How the ‘best-tasting chicken in the world’ came to Australia

Nick Venter couldn’t fry an egg when he first arrived in Australia in 2015 from South Africa. After a successful career in stockbroking, corporate rehabilitation and venture capital, he was looking for a cushy early retirement.

So why turn his hand to building a portfolio of luxury foods? “My mother, who I lost at the age of 13, would feed the world,” he recalls. “She was always cooking for an army.”

He parlayed his passion for good food into working out how to bring the best possible beef to the Australian market, closing the gap between the farmer and the cook. “For me, it is all about not interfering with the flavour, creating the best products in their most natural form,” he says.

Venter now runs CopperTree Farms, specialising in premium, dry-aged beef from retired Holstein Friesian dairy cows. The brand has also released a range of cultured butters, developed in conjunction with butter-whisperer Naomi Ingleton and top chefs Corey Costelloe and Neil Perry.

One of his toughest projects, however, was bringing the famous blue-legged French Bresse chicken to the Australian market. “In 2018, I typed into Google “best-tasting chicken in the world” and found ‘Poulet de Bresse’,” he recalls.

With the genetics of the 400-year-old breed closely guarded, Venter secured the rights from AvGen Poultry’s Lyn Campbell, farming the birds at his own farm in Robertson, NSW before appointing a contract farmer near Bega, with a heartbreaking end result.

“Right before launch on January 1, 2020, the Bega farm burned down in the bushfires, and we lost most of what we had,” Venter says. He then found Luke Winder, a former electrician turned duck breeder and regenerative farmer, at Tathra Place in the Southern Tablelands. Winder grows the birds on pasture, guarded by Maremma sheepdogs, and is currently teasing production up to about 1000 birds a week.

The Bresse is a big, muscular, wild bird with a fighting spirit, bearing little resemblance to the soft, finer-boned chicken we know. The heritage breed has now come home to roost on such high-echelon restaurant tables as Ester in Chippendale, Icebergs Dining Room in Bondi, Mimi’s in Coogee and Tetsuya’s in Sydney’s CBD.

Venter’s latest development is CopperTree Farms Chef’s Series truffled butter, developed with Sydney-based chef Mark Best and launching in Woolworths on July 12. “I wanted to bring a little luxury to the home cook as well as the professional chef,” he says. Sounds like the perfect medium in which to fry an egg.

This article appears in the July issue of AFR Magazine. Read more here and follow AFR Mag on Twitter and Instagram.