Blog

A decent catch

I’m Al Brown, a born and bred Kiwi, living in the capital city Wellington.  To earn a crust, I’m a freelance chef, TV presenter, food writer, and I’m also a passionate fisherman, hunter and gatherer.

As a New Zealand chef what drives me, is showcasing this amazing  country and celebrating the diverse range of products, whether from the land or ocean, that we are so very fortunate to have access to.  Front of mind is to encourage, support and to look after this unique country for our generations to follow.

I trained in the US at New England Culinary Institute, then travelled and cooked my way around North America and Europe. I was the chef for the New Zealand Embassy in Brussels, then chef and still co-owner for Logan Brown restaurant here in Wellington.

I stepped out of working day to day at Logan Brown and essentially became a silent partner nearly three years ago. This has freed me up to pursue a diverse array of projects that up until then I was unable to tackle due to my commitments to the restaurant.

With the award winning TV series ‘Hunger For The Wild’, finishing up, I have since presented a series called ‘Coasters’ due to air early in 2011. ‘Coasters’ is seven episodes, looking at seven pieces of New Zealand’s wonderfully diverse coastline. In each episode I journey from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’  looking at how we interact with our coast, the history of that coastline, the people that live or who are making a living from the that piece of coast, and of course I always get an opportunity to cook the freshest of seafood and shellfish from that region.

Currently I’m filming another series called Get Fresh With Al Brown which we will finish making by the end of the summer.

‘Get Fresh’ is purely a cooking show.  It’s ten episodes looking at ten regions of New Zealand. At the top of each show, I experience the local farmers market to get a feel for what is seasonally available for that particular province. The show continues as I meet producers and growers.  I travel around in an old 1980 Toyota Hilux pimped out with a sort of camp kitchen on the flat deck. I cook ingredients on the back as I go, meanwhile formulating three dishes, which will be served at the end of the show that in my eyes celebrate each individual region.

I’m also working flat out on my new book, to follow up on the success of ‘Go Fish’.  ‘Stoked’ is due out in the middle of next year.  Similar in size it will compliment Go Fish, but heavily focused on meat cookery over wood fire.  It lauds our love of cooking over open fires, and celebrates our kiwi ingenuity with building barbecue, and homemade smokers out of old fridges etc… Once again the photography will be shot by the super talented Kieran Scott and design by my great friend Gary Stewart of GAS design fame.

So there’s plenty going on, and it will be a pleasure to share with you the comings and goings.  I’ll shoot as much footage and pics as possible to share with you as I go. I hope this blog will be a good forum for discussion so please comment if you feel inclined.  I will endeavour to stay on top of things, and have my wonderful PA Laura (aka witchy) helping me out as I go.

See you in the soup!

-Al.