Local, seasonal produce is the norm in Australia’s top restaurants. At supermarkets and fruit shops, though? Not so much. Most fruit and veg is available year-round, with fluctuating quality and price the only clues as to whether things are in season and how far away they came from.
A decade ago I lived in Germany. Things were different there: as the seasons changed and new produce sprouted, the whole city seemed to rejoice. It wasn’t unusual to see strawberry stands set up inside the subway for a week or two during the peak growing season, and commuters getting stuck into punnets on the train.
But nothing compared to the fevered excitement of Spargelzeit (asparagus time) from April to June, when grocers set out huge displays of spears, restaurants put the vegetable back on menus and home cooks make huge pots of soup. Numerous towns across the country even hold festivals to honour the “royal” vegetable, which was once cultivated in palace gardens.
The whole thing was perplexing to me. A mango or tomato festival I could understand. But asparagus? Then I saw what was being celebrated. Not the skinny green pencils we eat here, but fat moon-white numbers, thick as sausages. And the flavour was sweeter, milder and earthier.
Farmers produce this white asparagus by keeping it covered as it grows, either under black plastic or, more traditionally, a thick layer of heaped dirt. The spears never see sunlight and thus never produce chlorophyll to turn green.
Farmer Richard Weston first tasted white asparagus in 2012, in the Netherlands, which has a similar enthusiasm for the vegetable.
“I wondered why could something be so popular and so in demand in Europe and yet Australians weren't entertaining the thought,” he told the ABC this week.
After six years of experiments, he’s just started harvesting white asparagus in southern Tasmania. The soil there is well-drained sandy loam, meaning the conditions are similar to Europe. White asparagus has been grown in Australia for a long time (by Bickley Valley Asparagus in WA, for example) but Weston and business partner Tom Barham are cultivating three superior European varieties called Magnus, Cumulus and Prius – all bred relatively recently and never before seen here.
Quay and Bennelong chef Peter Gilmore visited the farm recently for a taste. He’s an early adopter and has already added a white asparagus dish to the current menu at Quay. This is no surprise – he’s well known for his enthusiasm for rare and heirloom vegetables grown for flavour and colour over more commercial attributes like size. And in Melbourne, Etta’s Rosheen Kaul and Lee Ho Fook’s Victor Liong have done the same.
With chefs of this calibre leading the way, expect to see white asparagus on more restaurant menus sooner rather than later. But not for long – the Tasmanian harvest lasts only a month, a compressed season that would surely whip the Germans into a frenzy.
Update (9:57am, October 5, 2022): an earlier version of this story incorrectly stated Weston’s crop was the first commercial Australian harvest of white asparagus.
