Field Of Dreams

Culinary doyenne ALLA WOLF-TASKER shares a taste of her latest project Dairy Flat Farm, where guests are invited to celebrate the seasons and relish simple flavours straight from the paddock.

- Michael Harden

Alla Wolf-Tasker is not one to rest on her laurels. Admittedly, she has always piled project upon project at Lake House, but Wolf-Tasker and her team were just beginning to cruise along comfortably when a new place suddenly popped up. “It had such good bones and spoke to everything we’ve been talking about at Lake House – about connecting people to the food they’re eating – that we just looked at each other and said, ‘we have to do it’,” she says.

The place Wolf-Tasker is talking about is Dairy Flat Farm, a 16-hectare working farm seven kilometres from Daylesford in central Victoria, home to her renowned restaurant and hotel Lake House. Since buying the farm in 2018, Wolf-Tasker and her family have turned the existing house into a luxury lodge for 12 guests and established a bakery in the cellar that supplies all of the family’s businesses with slow-fermented sourdough loaves and Viennoiserie.

But the core project and the reason for buying the property lies in the fields surrounding the lodge. Lake House has long championed locally grown produce, its menu and cooking classes focused on the best fruit, vegetables, herbs and meat being produced nearby. Now Wolf-Tasker is taking the opportunity to not only grow as much produce as possible for the restaurant and their Wombat Hill café but also to present guests with a “closed-loop” food and farm experience, where they can sample the food that is growing all around them.

Wolf-Tasker has created recipes for this issue of Gourmet Traveller based on the simple dishes they serve to lodge guests at Dairy Flat Farm, dishes that are driven by the season.