Pepper pricing

One subject that often crops up when people are filling in the survey is that of Australian food products being very expensive and out of the reach of many people who have to manage on fixed incomes.

I understand this concern. I am no stranger to the idea of living on a fixed income.

I realised when searching the internet for Australian produced pepper – I’m never going to find it in the supermarkets – I had found a product priced to support their argument.

The price of imported black peppercorns on the supermarket shelves in the local foursome range , depending on the amount purchased and whether it is on special,from forty to maybe fifty cents per ten grams.

Compare this with the online price of Australian grown peppercorns. At this site, which I am using for the purpose of the exercise, 150g whole black aussie pepper plus the delivery cost, totals $20.50. Do the sums. This particular Australian grown item is only going to appeal to those people with stacks of disposable income.

I am pleased with my decision which allows a very generous lead time for this project. There is no way I am going to be paying that price for an Australian product. At this moment in time, 2014 looks very much like being black pepper free for ten days each month.

Not a prospect I am looking forward to, quite frankly.

Organics in Inverloch

This afternoon I took the magnifying glass down to Greenheart Organics in Inverloch and examined the produce closely. I was looking for Australian products, of course, and although there may be one or two items on this list where the ingredients may need closer examination, the following are up for further consideration.

Here is the list of products that made it into the Ausfood notebook.

Almonds
Apple Cider Vinegar
Brown rice
Dried Apple Wedges
Dried Apricots
Mock Red Hill Bio-dynamic Apple Cider Vinegar
Oat Flour
Pecans
Polenta
Quick Oats
Roasted Peanuts
Rolled Spelt
Rye Flour
Sunflower Seeds
Tasmanian Quinoa
Unhulled Buckwheat
Walnuts in Shells
Wholemeal Flour

There are definitely some items on this list which won’t be found in either of the duopoly supermarkets.

I would be delighted to find vinegar to add some variety to the salad dressing but I suspects if I read the labels carefully for the one listed it will have some form of cultures on the ingredient list.

Cultures?  Where on earth do cultures come from? I will have to investigate this matter further.

Two purchases

After quite a lengthy time wandering around the shop and examining any product that looked worthy of examination I finally came away with two purchases.

Yes, only two.  Spelt pasta and cracked wheat.

The pasta, when I get around to using it, will be a new experience.  There are no cooking instruction. It's my intention to use it when I find ingredients that might fit in with a tomato sauce that I often put over pasta in the summertime.  I usually use tinned tomatoes, but it is difficult to find Australian tinned tomatoes and when I do they have additives which might come from who knows where. Eating by numbers again.

The cracked wheat will be used for tabbouli and I don't forsee any problems with ingredients as most of them will be fresh produce: tomatoes, mint, parsley and cucumber.

The woman behind the counter must have been pleased when I finally made my purchases and left the shop. She kept watching me like a hawk and maybe considered I was some poor old down and out who was about to stuff some goods under her jacket and run out the door.

Run out the door.  A chance would be a fine thing.

One thing leads to another

Today the path to the ice-cream shop leads me to a gum tree. A Gum Tree with capital letters.

The Gum Tree is a rather fancy food store in Albert Park, stocking a vast range of goods that might appeal to those lucky enough to have a vast amount of disposable income. The disposable suggestion was prompted by the startling difference in the price of Murray River Salt Flakes as compared with prices in supermarkets.

In my search for Australian produced/grown food there is no limit to the upper or lower end of the price scale. Any produce vendor is fair game as far as I am concerned.

I head in the door in a brisk and businesslike manner and start the usual search. My first inspection stop is just inside the front door, where the fruit and vegetables are displayed. I speak to Ben who is stacking the shelves and generally making the display look appealing. In answer to my question about Australian grown produce he tells me that their produce is always labelled. I look along the rows and see little evidence, apart from pre-packaged goods, that this is the case.

I always find this disappointing but by now I know the inevitable answer to a question about lack of labelling. Invariably the answer is framed, more or less, about the time and cost taken to label the produce. An answer, which is more often than not, is delivered in a defensive and irritated manner.

I must make it quite clear this was not the response at the Gum Tree today.

My main mission in this store is to enquire about the availability of compressed yeast. I think my chances of this product being available are zero and in this respect I am not disappointed. Ben does suggest I might make enquiries at the South Melbourne market and I am very pleased to at least have a pointer in some direction.

It’s always a good thing to have a search prospect ahead of me.

Sultanas, yes. Apricots, no

Just when you thought you had heard the last on the subject of breakfast muesli, it makes a return.

Yes folks, I am revisiting the muesli jar and the last two bothersome items. Sultanas and dried apricots.

Both sultanas and dried apricots fall under the heading of dried fruit and although you might think either of these would be readily available on the supermarket shelves as an Australian product, this is not so.

Sultanas are more easily found than apricots. At the moment imported dried apricots rule on the supermarket shelves; it might be possible to find some Australian dried apricots but the ingredient labels will invariably read ‘local and imported ingredients’. How much is local content and how much is imported is anybody’s guess. Turkey seems to lead the way with the imported products and Turkish dried apricots are easily identifiable by their plump shape and bright golden colour.

All of the above has led to dried apricots being moved to the too-hard basket for the moment. And being temporarily removed from the breakfast muesli ingredient list. I use the word temporarily; I am at my optimistic best today and like Mr Micawber, I live in hope that “something will turn up” in the local dried apricot line.

Sultanas on the other hand may be imported or they may be marked ‘Australian sultanas’ on the packaging but sitting right next to those two words it will be the words canola oil, with no country of origin identification. Vegetable oil of one type or another often appears as part of the ingredients description on dried fruit packaging. While the consumer may think they are buying only sultanas (or currants, or raisins) they will invariably find they are buying an extra such as the vegetable oil, which is used to glaze the fruit, reducing its moisture loss and maintaining product quality.

I’m not interested in whether oil has been added to my sultanas and I am less than impressed to find yet another ingredient whose origin cannot be traced.

Yet another cause to get the magnifying glass out and run it over the labelling.

Addressing Dressing

The idea of using white wine vinegar, apple cider vinegar or balsamic vinegar when making a salad dressing has run into the usual brick wall. A long leisurely look along the shelves in the supermarket reveals almost without exception that all vinegar is imported. Italy seems to have a stranglehold on the vinegar available in supermarkets for the home consumer.

Vinegar produced in Australia? Zilch. Nada. Nothing.

I’m not happy about this state of affairs. I take myself off to the nearest Leo’s supermarket and start the process all over again. This time I hit pay-dirt in the form of Maggie Beer’s Aged Red Wine Vinegar. What a relief to be able to find an Australian product that allow me to make something as simple as salad dressing.

Hurrah for Maggie Beer.




The other alternative to vinegar is lemon juice. No problems here with lemon juice; lemons are readily available and the only drawback is if you are in a rush you have to juice the lemons. Life’s tough isn't it?

I am however, sorry that I can’t find a balsamic vinegar that is not a product of some other country, usually Italy. I quite like to use it as an alternative in salad dressing through the summer. And with strawberries, of course.


As for oil for the salad dressing. That’s easy and straightforward. Cobram Olive Oil is my choice. There are many varieties of home grown olive oil and nearly as many price variations. The Trash Palace Kitchen is not a place where price – although it may well reflect quality in many cases – is the criterion. As long I can stick with the most recent harvest, Cobram will be the basis of my salad dressings.


Simple. And time saving. No wandering along the supermarket aisles, looking at this type of vinegar and that type of vinegar and then having to make a decision.

Red wine vinegar at that supermarket, olive oil at the local supermarkets and lemons at any of the aforementioned.

Wandering in the Ausfood wilderness

I've now spent nearly eight weeks reading labels and putting together the foundation of my Ausfood cupboard.

While on the one hand I am greatly encouraged about the availability and labelling of some Australian food products I am now becoming aware of certain confusing aspects of food labelling that needs to be approached with some caution.

A particular item, let’s say for the argument, might be tomato paste or might be canola oil, will have the same brand name but will be labelled product of Australia on one size container and labelled as an imported product in another. Or it might be a combination of imported and local products. This makes life difficult and means that every time you buy this item you need to read the label if you want to be sure you are buying Australian.

What really irks me is tomato paste; I have found that multiples of two or four packs may have no identifying country of origin at all. Multiple packs of tomato paste require a great deal of application when reading the labels, even for some-one dedicated to the cause!!. I fail to understand all the discrepancies but I am sure the food manufacture has a perfectly good reason for stuffing around with the labelling process regarding country of origin.

There – I've got all that off my chest. Now I can move on to another grouch because Grouchland is where I am headed today.

At this stage I am becoming more aware of the number of ingredients that might be found in something as simple as flour, especially when you move away from plain flour. These are usually additives which keep the flour fresh and easy to use, no sifting and in the case of SR flour the raising agents are numbers. As for buying plain flour and adding the raising agents yourself – forget it – I am yet to find on any supermarket shelves any raising agents manufactured in Australia. Only bi-carb soda is a product of Australia; cream of tartar and baking soda come from some other place.

Meat is labelled in the duopoly supermarkets because it is packaged but even this rule of thumb cannot be applied to all other supermarkets where labelling is haphazard and in the case of the butchers shop with meat cut and displayed in cases no mention is made of country of origin at all.

Any questions about this bring the curt response of all our meat is Australian. I am mystified why supermarkets seem to have one labelling system for meat but this doesn't seem to apply to your standard butcher shop. Huh?

As I could go on at length on this topic I will close off by putting fruit and veggie vendors under the label magnifying glass. Once again the duopoly labels their products but not all the other supermarkets follow this practice. The more consumer oriented green grocers will identify their products but the only products easily identified in the smaller shops will be the packaged products.

Country of origin product labelling? What a confusing tangle for the ordinary shopper.

In the hours between midnight and dawn

Some evenings I listen to the radio before dropping off to sleep. Sometimes it happens I doze off and hours later I am woken by the sound of the presenter’s voice going on about something. One night a week or so back, I heard the words: sheep, wheat, barley oats and dairy, in no particular order.

This was enough to stop me from reaching out and turning the radio off. I tuned in. I listened for a minute or two and then reached out for my trusty notebook and pen. The program was about Australian produced food and the program might well have been presented especially for me.

First up was an interview with a representative from the Rural Industries Research And Development Corporation. The talk then ranged over many topics, truffles and essential oils in Tasmania, bush tomatoes in Central Australia and broad scale farming. Tasmania grows saffron, wasabi and quinoa; all very well, but not items that you would find on the shelves in my pantry.

Here in Victoria we have the Meredith Dairy yogurt and Shaw’s buffalo mozzarella and yogurt. I have tried both the Meredith Dairy sheep yogurt and the Shaw’s buffalo yogurt and I like them both but I would say  Meredith wins in the taste stakes by a short half head.

Queensland produces a number of more exotic food items, such as dragon fruit with its bright red skin, white flesh and black seeds. Vanilla pods, tomato peppers (small, round, red peppers looking very much like a tomato) and finger limes also come from Queensland.

And coffee. In Queensland. This will definitely be investigated.

Every state grows olives and Australia produces good quality olive oil. The conversation, which is now talk-back, moves on to ramble around from eel farming, to native fish in water filled disused open cut mines and an old chap on King Island who talks about seaweed which was once used for gelatine. Beach cast kelp is still harvested and milled for export to Scotland, but not I suspect for food purposes.

A new crop of Australian food, the Kakadu plum, seems to be the food of the moment and is referred to as a super crop. An online search for the dictionary definition of super food informs me it is:

a nutrient-rich food considered to be especially beneficial for health and well-being.

When the talk wanders off to other places where people take the opportunity to promote their host farms and suggest olive growing is a tax dodge, I lose interest and I reach out and press the off button.