Welcome to Yes, Chef! A monthly newsletter in which food writer Sophie Hansen shines a light on our regional chefs. This week she talks with Will Cowan-Lunn of Ates in Blackheath.
Ates in the upper Blue Mountains village of Blackheath is a small restaurant with a special place in Australia’s food history. It was the Mountains’ first bakery, and years later became Phillip Searle’s celebrated eatery Vulcan’s. Now it’s Will Cowan-Lunn’s woodfired Ates.
From bakery to hatted restaurant, the heart of this story is the heat from a huge 150-year-old Scotch oven. It took almost a fortnight to get it going once Will got the keys a few years ago. The oven is fired by ironbark and it dictates most of Will’s prep and menu planning.
“The oven has certainly slowed my cooking,” he says. “It’s slowed me down. You can’t rush anything in here.
“We cook things in the oven for hours at a time, all day sometimes, and that requires us to be more organised, but makes for a less hectic service because so much prep has to be done in advance.”
From Wildfire to Rockpool, Tetsuya's to Martin Wishart in Scotland, Will has worked in some of the world’s finest diners. These days he lives just down the road from his restaurant with his wife Abby and young children.
Sophie x
Some kitchen shortcuts are really worth taking. Good all-butter pastry is one of them. But the only brand that does it properly in Australia is Carême Pastry. All its pastries are preservative free and made with proper butter, not vegetable or palm oils which you see in lots of pastries in the frozen section of the supermarkets.
If this sounds like an ad, well, it is! Galah approached Carême to come on as an advertising partner because we love its products so much. It is a family-run business based in the Barossa Valley – 100 per cent Australian made and owned – making high-quality, delicious pastry sheets that taste as if you'd made them yourself.
Together with Sophie Hansen, we’ve got some fab recipe ideas for you, including these puff pastry bites with salmon rillettes, which can be baked using Carême All Butter Puff Pastry
If you’re wondering where you can buy Carême pastry, just head here to find your closest stockist.
If “home” means a recipe that takes me to an early childhood memory, then it’s my Mum's spaghetti Bolognese. Her recipe was very traditional, with lots of tomato paste. My mother is a fantastic cook and would feed our family of four kids without breaking a sweat.
I'd say barbecued marinated trout with cabbage and peanut nuoc cham salad (below). Especially at this time of year. This is a fairly simple recipe (see below) of ocean trout marinated in oyster sauce, soy, ginger, garlic and sugar, and dressed with nuoc cham, a Vietnamese dressing made of lime juice, fish sauce, palm sugar and chilli, ideally brought together in a mortar and pestle. I serve this over sliced cabbage with any and all raw vegetables finely sliced and dressed in the nuoc cham, then finished with toasted peanuts and crispy shallots.
As soon as the weather warms up in early summer, I make this to celebrate the joy of warmer days ahead. The Blue Mountains are very cold in winter, so we celebrate summer nights.
I make a braised lamb and lentil soup that will always comfort me or those around me who need it. It has lots of onions and garlic, and cumin, turmeric, ground coriander, potatoes and wilted silverbeet. I braise lamb necks in this broth for a couple of hours, then shred, add cooked lentils, return the lamb to the pan, and serve with lots of olive oil, lemon juice, and fresh parsley.
Ates in Blackheath is built around a 150-year-old woodfire oven, which is really the main character of the whole place. I've lived in the Blue Mountains for 20 years and love the national park surrounding us, the clean air and community. Our small town of Blackheath has a wonderful community, and having a hand in Victory Café just up the road means I get to see familiar faces every day and all the joys that come with that.
Tomatoes. Every summer I get excited about all the different varieties and how to use them. We're about to put on a dish of stracciatella with frozen grated tomatoes and basil oil. I can't wait for people to try that.
Before a busy service: Metallica’s Master of Puppets. On a quiet morning at home: Massive Attack’s Blue Lines.
Coffee. Long black.
Neil Perry’s date and custard tart.
Negroni.
Fried eggs with crispy chilli on sourdough.
Serves 2
Trout marinade
Nuoc cham dressing
Salad
Combine the marinade ingredients in a bowl or container, mix and add the trout fillets. Cover and leave to marinate for at least 2 hours.
For the dressing, crush chilli and garlic in a mortar and pestle until a paste. Add palm sugar and crush. Mix well. Add fish sauce, white vinegar and lime juice and check the flavour, adjust to taste and set aside.
Barbecue marinated trout on medium heat for three minutes on both sides. While trout is cooking, mix salad ingredients, except for the toasted rice, with the dressing. Plate trout dress with the salad and sprinkle with rice for texture.
*For the crushed, toasted rice: toast raw rice gently in a dry frying pan until pale brown. Crush in a mortar and pestle until it’s a rough sandy texture.
To hear more of Will’s story, listen to this episode of the Dirty Linen podcast.
These puff pastry bites with salmon rillettes are so delicious and always such a crowd pleaser. They’re good with a glass of chilled sparkling or chardonnay at a drinks party, and especially good to have ready made, stashed in the freezer for exactly these moments. Sophie x
See you all in February 2025 for the next instalment of Yes, Chef! Over and out,
Sophie