Taste test's jump start
From the November 2008 edition of Agriculture Today.
A taste of Kangaroo, the recent special promotion to the Sydney food sector of the benefits of this native meat, staged in the Parliament House dining room at the invitation of Ministers Ian Macdonald and Tony Kelly, was a roo coup.
Six of Sydney’s top chefs, Tony Bilson, Jean-Paul Bruneteau, Sean Connolly, Darren Ho, John Leong and Ray Kersh, conducted a master class.
At cutlery-point, they held spellbound 150 chefs, restaurateurs, caterers, hotel food and beverage managers, specialty butchers, meat processors, food and hospitality training institutions reps. And the food media.
The "masters" seemed to seduce all palates - that’s what the hard facts said later; more than half the attendees volunteered the requested feedback and of those, 94 per cent of the food trade participants said they’d be likely to use kangaroo meat.
Repeatedly, there were murmurs of satisfaction all round, between breaks for Q and A from industry experts Michael Mulligan, president of the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia, Mike Archer, University of NSW Dean of Science, Jennice Kersh, principal of Edna’s At Your Table and Peter Ampt, author of Consumer attitudes to kangaroo meat products.
Everyone said they would come back for more, like the bloke who, when the MC asked were there any questions after the exquisite presentation of Mr Connolly’s lean roo mince tartare (raw, cold) served on a crisp ficelle crouton, blurted out, Oliver Twist-like, "yeah, can I have another one"?
