What Happens On Tour

Research trips for Australia’s finest chefs are a source of pleasure, pain, and inspiration, writes CANDICE CHUNG, as she dives into the relentless eating, last-minute bookings and all-out extravagance that feeds their creativity.

- Candice Chung

Duncan Welgemoed is at a family-run mezcal distillery in Oaxaca for lunch where a whole goat has been smoking underground since dawn. To one side of the property there’s a view of a prison, far off in the distance. To the other, the tops of Monte Albán’s Zapotec ruins. At his feet is a tiny crucifix and a rose – a makeshift memorial, he figures, for the family’s now-barbecued goat.

It’s 2016, and the Africola chef is on a mission to eat an encyclopedia of Mexican food: tacos, cecina, tamales – traditional foods that might inspire his cooking back in Adelaide. Welgemoed wants to bring the techniques of the cuisine back home – the intricacies of barbacoa, say, or the different uses of chillies and the way fruit can be used to soften or accentuate their heat. He’s committed to the cause, often eating up to 25 dishes a day in the name of research. “I was either eating or drinking or sleeping,” he says. “There was nothing in between.”

Welgemoed’s search for Oaxaca’s finest barbacoa has led him to this distillery, where owner Don Felipe Cortés serves a day-long feast. It’s a masterclass in nose-to-tail cooking. “You’ve got a goat shoulder wrapped up in agave, smoking underground on the coals,” says Welgemoed. “Then there’s a rack with a haunch and a saddle – almost spit-roasting – with all the juices dripping into a pot of consommé of internal organs. I don’t know many chefs who can pull off something like that.”

For Welgemoed, this experience is also a reminder that not everything can be learnt in a kitchen, or in restaurants. “Restaurants are a curated experience,” he says. “To make sense of food culturally, you have to get off the beaten track.”