Useful Arts! A Yayoi Kusama decorated building.

I love a good food tour and the idea of working off some calories while sampling food is enormously appealing to me. Of course walking for a few hours doesn’t necessarily negate a three course lunch, chocolate and coffee tasting and delicious home made cakes but every bit counts right Dear Readers? And if anything Wellington is a good city to be doing one in as the main city area is and compact. Mr NQN and I meet our Zest Food Tour Guide Stephanie, in the heart of Wellington and we join our other tour participants, two ladies from Auckland and New Yorkers Alexia from Frommer’s and her husband Tim who works in publishing. And get comfortable because it is a long story as it is a very comprehensive guide to Wellington!

Mojo Coffee

We start with some architecture, the silver ball above us represents the five ferns that grow in New Zealand. Our first stop is to Mojo coffee, one of the most well known coffee makers in Wellington. Wellington is known for its cafe culture with nineteen coffee roasters in total.

Lambros the father of the owner Steve is busy at the coffee bean roaster. He shows us the beans being roasted until they reach a certain temperature. At 215-220C the beans are then  cooled rapidly to avoid condensation and heating. The machine then sorts the beans from all the debris-in a typical bag there are rocks and nails as the coffee beans originate from areas where the factory floor may have other objects and debris. 93% of their coffee beans are organic and the owner Steve travels to various countries sourcing the coffee beans. They serve us a flat white which is their speciality.

Before the shipping containers arrive, they inspect the containers to see signs of anything suspicious or of issue and if there is, they alert customs. Once inspected, the pallets of bags of coffee beans are unloaded from the shipping container and is offloaded into a cordoned off  yellow area. Quarantine then comes and inspects six bags at random and then it is brought into the warehouse.

Circa Theatre: moved!

On our way to the next stop Stephanie tells us that New Zealanders (and in particular Wellingtonians) like to move buildings. Yes entire buildings are relocated, even heritage buildings and we see several that have been moved from their previous locations.  In fact one of the hotels, The Museum Hotel was called the “Hotel on Wheels” due to the number of times it had moved.

Ciocco Chocolates

We reach Ciocco chocolates where we’re in for a blind taste test! If you know me, you’ll know I love a blind taste test and there is a list of flavours up on the wall. The sales assistant tells us that most people guess one or two out of the five that they try. We each take a piece of paper numbered 1 -5 and a pen and we write down the flavours  that we think that we are tasting.

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It’s not every day that an olive oil producer invites you to visit their olive grove during harvest time. So when the invitation came by email enquiring as to whether I’d like to tour an olive grove and then be cooked a lunch by Gabriel Gate, it was a rather quick and easy decision to say yes! The reason for my enthusiasm is that one of the biggest issues for the Australian Olive Oil industry is the influx of overseas oils which were recently tested by the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) and found to be adulterated or refined with blends of other oils whilst still claiming to be Extra Virgin.

Extra Virgin is the highest grade of olive oil from the first pressing of olives which doesn’t contain any other oils or solvents, has less than 0.8% acidity, no faults and has the greatest health benefits. It was common practice to pass off lesser or blended oils to non Mediterranean countries and these were slipping through the system as Australia had no mandatory testing and certification regulations until action was taken this year. The Australian Olive Association has drawn up a list of criteria to qualify an oil for Extra Virgin Olive Oil status including the properties above but products must also have undergone organoleptic and chemical testing. Australian producers that have agreed to this practice can put the “Australian Certified Extra Virgin” symbol on the bottles. One supermarket chain Aldi has signed up to only sell oils that adhere to this practice. “Pure” or “light” olive oil tags are misleading and these are simply names for lesser quality oils. Light is light on taste (rather than calories) and pure is a blend of extra virgin and virgin which has more acidity and slight defects.

Being slightly terrified of light planes, I was not going to be a good candidate for a flight from Essendon Airport to Charlton to visit Cobram Estate. Until I discussed it with my friend Carbon Debit who knows a thing or two about planes and she volunteered to take my place. It was also not really a light plane as it seats 22 and when we saw how magnificent “Air Nostalgia” was with it’s gorgeous metal exterior and rivet work I almost expected Don Draper to walk up to it, give his mysterious “Mona Lisa” smile, take off his hat and board. Inside it’s fully refurbished (at great expense) and our pilots welcome us on board and tell us that they fly this plane “for a bit of fun”. Our flight attendant tells us that we can put our hats and coats in the storage compartments (that’s for you Don!) and we get our little breakfast of yoghurt, muffin and fruit salad. As we leave, they beep the horn-yes there’s a horn and we’re off!

We touch down at Charlton and take a coach to one of Cobram Estate’s Boundary Bend sites. The this site is massive with 1.5 million olive trees, the adjacent site has another million trees, they have 5 sites altogether. Their sites combined are in the top 10 of the world in production capacity of olives. True to the invitation, they’re mid harvest at the moment which entails harvesting 24 hours a day 7 days a week in two twelve hour shifts for an eight week period. The only thing that will stop them is wet weather. Olive trees are particularly hardy as unlike many fruit trees, olive trees will sacrifice the crop to save the tree. Their aim here is to get the fruit off the tree as soon and as early as possible to allow the tree to rest for as much as it can over Winter. It will then flower in October and early November and then fruit set will occur. Unlike many overseas olive farms who specialise in one type of olive tree they do a lot of cross pollination here which increases the yield at least 1-3% to make it more commercially viable.

The albertina is a squat tree which produces a delicate olive early and this is always the first that they pick from. We also pass frantoio trees and barnea trees (seen as the workhorse of the olives). All olives start off green and then turn black and the earlier that you pick the olives, the fruitier the olive oil will become, even within the varieties so it is possible to control the flavour of the oil based on the time of picking. This year they will harvest over five million litres which they consider to be not a large crop. This is because of the hot weather they experienced at the end of October and November which affected the flowering.

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Sydney somehow, strangely has become somewhat of a chocolate capital. Sydney-siders can’t get enough of the stuff and not only were we blessed with the very first Lindt chocolate store, we had a treasure trove of chocolatiers that would make any hardened cocoa bean addict weep chocolate tears of joy. So when Anne Maree, herself a chocolate addict told me about a new kid on the block in my former suburb of Mosman I was intrigued. That night we dined with Deniz Göktürk who opened up Carre Noir in Mosman. Denis is Turkish and she came to settle in Australia after a career in finance and logistics but creativity won out in the end.

She told us a tale that had us silent about her creation, chocolate cream which she premiered in the Europain 2005 exhibition in Paris. Her chocolate cream, a stable and easy to use pastry cream that can be used  in filling, coating and shaping cakes attracted much buzz there and many companies bid in order to use it. She went with Rich’s in New York where she worked to produce the cream and it was also sent to the Culinary Institute of America and she currently holds a worldwide patent for the cream. Eager to try this, Mr NQN and I visited Carre Noir the next day.

Carre Noir literally means “black square” and was opened here on Military Road three months ago. The display is filled with chocolate eggs, macarons in pistachio, raspberry, coffee and caramel, house made cakes featuring her patented chocolate cream.

Mayan Hot Chocolate $6.50

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