hurry to follow a chef from one restaurant to another as a consumer if I thought he was just doing the same menu. Unless I thought his menu was absolutely brilliant.
A lot of chefs I talk to say that it’s important to keep learning; that’s the challenge and that’s where the passion comes from.
Part of being dedicated to what you do is pushing yourself to learn, develop and grow. If you’re not doing that, you get stagnant and complacent, which isn’t a good thing.
I probably have close to a thousand cookbooks at home and close to a hundred I haven’t even read yet. I fall into that trap where I go in to buy a new book and walk out with seven.
Have you lived in Thailand or spent time there?
I’ve been there for holidays and stuff. I don’t speak Thai. I’m not one of those guys who has fully immersed myself in the culture. What I know about the food comes from reading and experiencing it and from working with and talking to Thai people. To be honest with you, I know people who have spent a lot of time in Thailand and know nothing. Just because you’re there, doesn’t mean you’re learning. You can get caught up in places and lifestyle when you’re surrounded by something all the time and take it for granted.
Also, people can be very secretive with recipes and techniques which is why it can take a long time to fully understand something. It’ s like anywhere in the world, one person’s curry paste is different to another person’s. They’ll have different ideas about how you should make it and what you should put in it. You have to get to a point where you’ve got the basics and then you’re developing your own from where you want it to go. The understanding of the basics is more important than trying to be some kind of encyclopaedic savant.
Food is very subjective. It comes down to a matter of personal taste. As a chef, you’re trying to get your personal tastes across to the diners. That doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong, it just means it’s your take.
How do you go then if people don’t like or appreciate what you put up?
If it’s valid, it’s valid. If it’s not, it’s not. If something is over cooked or undercooked or there's a technical error, then yes, you have to take it on board. If it’s a matter of taste, they didn’t like it that flavour or ingredient, that’s their thing. You have to take everything with a pinch of salt but you also have to be receptive to the fact that something may have been out on the night. That’s part of being a chef. You have to check stuff out and make sure that when you send food out, it’s not wrong, that technically it’s correct.
Sure. That’s a team thing as well.
It is a team thing. It’s trusting your people and making sure they know how you want things cooked. Mistakes always happen but the important thing is that mistakes don’t leave the kitchen and get out into the dining room.
Tell me about the food at Alter Dining. I see it’s described as modern Australian but the menu looks as though it still has some Asian influence.
We decided to move away from the more traditional Thai flavours that featured at BKK to focus more on using the flavours in a different way. The idea of Alter is that we’re not bound to a denominational cuisine. We’re not trying to be Thai any more, we’re not trying to be modern Vietnamese. We’re not trying to be anything, we’re just Alter. The cuisine is essentially what we create. At the moment we are using a lot of Thai flavours and ingredients, but we’re also using a lot of French traditional technique and sauce making; or there are Japanese techniques and ingredients coming across. In that sense it’s modern Australian because it’s our Australian perception of European food with an Asian filter.
Do you enjoy cooking in this way?
I’ve been cooking like this for a long time anyway. When I cook at home I don’t typically cook a straight up Thai dish, I always cook what I feel is right for what I want to eat. I don’t necessarily think, oh I can’t put that into paella because paella is Spanish and that ingredient is Chinese. If it works, it works. I’ve been using fish sauce to season my pastas for 10 years. It makes sense to me. It has umami and a depth to it that salt doesn’t have.
You obviously really love what you do and read all around it.
I like to get around different things. I like to know about a lot of things. I’m interested in a lot of different things outside of cooking as well. As far as cooking goes, I want to know as much as possible about as much as possible. I probably have close to a thousand cookbooks at home and close to a hundred I haven’t even read yet. I fall into that trap where I go in to buy a new book and walk out with seven.
I have worked in different cuisines. I’ve done café stuff, I’ve done Spanish and Mexican, a bit of French. I’ve never done straight Italian. You learn bits and pieces and it seems strange to me that you would only want to do one cuisine and focus solely on that in your life.
Part of the ethos I have set for myself and for the Alter kitchen is to use as much local produce as possible; fruit and vege, meat and seafood. We want to keep it as close as possible. It isn’t always easy because you can feel a bit limited, but it’s also not that hard because Victoria is pretty big. There’s a lot of different stuff going on.
It’s good for the kitchen to have to work in a seasonal way and to have to work with what’s available. It’s good to showcase good local producers too. I grew up in kitchens where we had the menu and if asparagus was on the menu in winter, we were buying Peruvian asparagus, which to me is crazy.
Yes, we’ve lost the idea of the treat of the flavours that come with seasonal eating. We think because we can access everything all the time that we should.
The vegetables and berries and all of those things are so much better in season.
It’s also what our bodies need at that time…whatever grows in summer, like watermelon and lettuce, we need more hydration. We need citrus in winter because our bodies need vitamin C. It all makes sense but we tend to forget that once we are in the supermarket and can have whatever we want.
Right now we have finally had some rain and the mushroom season has taken off. Wild mushrooms are great. They are probably one of the few things that is super seasonal in Victoria. There is a distinct season and you get excited about it. I can get pine mushrooms now. It’s awesome. There are certain ingredients I get excited about when they come in. Asparagus is another one. I’m very conscious of not eating it outside of spring and not keeping it on my menu either. But there are other spring things like the young shoots of garlic. I love them.
And truffles. I always get excited about truffles. There are some really good local truffles now. I had some last year from Apollo Bay and they were some of the best truffles I’ve had. They were only around for a month.
Being seasonal isn’t a new thing, it’s kinda the way things should be.
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