Speaker Profile

Elke knows food. She has been cooking for over 25 years in commercial kitchens as a chef and, using the seasons and senses, and continue to love creating simple seasonal dishes.
While Elke’s career as a chef has taken her around the globe, she has a strong passion for the ocean and her home country. Travelling around in her younger years taught Elke to appreciate the link between the seasons and local produce, which she aims to express through French-style culinary creations, both in commercial kitchens and at home with family.
She worked in restaurants such as the Hotel Äqua in Lorne, Vic and as Private and Boardroom Chefs and established Bite Size by Elke. Elke has been honoured to work with celebrities such as Curtis Stone and Donna Hay as food stylist, private chef for stars such as Usher and Madonna and be involved with emerging food brands within the Woolworths companies, SMEG an Coles.
Yet, in addition to this appreciation of seasonal flavours, another thing that drives her as a chef is an aversion to waste. In the restaurant kitchen, nothing is wasted - everything is used to create delicious meals. Seafood wild catches are precious yet 35% of them are wasted globally. Our oceans are under threat and we need to move rapidly towards a more sustainable approach.
Elke is also a lecturer at one of Sydney’s leading cooking schools inspiring the next generation of Chefs.
In 2020 she co-founded Seaweedery, aiming to reflect the way a chef works in the kitchen by finding creative ways to use up all the ingredients. Striving to take less from the ocean while creating more value.
While restaurants and food manufacturers might aim to reduce waste, our food system as a whole remains deeply wasteful, with a lot of resources lost in the food supply chain. This continues to inspire us to go further, rethinking accepted norms and established ways of doing things.
We see waste as a resource, a lost delicious ingredient for the food value chain.