The Task Force for Conscientious Connoisseurs

Corona is changing how we eat

The philosophical stage for the extreme culinary workshop was set by experienced food trend researcher Hanni Rützler, who offered a brand-new lecture on our eating habits and how they are changing significantly as a result of the corona pandemic. The focus has shifted back to core values, with meat earning the loudest calls for change. People are no longer just focusing on origin, farming conditions and animal health, nor on husbandry, slaughter and maturation. They are advocating for an appreciation of the entire animal.

Inner values

A sustainable and respectful handling of animals is a particularly important point for Executive Chef Heinz Reitbauer. No wonder then that the “Trip Inward” event at his award-winning Vienna restaurant focused exclusively on offal. Austrian cuisine, especially in Vienna, once held offal in exceptionally high regard. Dishes like the “Wiener Innereienhimmel,” “Glacierte Leber,” “Beuscherl” and “Hirnpofesen” enjoy a long local tradition. By the 1970s, however, offal cuisine had lost its popular shine. Yet the intervening years have revealed that offal is in fact rich in components such as vitamins (vitamin A, B and C) and minerals (zinc, iron and folic acid). At the Koch.Campus workshop, Heinz Reitbauer explained the various properties of brain, stomach, heart, kidneys, spleen, lungs, etc. and how quality foodstuffs can be identified. A calf’s lung was even inflated using a compressor to demonstrate in very real and precise terms how the quality of the lung extends down to the smallest lung nodule. Heinz Reitbauer emphasizes at every opportunity that the health and well-being of the animal is essential for high-quality offal delicacies. “More than any other part of the animal, proper husbandry, quality feed and healthy growth are immediately visible — and tasteable — in the offal!” The lecture then shifted to practical mode, as the entire restaurant became a true offal lab. The Steirereck team ran five cooking stations together with offal experts Max Stiegl (Gut Purbach) and Master Butcher Franz Dormayer. Each held offal dishes for tasting by the assembled audience of experts. This included ceviche from horse heart, ragout from fish heart, bratwurst from lungs, rooster testicles, greaves from lung and backerbsen from spleen. Another stand presented raw offal for assessment and comparison, with butcher Christoph Zotter (Fleischerei Zotter) providing insightful analysis of the differences between offal drawn from industrially farmed animals and offal from animals that enjoyed humane husbandry. Executive Chef Paul Ivic (Restaurant Tian) prepared a range of vegetable dishes to offer a vegetarian counterpoint.

Terroir Carrots

The experts gathered by day at Gastwirtschaft Floh in Langenlebarn, but their sights were on something dark down below: the soil. All carrots are alike, you might think. Wrong! Even the same varieties, with seeds from the same breed and sown at the same time, can develop a completely different taste profile when cultivated in different soils. The team of experts working under Koch.Campus Executive Chef Josef Floh offered compelling evidence for this thesis: carrots from the Milan variety were planted in May 2020 at six different locations around Austria. Lerchenhof in Straß (NÖ) is dominated by gneiss, while Zinsenhof in Ruprechtshofen (NÖ) features the fine sediments of the Melk; in Jaklhof in Kainbach near Graz (Stmk) the seeds were cultivated in chalk-free gravel, and at the Kleiner Farm in St. Nikolai im Sausal (Stmk) in marl. The soil of the City Farm in Vienna Augarten is comprised of fine sandy deposits from the Danube, while the Krautwerk in Großmugl (NÖ) is notable for its loess. The carrots were harvested simultaneously at the six different sites in August. Vegetable experts Johann Reisinger and Robert Brodnjak from Krautwerk then prepared a complex sensory tasting that saw the carrots served in various aggregate conditions (e.g. as juice, dried or steamed). The products from all six sites were prepared identically and served parallel to one another. The results were mind-boggling! The carrots absolutely reflected the character of their respective soils. The flavor profiles ranged from malty sweet to freshly fruity to earthy bitter. The carrots from Krautwerk, grown in loess, and from Lerchenhof, grown in gneiss with pockets of loess, were notably fruity and sweet for example. The carrots from Vienna Augarten, by contrast, paid homage to the Danube deposits in the soil through a strong mineral cast. The chalkiness of the soils and weather were also taken into account, although they appeared to be less significant in their influence compared with the composition of the soils.