Food Safari

The heady mixture of charcoal-smoked grilling

fish and meat, spit roast and a traditional

oven.

Welcome to the delicious world of Croatian

food, full of tradition and great flavour.

Join our food safari to learn the secrets of

making cabbage rolls, the best of Dalmatia,

the famous seafood brodetto, the most delicious

artichokes, rack of lamb and how to cook it

to perfection and sweets to make you swoon.

We have two cuisines, we have a Mediterranean

flavour to cuisine which is seafood, shellfish

and crayfish and all that, lamb, olive oil,

garlic and parsley and then we have a continental

part of Croatian cuisine.

You're talking cured meat, cheeses, milk

and creaming products and maybe a little bit

of lard, beautiful toast and desserts, you know so when you combine the two of them

it's absolutely fantastic and different and one of the best cuisines in the world.

To say Denis Valcic is passionate about the

food of his homeland is an understatement.

A trained chef, he's had a one-man mission

since he arrived in Australia 40 years ago

to enlighten people about the delights of Croatian food through cookbooks, cooking

demonstrations and cooking in restaurants.

On Fridays he plays to a home crowd at the Croatian club in Sydney.

Okay Denis on our tour of Croatian vegetables is there one that is loved above all

others?

Yeah I suppose this one here, which is plain

cabbage of course, use it for Croatian coleslaw.

As you know we don't use mayonnaise in Croatian

coleslaw, we only use vinegar, oil, salt

and pepper.

Another very important part of Croatian cooking, I suppose Mediterranean cooking,

garlic, I use a lot of garlic.

This is the must product, I mean.

You use it throughout?

Yes, I use garlic a lot.

A household without fresh garlic, I don't want to go into it.

Potatoes, particularly this one, the Cheto,

new potatoes, we can use them for potato

salad, for Croatian potato salad, against

no mayonnaise and we eat a lot of potatoes.

As Croatian we use a lot of olive oil.

In Dalmatian coast almost every household makes their own olive oil.

An extra virgin you love?

Extra virgin depends, extra virgin most for salads and things like that, octopus

salad, any other salad, to spread on the seafood or just sprinkle on the seafood,

virgin olive oil.

Here we've got polenta, we use a normal polenta, not an instant one, we like to

cook it just a little bit extra.

So this is made from corn, isn't it?

Corn, yes.

They're fine and there's a little bit coarser one, I think the coarser is much

better.

We use it for brodetta, we cook the polenta and then we put pieces of brodetta

or fish on top of it.

Paprika powder, again two kinds, mild and a very hot one.

It's used mostly in continental part of Croatia, near the Hungarian border,

right, for the fish paprikash and the goulash and chicken paprikash.

Aiva, which is additive to our mixed grill, to roast pork, roast meats,

cevapi or whatever.

What's it made from?

Because it is a beautiful flavour.

It's a grilled and minced paprika, they're very hot and a mild one, right,

mostly in continental part, not much in Adriatic coast.

Croatian gems, the famous plum butter because it's thick, it's made from the

special small plums in Croatia, fully imported of course, and it's good

because when you put it inside the biscuits and bake it, it doesn't run,

it stays.

The famous saukra, now we are really deep intercontinental part of

Croatia, they love this stuff.

Just next to it is the same thing, it's the cabbage leaves to make Croatian

cabbage rolls, right?

The whole leaf is here, it's about six in each roll, you just unroll it,

you put some meat and you make beautiful cabbage rolls.

It's nice because there's lots of vegetables in it, rice, meat and with

potato, it's a substantial meal.

Sounds great to me, yeah.

So this is a cabbage that's been pickled?

Yes.

Branka Rončević's dedication to her favourite dish,

sama, is finding the best pickled cabbage.

Many hunts make their own by immersing whole heads in a salt brine

for at least six weeks.

And is that still the salt on the outside?

Oh, no, it's ice.

It's not one of the sides, it's the ice here.

In a generous amount of olive oil, Branka cooks echelots,

chops speck and crush garlic.

Garlic and I put paprika, paprika must not be over fried.

To a course, butter, salt and pepper.

For beef and pork mince, Branka adds Croatian vegetable stock powder,

pepper, salt and the paprika mix, then beaten eggs, chopped parsley

from her garden and arborio rice.

Now I'll mix with the hand.

Now it's done.

I think everything is mixed through OK.

Now I make rolls and they stick together because of eggs and mince

and everything in it.

You just tuck this in and stays in.

And when you eat, you know, you just...

So you don't need toothpicks or anything?

No, no.

Branka places the rolls in a deep pot on a layer of finely sliced

sauerkraut.

For more flavour, she adds large pieces of speck on top of the

cabbage rolls and more sauerkraut.

Covered in stock.

Now we boil one and a half now.

Wow, that smells great.

Beautiful.

Between meals or to start a meal, there are many cured meats.

Prosciutto is something every family used to make.

Some even made their own salami.

They already come at the smoking.

They are ready for sale.

40 years ago, Ivan Speha came to Australia and began smoking and

curing meat the traditional way.

This is a real traditional cooling from Slavonia.

And this is a pure pork inside.

And this casing here, what you see, this is a pendix of the pig.

I wondered about the shape of it.

Pendix.

This is a pendix.

There's a lot of garlic inside and they're spicy and also

because the casing is from pendix and that gives them a

different taste.

Speck, called in Croatian, suha slanina.

You never see one house, Croatian house, I think, in the

world without one of these.

Or without the chabaj.

We call it srenska kovacica.

You don't see not one Croatian anywhere without.

Even the younger generations, the born third generation,

they still eat that.

This is in English called smoke hocks.

In Croatian we call it suha koljenica.

Koljenica means knuckle.

In Minca, especially, with the cabbages, beans and all sorts

of pea soups.

Probably the most well-known small goods are cevapcici,

the skinless sausages beloved of Croatia,

the taste best cooked over charcoal.

It's the glowing charcoals that are essential for

Croatia's most treasured cooking implement,

a marvellous outdoor oven called a peka,

in which meats like pork belly and turkey pieces cook

in their own juices with some garlic and herbs.

How do things taste when they've been cooked in the peka?

Well, it's a convection type of cooking,

so the meat is infused with the flavour of the iron

bark and the heat beads, and it retains its moisture.

So that's the difference.

So if you're cooking on an open grill,

it tends to be a bit dry.

So this technique, you can cook a lot of meat

and you can cook a lot of vegetables all in one go.

Chef Frank Roncovic says even though he cooks every day

in his cafe Zegna, he doesn't miss a sundae overseeing

the traditional lunch cooked in the peka,

and says everything cooked under the metal lid

tastes amazing.

So that's it.

That's the pork belly, the potatoes and the turkey.

That's done.

So what we'll do, we'll take it to the table.

We're ready.

Yay!

Dessert!

Another sort of roasting is seen in every village,

especially during spring.

Spit roasts are a good excuse to get people together,

and it's the men's job to do the cooking.

Tonchi Farrak is from the same island

the famous Marco Polo came from.

He's the owner and general manager of Wildfire Restaurant

on Sydney's famous Circular Quay.

The methods of cooking at the restaurant,

over open flame and with a wood-fired oven,

are exactly what he grew up with.

And he knows how flame can add its special flavour

to any meat cooked, especially when you observe the rules.

How do you tell that meat is good?

You could tell probably by the colour of it.

It needs to have a little bit of fat as well.

And also this one, we left the fat on it.

Normally in the supermarkets, this part would have been taken off.

They sell it where it's fairly young,

so what we need to do is bring it home,

put it on a rack in the fridge,

let it age so the air goes through it for, say, a week.

Oh, really?

On the weekend, you buy it on a Monday.

And what we do, we just stud it,

and then you just put the rosemary,

you can just go with your finger inside

and leave some outside like that,

because this will then burn

and it'll impart the smoke and the flavour into the lamb.