Trend Spotter: Frying Leaves

Chefs are green with envy for texture, colour, and taste

Whilst eating out, are your dishes looking a lot more verdant and botanical? Sage, mint, and curry leaves. These are all being fried at the moment, dancing and falling over plates in a fittingly crisp, autumnal style. Colour, texture, and taste are all being enhanced.

Photo 1. Pondicherry fish curry - Rick Stein at Bannisters Port Stephens.

Konak Kitchen does this most expertly, frying mint leaves in a beurre noisette to accompany their manti, genuinely elevating the dish, to use the hackneyed term. Jacqui Challinor showcases the technique at Nomad utilising curry leaves, as does Rick Stein’s restaurant at Bannisters Port Stephens. Lennox Hastie at Firedoor and Alex Bloods at Bloods Bakery go one step further, turning their plates into stark resemblances of an Australian August flowering wattle.

Photo 2. Salt cod floss are the Acacia’s inflorescence, curry leaves play themselves, charred okra - branches after a bushfire. Firedoor, Sydney.