🍩The Donut Daddy (bite-sized) 💪🏽

On The Donut Daddy's menu: Bisnonna's Zippuli, Rockpool with Mum, Beef Mince & Cheese 

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TFM is produced and edited by Lauren McWhirter with original music by Russell Torrance. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Let's get going. One at a time. Starting with Biz Nonna's Zupli. What are these? And first of all, what is a biznonna?

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Yeah, so biznonna, so that's my uh great grandmother. So it's my, yeah, my dad's grandmother. Grandmother, yeah. Yeah, it's my dad's grandmother. So it's my great-grandmother. I don't know why tripping up. Um so yeah, it's my biznonna and my bisnonnu, which is my great-granddad. Yeah. Right? Uh so there's my Italian great-grandma, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

And it's Hazuppli. Tell us about this, why this is number one memory.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Uh I don't know. It's just so weird. So like we would they have this house, we used to, it's like this really old Italian house, and it's like super classic looking. In the lounge room, there's like a sunken, uh, there's like a sunken floor. You know, that kind of look? And and like everything just it it just it smells old-fashioned. And no, when I used to go there really young, so my dad and my me and my dad and my brother would go there and sh she would always be cooking pasta and making these little like crispy donuts with the sugar on top. And they're like these really long, crispy donuts. And I just loved them. Like I would just eat them, and she would always, she'd always say, manja, like eat, because I was always skinny. And so she's like, you know, you gotta eat. And every time she'd see me, she'd just like force feed me basically. Um what was the flavor of them? It was very fragile. It's very fragile, and it was just sweet and crispy, and I just remember, yeah, they kind of like melt in your mouth a little bit. They're not chewy or anything, they're just like they just straight up melt in your mouth. It's really strange that she would make them. You know, it's just so I feel like it's so looking back, I'm like, it's such a random thing to make. Do you use that recipe in any of your No, I I I haven't, I've never made them. I've never seen them like since. I just know because when I when I thought about it, I was kind of looked into it and I was like, you're like, it's so like random, and you don't really see them. I mean, sometimes you see them like really randomly in like Italian grocers and stuff.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

What part of Italy were they from?

SPEAKER_00 2:16

Um, so they're from Sicily, my family.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

So it's an a it's a Sicilian kind of suite.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

I think so. Yeah, I actually haven't looked into it, but it must be.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Let's go to the second memory. Yep. So from one great woman in your life to another, this is a memory um about your mother, and it's the time she took you and your brother to Rockpool.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

Yes. So yeah, we were really young, and um my mum was really getting into like different celebrity chefs, and she was really into Neil Perry at the time, and we didn't really go out for dinner much, you know.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Like we Was she a cook, your mum?

SPEAKER_00 2:52

Yes. Right. Yes, she cooked a lot. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

So And she but she wasn't Italian?

SPEAKER_00 2:56

No, she no, so my my mum and her family, um, she's half German and Irish. Right. She's super into cooking. You know, her mum was like would cook all these curries and stuff, and so my mum was like super into cooking, you know, she'd always cook different cuisines. Like one week would be Indian, the next she'll be doing like English food and or Italian food, and she would just change it up all the time. You know, as a teen growing up, you you kind of think to yourself, I just want the most basic thing. Like I I always just wanted like really basic things, but it was actually really good that she did all that. I know I'm getting a bit sidetracked, but the reason why I appreciate her doing all this cooking from scratch is because it made me appreciate taste in a different way.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

She gave you another lens, yeah. Another way to look at the world.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

Yeah. And I had a more appreciation for those things. So now it's easy for me to eat healthy because it developed my uh taste buds for those things earlier in life. So we went to this Rockpool restaurant and we're waiting ages for this table, like so long. But it stuck out to me because first of all, like the restaurant was like amazing in that, and we'd never really been to we'd never been to a fancy restaurant. We we got some steaks and um yeah, and we just I just remember waiting ages, but it was it was a like awesome experience. It's a different memory because like I always think like my parents are split, so we didn't have like a whole heap of money growing up and that, and so her taking me there was like a bit of a special memory, you know. It's like a it's like a yeah, it's different.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

There's some tears in your eyes now reflecting on it.

SPEAKER_00 4:30

Yeah, a little bit, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

Now the next memory is a bit of a bloody downgrade from Rockpool. We had we're going down the slope. But this is a real turning point for you. Yeah, it's the beef, mints, and cheese. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

This oh this is rough, man. This is this is the greatest time, but it was rough. Um yeah, the beef, mints, and cheese. So what we did is I had no money. You know, starting these businesses, you just don't have any money for so long. Like you just try and How old were you when you started? So when I actually quit my job, I think I was 22.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

Yeah. So that's when I like quit my job and like kind of went all in. But I started the business, I started conceptualizing business from the age of 19 or 20. That's when I started thinking, I wanna I want to be a business owner, I want to be an entrepreneur. I I cannot envision myself working a normal job. And that's when I decided entrepreneurship. Yeah. And then it was 22 when I finally quit my job because it wasn't because I the businesses were doing super well, but it was only because I I didn't have enough time to sleep and do everything, you know, and I would rather I chose the businesses over um the job I was working. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:41

And so this beef and cheese story, where did it be?

SPEAKER_00 5:44

So the beef what happened was for some reason. Okay, so it started in my mom's garage. We'll we'll making these donuts for events with the cart. We built this cart, we're selling on weekends. We'll and me and I had a business partner, and we would go on weekends to the events and sell, right? But what happened was once I quit my job and we got in, we got into another little kitchen, a tiny kitchen, because our mom's like, my mom said to me, She's like, she just couldn't bear it anymore. Us just like up at all hours, baking, like, and I wasn't there all the time, but it was my business partner who was basically sleeping there to get all this stuff done. And she's like, you guys basically like you gotta find something else, you know. It was it was kind of getting out of hand. So we found this tiny little kitchen in Marabin in Melbourne, and we we set it up as our base. We're meeting a lot of people, and this guy just he was like an Uber driver because we were doing like Uber Uber deliveries out of this kitchen. This kitchen was not like this was not fit for what we're doing. Like we just had to take whatever we could so we can slowly build. Like this was a tiny kitchen, it was just so crammed. But this guy came to us, he said, Hey, I've got these beef beef patties. He's like, and he sold us like hundreds of beef patties, frozen ones, really cheap. And then my me and my business partner were like, you know what? Let's just live off beef patties. Like, let's just live off beef patties and cheese, and we'll save tons of money so we can keep growing the businesses, you know?

SPEAKER_01 7:16

And and so that's a very Italian migrant, isn't it? Let's just let's just go in by bowl.

SPEAKER_00 7:23

Yeah, yeah. So we just like, you know what, let's buy all these beef patties. We don't have to go shopping, we don't have to leave the kitchen. We'll just and then we just cook them on a pan, we put cheese, that's it, right? And so they'll it worked out to be like 50 cents or something a beef pad, like super cheap. So we would spend a few dollars a day on food, and that's all we I ate really was these these beef patties, man, they were bad. And I don't know how this guy gave them to us so cheap or where he got them from. Like, I just wouldn't do that to this day.