Australian Oil Rig Kitchens Have Gotten Fancy

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Australian Oil Rig Kitchens Have Gotten Fancy

Isolated oil rig companies typically face a huge problem: feeding large crews where the nearest produce center is a plane ride away. But in the Australian outback, one chef is making four-star cuisine for a massive group of workers despite these...

Oil companies go where there's oil, and not where there's food. That often means a few hours out to sea, but for isolated onshore rigs, they face the problem of feeding large crews, where the nearest produce center is a plane ride away. This is the challenging reality for some Australian outback oil companies.

One of the continent's most profitable fields is the Cooper Basin, about twenty-one hours inland from the state capital of Adelaide. It's all desert, salt-bush, and oil rigs, usually hosting forty employees, running twenty-four hours a day. You'd think that such camps would exclusively serve deep-fried garbage, but surprising, this is far from the truth. In fact, good eating is seen as vital for staff moral in a place that has (literally) nothing else surrounding it.

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So how does one actually cook quality meals in the Cooper Basin? And what do oil rig crews like to eat? I spoke to Joel McCarthy, a chef who is the part owner of the petro industry catering company, Caza Catering and Consultancy, in search of answers on what he's serving up.

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MUNCHIES

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Hey Joel. I can't help but wonder: how did you get into this niche job?

Joel

: Well, I've been a chef since I was fifteen. I trained at a Brisbane restaurant called About Face back in the 80s and then worked my arse off for the next twenty years. In 2005, my mum died and I realized that I wanted a change. Being a chef is hard. You're always working when everyone else is off, and I was tired of never seeing my friends or family. I decided that the fifo lifestyle would give me more of a life/work balance, so I got a job on an outback rig. (Fifo is short for fly-in, fly-out. The typical schedule is two weeks working remotely, then flying home for a week.)

oil-rig-site

Sounds interesting. Tell me about the food. What do oil rig crews like to eat? It's funny because when I started, everyone wanted the usual hearty, greasy dishes. But now it's all high protein and low fat. A lot of the guys are health conscious, working out and cutting back on the carbs, so we're all about fresh and interesting dishes. And that's the other thing, with all these cooking shows on TV, everyone wants high-end restaurant grade quality meals.

That makes sense. Can you give me some examples? Oh, we do sushi or Moroccan spiced duck, or a chicken with a sun-dried tomato stuffing. And then when the executives come in on the helicopter, we really throw it on. We'll do truffles and seafood, the whole lot. They'll fly from camp to camp, just eating breakfast through to dinner.

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That sounds decadent and totally not what I pictured to find out here. How would you describe the conditions of cooking in a rig kitchen compared to a regular restaurant kitchen? Just the remoteness. Store trucks come in once a fortnight, not every day, so if something is absent or the equipment fails, you've just to go without it. The barbecue pit always saves the day. If the oven doesn't work, we make barbecue for breakfast and then Mongolian barbecue for dinner.

What's the meal schedule? Every three hours, twenty-four hours a day, with plenty of freshly cut fruit, cakes, and slices in between. The guys work in twelve hour shifts, swapping over at midnight and noon. Then it's basically breakfast, brunch, lunch, afternoon smoko, dinner, supper and so on. A lot of catering companies do a cycle menu but we don't. Cooking the same thing all the times makes life really boring for the chefs and we want to keep them feeling creative and happy.

May I ask what kind of budget you're working with? We budget for between $18 and $22 per person, per day. When you're cooking for forty people, that means you can afford some good stuff.

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Is there anything you won't cook? Yeah, I once brought in some lambs brains and served them at lunch. No one would touch them. Then I crumbled and deep-fried the rest as a late snack with dipping sauces. The next day, everyone was complimenting me on the chicken nuggets.

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Ha! Sounds delicious. What do you consider the single hardest thing about working out here? Just the remoteness and the harshness of the elements. For cooking, that also means we have to be extra careful with hygiene. Being so far away from civilization, we absolutely can't have anyone getting sick, so we temperature test everything twice before it hits the tables. And we never refrigerate leftovers. If it's not eaten, we throw it out.

That sounds stringent. Do you think there's a secret to being a great oil rig chef? You've got to fit in with the guys. The food is important, but if you're not one of the boys, and you take yourself too seriously, you won't last.

Thanks Joel.