Every Bite

As a trained cellist, food writer and cook Gurdeep Loyal relies on music theory to amplify flavour. While he spends more time in the kitchen than in the string section these days, Gurdeep's first two cookbooks lean heavily on musical ideas, such as the flavour chords and triads that underpin all his recipes. Building on those concepts, his new cookbook, Flavour Heroes, takes fifteen underutilised pantry items and builds a repertoire of meals, snacks and sweets around each one.

While tasselled lanterns, weaving dragons, dancing lions and firecrackers are a familiar spectacle in Chinatowns right across Australia during Lunar New Year, the season is celebrated by more than just the Chinese community. In this episode, we explore the roots of Chinese New Year festivities in Australia, give the stove god some time off for Tết, Vietnamese New Year, and become older and wiser with a bowl of tteokguk, an essential dish during Seollal, Korean New Year.

The fresh air, clear waters and rich soil of regional Australia are encouraging some of the world's top chefs to trade in their chef whites for overalls and swap grand banquet halls for intimate dining rooms — including Analiese Gregory. She trained in Michelin-starred restaurants in Europe and now calls southern Tasmania home, where she'll soon be opening a 10-seat eatery on her property. But is her homegrown, hyper-local approach a reaction against her formal training or a product of it?

A chant heard at Sydney's first Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras was "out of the bars, into the streets!" But bars were not the community's only gathering places: Even revolutionaries have to eat. We don't hear much about queer restaurants and cafes, but often they pre-date the famous nightspots that are now synonymous with queer pride.

After coming to prominence as a finalist on the Great British Bake Off, Ruby Tandoh is now a celebrated food writer, known for astute observations on how we eat and why. Her new book, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now, is a deep-dive into the food culture of today — an era defined by novelty, abundance, and, paradoxically, scarcity: manufactured queues for trending foodstuffs. For those willing to queue, the prize may be a new taste sensation or simply online bragging rights. So, who benefits from this hyperactive zeitgeist of constantly evolving food preferences?