September 5th, 2020Sault @ Home

LOTS of restaurants have pivoted over the past few months, offering takeaways and deliveries, but Jodi Flockhart at Sault has come up with a unique idea for our region – Sault @ Home.
It starts with an emailed order for either two or three courses, with the components, some ready to go, some needing a tiny amount of prep, then put together by head chef Hugh Maxwell and his team. You can then either pick up or ask for delivery. And then, best of all, you head to Sault’s website and watch the video on how to create your dishes at home.
We chose three courses and the pick-up option – who would not want to drive out to Sault at Sailors Falls and take a few moments to enjoy its beautiful surrounds as the sun sets.
The menu is small but perfect. I chose the cured ocean trout with a green tomato and buttermilk sauce as my entree, followed by the barramundi fillet, spanner crab, nasturtium seeds, fennel and white bean skordalia for my main and the chocolate, rum, raisin and walnut for dessert.
Kyle, who loves his meat, opted for the pork belly with sage, carrots and a hock glaze for entree, the eye fillet with bresaola, onions, horseradish, pickled garlic and jus for mains and the Holy Goat “La Luna” lavender scone with Sault honeycomb.
Oh, don’t forget the house-baked ricotta whey sourdough bread with confit garlic butter and the Sault garden salad with a green tomato dressing.
Back home, we whacked the oven onto 180 degrees Celsius, opened a bottle of chardonnay, did the “cheers”, watched the first run-through of the video featuring Hugh and Carmen Burns and then put together all the ingredients for our first courses on the island bench. Then I went hunting through our crockery to try and find something inspiring for plating up. (Note to self, need to shop one day…)
Finally, after a glass of wine, we started on our entrees – and it was fun. Mine was easy, no cooking, just beautiful strips of 12-hour cured ocean trout placed on the plate with the buttermilk, green tomato and fennel oil emulsion neatly spooned over the top and then decorated with squid ink tapioca, trout roe, sea grapes, broadbean flowers and salty pigface leaves. I didn’t have tweezers for the fiddly bits but chopsticks were the perfect swap. And every mouthful was an explosion of taste and texture.
Kyle’s was a bit more involved, but still easy. The pork belly had already been cooked for 16 hours, he just had to bring a frying pan to a medium heat then add about 30ml of olive oil.
The pork belly is then cooked about one minute on each side before reducing the heat and then adding the hock glaze to the pan. Then it’s just a matter of basting the pork until the glaze becomes sticky.
Once that’s done, you do a nice smear with the carrot puree on a plate, add the pork, layer the pickled carrots over the top and then finish off with the carrot tops and the sage and pork crackle crumb.
Again, delicious. The pork belly has very little fat and is just so tender – with the crunch coming from the pickled carrots and the crumb. I won’t go into details for the rest of the meal, you get the picture, and you can get the videos by heading to www.sault.com.au It was a great way to spend a Friday night with some delicious food, a few laughs, well a lot of laughs, and some kitchen inspiration.
Jodi said the Sault @ Home idea really came from her husband Damien Aylward after they saw Melbourne restaurants doing similar things.
“They are places we adore and we thought why can’t we give it a go in regional Victoria. We are cutting edge up here with our produce so Damien broached the idea with Hugh. Then Damien and I decided to utilise our background in acting for the videos and because we have been doing remote auditions as a family, Damien has learned to edit and splice videos, so we could make it look good and easy to watch, not clunky.
“We made it personal with our introductions to each video and it is really our way of people being able to reach into Sault, and for us to reach out to them at home. People love being in our kitchen and seeing the process behind the creation of dishes.”
Jodi said she was then approached by staff member Matt Phillips, who had a permit to travel from Melbourne to continue working in the produce store, who offered to deliver where permissable to locked-down Melburnians. So every Friday and Saturday Matt heads down to Melbourne with eskies loaded with local produce to provide a taste of the region.
“Matt didn’t have to do that but we are so lucky to have the team around us that we do. We are doing all we can to keep up morale and keep everyone upbeat – even holding fortnghtly working bees in our kitchen garden.”
And the next move? Father’s Day @ Home, of course. Check out the website, pre-order and Happy Father’s Day!

Words: Donna Kelly | Image: @connieandluna