Vegemite ice-cream: the new dessert spread

And so John Marshall's Frugii Dessert Laboratory in Canberra has welcomed the Bega Cheese announcement that it’s buying back Vegemite from US food giant Mondelez.

In fact, he’s celebrating it by producing Vegemite ice-cream.

And what better day to launch an important part of our food history than Australia Day?

Indeed, it will be part of a special four-course $270 lunch at the eponymous restaurant of celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal at Melbourne’s Crown Towers.

The dish will be served on a biscuit sourdough crumble base with toasted puffed spelt, cocoa nibs, burnt honey and macadamias.

And the waiter serving it up will drizzle caramel sauce from a Vegemite jar.

The restaurant’s group executive chef, Ashley Palmer-Watts, said it took six months to develop the recipe in the UK.  A team of specialists deconstructed it to identify that unique blend of flavours that makes Vegemite so uniquely Australian.

“Heston was intrigued by the flavour immediately and pretty insistent for some time that we explore a dessert dish based on the spread,” Palmer-Watts told the West Australian.

“There are notes of caramel and a rich chocolate backdrop, as well as a yeasty saltiness.

“It was great fun exploring the flavours, which led to a pretty complex dessert from a real cult Australian product.”

And just to keep the genuine Australian flavour there, they will be converting cult favourite Tim Tam biscuits into a one-off breakfast spread served on a thick slice of bread.

The dish will be served at selected hotels across the country, including Perth.

It’s all a natural development for the Frugii Dessert Laboratory which has been making ice cream from its own bases, extracts, pastes, powders, freeze-dried products and chocolate for well over a decade.

And apart from Vegemite, it’s ice cream offerings include vanilla, chocolate, salted caramel, lemon myrtle, cookies and cream, lemon sorbet and blood orange sorbet.

by Leon Gettler, January 25^th 2017