Tasmania Food & Traditional Cuisine

Tasmania produces at a scale that suits small, careful operations rather than volume, and the result is a food culture that is genuinely one of Australia's best.

The cold clean water gives oysters, abalone, rock lobster and Atlantic salmon; the cool climate gives berries, apples, cherries and stone fruit that ripen slowly; and the highland flowering gives leatherwood honey, which comes from a tree that grows nowhere else on earth.

Much of it never leaves the island, which is the argument for eating locally here rather than at the obvious places.

Oysters

Grown in the cold estuaries, sold at the farm gate on Bruny Island and around the east coast, and noticeably better where they are grown.

Rock lobster and abalone

Both fished commercially and both expensive; the west coast rock lobster is the one locals rate.

Leatherwood honey

Strong, floral and slightly medicinal, from a rainforest tree endemic to Tasmania. It tastes like nothing else and divides people sharply.

Scallop pie

A Tasmanian invention: scallops in curried sauce inside a pastry case. Found in bakeries across the island and almost nowhere else.

Cherries and berries

The cold ripening makes them exceptional; the cherry season around January is brief and worth catching.

Single malt whisky

Tasmanian distilleries have won international awards outright, and the island now has more than twenty.

Salamanca Market in Hobart every Saturday is the island's main event — producers, makers and food, in front of the Georgian sandstone warehouses.

Farm gates are the real Tasmanian experience: oysters on Bruny, cheese in the northwest, berries and cherries through the Huon and the Coal River, most on honesty boxes.

Cellar doors and distilleries cluster in the Tamar Valley, the Coal River Valley and around Hobart, and most are small enough that you meet the maker.

Launceston's Harvest Market on Saturdays is the northern equivalent and strictly producer-only.

Tasmania is Australia's coolest wine region and its most important for sparkling wine — the climate is close to Champagne's, and mainland producers buy Tasmanian fruit for their premium sparkling precisely for that reason.

Pinot Noir is the flagship red, lighter and more perfumed than mainland examples, and the island also makes excellent Chardonnay and Riesling.

The two main areas are the Tamar Valley in the north and the Coal River and East Coast in the southeast, both small and both dominated by family-scale producers.

Whisky is the other story: distilling restarted in 1992 after a 153-year prohibition, and Tasmanian single malts have since won major international awards.