The wide-eyed wonderment she experienced as 11-year-old girl – taught by an uncle to bake bread in her grandmother’s outdoor oven in Croatia – has never left Katrina Kucan as her own baking business soars.
Kristina, who founded Sunshine Coast business Silver Tongue Foods with partner-in-life Andy Tolson, has been creating organic, preservative-free sourdough lavosh crackers and condiments from a small commercial kitchen in Dena Street, Maroochydore, since 2020.
But the couple is now seeking larger facilities as production is about to ramp up.
Silver Tongue Foods has just won a contract to supply crackers for the new Sunshine Coast Airport-based Bonza Airlines’ in-flight menu.
“At the moment in our current kitchen set-up, we can do around 1 tonne to 1.5 tonnes of dry goods per week and that’s only on crackers,” Kristina said.
“We’ve also got the organic pickle and the preserve range, which we call our cracker condiments. They mainly started out to assist with our tastings, just to demonstrate how to use our products with versatility.
“The core business is the crackers.
“With the whole Bonza contract, it’s given us the courage to take that next leap. Looking for a bigger space has been on our agenda for the past 12 months.
“If we’ve got more space, we can stockpile more and we purchase more (ingredients) and have a lot more space to do what we need to do.”
- SEE THE RECIPE BELOW
Bonza has given prospective travellers a sneak peek at its newly launched food and drinks menu that features more than 40 products, including many aviation firsts such as non-alcoholic beer, banana bread waffles and a snag in a bag.
Bonza chief commercial officer Carly Povey said it was important to have Australian products on board. She expected the small to medium businesses involved would enjoy greater exposure to new markets as the entire menu would be offered on all 27 routes.
And that is especially exciting for Kristina and Andy, who have changed the branding and created a smaller bite-size cracker within a custom-made 30g packet for passengers.
“When you’re on a flight, you don’t really want to get messy,” Kristina said.
Do you have an opinion to share? Submit a Letter to the Editor with your name and suburb at Sunshine Coast News via: news@sunshinecoastnews.com.au
“There’s been thought put in place as far as ‘how will the end consumer utilise the product on the flight without getting crumbs all over themselves’.
“It takes a lot of effort. We obviously looked at sizing, what’s available currently in the market, what are people serving currently in the market as a snack pack-size crackers. We looked at the feel of our brand – so it’s going to be a foil bag.
“We wanted to keep our brand image there but just updating it to suit the niche of changing that product shape.
“My sister Nikolina Perkovic does all our artwork and design for our packaging, so I spent a lot of time on the phone, a lot of time on emails going backwards and forwards – ‘Yes, I like this’, ‘No, I don’t like that’, “Do this’, ‘A bit more of that, less of this’ – just to get the right feel for what we wanted our brand to be presented as.”
It’s not the first time baking has brought the Croatian-born sisters together.
Before their family began a new life in Australia as refugees after the War of Independence in 1995, they had been living an idyllic rural life in Slavonija, one of four historic regions of Croatia.
“My most fondest memory was baking my first loaf of bread with my uncle who was a master baker,” Kristina recalled.
“He worked at a mega bakery.
“It was one summer trip in Croatia. He tasked us with baking a loaf of bread.
“My sister and I, being young, we didn’t know what we were doing. And he said to my mother, ‘Haven’t you taught your children anything?’
“So, he taught us how to bake bread. We baked it in the outdoor oven at our grandma’s house.
“We used cabbage leaves so the stone didn’t burn the bottom of the bread. And it was just a beautiful experience and sharing of that skill.
“We have a theory that food brings people together and that’s how you create those special memories.
“That is one lasting memory for me personally – just learning that skill set that’s been transferred through my family.
“With the crackers, they’ve been made by my family by my mum, my grandmother, my uncle for a long, long time.”
But it wasn’t until COVID lockdowns hit that Kristina really went ‘crackers’.
In 2020, she was contracting to a waste and recycling firm that specialised in taking rubbish away from pubs and clubs. The lockdowns shut down much of the hospitality industry and her role became redundant.
“I said to Andy, ‘I just need to bake to keep myself sane’,” Kristina said.
“I pulled out grandma’s starter that I’ve literally carted around the countryside with me.
“The starter was 35 years old when I refired it up. It takes a lot of love and care to keep our starter healthy. You treat ‘your mother’ well, she treats you quite well in return.
“I pulled it out of the fridge and I got it going again.
The sourdough starter culture, as any home cooks obsessed with TV and YouTube cooking shows will tell you, is a real science.
“The starter has its own ecosystem,” Kristina said.
“You have just got to keep it healthy by your feeding routines and everyone’s starter has a different flavour that it imparts as well.
“A lot of people have their own sourdough cultures that they’ve created and that will have a different flavour profile to mine.
“Everyone’s starter footprint is unique to that individual. It’s quite a special process.
“We don’t use any flavourings in our products and, when I say ‘flavourings’, we use salt, pepper, celery but we don’t use any sourdough culture flavouring.
“It’s all what our natural ferment produces. If it’s a longer ferment, you get more of a tang. If it’s a younger ferment, it’s more of a sweeter, parmesan taste which obviously changes with the weather patterns and how quickly the ferment goes as well.”
The couple’s business started with breads and grew simply by word of mouth.
Andy took the loaves into his workplace where colleagues snapped them up.
Then their friends and strangers started placing orders, organically increasing demand.
“The crackers were my little gifts to people who were buying the breads,” Kristina said.
“Next minute, people were placing orders for the crackers.
“I’d made the crackers for him (Andy) prior to COVID but we never really put much thought into it.
“And he was like, ‘there’s really something special about these’. That’s how we ended up pursuing the crackers.”
Kristina and Andy have virtually been a two-person team ever since – fermenting the dough, rolling it out, hand-cutting and hand-salting it, baking it and then packing the crackers for retail and commercial clients.
A major boost came in October 2020 when the White’s Group accepted the sourdough crackers into its specialist Locavores artisan producers’ program on the shelves of its IGA Supermarkets on the Sunshine Coast.
Now, the couple is interviewing for an additional production staff member to add to their two “taste marketers” who demonstrate the products in retail outlets.
Kristina has put her own touch to the old family recipes to produce the Silver Tongue Foods crackers.
But it also was important for her to maintain an authentic connection and be true to her heritage by going “back to basics” with traditional, natural ingredients and no modern flavour additives or preservatives.
“The first flavour that we launched was Fleur, which contains local edible flowers that we press into the dough,” Kristina said.
“They’re all seasonal – what our flower producers can provide based on the season, based on rainfall, based on a number of other elements.
“That was my unique twist to making it my own, instead of just doing the plain flavours that my family did.
“I’ll put these flowers on top and have the uniqueness of our product. Then each of the flavours as we grew our range was something I either personally liked or that someone in our family liked.
“The Sweet Pink Peppercorn was a flavour I did for Andy because of his Canadian heritage. We use Canadian maple syrup in that product to give that sweetness to the peppercorn and that also ties our relationship into the whole business.
“Everything has a bit of a meaning in what we do.”
PROBIOTIC CARROT AND MISO DIP RECIPE
Serves 8-12
You will need:
1kg carrots, peeled
2tbsp cold pressed olive oil
FermenStation Miso
Water
1tbsp yoghurt
Juice from 1/4 lemon
1/2 tsp sea salt
Method:
1. Heat the oven to 180C fan-forced.
2. Chop up carrots so that they cook evenly.
3. Arrange on a low-sided baking tray. Cover with the olive oil and roll the carrots to ensure they are all fully covered. Roast for 30 minutes, turn the carrots, and roast for an additional 15 minutes (or until they are shrivelling a little, releasing oil, look sticky and smell sweet).
4. Weigh the roasted carrots (they will have reduced in weight almost by half), then add them and any cooking oil to a blender, along with 20 per cent of the cooked carrots’ weight in miso, and 10 per cent in water. Blend until very smooth.
5. Mix in the yoghurt, a squeeze of lemon and some salt.
6. Cool to room temperature and serve with Silver Tongue Foods Crackers.
Local journalists supporting local people. Help keep independent and fair Sunshine Coast news coming by subscribing to our free daily news feed. All it requires is your name and email. SUBSCRIBE here now.
