Gourmet Farmer Series 2

Gourmet Farmer Series 2

One of Australia's most discerning food critics, Matthew Evans, swapped city life for small farm living in Tasmania. After spending most of his life writing about food; Matthew had to adjust to his tree-change and learn from scratch how to grow and rear his own food.

The second season of Gourmet Farmer continues to follow Matthew's journey from living in Australia's biggest and busiest city to a country life in an isolated part of the island state.

Once a single guy trying his hand at pig farming and experimenting with making artisanal produce, Matthew has begun a new focus.

He is now a fully-fledged family man with partner, Sadie, and son, Hedley. It is time for him to get serious about bringing home the bacon.

Matthew starts up-scaling his farm, expanding from two pigs to 22. He sets about coming up with ways of preserving and selling the extra pork produce from more than just his market stall. An invitation to Slow Food's Salon in Turin affords him the opportunity to travel abroad to Italy and France. There he learns skilled ways of preserving meat which could help him balance his -drought or glut' issues.

With his good friends Nick and Ross, a new business idea is born – A Common Ground. The aim of his new business is to travel to remote locations around Tasmania to set up a long table, and cook multiple course menus from produce sourced solely from the area. Whether or not locals and mainlanders will travel the miles and pay the price for a genuine locavore experience is yet to be seen.

However it's not all hard work. Matthew continues his boy's own adventures that include a Kayak trip down the Picton River with Nick and Ross.

Matthew Evans once trained as a chef before he crossed to the dark side of the industry and became a restaurant reviewer. After five years and 2000 restaurant meals as the chief reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald, he came to the slow realisation that chefs do not have the best produce in the land, normal people who live close to the land do. So he moved to Tasmania, to a small patch of earth where he is raising pigs and sheep, milking a cow and waiting for his chickens to start laying.

Gourmet Farmer Series 2
Begins Thursday 25th August
7.30pm on SBS ONE