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Tasting Australia with Adam Liaw

Antoine Lewis goes on a tour of the local market in Adelaide with the winner of MasterChef Australia’s second season

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Adam Liaw, the winner of MasterChef Australia’s second season
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With his warm smile and famous topknot Adam Liaw is almost instantly recognisable. Every couple of steps someone does a double take on realising who’s just passed by. Some stop to give him a smile, the bold take a quick selfie, while shopkeepers wave out cheerfully. 

Adam, the winner of  MasterChef Australia’s second season, is now a familiar face on Australian television. Though based in Sydney, he’s in Adelaide to participate in Tasting Australia, South Australia’s largest and the country’s most well-known food festival. As part of the activities, he’s taking about 20 of us on a guided tour of the Adelaide Central Market at the heart of the city.  

Having grown up in Adelaide, he knows the Market rather well, since, like many locals, this is where he’d shop for all his produce. There’s a good reason why it attracts over 8.5 million visitors every year despite Adelaide’s several supermarkets. With over 80 traders under one roof, the Market established in 1869, is considered ‘the Mecca for multicultural cuisine’. It’s also one of the largest undercover markets in the Southern Hemisphere. 

Compared to other markets it offers a far greater range of fresh fruit and vegetables. It houses several stores specialising in artisanal meats and cheeses as well as specialty butchers, seafood stores, ethnic food stores and bakeries. You’ll also find some of the city’s best cafes and restaurants here and right next door, Adelaide’s China Town.

After a quick coffee, our first stop is at the boutique store—The Smelly Cheese Shop. Adam has some useful word of advice, “If you want to learn about cheese, then like wine, focus on a particular region. Taste as much cheese as you can till you get a sense of the style and character and then move on to the next region”.

We move on to Nanna  Hot Bake, a small stall, which doesn’t look like much. But this 23-year-old family-run business, which specialises in Asian-style sweet and savoury buns, is quite an institution. Their sweet custard polo bun and BBQ pork bun are to die for; the buns are light and sweet, and the fillings full of flavour. Some of Adelaide’s best restaurants source bread for their bread baskets from Nanna.

We nudge our way through the bustling market with shoppers carrying bags full of vegetables and fruit. Every once in a while we can’t help but stop to admire the colourful produce ourselves. Sitting side by side are plump, fleshy persimmons; shiny mandarin oranges; sombre purple and green avocados; punnets of fresh strawberries, blackberries and raspberries; celeriac the size of cannonballs; cheerfully bright carrots and blood-red peppers. 

By the time we reach Feast@The Market, a much-awarded butchery, we’ve already eaten enough with our eyes. Apart from retailing meats from some of the top Australian producers, Feast also specialises in aged beef and is great for picking up expensive meat breeds ranging from Australian-reared Wagyu to Angus. 

After a leisurely halt at a Chinese grocery store, where Adam helped us navigate a maze of unfamiliar ingredients (I picked up dried black fungus), it was time for the final stop. Lunch was arranged at Asian Gourmet, a simple restaurant Adam was introduced to by Cheong Liew, one of South Australia’s most famous chefs.

On Fridays, they serve a Sarawak laksa and Adam says this is the only place in Australia where he’s found this version of the dish. A meal-in-one, the large-ish bowl of thin noodles is topped with a spicy, thick coconut curry swimming  with prawns, shredded chicken, sliced fried tofu and bean shoots. It’s definitely a lot spicier than other laksas I’ve eaten; halfway through it, almost everyone on the table has broken out into a sweat.

A chance to visit this local market is a treat for anyone interested in food. It’s an opportunity to explore the bounty of the sea and the land, to see, smell and taste ingredients you’ve only heard of or seen images of. South Australia is one of the most bountiful regions of the continent and almost all that it produces arrives in its capital’s biggest market. It’s quite fitting then that Tasting Australia, which embraces and celebrates local produce, should dedicate half a day to explore the market.

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