Tag: food and travel

Story of the week: Raising a glass to British Food Fortnight in Cumbria

Local ales

* British Food Fortnight runs until October 6 this year, celebrating local produce and regional flavours. Some of my favourites come from Cumbria and this story picks up on that theme.

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Alex Brodie sups his pint and ponders for a moment.

“Do drinkers become journalists, or journalists become drinkers?” muses the former BBC World Service broadcaster turned microbrewer.

Reclining in his beer hall-style tasting room in his Cumbrian craft brewery, he sups a pint of the award-winning Hawkshead Bitter and lets the question roll around the high ceilings.

I join him on the leather sofas with a pint of dark and malty Brodie’s Prime and a piece of Welsh rarebit from the next-door café, Wilf’s, and quaff my beer appreciatively. “I love beer,” Alex stirs from his reverie.

“A good beer on a hot, sunny day is pure Ambrosia.”

“Walking the hills and sitting in country pubs sustained me through years of reporting from the Middle East,” he adds.

Real ale trail

Cumbria has a rich heritage of artisan brewing [pictured above] since the 1830 Beer Act first gave rise to a proliferation of local brew houses.

By the 1970s real ale was dying out but, thanks to Gordon Brown’s 2002 budget, whereby the excise duty was cut by 50% for brewers at a certain level of production, there are now over 600 independent breweries in the UK, of which 20-odd are based in Cumbria.

The Hawkshead Brewery, having relocated to the picture-postcard village of Staveley in 2006, is one of the new breed.

The brewery currently produces 80 brewers’ barrels per week [4 x 9-gallon casks] and sells its four permanent beers, plus seasonal beers, to 170 UK pubs. There are plans afoot to expand brewery tours to offer short courses for amateur would-be brew masters.

“We’re doing our best to change the image of real ale. We now stage two beer festivals per year and it’s not all beards and bellies — about half the drinkers are female,” enthuses Alex.

“There are now lots of microbreweries playing around with hops to produce fruity, hoppy beers,” he adds. “In same way new-world wine producers took the fear away from wine by talking about the grape, we’re now talking about hops.”

I’ve come to Cumbria to test drive the Lakes Line Real Ale Trail, a green-friendly initiative collaboratively launched by Westmorland CAMRA and the Lakes Lines Community Rail Partnership, plus First TransPennine Express.

The trail is based along the Lakes Line, a rural branch line that trundles through the scenic countryside of the Lake District National Park from the mainline train hub of Oxenholme to Windermere.

“We were conscious of the impact of the 16m visitors to Cumbria each year. This seemed an obvious way to showcase our local breweries while supporting sustainable travel and encouraging sensible drinking,” says Chris Holland, Chairman of the Westmorland branch of CAMRA.

“It’s only seven miles of railway now, but we plan to expand the idea to other parts of the region’s rail and bus network.”

Local brews

On a bright Lakeland morning I set out from my base at the Riverside Hotel in Kendal, a traditional inn serving a decent pint of Lakeland Gold, to explore the hop-flavoured trail.

There are nine pubs along the route, all within a short walk of the stations, and some attached to specialist small breweries.

Each has their own appeal from a swift lunchtime half of Directors in the Lamplighter Bar in Windermere, followed by a hike by the lake, to a mid-afternoon pint of Blond Witch at the Station Inn, Oxenholme, while soaking up the view and waiting for the next train.

It’s a greener way to sample the perfect combination of Lakeland beer and scenery, while supporting local transport.

Some of the nine establishments offer discounts upon presentation of a valid rail ticket, but make sure to have a copy of the timetable to hand at all times.

After developing a taste for Ulverston Pale Ale at the Eagle and Child Hotel in Staveley, it’s easy to roll out onto the station platform to face a sobering 60-minute wait for the next train.

Award winner

Towards the end of the day, as the sun hangs heavier in the sky than a Lakeland downpour, I head for my last stop, the Watermill Inn and Brewery.

Located down in a country lane in the village of Ings, outside Staveley, the cottage-industry microbrewery was founded in 2006 as an add-on to the family pub.

The two-man operation now produces 22 brewers’ barrels per week — around 6,300 pints — and the seven-beer portfolio includes three main brews plus seasonal ales.

“Brewing is a craft, the product of good ingredients and good practice,” explains the softly spoken brewer Brian Coulthwaite as we sit on the outdoor terrace with a pint of Blackbeard Ale and views across the rolling, sheep-grazing fields to Windermere.

“It’s essentially chemistry, all formulas and calculations. What I enjoy is experimenting to create new flavours.”

Back at the Hawkshead Brewery, Alex is taking me on a whistle-stop tour of the brewery and threatening to treat me to sneak preview of his latest brew, a Damson-flavoured stout.

“There’s a perfect storm for this kind of trail now with the public keen on local produce and green issues,” says Alex, indicating the ‘copper’, the vat where hops are added to give the complexity and flavour of the beer.

“It gets people out of their cars and walking, or using a train line that is periodically under threat,” he adds.

“After all, this is a national park, not a car park.”

 * This story was first published in the Daily Express in 2008. Liked this? Try Local Food Heroes in Cheshire.

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British menu

Story of the week: Meeting the local food producers in Ghent

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* Another story from the back catalogue, this week with a Flanders theme. I’ll be back in Belgium this autumn for the opening of the Red Star Line Museum in Antwerp’s Little Island district but, for now, a foodie tale from Ghent. Follow me on Twitter or subscribe to the RSS for more story updates. 

Belgian food gets a bad rap.

But the Flemish city of Ghent, a short hop by train from Brussels Midi, is kicking back against the stereotype of chips and waffles.

Not only is the Belgium’s fourth city home to traditional local stalwarts such as mustard purveyors Tierenteyn-Verlent and sweet shop Temmerman, but also a groundswell of small-scale food champions is adding a modern, new twist to favourite local flavours.

Many of these will be showcasing their wares during the city’s annual Patershol Festivities staged August 12 to 15, a long-weekend jamboree of music, performances and tastings around the labyrinthine, medieval streets reborn as the city’s restaurant district.

We profile the some of the faces behind Ghent’s burgeoning food scene.

Roomer

Brothers Maarten and Jeroen Michels started distilling elderflower wine during childhood visit to their grandmother’s house, using the fragrant flower that grows abundantly around East Flanders. Now in their mid thirties, they left steady jobs to turn Roomer [pictured above], a 14.9% alcoholic beverage based on elderflower, into a home-grown drinks business.

“It’s not a wine and not a liquor,” says the hirsute Maarten, surrounded by toys and Lego on the terrace of his office-home in Ghent’s residential southeastern suburbs. Roomer is based on all-natural ingredients and distilled with 21 varieties of herbs.

“Secret herbs,” adds Maarten from behind dark glasses. “They give it a dry, easy-drinking taste.”

The brothers have grown the business organically, producing 70,000 bottles of Roomer last year.

“We started as anti-professional with buckets in the kitchen. We’re now semi-professional,” smiles Maarten, who still rolls up his sleeves each June to collect some 1,200kg of flowers from sites around Ghent. Indeed, the whole production remains a hands-on, family affair with mother Marie Louise daintily placing flowers into open bottles with a pair of teasers.

“Exactly 50 flowers each time,” says Maarten. “She has a feel for it.

Roomer may now sit next to Martini and Pastis on aperitif lists at 500 restaurants across Flanders, but the brothers retain their non-corporate approach to business.

“We are entrepreneurs but philosophically we just wanted to have fun.”

Maartan raises an ice-clinking glass in cheers. “Op eu muile,” he smiles. “On your face.”

De Blauwe Zalm

Ghent’s Patershol district is a fashionable restaurant quarter

But when chef Danny De Cleyn and front-of-house Christine Beernaert first opened De Blauwe Zalm (The Blue Salmon) in 1984, the area was still a down-at-heel backwater and their idea to prepare only fish, organic and seasonal food a curiosity.

“We started with 15 covers and the pans from our kitchen,” says Chris. “When I put Jerusalem artichokes on the menu, people laughed at me.”

The couple moved to bigger premises in 1993 and became a stalwart of the Patershol scene, championing a low-food-miles approach without being prescriptive.

They still grow much of their own produce on an allotment near Ghent and source their fish sustainably from the North Sea, although the average dinner would have little clue about their green credentials of their meal – from the recycled tables to the freshly picked flowers on the tables.

“We haven’t sold tuna or swordfish in four years because of overproduction. But we’re not severe,” says Chris. “I’m not selling a religion.”

As I tuck into the light, seasonal flavours – basil, aubergine, muscles, brill and sea bass amongst them – a large blue-salmon-shaped light fitting swims along the ceiling above me.

“The salmon always swims against the tide.”

Chris smiles. “But always gets there in the end.”

Yuzu

Yuzu, the domain of chocolatier Nicholas Vanaise on the fringe of Ghent’s student quarter, offers a non-Belgian take on Belgian chocolates.

One-man-band Nicholas gave up Indiana Jones-style archaeological adventures around the Middle East to return to Ghent, but he continues to dig out new, contemporary flavours. Today Yuzu, named after a Japanese citrus flavour, comprises 150 chocolate varieties with a core range of 25 flavours.

“There’s a story behind every chocolate. Each praline is a memory board,” says Nicholas. “For example, the Havana, a best-seller flavoured with malt whisky and tobacco leaf, tastes of an English gentleman’s club.”

The selection box of Ghent flavours, by contrast, features chocolates laced with blue cheese, cured ham and beer.

The capsule-hotel-sized shop in Ghent is a shrine to Japanese taste with bottles of sake, sachets of green tea and porcelain cups lining the shelves. Nicholas goes flavour hunting to Japan each year and already sells his creations through the Matsuya department store in Tokyo.

Outside of running the shop, Nicholas spends up to eight labour-intensive hours per day making chocolates at his home-based laboratory, preparing up to eight varieties per day in batches of 100 pieces.

“At the end of a day of chocolate making, I’m desperate for something to take away the sweetness,” laughs Nicholas.

“I can murder a curry.”

Gruut

Gruut is not only Ghent’s only city brewery but it’s also an all-female affair with brewer Annick De Splenter opening the canal-side microbrewery restaurant in 2009.

Annick wanted to reinvent the mage and taste of beer and spent months researching the brew process before hitting on a formula.

She took an old recipe from the Middle Ages and replaced the hops with herbs, some sourced from her own garden.

“I wanted to get away from the dusty old image of brewers,” says elfin-blond Annick, surrounded by dark wood tables and shiny steel brewing vats.

“Brewing was traditionally a very physical job but technology helps us now.”

The Gruut range, named after the coin used in the Middle Ages, now extends to five beers, including a Trappist-style dark beer and a grand-cru ale, the Inferno.

Annick brews twice a week, producing some 1,000l of beer overall, which sells at 150 bars and restaurants around Ghent.

Annick has already launched some spin-off products, working with local companies to make Gruut-based pâté and cheese; she recycles malt from the brewing process to make bread for the restaurant.

But the real secret of Grout’s success is simple. “It’s a proper beer but with more softness than a typical brew. Best of all,” she grins.

“The herbs have aphrodisiac properties.”

 Gazetteer

 www.roomer.be 

www.deblauwezalm.be

www.gruut.be

* This story first appeared in Metropolitan magazine in 2011. Liked this? Try also Shine a Light on Flanders.

Dutch Lifestyle travel writing awards 2013

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I’ve won a travel-writing prize.

I’m delighted to say that I picked up the award for Best Article about a Dutch Icon at the annual Taste the Dutch Lifestyle Travel Writer Awards last month.

The awards were organised to honour UK journalists who have written outstanding articles about Holland in 2012.

The winning piece was Holland on a Plate, published in The Daily Express in July 2012.

Here’s an extract:

Farmer’s wife Corrie Balthus greets me with a white-plastic apron and a cheese mould.

She’s been up since six, making cheese in her rustic kitchen at Zeilzicht farm as she has every Friday for over 30 years.

“You need all five senses to make high-quality cheese,” she says, cutting into a eight-year-aged Gouda with a knife more like a sabre.

“You look at the colour and form, listen for the sweetness, crumble and smell it in your hand, and then taste it.”

More about the awards from the press section of Holland.com.

Liked this? Read about another win – the Golden Pen award from the Croatian National tourist Board.

And post your comments below.

Story of the week: The best steak in Buenos Aires

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* This is the sixth post in a new weekly series, highlighting stories from my travel-writing archive – many with no link online. I’m running them here in full. Subscribe to posts at this website for more.

I’d just never cut it as a gaucho. While the notion of life as an enigmatic loner, wandering the Pampas of Argentina with only a sturdy knife and a trusty steed for company, may have a romantic frisson, in reality I’m useless on horseback, have no aptitude for cattle ranching and don’t cut an attractive figure in the traditional loon pants known as bombachas.

In one of the gaucho’s traditional skills, however, I do have a fighting chance of cutting the mustard: preparing a good steak.

Like any meat-eating male with a bag of briquettes and a penchant for scorching cocktail sausages to within an inch of their lives, I’m keen to my flex barbecue muscles come the first hint of summer.

Now, thanks to a trip to Buenos Aires and a crash-course in the fine art of the grill at a legendary steakhouse, I can hold my head up high as a bone-fide grillmaster, a skill steeped in the meat-handling heritage of Argentina’s gaucho tradition.

So it is on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Buenos Aires we gather at La Cabaña, located in the city’s fashionable Recoleta district, for the three-hour Argentine Barbecue Master course. This Buenos Aires institution, reopened in October 2003 having been acquired by hotel and leisure company Orient Express, last year celebrated the 70th anniversary of the opening of the original restaurant in 1935.

La Cabaña works with over 3,000kg of top-quality meat per month, sourced from 75 farms in the wet pampas region around the city. The meat is hung for 30 days to make it more tender and sealed in plastic wrapping before delivery to La Cabaña.

The most popular cut of steak in the restaurant is the Baby Beef (a 14oz cut off the rib, similar to a sirloin or Porterhouse), which retails for around £8.50. The King’s Beef, a new 43.9oz rib eye named after King Carlos of Spain, is now on the menu at £20.

Beyond the understated facade, an open kitchen gives way to an opulent dining room with a series of private rooms tucked away in discrete alcoves. Modern artworks adorn the walls and two giant cows guard the entrance, while the centrepiece is a traditional Argentine asado, an open fire of glowing coals over which cuts of meat are cooked on a spit.

While we prepare for class, the staff, attired in sleek, black uniforms and going about their business with a cosmopolitan air, busy themselves by preparing the covers for the evening service.

The course combines theoretical tuition on the different cuts of meat with a practical application of barbecue techniques. Hence, before we are let loose with a hot grill and a huge tenderloin, we first eschew the aprons for notepads and pens.

Grill chef Daniel Leguisamo starts by examining the 19 most commonly used cuts of meat used in Argentina (from a possible 27), far more than other meat-eating countries.

As we group around a pin-the-tail-on-the-cow-style display board, Daniel points out how several cuts would not even make it onto French menus while, in keeping with the gaucho tradition, every part of the animal in la Cabaña’s kitchen.

Different cuts have different flavours and the wood-fired oven, fired with quebracho blanco, a slow-burning wood from the northeast of Argentina, ensures that the meat cooks slowly, maintaining its flavour and absorbing some of the distinct perfume of the wood.

After a round of choripan, bread toasted over the grill, stuffed with a grilled sausage and accompanied by a glass of Argentina’s favourite varietal, Malbec, we wrap up with the ten commandments of a good grill, notably that the meat is cooked from room temperature and the embers moved to distribute the heat evenly during cooking.

Aprons on and hands scrubbed, we then start gently with the practical session, the preparation of the sweetmeats, kidneys and blood sausages to whet the appetite and test our ability to weather the furnace-like fury of the grill.

Suitably warmed up, head chef Damian Gelati rolls up his sleeves and takes me on one side. It’s time to go to work.

With the smell of sizzling meat whipping my gastric juices to a frenzy, we move onto the house speciality: the lomo, or tenderloin medallion, also known as the Argentine diamond. Under Damian’s watchful eye, I remove the fat with a viciously sharp knife, cut off a 400kg portion and pummel it furiously to soften the meat.

“Imagine it’s the face of someone you hate,” smiles Damian and he sets about the meat with bare knuckles and a vaguely demented look in his eye.

He continues: “There are two secrets to preparing the perfect steak. You have to maintain the temperature of the grill at a steady 120 degrees centigrade and only turn the meat once during cooking so as not to loose the flavour.”

The cooking itself is more straightforward. We first coat the grill in fat, rubbing the grease into the ridges to avoid sticking, and then sprinkle salt onto the meat. “The meat is cooked plain, not coated in sauces like they do in the United States,” he winks with a note of pride.

We cook the steak for five minutes per side before serving it on a thermal plate. Prepared and served in a few minutes, the simplicity of the process ensures it retains the very best of its natural flavour.

In fact, the only condiment is a dash of chimichuri, a lightly spicy sauce of wine vinegar, garlic, laurel leaves, oregano, parsley, paprika and dry pepper.

The taste? Melt-in-the-mouth delicious and cooked to perfection – even if I do say so myself.

I may never don a pair of chaps and rustle steeds in the pampas, but give me a knife, a slab of meat and a fine night in the back yard this summer and I’ll be the original lone-riding gringo gaucho.

* This story was first published in the Weekend Financial Times in 2006.