Sustainable gardener and chef Amanda Giason has enjoyed a successful 2024, with her preserves earning her medals, awards and a scholarship.
A dedication to sustainability in the garden and kitchen has paid off in spades for Rutherglen chef Amanda Giason with a medal haul in the 2024 Melbourne Royal Australian Fine Food Awards.
Amanda won a gold, silver and two bronze medals for her signature chilli jam, apple chilli jelly, beetroot ketchup and blackberry jam when the results were announced on July 17.
Amanda and her husband Aaron run Yarramanda Farm at Rutherglen, a one-hectare garden based on organic and permaculture principles encompassing an orchard, large vegetable garden and productive raised garden beds for herbs and a picking garden.
The swag of medals follows hot on the heels of winning an award for best sauce at the 2024 Urana Flame n Fest Food Festival where Amanda’s apple mint jelly was used in the cooking demonstration by head chef Grant Neal, of Adelaide’s Smoking Joint.
It also caps off success last year with a silver medal in the Melbourne Royal Food Awards for tomato chilli jam which featured on MasterChef Australia in 2023 as a glaze on pork chops and is a recipe honed by Amanda over 20 years. She was also awarded vocational student of the year at Wodonga TAFE and earned a scholarship to attend the 2024 Alpine Valleys Community Leadership program.
Not to mention scooping the pool at the Rutherglen show for her zucchini pickles, quince paste, chipotle barbecue sauce, hot pumpkin chutney, apple chilli jelly, tomato sauce and lemon butter.
Amanda is a qualified commercial chef and, with the help of her family, lovingly grows her own produce and transforms the seasonal bounty into bespoke small batch preserves and other tasty offerings.
When she is not juggling plants and preserves, she teaches cooking skills to children with disabilities and runs preserving, cooking and pasta making workshops on-farm.
“I have been focused on achieving my food dream and honing my craft. Making small batch preserves is a slow process to get it absolutely perfect,” Amanda said.
“The preserving classes focus on best quality produce and I show people our organic and chemical-free growing methods, harvesting produce at the optimum time, cleaning and preparing that vegetable or fruit for cooking. I also explain the science behind preserving, including sterilising equipment, hygiene for food safety and supplying them with a pH meter.”
Amanda makes the preserves the old-fashioned way without any thickening agents, gels, unnatural preservatives or gums.
“We are transitioning to raised beds to increase yields and labour efficiency and are able to produce three times the amount of produce in a raised bed versus conventional plantings. A zoned wifi watering system means I can operate it remotely from my mobile phone,” she said.
“We carried out replicated trials with the same seed, water and mulch over three years to ensure the transition would be successful.
“A greenhouse has been established last year with a view to produce super hot chillis year-round for the preserves. There are around 30 laying hens to provide eggs for seasonal curds.”
The chemical-free garden means manual removal of weeds, fruit fly exclusion netting, picking off slugs from seedlings at night with a torch and plucking cabbage moths from brassicas and feeding to the chooks.
Aaron and Amanda focus on sustainability by reusing, recycling and upcycling where possible, including upcycled bullnose corrugated iron for the raised beds, and using mulch and composted animal manure.
Nothing from the kitchen goes to waste, with tomato powder made from the discarded skins and seeds from the passata-making process. All kitchen scraps/trims from small batch preserving processes stays on farm and are fed to a worm farm, chickens, ducks and sheep.
Yarramanda Farm produce can be found on the menu at the award-winning Victoria Hotel at Rutherglen, at Rutherglen farmer’s markets, food and off-grid living festivals and online.
“My plans are to do more workshops, getting people out to the farm and engaging, connecting and learning with food,” Amanda said.