Issue Twenty Seven THINK
BIG

Editor’s Letter

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Editor’s
Letter

 
 

 
 

Welcome to Issue 27 where it’s all about thinking big – and how that concept comes to life in a variety of ways. Take for example our cover shot – it takes some big thinking to put beef heart on the menu – but when it is brined, smoked, thinly sliced and served with the flavours of a cheeseburger and puffy bread straight from the woodfire – well then, you’re on to something. Shout out to chef Kyle Nicol at Lilac Wine in Richmond for this incredible dish.
 
From a foodservice perspective thinking big can take on a multitude of forms – perhaps it’s jaw dropping large format cuts taking centre stage, or maybe it’s a new foodservice concept altogether, a bold menu move or ingredient pairing, or it could be that you are already the biggest in your category in Australia. Whatever your take, big things are happening all around us.
 
Pat Nourse takes the brief quite literally with his story on The Big Group – the biggest in the premium end of the catering game, serving around a million guests a year at events like The Melbourne Cup, Formula One, and the Australian Open to name but a few.
 
Mark Best explores the best way to cook large format cuts perfectly every time. Mark says it’s a high-steaks game but conquering the preparation of large, premium cuts of meat marks a significant milestone in your culinary journey.
 
In Hot Plates, we feature two venues thinking big. First up is King Clarence where chef Khanh Ngyuen’s creative approach to cooking and sharp interpretations of nostalgic favourites are elevated by the best Australian produce and laser sharp technique. And then, Poetica – a protein-proud venue from the team behind Loulou Bistro and city showstopper, The Charles Grand Brasserie. Poetica is the first of a suite of new venues planned for North Sydney by the Etymon Group.
 
Tasty Meats features Alfie’s, the latest from the Liquid Larder group – with three venues dedicated almost entirely to three cuts of steak (and another with one of the city’s best burgers), you might say that Liquid & Larder group are Sydney’s steak savants. And certainly, thinking big.
 
Really notching it up in the big stakes – our Big Business section features Domino’s, Australia’s largest pizza chain serving over 1.5 million pizzas every week. Did you know that Domino’s Australia is also the largest franchisee for the Domino’s Pizza brand in the world? Now that is big.
 
And of course, What’s Good in the Hood, hosted by the vivacious Myffy Rigby, is always a big adventure – this time it’s the bustling suburb of Richmond in Melbourne delivering big flavours.
 
Whatever your perception of thinking big – we hope you find inspiration in this big issue!
 
 

Mary-Jane Morse
 
Meat & Livestock Australia
[email protected]
@_raremedium

 

Copyright: this publication is published by Meat & Livestock Australia Limited ABN 39 081 678 364 (MLA).

Pat’s Picks

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Going big, says Australia’s top caterer, is also about keeping it intimate. For Bruce Keebaugh, it’s all about what Monday is going to look like. “When you’ve spent all the money and the party is over, what did it really feel like for you?” Focussing on Monday, he says, helps him work out what he needs to put together on the Saturday to make it happen.

Bruce Keebaugh co-founder of The Big Group

Bruce Keebaugh co-founder of The Big Group

Keebaugh is the co-founder of The Big Group, the Melbourne-based company that’s the biggest in the premium end of the catering game and considered by many to be the best. He and his wife, Chyka employ 1,200 staff and serve around a million guests a year across the venues they own in Melbourne, and the sites they activate around the world. They do boardroom lunches, weddings, and picnics, and they do the Formula One, the Australian Open and the Melbourne Cup. They call themselves architects of experience and masters of high-touch hospitality, and champions of the good time. If you want to go big, after 34 years at the top, Bruce is the man to talk to.
 
The first thing Bruce would like you to know, if you’re coming at this from restaurant-land, is that what The Big Group does is kind of the opposite of the restaurant experience. In some ways, he says, the food is the easy part of the job. “The most intricate part of what we do is understanding the DNA of the brands for which we work. That could be corporate brands, or luxury brands, or it could be personal brands.” Once you understand how people live, how they dress and how they eat, and what their aspirations are, he says, then you can correctly design environments and menus and the entire hospitality experience for them.

Behind the scenes in one of The Big Group kitchens

Behind the scenes in one of The Big Group kitchens

Where a restaurant is a broadly fixed set of ideas and expectations that the guest signs up for – a particular cuisine, for example, or the perspective of a particular chef or restaurateur – The Big Group works to reverse-engineer something that’s all about you. “When I go to Margaret tonight, I know that Neil has curated that menu and that environment and I’m buying into that, right down to the lamb cutlets. With our work, it’s the opposite.”
 
One week that work might be translating a Luke Mangan menu, plating up centre-cut Brooklyn Valley fillet with mushrooms and sansho pepper as they did for Lexus at the last Melbourne Cup, while the next week it might be collaborating with Tedesca chef Brigitte Hafner to serve porterhouse steaks of grass-fed, dry-aged Gippsland beef from the mighty O’Connor family, cooked on a wood grill and complemented with chimichurri for a very appreciative wedding party.
 
The Group is as adept at getting guests to gather around the table to share lamb shawarma swaddled in brik pastry with tahini yoghurt as it is in producing exquisite little one-bite canapé morsels of bresaola, black fig and parmesan cream, a thousand a time. “We play with the best collaborators in the world, from chefs to designers, florists and architects,” Keebaugh says. “We have the creative ability to go wherever you want to go.”

Lamb shawarma swaddled in brik pastry with tahini yoghurt

Lamb shawarma swaddled in brik pastry with tahini yoghurt

That can mean catering to people who say ‘I want it to be like France-Soir, or I want it to be like Mimi’s’, or it can be billionaires who want their steak “cooked till it’s grey, with mushy peas, chips on the side and their favourite mustard”. Oftentimes the richer a person is, Keebaugh says, the simpler their taste in food. “They know what they want, and they’re not interested in the chef’s take on that.”
 
But most customers are more sophisticated. Where in the ’90s you could plonk down a 220-gram hunk of fillet in front of every guest and they’d be happy enough, now they’re more likely to expect a big, marbled piece of meat cooked on the bone and sliced to share. “They’re acutely aware of trends, in other words, and they’re expecting a restaurant-style experience, even while restaurants are serving 60 or 80 people and we’re feeding 6,000 or 8,000.” Getting that right is not easy, Keebaugh says. “But we don’t find scale daunting, we find it fun.”
 
Here’s a truth-bomb from Bruce: the bigger you get, the more important it is to think about the intimacy of how your guests will engage with each other.

“The thing to remember is that even as you scale those numbers up, once you sit down at the table, if you’re at a seated event, the real estate in front of you and the couple of people either side is pretty much all you’ve got.”

Don’t think of it as entertaining 100 people, he says, think of it as 10 dinner parties. “It’s the same if you’ve got 1,000 or 10,000. You need to always curate what you’re doing back to that, to keep that feeling personal.” Keebaugh likes the Japanese term omotenashi: the idea of treating a guest as you would in your own home. “Our job is creating that intimacy at scale.”
 
How does that work in practical terms? “Sometimes it might be as simple as changing up the way you dine. Instead of putting a plated rib-eye in front of everyone, we serve it sliced up and we make it feel family-style with the sides there – people are passing and sharing and immediately you have a connection between humans. Whereas if I get 20 waiters to come out with white jackets and white gloves and place down something fully formed and finished off like we were having a degustation, that creates a different kind of formality between the guests on that table. If we design S-shaped tables that are all wiggly, then people feel differently than if we put them on two long tables straight down the guts of the room. The decisions you make about the design of the room and the aesthetic has a real impact on the feeling that the guests have. And that’s what we’re all about. It goes back to the question we ask at the beginning: what do you want to feel on Monday?”

Luke Mangan inspired centre-cut Brooklyn Valley beef fillet with mushrooms and sansho pepper for the Lexus Melbourne Cup

Luke Mangan inspired centre-cut Brooklyn Valley beef fillet with mushrooms and sansho pepper for the Lexus Melbourne Cup

What does luxury look like to Bruce Keebaugh himself? He knows what it takes to put it together behind the scenes, so his take might not be what you might expect. “If you said to me, would you rather serve a burger to a thousand people or a perfect steak, I’d go the steak any time. We can get that out in a flash. When you break a burger down, though, it’s about 12 touchpoints, toasting buns, your butter, lettuce, sauce, tomato, the burger itself, then putting it all together and then getting it out hot – we’d need 16 deep-fryers, 12 Rationals, four just for buns, four for plates, four just for meat, so a lot of space. This is a hard thing to do. For me, that’s a luxury. But if you served that at a certain kind of high-end party, 80 people out of 100 would say ‘you’re serving me a burger?’ even though it’s harder to execute than the finest wagyu.”
 
Let the record show, then: if you want to impress Bruce Keebaugh, serve him some caviar as an entrée and then a perfectly hot burger with perfectly hot fries and a cold glass of Champagne, and you’re onto a winner. “That’s something I’d pay good money for,” he says. “And you know that’s going to be a fun party.”

A Big Group x Tedesca chef Brigitte Hafner wedding collab of dry aged O’Connor porterhouse steaks with chimichurri

A Big Group x Tedesca chef Brigitte Hafner wedding collab of dry aged O’Connor porterhouse steaks with chimichurri

 
 

Best Practice

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BIG STEAKS

 
 

Cooking a large chunk of meat is no longer for the faint of heart – be it the investment you’ve made, the pressure of technique, a desire to impress, or all of the above; and probably more.

Who hasn’t headed to the shops for a couple of steaks, spun the wheel, put it all on black, and accidently come home with a massive tomahawk? You can do the maths but cooking large cuts for most people is a mystery and given that there is only 14c between perfection and disaster, a potentially fragile experience.
 
It’s a high-steaks game but conquering the preparation of large, premium cuts of meat marks a significant milestone in your culinary journey. It’s one thing to do it in a professional kitchen with bespoke wood-fired grills and Lennox in your ear but how do we plate up perfect steaks every time, regardless of where you may be?
 
In On Food and Cooking (if you don’t have this you are not serious about the game) Harold McGee, the renowned food scientist, illuminates the benefits of that delicious delta between low-temperature and time for the cooking of meat. Temperatures around 40°C/125°F ensure remarkably even doneness, prevent moisture loss, and give the meat’s natural enzymes ample time to tenderise even the most resilient connective tissue.
 
Traditional tonging techniques are dependable enough for smaller cuts. However, the reverse sear is an essential, and approachable, tool for large format, premium meats.
 
You start in a low oven until the desired internal temperature is reached, then follow with a high-heat sear, ensuring both your internal temperature is “en pointe” and you have a drool-worthy crust. It is essentially the same as most two stage cooking methods, where there is an initial high-temperature surface browning, and a subsequent cooking through at a much lower temperature. When we put this method in reverse, we can guarantee a much longer and more exact window for doneness.

While this approach works with any meat, wagyu, with its high intramuscular fat content, retains exceptional juiciness throughout this extended cooking method, making it particularly well-suited for the low-and slow approach.

The pre-seasoning and then long slow cooking allows the juices to pool on the surface of the meat as the muscle fibres slowly contract. These juices are rich in glutamates and amino acids and that’s where the Maillard reaction comes in. This series of chemical changes triggered by high heat creates the savoury, complex aromas and flavours we associate with perfectly cooked meat.
 
Understanding the science behind cooking and applying the right techniques lets you conquer the challenge of any cut. When it comes to perfectly cooked large format steaks every time, give the reverse sear a go. All you really need is an oven, a thermometer, and a hot grill. Let’s see if you’ve got the chops.

REVERSE SEARED TOMAHAWK STEAK

Serves 2-4

Ingredients

 
1-2kg bone-in tomahawk steak, about 5 cm thick
2 tablespoons of your favourite steak seasoning (or make your own, see below)
1 tablespoon olive oil
2% Murray River Salt ratio – 1g per 1kg of steak (20g per kilo)
 
 

Simple Steak Seasoning

 
1 tablespoon coarse salt
1 tablespoon black pepper, freshly cracked
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
 
 

Method

 
1. Prep the Steak
– Pat the tomahawk steak dry with paper towels
– Let the steak sit at room temperature for at least 1 hour before cooking
– Brush with the olive oil and coat on all sides with the salt and seasoning mix
 
2. The Low and Slow Phase
– Preheat the oven to 120°C
– Place the steak on the wire rack set over a baking sheet and cook until the internal temperature reaches 46°C for medium-rare, about 45-60 minutes
– Adjust temperature targets for your desired doneness. These temps allow for the final sear

    Rare: 46-49°C
    Medium Rare: 52-55°C
    Medium: 57-60°C
    Medium Well: 63-66°C
    Well Done: 68°C +

 
3. Rest
Once your desired internal temperature is reached, remove the steak and loosely tent with foil, rest 15-20 minutes
 
4. Crank the Heat
– Fire up your hibachi, BBQ or other grilling mechanism while the steak is resting
– You want a good amount of coals/heat to get a good sear on the meat without raising the internal temperature too much
 
5. Slice, Serve, and Enjoy!

What’s Good in the Hood

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RICHMOND

 

It’d be easy enough to get lost on Victoria Street in Richmond, where the Vietnamese food is some of the best in Australia.

 
 
That would, of course, be a spectacular way to while away a day. Dig a little deeper, however, and discover a suburb rich in wine bars, bistros, hearth restaurants and a sandwich shop that’ll blow your mind.
 
With that, here’s What’s Good in the Richmond Hood.

I LOVE PHO

 
264 Victoria St, Richmond
pholove.com.au

There’s plenty to love about this family-run restaurant that services Richmond with bright, fragrant beef broths, vibrant salads and a come one, come all attitude. The restaurant, run by matriarch Hien Vo and her husband Tan, is bustling from open till close. The special here is pho dac biet – rare beef slices, rich brisket, silky, gelatinous tendon and tripe along with beef balls – are all caught in a star-anise-rich broth. An instant collagen injection.
 
Order some crisp spring rolls with a garden’s worth of Vietnamese herbs on the side for a palate cleanser. For a real jolt, chase all that with a Vietnamese coffee (drip coffee with a dollop of condensed milk) and sprint though the rest of the day.

CLOVER WINE

 
193 Swan St, Richmond
clover.wine

A celebration of natural wine and casual neighbourhood vibes with small plates to match, from chef Charley Snadden-Wilson. Clover combines Melbourne service smarts with Parisian wine bar sensibilities, offering a deep wine list and share-friendly snacks. Start with the restaurant’s signature honey bread, some oysters and a serve of split prawns, fired in the custom woodfired oven.
 
Lamb saddle, served rosy and tainted with just a little smoke, comes dressed with a sauce of chicken fat and a sweet pear reduction for the ultimate mix of sweet, fat and smoke. A cool celebration of an oft-forgotten cut, served with plenty of warmth.

FUTURE FUTURE

 
191 Swan St, Richmond
futurefuture.com.au

The cutest izakaya this side of town, care of Shannon Peach (Milieu Hospitality, who also have Congress wine bar) and Stefanie Breschi (ex FOH at Jacques Reymond). It might boast three levels of gorgeous exposed brick and 130 seats, but reserve the bar in the main dining room for a front row seat to watch the chefs in action at the hibachi grill making your wagyu shokupan sando with chicken skin mayo and karashi mustard.
 
Love sandos and can’t stop at one? There’s also a wagyu meatball version. Chase it with a crrrrrisp Yebisu beer and end on a sweet note with the bavarois with miso caramel and chocolate crumb. You could even book out the private upstairs dining room and host a sando party complete with Japanese disco music, if you asked them nicely enough.

LILAC WINE

 
31 Stephenson St, Cremorne
lilacwinebar.com.au

It’s pure cosiness here at this sweet wine bar/warehouse/hearth restaurant, set down an easy-to-miss Cremorne side street. Chef Kyle Nicol (ex-Rascal) is behind the menu with cool Brittania undertones. The open kitchen, surrounded by bunches of herbs drying, meats curing and big jars of ferments, gives some serious Mrs Beeton vibes.
 
Check out the thinly sliced beef heart served on a bed of mustard leaf and dressed with white sauce with a puffy, woodfired bread on the side. Or savoury mince on toast for a pure lesson in comfort, chased with a side of duck fat roast potatoes. Finish with the seasonal clafoutis with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream. All of that and a roaring fire, candlelit tables and a 250-strong wine list focussing on natural, organic and biodynamic drops. Come at us, winter blues. We have the solution.

CA COM BANH MI BAR

 
336 Bridge Rd, Richmond
cacom.net.au

Ca Com, which means ‘anchovy’ in Vietnamese, is Thi Le and her partner Jia-Yen Lee’s banh mi shop. The pair have poured themselves into three foodservice offerings nestled into two neighbouring shop fronts on Bridge Road – there’s the recently re-opened Anchovy, Laotian restaurant Jeow, and this excellent sandwich shop.
 
This is no ordinary baguette, mind. Here, marinated beef short rib is cooked over wood fire, and they toast their buns over the same hardwood embers for just a lick of smoke. The meat is then thickly sliced and packed into a roll with a dizzying amount of herbs. A perfect balance of fat, sugar, salt, heat and acid. Don’t leave without a tin of their Vietnamese-style beer nuts, all covered in salt and mixed with tiny, dried anchovies. Delicious.

FREDERIC

 
9/11 Cremorne St, Richmond
frederic.com.au

A new-wave French-style bistro brought to you by siblings Antoine, Edouard and Nathalie Reymond – beloved Melbourne-based French chef, Jacques Reymond’s kids. Their third venue, (they also have Bistro Gitan and L’Hotel Gitan), you’ll find the restaurant in the old rag trade end of Richmond, built inside a refurbished warehouse. The menu is an elevated take on classic French bistro fare. That translates as a beautifully textured beef tartare served with shavings of cured egg yolk and dots of smoked sour cream, finished with a shower of house-made potato crisps and chive dust.
 
Southern Ranges grass-fed eye fillet is served with shoestring fries, a side of house-made mustard and brightened with chimichurri. It’s a venue made to relax and lose a night in. After a slightly more casual experience? Check out Fred’s next door – Frederic’s sister wine bar and all day diner.

SALONA

 
260A Swan St, Richmond
salona.com.au

A mainstay of Swan Street since 1969, the Konis family have been running this much-loved Greek restaurant since 1980. Back in those hair metal years, Alice Cooper and Bon Jovi both made appearances. And while a recent makeover has given the restaurant a much-needed glow up, there’s still some of the original charm, including the original mural painted with a pastry brush and leftover door paint by a soused patron in the 70s.
 
Grab one of the outside tables and soak up some cool Melbourne sun and order the lamb kontosouvli – juicy lamb neck cooked on the spit and served with roast vegetables and a side of hand-cut chips scattered with wild Greek oregano. Perfect with a Mythos Greek lager, too. If you’re here for the signatures, the portokalopita, a dense, syrupy orange sponge cake served with orange segments and orange cream is unmissable.

Hot Plates

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Award winning chef Khanh Nguyen is back on Sydney soil and heading up the kitchen at the Bentley Group’s corner-clinging restaurant King Clarence. While the general consensus is ‘modern-Asian’ – it’s really all about Khanh’s creative approach to cooking with his sharp interpretations of nostalgic favourites elevated by the best Australian produce and laser sharp technique.

 
 
On the menu at King Clarence, the Angus Beef Short Rib is served sliced with surgical precision and accompanied by horseradish oroshi and sweet soy. For us, Khanh considers the issue theme of ‘think big’ and reimagines the dish, taking inspiration from a classic san choy bow and stepping up the condiment offering for an epic build your own beef adventure.

Marble score 4+ Riverine short rib is marinated in chickpea miso before enjoying a long smoke in the custom-designed kitchen workhorse – originally built for Noma’s Sydney pop up and repurposed for King Clarence – before hitting the grill for service. The result is decadent, tender and magically moreish.
 
The short rib is artfully sliced from the bone and served doused in sweet soy. On the side, a dizzying array of flavour packed accoutrements including kimchi, chilli pickled radish, fermented chilli sauce, horseradish oroshi, smoked oyster cream, and confit garlic. Select from an assortment of crisp lettuce and cabbage cups, or layer a little of both, add slices of umami amped short rib and go all in on the accompaniments.
 
It’s classic Khanh – taking a core food memory like san choy bow, remixing it with flavour hits and technical twists from his astute arsenal, and rewarding the diner with an entirely new experience – one likely to live rent free in your head where a san choy bow used to be.
Insert video

 

Sydney’s not shy when it comes to its new cohort of eateries where protein takes pride of place – bountiful brasseries, swanky steakhouses, beefy bistros are aplenty, and we can’t get enough of it.

 
 
Enter Poetica, a coup for North Sydney in its gradual growth as a destination for dining, beyond the office lunch. From the team behind Loulou Bistro (also in the North Sydney area) and city showstopper, The Charles Grand Brasserie – Poetica is the first of a suite of new venues planned for North Sydney by the Etymon group.
 
Poetica proudly puts protein in the spotlight – from dry ageing cabinets on display at the entrance of the venue, to menu options like Black Onyx flank steak, beef short rib, Jack’s Creek MB3 sirloin on the bone, MB2 T-bone from Wagga Wagga, and a 1.5kg Ranger’s Valley MB3 tomahawk. Then, of course, there is the 15-metre open kitchen giving diners a first-row seat to the custom woodfired hearth and hulking Josper grill.

For us, it’s a colourful plate of Cowra Lamb saddle that gets the guernsey. It is dry-aged for at least a week and then skillfully butchered in house – resulting in a selection of saddle cuts to adorn the plate. Loin on the bone, the tenderloin or backstrap, and two strips of lamb belly that have been brined, braised and pressed.
 
Prepared with a combination of direct and indirect cooking over glowing coals, smoke swirls and engulfs each piece for optimum flavour. The loin is then sliced from the bone for service and precision plated with the tenderloin and belly, grilled zucchini, white anchovy and pickled lemon blossom salad, and a luminous green sauce of basil, zucchini, and garlic.
 
Almost too pretty to eat. Almost.

 
 

Tasty Meats

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DRY AGED SIRLOIN | GREEN MUSTARD

 

ALFIE’S | SYDNEY

With three venues dedicated almost entirely to three cuts of steak (and another with one of the city’s best burgers), you might say that Liquid & Larder group are Sydney’s steak savants.
 
And you’d probably be right.

 
 
Bistecca, as its name suggests, heroes the Bistecca alla Fiorentina, or as we more commonly know it here at home, the T-Bone. Sourced from NSW’s Riverine region, each cut is sliced from the dry aged primal, weighed, presented raw to the diner, then cooked over ironbark and charcoal. All you need to do is choose your sides.
 
Meanwhile, in an opulent basement across town, The Gidley is all about premium prime rib. Here you can choose from variations of the same cut – thick sliced slabs of prime rib roast, rib eye on the bone, boneless rib eye chop (scotch fillet with the spinalis removed), or the succulent spinalis itself. There’s also rainbow trout and brik chicken – but we know everyone’s here for the steak.

The latest venue from the group puts another steak securely on a pedestal – this time the Sirloin. Whilst Bistecca and The Gidley dance more on the side of decadence, Alfie’s is the simplistic steak experience we all want and need. As with all the venues – it starts with the steak. Sirloin is sliced from the striploin by a butcher in a window in full view of diners – next it is grilled to perfection on Alfie’s custom-made grill and guaranteed at your table, with your selection of sides, within 15 minutes of ordering.
 
A peek behind the scenes at Alfie’s shows us just a glimpse of Sydney’s salacious appetite for steak – a huge onsite steak storage facility housing both wet and dry aged products for the suite of Liquid & Larder’s venues. And it’s no surprise when Alfie’s alone is slicing, searing and serving up to 1,500 sirloins a week.
 
Hot tip: if you forget to make a booking and can’t snag a walk in, Alfie’s bar has got your back. Whilst you can’t order the steak from the bar area, you can lose yourself in the creative list of cocktails and indulge in executive chef Pip Pratt’s hangover-helper, the rotisserie beef hot chip butty. In addition to the bountiful butty, clever thinking about utilising trim from across the group means Alfie’s bar menu also offers bar snacks like beef nuggets with brown sauce and charred beef skewers with herb and chilli marinade.

 
 

Big Business

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In this section, we explore some of the country’s biggest foodservice operators – plating up thousands of meals every day from the seas to the skies and everywhere in between.

 
 

AUSSIE LAMB
TAKES A SLICE
OF DOMINO’S

 
 

This year, Domino’s Pizza Enterprises – Australia’s largest pizza chain – celebrated 40 years in Australia. With over 740 stores employing more than 16,000 team members, Domino’s Australia is also the largest franchisee for the Domino’s Pizza brand in the world.

 
 

Domino’s Greek Lamb Tzatziki Pizza

Domino’s Greek Lamb Tzatziki Pizza

Every week in Australia, Domino’s sells over 1.5 million pizzas and over 7.5 million sides – while representing a whopping 50 percent of all pizzas sold out of home in Australia every week.
 
Meat & Livestock Australia approached Domino’s about the potential for a joint promotion alongside its annual Summer Lamb Campaign – both brands worked together to realise synergies and launch a successful limited time lamb offering.
 
Michael Treacy, Head of New Product Development & Innovation for Dominos Australia and New Zealand said the collaboration aligned with Domino’s support of Aussie farmers and commitment to customer satisfaction.
 
“We are committed to working with local Aussie farmers to deliver the best produce and red meat to our customers. We handmake dough in store daily using Australian wheat, our pizza sauce is made from Australian tomatoes and fresh vegetables come into store daily.”

“Red meat plays a huge role in our category because that’s what consumers want. Every year we sell over 15,000 tonnes of pepperoni, a signature blend of beef and pork for Domino’s which you won’t find anywhere else, and over 1000 tonnes of beef crumble. We felt there was an opportunity for us to really deliver some special pizzas, and hence we started working on this amazing lamb promotion,” Treacy said.
Michael Treacy, Head of New Product Development & Innovation for Dominos Australia and New Zealand

Michael Treacy, Head of New Product Development & Innovation for Dominos Australia and New Zealand

The special Australian Lamb promotion was a limited time offer aligned with MLA’s Summer Lamb Campaign – and the advertisement that captures a nation every January. The range included a Greek Lamb Tzatziki Pizza, a Lamb Meatlovers Pizza, a Tzatziki Lamb Meltzz, and a Lamb Ragu Pasta.
 
The volume of pizza production at Domino’s means new products must be rigourously tested to ensure they meet both quality standards and ease of application.

The limited time Australian Lamb range at Domino’s

The limited time Australian Lamb range at Domino’s

“Because we make pizzas so quickly – a busy store can make over 500 pizzas in an hour – we need something that is easy for our team members to be able to top on a pizza and bake through our ovens. What we ended up using was a 12-hour slow cooked lamb leg that had been sous-vide and shredded in the bag.”

“With the seasoning on the lamb and the slow cooking method, it gave it a really juicy, tender cook and delivered a really rich flavour. Lamb is a little bit niche on pizza, this really cut through and became the hero of the pizza.”
 
“It has been a huge success for Domino’s – we took over 50 tonnes of fully cooked Australian lamb leg which equated to sales of over 500,000 Pizzas and Meltzz. The promotion really helped drive sales and made up almost eight percent of our total product mix,” Treacy said.

Domino’s Lamb Meatlovers Pizza

Domino’s Lamb Meatlovers Pizza

 
 

The Goat Trail

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SYDNEY’S GOAT TRAIL

 

Join us on Sydney’s first Goat Trail – hosted by Sarah Tiong, 2 x Masterchef contestant and chef and co-owner of Ogni Restaurant in Surry Hills.

 
 
Australian goatmeat is a delicious protein that can be used in a variety of dishes and cuisines – take inspiration from the incredible dishes featured in our first Goat Trail – or go and try them for yourself.
 
⦁ Smoky Goat Rezala – Ogni Restaurant, Surry Hills
⦁ Goat Pie – Fabricca Bread Shop, Rozelle
⦁ Curried Goat – Jamaica Vibes Food Hut, Castle Hill
⦁ Momo Goat Dumplings – Dee Royal Nanglo, Blacktown
⦁ Goat Pan Rolls + Goat Kottu – Colombo Social, Enmore
⦁ Nigerian Goat Curry – Little Lagos, Enmore

 
 
 
 

Next Issue

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Rare Medium

 
 

Your go to destination for red meat inspiration and education

 
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