Peek into Beek’s cooking pot
Melbourne chef Bart Beek can’t wait to get his hands on some goldband snapper, Exmouth prawns, Shark Bay blue swimmer crabs and Cone Bay barramundi when he showcases his cooking style at the Fremantle Seafood Festival.
“They’re my favourites but I always make sure to order dhufish if I go to a restaurant in WA because we don’t have it out our way,” he said. “So much of the produce you have is unique. The goldband has a clean, beautiful flavour and I’ll do that in my own adobo seco seasoning over charcoal with sprigs of rosemary if I can get plate-size fish.”
A familiar face for six years on Channel 10’s lifestyle show Escape with ET, Beek is the resident chef for Club Marine magazine and runs the Essence Food Studio in Melbourne with wife Alaine in between creating seasonal recipes for Tasmania’s Huon salmon, road testing Everdure barbecues and putting on weekly spreads at historic 60-room Werribee Park Mansion, built by one of Victoria’s wealthiest farming families in 1877.
“It’s my favourite gig,” he said. “I cook on a beautiful three-metre wood-fired oven and we do all the old Scottish-English food with a complete modern twist.”
Seafood is his favourite protein because it takes so little effort in the kitchen to make it shine.
“You don’t need to do a lot to something that has a beautiful base flavour,” he said. “Keep it simple and source the freshest and the best you can find. “The problem a lot of people have is that they worry about under- cooking and so end up taking it too far the other way instead. You want something that is moist and flakes apart beautifully on the plate.”
Bart Beek will be
on the Seafood Theatre stage at Fishing Boat Harbour with a WAFIC special guest at 10.15am and at 1.30pm presenting wine and seafood. You can also catch him on the Tastes of Fremantle
stage at 4pm.
