Welcome to the Vic Cherikoff Australian food website.

Here you will find information about:

• Australian food eg Wattleseed, lemon myrtle sprinkle, Alpine pepper, paperbark
• Australian recipes eg Wattleseed pavlova or Lemon myrtle on barramundi in paperbark
• Australian functional ingredients eg Herbal-Active™ and HerBev™
• Australian menu ideas
• and a blog on recent news items, new products and industry happenings.

I’d like to summarize some resource material I have on-line for my natural preservatives, Herbal-Active™ and HerBev™ and delineate their different applications as natural flavors.

Cherikoff Bioactives is also looking for distributors for these natural preservatives as the demand has been significant for these substitutes for benzoates, sorbates, metabisulphite, parabens and other synthetic chemical preservatives.

It’s great to see Wattleseed on so many airline menus. It was once only a traditional Aboriginal wild food which I turned into a flavouring back in 1984 transforming parched seeds into a roasted, toasted ingredient for a multitude of culinary applications. See this article for more.

I had the pleasure of joining Scott Herbert in the Whole Foods Market kitchen in Chicago a few weeks ago where I prepared a steak salad using my Vic Cherikoff Down Under brand Kakadu Wild Fire Pepper Sauce now available in Whole Foods Market nationally across the USA.

I had a nice little story on some up-coming events in which I have a hand across the Tasman in the land of the Great White Cloud. They are the Rosemount Spirit of Mateship Gala dinner on the 30th April and the Great Australian Gala Dinner on the 2nd May.

They are all to do with Australia Week and Tourism Australia’s efforts at drumming up more awareness of the Australian tourism scene.

Out of a bunch of restaurants in which lemon wedges on drinks were microbiologically tested, 77% returned high populations of food borne disease organisms including faecal bacteria on the lemons in our drinks. Another case for Herbal-Active™ – the new natural herb extract mix with powerful anti-microbial properties.

A one page ad about my cooking on the US HSN (Home Shopping Network) is currently running in Gourmet Magazine. Pictured are Emeril, Wolfgang Puck and Gordon Ramsay, so we should be guaranteed a strong viewing audience.

I will be cooking with my new BBQ Hot Sheet which is being distributed in the US under my licensed Vic Cherikoff Down Under range.

Herbal-Active™ is an effective natural preservative for foods, beverages and cosmetics. While it is not always a dump and stir solution, a methodology of approach is developing to apply this new natural preservative to the many products currently using benzoates and other undesirable chemical preservatives.

And the good news is that there is a follow up function in April with Australia Week celebrations as part of G’day NZ festivities. Check out the Australia Week website for the latest details and put the dates in your diary now.

Many thanks to Coles for the launch of Vic Cherikoff Down Under BBQ Hot Sheet into its Victorian stores. They are on a free-standing display in the fresh meat area and they really are a terrific product backed up with a DVD inside every pack so recipe ideas and applications are all easy to see and understand.

The publication of my analytical findings of the Kakadu plum (Terminalia ferdinandiana) as the world’s highest fruit source of vitamin C went around the world and has lead to a plethora of products, most notably, Kakadu Juice. This happens to use my Kakadu Complex which is a super-mix of antioxidant fruits and herbal extracts, naturally preserved with my new Herbal-Active™.