PART 1: Frontier chefs -
Cooking in the Antarctic

IN THIS TWO PART REPORT, Foodservice Rep takes a look at the appeal of working as a chef in remote locations as well as the challenges it brings. In this first part, we talk to Noel Tennant, who has made three trips to Antarctica as a chef with the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD), a Federal Government body which undertakes scientific research in the region.

Planting the seed

Noel began his apprenticeship in Perth with the usual restaurants and catering companies, but says “I got a little bit sick of working weekends, split shifts and nights. So I went to work out in the mines, and after probably two years of doing that an opportunity came up to work on an oil rig which I jumped at. That experience then gave me the impetus to apply as a chef in Antarctica, which is something I'd had in the back of my mind for many years: one of my TAFE lecturers had shown us photos of when he went to Mawson Base back in the 1970s, so he planted a bit of a seed there.”

In 1997, after three years on the oil rig, Noel was on his way to Davis station: “That was my first contact and interaction with the Antarctic division and I’ve been pretty much hooked over since. A lot of people are extremely social and need the company of others and busy places, whereas I’ve always enjoyed wide open spaces and not so many people – I’ve always been happy with my own company.

“Having said that, the irony of being in the Antarctic is if you don’t like other people, you're locked inside with them a lot of the time!”

Noel’s longest stint in Antarctica was 17 months, on his first trip, and his shortest stay lasted some five months. “Generally speaking if people go for a summer job it can be between four to six months, and if they go for winter it can be pretty much a whole year on station, say 12 to 14 months.”

Australia has a number of reasons for being in Antarctica – the AAD is responsible for maintaining sovereignty over Australia’s Antarctic territory, and scientific research is also a very strong driver. But as Noel points out, “The science contingent is not as big a percentage of the station population as some people might think – because we have so much infrastructure, we have to make our own water, electricity etc, so we have plumbers, carpenters, technicians, diesel mechanics and so on just to keep the place operating before we can even think about bringing other staff in. And all those people have to be fed, so we need chefs!”

The size of the team varies a bit; during winter there’s a skeleton crew, typically numbering between 15 to 25 at each of the four stations. During the summer when the weather's better and daylight hours are longer, the population swells. “Two of our stations, Davis and Casey, are quite large in terms of both size and population – they can have between 80 and 100 people during the summer months and to help cater for those numbers we send two additional chefs for the summer, so there are three on hand at Davis and Casey during that time of year.”

When you consider that Antarctica is a similar size to Australia, you get a sense of the distances involved: “As the crow flies between Davis and Mawson it's about 400km, and between Davis and Casey it's probably 1300km or so.”

Landscape and wildlife are the great draws

Each station is quite a social place: when outside activities aren’t available, pastimes like darts and pool are very popular while others might indulge in a game of chess. There’s also a bar and lounge area for social interaction. Noel adds, “The internet access has improved over the years, so these days we also have people playing online games against each other in their rooms. We watch a lot of movies – there’s a small cinema on each station – but the preference if the weather allows is always to get outside.

“Landscape and wildlife are the two things that are really the great draws for Antarctica. There’s that old adage of ‘how many words for snow do the Inuit people have’ and when you’re there you understand why: snow and ice takes on so many different forms, it’s constantly changing and fascinating. Before my first trip I’d always lived in tropical and subtropical areas and had only seen snow from a distance. What really struck me upon arriving was that we always tend to think of ice as being white but in fact it’s blue. It’s very much like liquid water, it reflects the blue and absorbs the red, so seeing icebergs and even really deep snow and ice cliffs and glaciers, the extraordinary shades of blue, is a beautiful thing and something I really wasn’t expecting. The landscape itself is quite alien and you quickly become fixated on the weather, because it rules over everything and it’s quite an awesome thing to see it change.”

Naturally the remoteness of the location impacts on the logistics of bringing in food supplies: “We pretty much only resupply each station once a year, so immediately that will raise chefs’ levels of anxiety,” Noel says. “Australian cuisine has developed to a point where it’s heavily reliant on fresh product and seasonal produce, but that really can’t be a consideration there.

We can't bring in a lot of soft fruits or leafy green vegies because they just don’t transport particularly well and don’t hold for any particular length of time. So the fresh produce we do bring in is a lot of root vegies because they'll keep for a long time, and firmer fruits – apples, pears, oranges, citrus. We are quite limited in what we can send down fresh, so we do send lots of frozen vegies and fruits, but I have to say the quality of those has improved enormously in the last 20 to 30 years since I made my first trip.”

When it comes to storage for refrigerated and frozen food, another irony is that the storage space on station under the most pressure is freezer space. “So we resupply during the summer months when we can actually bring ships in. The temperatures quite regularly get into single figures above zero, in fact I've seen temperatures as high as 13 degrees at Davis station, so clearly you can’t just leave your frozen food in a pile outside. It’s not until you point these things out that people realise and say, well that makes sense!”

The kitchen is often the hub of station social life

As to the particular qualities a chef needs to work in this environment, self-motivation is at the top of Noel’s list. “You don’t have an executive chef looking over your shoulder constantly keeping you on track, so you need to have a very calm sort of personality and be able to ride things out because no matter what, every station ends up with some unforeseen issues. It could be 25 people arriving from a Chinese or Indian station down the road unannounced, 15 minutes before mealtime – this sort of thing happens. Or the supply ship may not arrive until a month after the scheduled resupply date for unforeseen reasons. So you need to be resilient and get over those humps.

“You also need to be able to get on with people and to mentor them, because there’s a lot of work to be done in the kitchen other than just food production, so we roster several of the other people from the station to be a kitchenhand or steward for the day. It's a "slushy" system which is an old military term: you might have a diesel mechanic, a plumber, a doctor, an atmospheric physicist as your kitchenhand for a day – and they may never have been in a commercial kitchen before. Which means you constantly get asked the same questions everyday by different people: where does this go, how do I do this? You need the ability to work with other people, to quickly identify their level of comfort and ability, and be able to use them to best effect.”

Noel adds that the kitchen often becomes the hub of station social life and gatherings: “You often find people will just wander in at any time of day and start talking about their day or their work. They may just want to get something off their chest and the chef is typically seen as a neutral party they can vent to. So you just nod and smile and learn to keep things to yourself. Everyone has peaks and troughs during the season – we all have days when we're a bit off-colour.

“And the chef is judged three times a day on their performance – you're only as good as your last meal – but with that also comes an enormous amount of acknowledgement for just doing your job.

There are also particular skills sets which will benefit chefs aspiring to work in this environment: “We produce all our own bread on station from scratch on a daily basis, so having a good background in bread production and baking is enormously beneficial. You might be used to making your own dinner rolls in a restaurant, and that’s certainly a useful skill to have, but it’s quite different to producing multiple loaves from sourdoughs to various types of specialty breads and sweet, savoury, you name it. Pastry work is another area where a good skillset is highly beneficial.

“What we’ve found over the years is that people who've spent time in more of an industrial kitchen setup, such as mine sites, tend to adapt to the style of catering we do in Antarctica very quickly. It's quite similar in type and quantity of food and clientele – you're catering to mostly tradespeople, but also a few professionals and academics here and there. The focus is on homestyle cooking, stepped up a bit on weekends and special occasions.”

Always new opportunities for applicants

In his current role as Station Support Officer for AAD, Noel is keen to encourage chefs to apply for work in Antarctica. “Generally we advertise for expedition enrolments once a year, and that window normally opens in December and closes in January. We usually recruit eight chefs each year, four for the summer and four for the winter. With COVID last year we weren’t able to do a summer season at Davis so our two summer chefs weren’t deployed there, but we fully anticipate that next year we’ll be back to a full quota of eight.”

Noel adds that while there is a regular cohort of chefs, the selection process remains competitive and “it’s not out of the ordinary for us to bring on one or two new chefs each year. Sometimes these are selected ahead of people who’ve been before, just on the strength of their application and skillset. And then there are chefs who’ve done one or two trips and decided that’s enough for them – so there’s always opportunities for new applicants to come in.”

Those interested in applying should visit the AAD website at https://jobs.antarctica.gov.au