Pork is a truly wonderful thing. From nose-to-tail cooking by chefs to a simple juicy cutlet for dinner by home cooks, it’s the clear choice thanks to its versatile nature and bounty of beautiful, subtle flavours. These are just some of the traits that PorkStar promotes in its annual program, calling on the help of industry leaders who are reinventing and reigniting a passion for pork. What are you waiting for? Click through for everything you need to know about 2018’s PorkStar chefs.

He’s mates with Jamie Oliver and got into the restaurant industry so he could squeeze in surfs before and after shifts. These days, Brisbane chef, TV presenter and cookbook author Ben O’Donoghue admits that while 80-hour weeks make surfing less frequent, he still loves his job. “I’ve always loved the camaraderie in the kitchen; the creativity of it; the instant gratification of cooking, tasting, serving and getting customer feedback.” Having an Irish dad meant that black pudding was always a part of their pork roast dinners, and just as important as the crackling and apple sauce. “It was always about who could snaffle the most crackle!” The almost five years he spent at London’s Michelin-starred River Café before opening the Billykart Kitchen restaurants in Brisbane armed O’Donoghue with one of his favourite recipes of all time. “Getting the whole pig in at The River Café and breaking it down and doing all sorts of things with it was a real highlight – it’s where some of my favourite recipes come from,” he says. “We used to cook pork in milk – it’s just such a beautiful way to slow cook a pork shoulder. It melts in your mouth.” When it comes to a roast pork, there are three pivotal things the chef lives by. “Make sure you dry it first so the skin is not wet. And [make sure there’s] always a good layering of fat in your pork. It’s great because it renders down and gives you that beautiful, soft, moist texture that we all love about pork. And always go Australian pigs. A lot of premade ribs, bacon and ham are now imported. If you’re buying cooked pork, buy Australian.”

It’s not long since Cameron Matthews departed Spicers Retreats and Hotels where he spent eight years as executive chef of their restaurant, The Long Table. He’s spent the past year overseas on a cooking tour of some of the world’s best restaurants, exploring sustainability in high-end dining. “What I’m actually wanting to do is create a small restaurant on a farm that’s really connected to the produce and the place,” Matthews says of his next move. Hailing from what he labels a “non-foodie family”, the chef’s love of pork came from an appreciation of the nuances in its flavour. “I love the difference from farm to farm, pig to pig, and how that impacts their deliciousness.” His signature dish over the years has undoubtedly been pork rillettes, France’s creamy, pâté-like charcuterie. “It’s such a simple dish to cook but requires a really good-quality pork. We used to teach it at the cooking school – it’s the kind of thing everyone can make.” And the chef has a controversial hack for perfecting the crackle. Matthews says that by focusing on the crackling at the beginning, it can turn soggy when the oven temperature is lowered and the pork begins steaming, so he flips the process around. “A lot of people cook it [the pork] high for a good crackle and then turn down the oven to cook the rest of the pork. I prefer to do it the other way around – put it in a really low oven and not worry about the crackle to start with, get it cooked first, and then take it out, turn the oven up full bore and crackle it up.”

Don’t be afraid of pork – that’s the message Claire Van Vuuren wants to share with the cooking community. “There’s a bit of a fear factor there of it becoming tough easily, but it’s one of the most versatile and flavoursome meats – it’s very difficult to ruin. I think people should be brave and jump in with pork – play around and experiment with it.” The head chef at Sydney inner west favourite Bloodwood in Newtown, Van Vuuren’s gigantic pork ribs have become one of the bar/restaurant’s hallmarks, their sweet and sticky scents drawing heaving crowds at their festival pop-ups. “Growing up, Friday night was always rib night with my family. We’d have sticky pork ribs and everyone’s faces would be covered in pork juice.” Today, Van Vuuren prefers to use the meat in lighter dishes such as salads, and extract its flavour for use elsewhere. “Dry it out, use it as a crumb and as a spice. Pair it with other things – it’s not just a big protein.”

He was responsible for opening the first international outpost of Bali’s coastal juggernaut, Ku De Ta, in Perth. These days, Dan Fisher calls Melbourne home, as part of the Laneway Greens restaurant family. “The business is set to expand this year,” says Fisher, who’s enjoying exploring his new home city by mouth. It’s a big move for any chef, but Fisher says he’s never felt anchored to a single city. “I’m a gypsy at heart, so travel always plays a big part in my fondest memories. I used to go to Sardinia every year with a big group of friends for a party, and there was this amazing restaurant by the beach that did suckling pig.” Fisher describes a table spilling with pork, roast potatoes, red wines and big bowls of gnocchetti Sardi. The former head chef of the acclaimed Print Hall calls himself a “homely eater”. “Pork lends itself to every cuisine of the world. We used to do a braised pig head dish, confit, rolled and grilled with braised lentils and smoked lardo – definitely very close to my heart.” As for his secret pork hack that he thinks every home cook should get behind? “Brining is such an underused way of seasoning meat at home. It is consistent and makes the meat taste so much nicer; it is a very easy restaurant technique that can be adapted to home use.”

As its name suggests, Dan Moss’s Clare Valley restaurant, Terroir Auburn, is fiercely local, with a menu that rotates weekly depending on what they can get their hands on. Originally from Port Lincoln, before doing time in the UK, Germany and Canada, then moving back to South Australia, Moss clued onto the importance of seasonality early on. “I think we were lucky, being born in Port Lincoln where we were exposed to extremely fresh produce,” Moss says. “My brother was always outside playing basketball and I was inside with my mum in the kitchen.” Today, his brother is a butcher, and the chef says there’s still an ongoing annual debate over how to nail the perfect crackling come Christmas. “I’m big on the Asian method of trimming a bit of fat off the inside (preferably the belly where there’s more fat content), then blanching it in hot water and rubbing it with Chinese rice wine or some sort of acidity to help draw moisture out to get that super-crackly crackling result.” Moss is also a fan of whole animal butchery, favouring secondary cuts such as jowl and crisp pigs ears at Terroir Auburn for their superior flavour and price point. “Trust your local butcher, and buy the best bit of pork that you’re in a position to buy,” Moss says. “Get a little adventurous – it’s not all about bellies or King Henry pork chops. Smoked ham hock makes the best soup of all time.”

It makes sense that an Australian chef is behind one of Singapore’s best barbecue restaurants, Burnt Ends. I mean, this is the country where tongs and a barbie are virtually mandatory cooking tools. But Dave Pynt says the move was more serendipitous than that. “I was doing a pop-up in East London, then me and the missus went travelling and we got a phone call when we were in South America. That’s how I ended up in Singapore.” Pynt has fond memories of his dad’s bacon brekkie sandwiches (“He always made sure there was a lot of bacon on there.”) when he was growing up, which might account for the number of barbecue sangas on the menu at Burnt Ends. “We’ve got a pulled pork sanga on: a 10-hour slow-roasted pork shoulder that we pile onto a sandwich,” he says. “I’ve also really enjoyed doing a lot of hog roasts that you pop out for the masses.” The whopping 90kg pig takes 14-16 hours to cook before it too is chopped up and given the sandwich treatment. “It takes a day to cook and within five minutes it’s gone.” Home cooks shouldn’t shy away from cooking pork, Pynt says, although he admits that timing is everything. “It’s one of those things where sometimes, when you’ve got the tougher cuts, you don’t cook them quite long enough, but for the loins and chops, you can overcook. If you’re using a good-quality pork, you don’t need to cook it medium-well – it’s okay to have it medium-rare.”

When Pho Nom owner-chef Jerry Mai opened Annam in Richmond last year, fans flocked. The Vietnamese-Australian chef’s contemporary spin on the food of her homeland (charcoal cooking is favoured here) has garnered a solid following in Melbourne. “I’ve been cooking for about 20 years, and because of my Vietnamese culture, food is a big part of my life,” Mai says. “From as young as I can remember, I was at home with my mother cooking stir-fries and things.” In a bizarre twist, Mai cut her teeth as a pizza chef in an Italian restaurant before making the transition to modern Asian, working at Longrain, Ginger Boy and David Thompson’s Nahm in London, then at Japanese fine diner Zuma. “Zuma taught me such a respectful way to treat seafood. I was very fortunate.” Mai concedes that pork is a huge part of Vietnamese cuisine, her favourite being the Lunar New Year classic of pork belly braised in coconut water, which features on the menu at both her restaurants. “During Lunar New Year, most Vietnamese families will do up a big pot of braised pork in coconut water. That will feed them for the next couple of days, because you’re not suppose to be cooking over the first couple of days of Lunar New Year.” Suckling pig is another standout for the chef, served with a simple Vietnamese herb salad. “Getting the cooking time right is so important as there’s so many different thicknesses of meat, but it’s such a great way to show off Vietnamese food.”

Once the executive chef of Luke Mangan’s restaurant stable, Joe Pavlovich took the reins of Sydney’s famous Bondi Trattoria (known to locals as “The Tratt”) in 2017. But Bondi Beach is worlds away from the farm where the New Zealand-born chef was raised. “I became a chef because, basically, I didn’t want to be a farmer – it was long, hard work. Little did I know that becoming a chef is probably harder work!” Pavlovich’s introduction to food was via his family farm, growing vegetables and raising livestock, including pigs, for their own use. “The best was the first roast, with lots of vegetables from the garden,” he recalls. “Roast day was always on a Saturday on the farm, with leftovers Sunday night.” Pork has been a mainstay on Pavlovich’s menus throughout his career, but the dish he recounts as his best-selling harks back to his first head chef gig. “I used to do a dish with confit pork belly, cuttlefish, baby zucchini flowers and a tamarind dressing, which was very popular.”

Thi Le might have been later to realise her dreams of becoming a chef than most, but she’s more than made up for lost time. The owner/chef of Richmond’s hatted Anchovy restaurant was on a gap year for her interior design studies when she realised she cared more for the global food markets than she did the architecture. “I love how food brings everyone together,” Le says. Le recalls, aged four, devouring bowls of braised pork trotters with her mum in Canberra. “Nothing much has changed!” the Vietnamese-Australian chef says. Pork features heavily on the menu at Anchovy, a Vietnamese blood pudding being a restaurant staple. “We make it like a blood custard with pork back fat and pork blood. Instead of a filler of rice or oatmeal, we actually use a lot of herbs, so it’s very fresh and light compared with European-style blood pudding.” For express midweek meals, Le says you can’t look past barbecued chops. “I think pork absorbs a lot of different marinades really well. If you marinate it and throw on the barbie – it only takes couple of minutes – you treat it like a steak (cook to medium-rare) and it tastes fantastic.” There’s no reason why more home cooks shouldn’t embrace more offal either, the chef says. “Pork liver is awesome – it’s one of those things that’s so underused right now, but stir-fried pork liver in any of your favourite stir-fries or sauces goes so well.”

For the Ward family, Christmas was an excuse to get together over Dad’s legendary roast pork and bowls of trifle. “For many years, it was my dad who would be up early to start cooking the shoulder or leg of pork on the homemade rotisserie. The ‘baton’ has been passed on to me and, a couple of years ago, it was porchetta and roasted apples for lunch.” Today, Ward is the sous chef at hatted LuMi Bar and Dining in Sydney’s Pyrmont, after a childhood spent devouring recipes and being glued to food shows. When it comes to meat, Ward is drawn to pork for its versatility; he loves having the option of cooking the same cut multiple ways. “I like to slow cook pork the most (braise, roast or confit) and to really intensify the flavour by breaking down the gelatinous connective tissue and the marbled fat that pork is known for.” At LuMi, he’s been playing around with a slow-roasted sirloin of Kurobuta (Berkshire) pork, which he glazes in a sweet licorice root with Tasmanian mountain pepper. The chef is also a fan of pork neck, which he marinates in black garlic for three days, then cooks slowly for six hours. And his secret to nailing the perfect slow-cooked pork at home? “Plan ahead. Having a game plan before the day gets the best results, especially when slow cooking. Adding flavour through brining the pork in salt and sugar also helps to keep the meat moist. Keeping it ‘low and slow’ by cooking with a lower temperature for a longer time helps to make the secondary cuts tender and keeps the moisture inside the meat.”