It’s rare for frozen meals to elicit much enthusiasm – especially among culinary professionals. But five-time cookbook author and celebrity chef Tobie Puttock is nothing if not passionate about his latest venture, Made by Tobie, a home meal delivery service the chef founded during one of Melbourne’s many lockdowns.

Puttock prepares Made by Tobie meals in an Alphington kitchen before snap-freezing them. Dishes like hunter’s chicken with orzo and greens, roasted salmon with sesame coconut veggie rice, and penne amatriciana, can be pre-ordered via the Made by Tobie website and are delivered to homes around Melbourne every Saturday morning.

The best part? The chef takes requests. “I really wanted to have the ability to make changes,” Puttock tells Broadsheet. “So you can order something, [try it], call me up and say ‘This is not favourable’, and I can develop a new recipe and do all the nutritionals very quickly.”

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The Box Hill-raised chef loves Italian cuisine in particular, and cut his teeth working at South Yarra’s Cafe e Cucina before a stint at Ruth Rogers’s legendary Italian restaurant The River Cafe in London, an institution beloved by Sir Paul McCartney, Nigella Lawson and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Puttock shares many food philosophies with close friend and fellow River Cafe alum Jamie Oliver, who brought Puttock on to help set up his first Fifteen restaurant in London, where Puttock was executive head chef for many years before returning to Australia to set up now-shuttered Fifteen Melbourne. “I’ve been working with Jamie Oliver on many projects for years and years, and we’ve always privately had discussions about how we think we need to eat,” Puttock says. “How do we be a healthier community and society? How do we lower emissions with farming?”

These are the kinds of questions Puttock is trying to answer through his business. For Made by Tobie’s offerings, meat is sourced from Gary’s Quality Meats and Cape Grim Beef, seafood from Ocean Made Seafood, and produce from small-farm supporter Natoora.

One dish that truly encapsulates the Made by Tobie ethos is Puttock’s Japanese pumpkin curry. Pumpkin skins, which would otherwise be discarded before roasting, are dried and then blitzed through with chillies, spices, sesame seeds and nori. This creates a pumpkin spice that’s folded into the rice that’s served with the curry. The result is a zero-waste dish that’s vegan and gluten-free.

“The reason I started this and doing it on such a small scale is so I can try and find solutions to these [food] problems,” Puttock says. He has no interest in scaling for profit’s sake but is happy for someone else to. “The big hope is one day somebody can copy an aspect of what we’re doing and scale that,” he says. “Hopefully, that starts to fix some problems, right?”

There are more than 20 dishes on the menu, and alongside a few of the options already mentioned you’ll find blackened white fish with kimchi rice and vegetables, sticky miso eggplant with spinach and sesame brown rice, and meat or mushroom lasagnes. There’s also a pasta bundle, where customers can select five meals from nine different pastas including garlicky kale orecchiette and tomato and vodka orecchiette.

Puttock has added a pro tip for each meal, too. For a Guinness shepherd’s pie, he recommends adding a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and some chopped fresh parsley. For chicken nasi biryani, serve with a dollop of plain yoghurt.

Meals come in packs of five, 10 or 20 – you select your own variation of single-serve meals within each pack.

Orders close 5pm Friday for delivery on Saturdays between 8am and 12pm. Made by Tobie delivers within a 22-kilometre radius of its kitchen in Alphington.

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