Three cook books down, five or so TV series later and Justin Bonello is tired. Tired, but a little jumpy from yet another cappuccino.
He’s in Johannesburg to promote his new book, Out of the Frying Pan (Penguin), and was supposed to be cooking lunch for the press. But that’s fallen to the chef of Little Tuscany, a grand suburban hotel near Montecasino.
He’ll hate the comparison to a popular British cook, but Bonello is as close as we’ve got to a celebrity chef. There’s yards of Oliver and Ramsay at your mall’s bookshop, but other than the late Lannice Snyman, Indian Delights and Pieter Dirk Uys, very few South African chefs have become household names.
All our chefs are stuck in their kitchens and, although the country has some of the world’s finest ingredients, we’re not really pegged — Franshoek’s Le Quartier Français aside — as a destination for fine dining.
Bonello, through his Cooked series for the BBC (which, incidentally, our national broadcaster turned down), has promoted the country’s food in a unique way — the way of the “bush cook”.
His first book, Cooked in Africa, is a collection of recipes that he cooked and filmed for the travel series. He’s self-deprecatory about his success, saying he’s only the “guy next door” who can cook a potjie on the beach for his mates with a couple of beers, yet his unique view — that of a culinary South African road trip — has been lapped up by audiences around the world.
Here you’ll find a good recipe for a bobotie, as well as Karoo oysters (fresh sheep, buffalo, boar or bull testicles), potjie bread, a seafood paella and a clever tom yum risotto with prawns.
He’ll also show you how to cook an ostrich fillet on a spade, make a pizza in a dustbin, poach an egg in a tin cup and cook a fish in newspaper. And there’s a terrific recipe for making a chocolate vodka drink, cadged from the barman at Mr Pickwicks in Long Street, Cape Town.
‘Culinary tour of sorts’
The new book is also a culinary tour of sorts, but instead of cooking on the beach he tours 13 mainly Cape-based restaurants, persuading the owners to part with some of their secrets.
“I needed to learn from someone else. If someone’s passionate about food, he’ll teach you and you’ll become a better cook. It’s like stolen knowledge. Sometimes you just need help to join the dots.”
He cooks a porchetta — a whole boned pig baked slowly in the pizza oven of Magica Roma in Pinelands — and steps into the kitchen of Terroir, where superchef Michael Broughton teaches him to show sauces the utmost respect at all times.
These recipes are pretty advanced, such as the one for scallops with corn velouté, gnocchi, quail eggs and bacon foam. Broughton is also probably one of only a few chefs in South Africa employing the sous vide method of cooking, in which the ingredient is vacuum-packed in plastic and then cooked in water. This ensures that the food is perfectly cooked and retains all its juice, which, as Bonello says, has opened up new realms of texture and flavour.
As part of his book tour Bonello has also been booked to appear at the Good Food and Wine Show and will speak on “great food hoodwinks”. He’s also “jumped into bed with Woolworths”, which opened up all its properties in South Africa to Bonello for this fifth series, affording him a behind-the-scenes view of places, such as the inner workings of abattoirs, where the public never gets to go. And this is where Bonello leans forward in his chair — and really starts to talk.
“South African farmers are in shit — We’re now a net importer of meat. The government doesn’t support them and then there’s the middleman who doesn’t pay for the risks farmers take. If a farmer has 100 sheep, he has to cope with predators, rain, or no rain. Farmers get R30 for meat on the bone and it’s being sold for R150. What the fuck happened between the farmer and you and me?
“Ten years ago there wasn’t a free-range chicken unless you raised it and slaughtered it yourself. Fifty years ago lamb and chicken cost the same. What the fuck happened? We got smart. We go from egg to slaughter in 40 days — We’ve tweaked the system.”
He also won’t eat a pig from South Africa and cites the gruesome conditions under which they are produced. The colour of the meat should be pink instead of white, which comes from being reared on an industrial farm. “We’re worse than animals — we’re human.”
Changing how people eat
He recounts the story of a feedlot of 5 000 head of cattle and how it occurred to him that every single animal was a “dead cow walking”. He relates how a farmer told him the worst kind of cow to deal with was one that had been hand-reared.
“For three months the cow comes up to you, it licks you, it trusts you. We didn’t eat meat for two weeks after that. Not even biltong. What the fuck are we actually doing?”
He’s not saying South Africans should give up meat, but he’s suggesting we ask our suppliers whether their meat has been fed on grass or corn. Try that in McDonald’s. Or try asking the Colonel if his chickens are free-range.
“I want to change how people eat. I’ve been into abattoirs, and I want to lift the mist.”