“THE MONARCH OF DARJEELING TEA IS FIRST FLUSH, HARVESTED WHEN THE FIELDS AWAKEN FROM THEIR WINTER HIBERNATION”

Images: Tom Bradley

It’s the heat that hits first: the thick, claggy heat, then the honking and fumes of the swarm of vehicles clamouring around the airport. Scanning the sea of faces as I step outside, I feel the sensory assault everyone had told me I’d experience upon first arriving in India – together with a tremor of misgiving as I take in the yellow fog and crammed, dusty buildings. My concerns are interrupted by a shout – “Clare! Over here!” – and the sight of a familiar face beaming atop a wholly unfamiliar outfit. In Borough Market, at his Tea2You stall, Ratan Mondal is one of the more smartly dressed traders, never seen without a suit jacket and chinos, but here in West Bengal his dapper ensemble has been replaced by shorts, a floppy sun hat and a safari-style shirt.

He waves a wooden walking stick and, once I’ve pushed my way through the crowds, takes my hand. “Welcome to Bagdogra! Are you hungry? Because it’s a three-hour journey up into the mountains.” I sigh with relief – not because I relish the prospect of a three-hour drive along dirt roads, but because for a confused and jetlagged moment I’d thought this pollution-choked city was the site of the tea plantation from which Ratan sources his Darjeeling tea. A hair-raising drive later and, while my nerves are on edge, my misgivings have dissipated entirely. Drawing up at Gopaldhara tea lodge, we appear to be suspended amid skeins of cool mist and waves of lush foliage, rolling down into the Mirik valley. There is no sound beyond that of chickens, cockerels and dogs. There is – imagine! – no wifi. “This is Darjeeling,” says Ratan proudly, as we step out of the jeep.

Gopaldhara is enormous. The next morning, as the sun rises, I’m reminded of the scene in the Lion King when Mufasa declares: “Everything the light touches is my kingdom.” Mahendra Kharti, the manager of Gopaldhara for the last 20 years, employs about 600 people, across over 320 hectares. His is one of 87 tea estates in the Darjeeling hills that have been accorded the right by Tea Board India to label their produce Darjeeling tea. In total, these estates cover more than 17,500 hectares of land, produce around nine million kilos of tea annually and employ around half the population of the Darjeeling district. It’s big business – and big bucks too, thanks to its prestige, popularity and the relative scarcity caused by its geographical restrictions.

Of course, inscrutable merchants get around these rules by mixing cheaper teas in with Darjeeling and passing it off as the real McCoy. Yet competition is fierce, even among respectable buyers like Ratan. “It is a tough job I’m doing, a very tough job – but I love the competition,” he grins. “I know the palate of my customers. I have knowledge of the tea.” The art of trading tea, he says, is in balancing numbers. “The better the quality of the tea, the less of it is produced.” That’s why the first flush of Darjeeling is so sought after: it’s produced in small quantities, over a very limited period. You might be King Charles – and indeed, His Royal Highness is one of Ratan’s customers – but when he’s sold out of first flush, that’s it. Everyone has to wait until next year. “You cannot dictate the crop. You can’t sell more than is grown.”

Which is where the fine balance comes into play. Over these few weeks in March and April, Ratan needs to buy enough first flush to keep his customers sated, but not so much he has stock left into the following year. Tea has a good shelf life, about 15 months, but those customers looking for first flush Darjeeling are not looking for leaves that are a year old. “Each year I have to work out how much I can sell. And I have to get the best, too,” he says.

Across the valley, the clouds are brewing and glowering menacingly. India has seven seasons to our three, and this – the beginning of summer – features thunderstorms and lightening most mornings. “You cannot predict the weather,” says Kharti, looking at the sky with surprising calm, given its implications for today’s harvest. Already the first pickers, deceived by the early morning sunshine, have started retreating.

The heavens open. Thunder rolls. The feeble power supply in the lodge splutters out completely. It’s dramatic, but also disastrous for both our photographer Tom and for Kharti, who now stands to lose not just a morning’s picking, but a morning’s processing too. His factory sits at the bottom of the valley, just out of sight from where we’re staying. We’d planned to walk down but until the rain eases, he says, no one can go anywhere. The paths are too steep and slippery to pass by foot or by vehicle. There is nothing to do but wait and – one silver lining – drink tea.

We wait with anticipation, the thunder grumbling around us, until Kharti’s housekeeper Didi emerges with a glass teapot of golden liquid. “Is this first flush Darjeeling?” we ask in hushed whispers. “Yes,” says Ratan, giggling delightedly, “but it is not very good.” I smile, wondering if his joke is lost on me – but he is in fact being entirely honest. “The best tea is exported. We don’t keep good tea in India, because abroad it has so much more value. Indian customers who want first flush? They buy it from England.” He laughs again, delightedly. “They buy it from me.”

Thus ends the first of many lessons about tea hierarchy – a hierarchy that makes the British class system look straightforward. Though all tea is the same species of plant, Camellia sinuses, it varies endlessly according to terroir, climate and how it is processed. The monarch of Darjeeling tea is first flush, harvested when the fields awaken from their winter hibernation, and is referred to as FTGFOP, ‘fine tippy golden flowery orange pekoe’ – or “far too good for ordinary people” as those in the trade jokingly have it. ‘Tippy’ refers to the tips, or buds, on the bushes; ‘golden’ to the tinge of leaves picked early in the harvest; and ‘orange pekoe’ to the fact it is whole leaf. “Orange pekoe is not a type of tea,” stresses Ratan. In the cup, FTGFOP commands delicate, fragrant flavours with astringency and beautiful sweetness. Golden flowery orange pekoe (GFOP), meanwhile, could be described as the landed gentry of Darjeeling: a whole leaf tea harvested in first flush, but with a slightly lower proportion of golden tips.

From there the tea descends in ‘class’ according to where it is harvested and how it’s processed. While most Darjeeling tea is produced using the orthodox method, meaning the leaves are kept whole and there is limited mechanical interference, outside of Darjeeling the most commonly found type of tea is produced by highly mechanical means, known as the cut, tear, curl (CTC) method. The leaves are passed through a series of teethed cylindrical rollers that crush, tear and curl the tea into small, hard bits, increasing the surface area and inducing that familiar bitter flavour. The result is piled into teabags, shipped, and served with sugar and milk.

“You don’t need milk with my tea,” boasts Ratan: indeed, to do so would be sacrilege, the equivalent of topping champagne up with lemonade or serving Parma ham with ketchup. “In the old days, the English used to lock up Darjeeling tea in their drawers. They saw it as gold dust,” he says nostalgically, “but English people don’t really know tea today.” Contrary to popular opinion, English breakfast is not a type of tea. It’s a blend of cheap black CTC teas from all over the world, picked in huge quantities. During a typical day on Gopaldhara tea garden, a picker will pick two to three kilos per person – perhaps just one, when picking the highest grade FTGFOP teas during a difficult season. “In Assam, where they are picking tea for CTC, an average picker will pick 25 to 30,” Kharti interjects somewhat disparagingly. In other words, they’ll pick indiscriminately, valuing quantity over quality, and with no thought as to the size of the leaf or its tips.

We are interrupted by the sound of birdsong. The weather seems to be turning, and within a few minutes the bell calling the pickers back to work is chiming insistently. A jeep pulls up and Kharti introduces us to his driver, “a very experienced man, who has been with me for eight years”. Within moments we are discovering why such experience matters. The Mizik Valley is steep: far steeper than the mist and green gardens suggested, and the dirt track running down to the factory is single file and edged on one side by a heart-stoppingly steep drop. What’s more, we’re reversing down it, at a pace that is far from cautious. I shut my eyes and try my best not to wonder how many accidents the driver has had or narrowly missed in the course of eight years.

“Gopaldhara Tea Estate” reads the welcome sign, in a colonial-style writing that reminds us that tea is not, after all, a traditional Indian crop, but one imposed by the British in the 19th century. Those colonial ties can be seen in the machines, half of which were made in Britain. The other, considerably shinier half are Taiwanese. On a sheet just outside the factory, the morning’s harvest is being laid out in what is now glistening sunshine. “It will sun-wither for two hours,” says Kharti, “depending on weather.” Inside, the factory is slowly warming up following the power cut, and for the next 20 minutes Kharti busies himself inspecting the various machines.

“The manager has arrived,” smiles Ratan as he watches his friend proudly. After nine years of trading, theirs is a relationship marked by respect and fairness. “He manages everything, from top to bottom. A tea manager is one of the most prestigious jobs you can have in this country – and Kharti is one of the best.” With 600 people under his care and numerous trading partnerships, Kharti speaks four languages – Nepalese, Hindi, Bengalese and English – and has a knowledge of tea Ratan says he can only aspire to. “I am his student,” he tells me modestly. “Don’t listen to him!” Kharti calls over. “Ratan is the master. He knows. He is the best.”

They agree to disagree and Ratan takes us upstairs, to long troughs where yesterday’s sun-withered harvest is being withered still further. This process involves blowing air through the leaves to dry them until they lose around 60 per cent of their moisture. Once supple, the now-dark green leaves will be rolled and oxidised – that is, fermented – and already there is a distinct, light but vegetal aroma rising off the withering leaves. Ratan can’t help but take a handful: “Smell that,” he says, proffering a fistful of leaves. Were Darjeeling a drug – and there are moments at which the long, curled tea leaves bear a striking resemblance to one – Ratan would probably need rehab. Mercifully for all concerned, that is where the resemblance finishes.

The depth of Ratan’s passion is echoed by everyone at Gopaldhara. It has to be. It’s a monotonous job, and there’s no step you can skip or fast forward. From picking to packaging, each stage demands care, attention and what Kharti believes is inherited skill. “You cannot teach this,” he says later that afternoon, as we observe women picking in the garden, throwing the fresh leaves expertly into the baskets on their backs. “They’ve been doing this for centuries, mother to daughter.” Though today they are under orders to pick only “two leaves and a bud, from the top of the bush – the highest quality”, they do so with remarkable speed, singing and chatting. Are they always this happy? I ask Kharti, somewhat surprised that such a seemingly tedious job could elicit such positivity. “Yes. They get a good salary. They start early, but they finish early, and medical care and childcare are free.”

The amount the pickers pick is weighed at the weighing station (a small platform in the garden, with an enormous set of old fashioned scales), and they are paid accordingly. India is deeply hierarchal, a compound effect of colonialism and the caste system – but while this hierarchy is manifest in the many managerial and supervisor positions in the garden, the plantation’s structures do not seem exploitative. The women work in the fields; the men work in the factory; the children are at school until their teens and then, in most cases, at college or university. The youngest age of any worker, factory or picker, is “no less than 22 or 23”.

Back in the factory, the driers are blasting out heat, the rolling machines are whirring, and the withered leaves from yesterday’s harvest are in a fanning machine to halt oxidation. “All black tea is oxidised, or fermented,” explains Kharti – in contrast to white tea, which is not fermented at all, and green tea which is only fermented slightly – “but my tea is not fermented quite as fully as most black teas.” How long the leaves are fanned for depends on how they have withered, which in turn depends on where they have come from. Much like how single-origin winemakers bottle their grapes according to areas of the vineyard, each part of the garden is picked and processed separately. “The leaf needs looking after, like a little baby,” says Kharti, catching a couple of leaves out of the fanning machine and feeling them. “These are ready,” he nods to the chap operating the machine.

Next up is the rolling machine: a cross between a roulette and a steel drum which curls the withered leaves tightly “to lock in the flavour”, Ratan shouts over the whirring. The spinning leaves are mesmerising, as is the deftness of Kharti’s eye as he judges when to stop and when to keep rolling, nodding and gesturing like the Willy Wonka of tea. “The timing is everything,” he says, as the machine slows to a stop and we stoop to inspect the leaves, tightly furled and wound together. “Each batch looks the same to you, right?” smiles Ratan. “But that is the game, for me. Because each will make for a very different tasting tea.”

Trespassing twigs are picked out, as are leaves that have not rolled properly. Big knots of leaves are carefully disentangled. “It’s like my hair in the morning,” I comment, as I help Kharti and Ratan with sorting, prior to the leaves entering the drying machine. The tea enters the drier looking like seaweed; it emerges recognisably as tea, dark and dry and ready for sampling – for Ratan will not make an offer on any batch without tasting it. “What’s your favourite part of the process?” I ask Kharti, as we watch the tea tumble from the drier into waiting trays. “I enjoy it all,” he replies. “If you do not enjoy it, you cannot make good tea.”

The leaves are moved to the packaging room, where patient workers comb through them one last time in bamboo trays before bagging them up for shipping. They wear masks and shoe protectors not to shield themselves (the amount of dust rising from leaves of this size is minimal to non-existent) but to protect the tea from any dirt they might have brought in from outside. In the meantime, Ratan heads to Kharti’s office for the tasting ritual: nine batches, nine cups, nine separate displays of dramatic sniffing, swilling and spitting. For someone whose tea custom is desk-based, with thirsty gulps conducted amid intermittent chatter and typing, such theatrics seem extraordinary – but when it comes to Darjeeling, the fair comparison is not your morning cuppa but the ceremonial tasting of fine wines.

“Same-day tasting is tough,” Ratan continues, halfway through the tasting. Like wine, tea continues to develop its flavour post-packaging, so freshly processed tea has a shallower flavour profile than it will do in a couple of weeks’ time. That’s where Ratan’s experience comes in. What to me still tastes like water, to him might have the makings of something marvellous. At one moment he stops and laughs. “This is the one,” he exclaims, his eyes shining. “The smell of it. It is the tea god. This one is mine.” The negotiations between Ratan and Kharti are friendly, but protracted – so Tom and I seize the chance to taste some tea ourselves, using Kharti’s framed Tea Tasters Guide as a reference point. It covers flavour, aroma, texture and aftertaste, with words like ‘muscatel’, ‘vegetal’, ‘briskness’ and ‘brightness’ peppered throughout. We fumble for the words to describe what we’re tasting, much like I do with the wine list in a restaurant I can’t really afford to be in. “Is this… vegetal?” we ask each other, baffled – and Ratan, having secured a price he is happy with, overhears us and smiles. “Tea tasters talk too much. You can describe the taste to a point, but beyond that…” he shrugs. “It is a feeling inside that is beyond words” – and with the inimitable taste and fragrance of first flush Darjeeling suffusing my senses, this seems a fitting place for this particular flow of words to bow out.

“JUST AS TOAST IS OUR GO-TO SNACKAGE IN THE UK, IN SOUTHERN INDIA DOSAS ARE DEVOURED WHENEVER HUNGER STRIKES”

Illustration: Ed Smith

Cooking a dosa is a masterclass in the transformation of humble ingredients into culinary catnip. Ground lentils and rice are stirred together with water to make a batter, left to ferment, then fried into pancakes. Crisp on the outside and vaguely spongy within (all the better for soaking up flavour), it is unsurprising that the dosa ranks among southern India’s culinary treasures.

Just as toast is our go-to snackage in the UK, dosas are considered a breakfast favourite in parts of India but in practice, they are generally devoured whenever hunger strikes. Comforting and filling, the batter can be made from a slew of ingredients that yield different textures, colours and flavours. Often, they’re wrapped around spiced mashed vegetables to make a divine edible pillow, then accessorised with chutney and perhaps a wet and soupy sambar for dunking.

“In all southern Indian kitchens dosas are really important,” says Gaurav Gautam, director of Borough Market Kitchen’s Horn OK Please stand, which fries, folds and fills hundreds of dosas for ravenous customers each week. “A lot of people will keep a jug of dosa batter ready in the fridge so it’s ready to go when they’re hungry.”

Dosas are commonly made with rice and urad lentils, sometimes scented with fenugreek. But, really, dosas aren’t about sticking to a single set of rules. Rava dosas are made with semolina and rice, imbued with cumin, ginger, asafoetida and nuts. Nariyal dosas come with coconut chutney, while a love-in of flour, rice flour, coconut, jaggery and sometimes cardamom give rise to jaggery dosas.

At Horn OK Please, Gaurav’s dosa dishes are a pan-India amalgam. The dosas themselves are made with moong beans and  – no fermentation required! – mixed with rice flour and a little turmeric to make a thick and brightly hued batter, a specialty of Andhra Pradesh in south-eastern India. Potato is a common dosa filling, but Gaurav honours a family recipe from northern India that involves cooking red and white potatoes low and slow, then spiking them with tangy dried mango powder. Served with chana chaat, a spiced chickpea stew, the whole thing is garlanded with date and tamarind chutney and pomegranate seeds. A national treasure indeed.

Urad lentils and rice

Dosas are traditionally made with urad lentils and rice, sometimes fenugreek seeds, soaked in water overnight to ferment and develop flavour. The mixture is finely ground to a paste, then enough water is added (and sometimes a little butter) to make a batter of the perfect consistency – stout enough to produce pancakes that can carry the load of a filling, but somehow airy as well.

Fat

Oil or ghee is used to grease the tawa or hotplate. The batter is spread out into a thin circle and cooked briefly until crisp, often on just one side, then folded or rolled around fillings.

Vegetables

Fillings often comprise boiled and mashed vegetables made flamboyantly flavourful with spices like curry leaves, ginger, chillies, asafoetida and turmeric.

Chutneys

Rowdy accompaniments convey an extra layer of deliciousness. Chutneys might be of a coriander, coconut, mint or mango inclination. Many dosa devotees claim that sambar – a hot and spicy soupy dish spiked with tamarind – is also obligatory.

“IT’S THE ETERNAL PROBLEM OF SMOKED FISH – EATING THEM TAKES MINUTES, BUT THEIR PRESENCE LINGERS FOR DAYS”

I live in a block in which one of the flats is occupied by a lovely family whose diet revolves around two rich, spicy, slow-cooked dishes, eaten in rotation, one emitting the pungent funk of offal, the other the assertive whiff of preserved fish. Both provide a full sensory assault. On fish days in particular, that heady smell moves through the building like an angry ghost, passing through doors and walls and dripping its salty ectoplasm onto everything. Insisting that a neighbour swap their delicious food for something much blander is out of the question, so instead the block’s other occupants have come to the unspoken agreement that the windows on our landings should be left wide open, regardless of weather or risk of burglary.

This is, of course, the eternal problem of smoked or salted fish – the fact that eating them takes just minutes, but their presence lingers for days. My dad’s favourite food is kippers, but at an early stage in his marriage he realised he had to choose between kippers and, well, marriage, and so only eats them in hotels. Even storage is an issue. I once had a bitter argument with a flatmate whose stash of saltfish in the fridge infused its scent into our milk so thoroughly that my breakfast cereal ended up tasting like a hot day at Billingsgate.

Some fish, though, are worth all the opprobrium and tainted laundry. These traditional cured, hot-smoked haddock from Oak & Smoke, sourced from a traditional producer on the east coast of Scotland, are a thing of wonder, soft, creamy and smoothly smoky. I like to smear them with butter then heat them under the grill, something I can do without risk: everyone else in the block will blame my neighbours. And they’re so good that if my morning porridge ends up offering a little taste memory, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

“YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT THAT SOME THINGS ARE NOT GOING TO WORK. BUT YOU LEARN SOMETHING FROM EVERY BATCH”

Images: Joseph Fox

“As the cows are being milked, some of it is fed directly into our milk van. We then drive it 20 yards from the milking sheds to our cheesemaking rooms…”

Dave Holton, co-founder and head cheesemaker at Blackwoods Cheese Company, talks me through this shortest of short supply chains as we stroll past a group of contented-looking cows, chewing away in a field. “Once there, the milk goes straight into our cheesemaking vats; there is no storage involved,” he continues. “In fact, it doesn’t even have time to cool down. All we do is add the cheese starter cultures and the cheesemaking process begins – we don’t have to apply heat to get things going. It is one of the many lovely things about being here.”

‘Here’ is a converted farm building deep in the Kent countryside. The cows belong to a small-scale organic dairy farmer, and Blackwoods Cheese Company’s cheesemaking facility is conveniently located in a red brick farm building on the same country estate.

“As a cheesemaker, everything starts with the milk: you can’t make great cheese with poor milk,” Dave explains. “The farm has a three-way breeding programme which uses Holstein Friesians, the classic black and white dairy cows we all know; Montbéliarde, a French breed traditionally used to make comte in the Alps; and Swedish Reds, which add a bit more butterfat to the milk. This produces beautiful milk, which is perfect for us to work with.”

The spectacularly short journey from udder to cheesemaking facility keeps the solids and proteins in the milk in perfect condition, lending Blackwoods’ finished cheeses their clean, highly defined flavours.

Standing here, looking out across the lush green fields of the Garden of England, it is difficult to imagine a more bucolic setting for an artisan English cheesemaker, creating classic English cheeses. But not everything is quite as it seems.

Far from being a man of the English countryside, Dave grew up in the Yarra Valley, near Melbourne – about as far from this green and pleasant land as it’s possible to get. His was a region with a rich dairy tradition. “I did a degree in environmental earth science, but soon realised that it wasn’t the field for me,” he says. “One of my mates was a cheesemaker at the local dairy, and I mentioned at a party that I was looking to work in food. It turned out that the dairy had a job going. I started three days later.”

It was his desire to experience cheesemaking in other parts of the world that brought Dave to England. “Learning to make cheese is both an art and a science,” he says. “You have four ingredients: milk, a cheese culture, rennet and salt. The process is as much about working with time, temperature and the environment as it is about manipulating the ingredients. It may take weeks, months or even years to see how changes in your process affect the final cheese. I was really curious to see how other people worked.”

Together with his good friend Cameron Rowan, Dave planned a trip to Europe. The idea was to visit cheesemakers and cheesemongers in France, Spain and the Netherlands, as well as Britain. They would eat cheese, make friends, drink wine and generally tour the continent, picking up what they could from the artisans they met along the way. They would then return to Australia, laden with this new-found knowledge, to start making cheeses of their own.

“Before leaving Australia, I had set up 10 days’ work here in London, so my first experience of European cheese was working behind the counter at Neal’s Yard Dairy in Borough Market during the Christmas rush – which I can only define as bedlam,” Dave recalls.

Those 10 days at Neal’s Yard Dairy somehow turned into three years, during which time Dave also managed to fit in an internship with the Mons affineurs in France.

While their plans for a European tour may have been shelved, the urge to make cheese was still strong in Dave and Cameron, so they joined up with another childhood friend, Rory Holwerda, and Tim Jarvis (the lone Brit), all of whom had worked at Neal’s Yard Dairy, to make their first tentative steps into production. “We named the company after the road I grew up on.” Blackwoods Cheese Co was born.

The gang’s first experiments were with ‘Persian fetta’, which according to Dave is a style of cheese developed by an Australian cheesemaker who had travelled through Iran in the 1970s and fallen in love with the local feta-style cheeses. Hugely popular in Australia, Persian fetta had proved impossible to find in the UK.

“We thought that if we missed that taste, then other Australians might feel the same,” Dave explains. “We adapted our process to work in local conditions and made a couple of tweaks, the main one being the use of raw milk, which is illegal in Australia. It is still recognisable, though, which is really gratifying to hear from Australians over here who have found us.”

However, if you head over to Blackwoods’ Borough Market stall, there won’t be a jar with the name ‘Persian fetta’ anywhere in sight. “As we are in the EU, the name ‘feta’ is protected, so we called it Graceburn after the river that flows through the town where we grew up,” Dave reveals.

“Being made from cow’s milk, it is less salty than a traditional feta, with a deeper, more rounded flavour. The olive oil we use is flavoured with peppercorns, thyme and garlic and you get some of those flavours coming through as well – it is a lovely cheese.” A bronze medal at the British Cheese Awards in 2015 would suggest that Dave is not alone in his assessment.

Dave’s plan was to have some fun with his mates making cheese in the frozen north, then head back home to make even more cheese in the Aussie sun. But life – as it so often does – had different ideas. While Cameron chose to fly back to Australia, and Rory – clearly deciding that London wasn’t quite far enough away from Melbourne – moved north to Scotland, Dave met and married an English girl and England became his permanent home. So, while Cameron and Rory still have a share in the business, Dave and Tim are now Blackwoods’ driving force and full-time cheesemakers.

In contrast to their current rural idyll, Blackwoods’ first dedicated production space was in the far more prosaic surroundings of an industrial estate in Brockley, south London. The move to Kent was a logical step: the team used to drive down here a couple of times a week anyway, loading 500 litres of milk in the van before driving the 40 miles back to London.

As well as its proximity to a supply of superb milk, what this converted farm building offered was a space in which the cheesemakers could truly express themselves, creating cheeses that reflect their characters and sense of craftsmanship. “Our core ethos has become one of not interfering in the process too much.” Dave explains. “It is all about following their development and seeing where they take us. We don’t want to end up with cheeses that are clones of something else.”

Dave points out that all artisanal cheeses are quite literally a product of their environment, so the new surroundings allow the cheesemakers to explore new tastes and textures. “Everywhere you go there are microbes in the air that will interact with cheese as it is being made, and these will vary in different areas,” Tim interjects.

Dave wholeheartedly agrees. “It is like making wine, but we have a different vintage every day – the milk and environmental conditions will never be exactly the same two days in a row. Working with these changes is at the heart of any artisanal production. It means we have the chance to create something that is entirely our own.”

The pair are particularly fascinated by soft cheeses. “It is a very involved process which works over a much shorter time frame than the hard cheeses,” says Dave. “Because things happen quickly, you have to pay constant close attention to things like humidity, temperature, air quality. You have to judge just the right time to wash the cheeses with brine, which we do to encourage the types of moulds we are after, and create the environment they need to thrive. This level of involvement gives the cheesemaker a real connection with the cheese.”

The process involves plenty of trial and error. “You just have to accept that some things are not going to work. But you learn something from every batch, and knowing what doesn’t work is just as important as knowing what does. For each new batch, you tweak different elements. You build on the good bits, then start again.”

“But never make too many changes at once,” Tim adds with a wry grin. “The worst scenario is to have a batch that turns up with a wonderful texture and lovely flavours, but then you struggle to recreate it because you can’t define what changes were key to the improvement. Communication is key. With so many variables, it is vital each of us knows what the other is doing. That’s why there are notebooks everywhere.”

While he may be firmly ensconced in the Kentish countryside, in two cheeses with the unlikely names of Edmund Tew and William Heaps, Dave is able to demonstrate that he has not entirely lost touch with his Aussie roots.

“They are part of our ‘Convict’ series – cheeses named after convicts who were transported to Australia for stealing cheese,” Dave says with a huge grin spreading across his face. “The chance for an Aussie to make cheeses in the UK that are illegal to produce in Australia, and name them after convicts sent to Australia for stealing cheese in Britain, was just too good to pass up.”

Given the enthusiasm that British judges once had for dishing out this particular punishment, there is certainly scope for a few more cheeses in the series. With such wonderful milk, in such a beautiful place, and with a sense of adventure that constantly pushes them forward, the likelihood of other unfortunate cheese-stealing miscreants finding themselved immortalised in the tastes and textures conjured up by Blackwoods Cheese Company seems high.

“THE EXPERIENCE OF HOLDING THE RADIANT, BEAUTIFUL, HEAVY HEART OF A JUST-SHOT DEER REMAINS VIVID IN MY MEMORY”

There are five organs that are essential for survival: brain, heart, kidneys, liver and lungs. It’s ironic, then, that these vital items are often considered the waste parts of an animal. The bits you neither want to cook, or eat. The offal. That’s such a shame, isn’t it?

In this new six-part series, I’m going to work my way through not only the vital organs, but the other bits of trim and pluck that are all too easy to turn away from. There’ll be choice facts, tasting notes, hints and tips and of course a recipe each time. As someone who’s cooked and eaten everything at least once already, but often not much more than that, there’ll be an honesty too – if the offal is difficult to cook or stomach, I’ll say that.

Hearts and kidneys: what do they taste like?

I once spent a day with a gamekeeper mid deer cull. The experience of holding the radiant, beautiful and remarkably heavy heart of a just-shot sika deer remains vivid in my memory. It was a humbling moment, to say the least. Could there be anything of greater value than a still warm heart?

And yet hearts are one of the most economical pieces of meat you could hope to buy. Just three or four quids’ worth of beef heart could easily feed a family of four.

Hearts are an excellent starting point if you want to get into offal. Once prepared, they look nothing like the original organ (well, the larger ones don’t) and, generally, the taste of an animal’s heart is akin to a mild version of the same animal’s prime meat, with just a hint of iron. It’s really quite a subtle ‘offaliness’, certainly relative to something like liver.

I’m afraid these tasting notes can’t be repeated when it comes to kidneys. In my view, the existence of kidney in childhood memories of steak and kidney pie is almost certainly why many people turn their nose up at offal. Those heavy ferrous notes in tough, overcooked nuggets of kidney were pretty off putting. Worse still, the bits of kidney often tasted of more than just iron – because of the work the organ did while its donor was alive, the chance of acrid, pungent, ever so slightly urine-like taste of poorly prepared kidneys is high.

But that point about being ‘poorly prepared’ is key. For in my opinion kidneys can be a real treat. A little challenging, yes, but silky and rewarding too.

Heart: cooking options

Think of the amount of work a heart gets through in its lifetime. This makes for a tough muscle – the now well-rehearsed cooking method for which is low and slow.

Indeed, many classic recipes call for a gentle braise, a few hours below 140C, during which the lean but tough fibres of a heart break down and soften. Alternatively, large cow and ox hearts might be chunked up and simmered in a stew until tender.

I’ll draw your attention to a few offal loving-chefs over the course of this series – Anissa Helou, Jennifer McLagan and Fergus Henderson will probably all feature more than once – and it’s to Henderson I’ll turn for a good example of a low and slow recipe: his stuffed lamb hearts in offal bible Nose to Tail Eating involves a filling of sage-flavoured bread, fat rashers of bacon round the outside, and then a gentle cook for two to three hours.

However, hearts behave in a similar way to squid and cuttlefish in that, yes, you can cook them slowly until tender. But you can also try cooking heart hard and fast. In fact, this is my preferred style of cooking and eating animal hearts.

If they’re on a menu, I can never resist ordering duck or chicken hearts skewered and cooked over charcoal, or flashed in clarified butter on a white hot pan so they’re brown and charred on the outside, but blushing pink within. They’ll often be served on a sweet root vegetable purée – jerusalem artichoke or parsnip, for example. Heaven.

Larger lamb, calf, deer, beef or ox hearts need to be sliced thinly to enjoy the same style of cooking. They’re trimmed of hard fat and sinew, then fairly easily cut open so that they sit flat on a board. Cut into 3-5 segments, they look pretty much like rump steaks already. But if more than 1cm thick, it’s best they’re sliced in half depth-wise, so that a 30-60 second sear on each side is all that is required. It’s very similar to eating a steak.

Kidneys: cooking options

Kidneys should be cooked quickly as well. While they’ve traditionally been used in pies and suet puddings, a long cooking process doesn’t suit this type of offal at all – it becomes tough, leathery and overpowering. By contrast, a few minutes in a frying pan or wok works a treat. The kidneys are just pink inside, delicate, flavourful and soft.

They need to be fresh, mind. You simply push any bits of fat from the kidney, cut away an obvious, stringy bit of sinew, then fry in clarified butter.

The best kidney I ever ate was one I’d removed from a lamb carcass about three minutes beforehand. It was light and lamby in flavour, smooth in texture and utterly delicious. A sprinkle of sea salt and pepper was enough on that occasion. But normally, kidneys like a little heat. In Britain we’re used to devilled kidneys on toast – cayenne pepper, cream, perhaps a bit of paprika too. It’s an absolutely brilliant dish. Further afield, there are similar principles at work with Sichuan spiced kidneys – tingly Sichuan pepper, a splash of wine vinegar, and a very hot wok.

Lamb’s kidneys are best, I think. But keep your eyes peeled for pig and goat kidneys too – both delicious.

Market offal

I wandered round the Market keeping my eyes peeled for both kidneys and hearts, ready to plump for whichever took my imagination.

Ginger Pig had a whole box of lamb’s kidneys, which was tempting, and I contemplated going round each of the butchers asking to collect any or all of their duck or chicken hearts.

However, I noticed first a tongue (this drew my attention), and then two portions of heart. I was in luck, so bought it straight away – half a beef heart (500g) for just £3.

A heart looks fairly impenetrable to begin with, but a minute or two of trimming and slicing transformed the organ into two large steaks: one about 2cm thick, the second 1cm.

I cut the thicker piece to the same depth and cut a little piece off to test, as if it were a steak. One minute on either side in foaming butter, plus three minutes resting worked a treat. It had a light beefy flavour and a hint of iron – some roast cherry tomatoes on the side would work a treat…which made me think: roast tomatoes > smoky chillies > smoky chilli tomato salsa > beef heart tacos with smoky tomato salsa and pickled red onions.

So that’s what I did with the rest of it. I chopped the heart into 1cm dice, marinated for an hour with a pinch of dried oregano, ground cumin and olive oil, then fried the heart very hard for one minute, before assembling the tacos and eating straight away. Loved it (pun intended).

Read Ed’s recipe for beef heart tacos.

“JAN IS A BIG FAN OF NATURAL PEST CONTROL. HE’S A FAN OF NATURE GENERALLY. BUT NOT AT THE EXPENSE OF PROGRESS”

Images: Christopher L Proctor

“Being a farmer isn’t something you switch on when your alarm goes off, and turn off again come the evening,” says Leo McCourt. “You’re always a farmer.” His dad, Jan, nods in agreement. Jan has been breathing, eating and barely sleeping farming since he swapped banking for beef two decades ago, and while he has since handed over many of the operational responsibilities to Leo and Dom, his second son, he remains very much involved.

We’re at Northfield Farm now: ensconced in what seems the very essence of a farmhouse kitchen. Rustic wooden table? Check. Aga? Check. ‘Proper’ milk? Check. The only point of incongruity is the farm dog: half deaf, half blind and “very smelly,” says Jan fondly. “I rescued her 14 years ago.” His working dogs – two tall, gleaming New Zealand huntaways – are outside with the cats (also rescued) and the llamas, between them warding off rats, foxes and badgers.

Jan is a big fan of natural pest control. In fact, he’s a big fan of nature generally – it comes with the territory, as a farmer – but that doesn’t come at the expense of progress. When we arrive, Jan points out two windmills: one of them two centuries old and the other, built to power the local abattoir, modern and new. It seems not insignificant that they sit either side of Northfield Farm.

Jan smiles when I point this out. “We are in many ways on the cusp of history,” he says. On the one hand, the farm is a very traditional operation, home to some of the oldest rare breeds in the country. The white park, Jan’s “particular passion”, has been raised in Britain for 2,000 years, and is closely related to our native wild cattle.

Yet, in order to preserve the integrity of this breed and others, Jan has embraced the advances in technology bestowed by recent decades. He screens annually for common diseases, a practice that reduces vets bills and removes the need for antibiotics “almost entirely”. He also closely monitors the various characteristics of the herds, particularly the cattle. “We are always monitoring: ease of calving, fat cover, muscle size, fertility – even testicle circumference! – and we trace these back to individual genetics. It is a very scientific process,” Jan explains.

This isn’t high tech farming as we know it: intensive, mechanised industries designed to produce a lot of meat in very little time. This is “using science to be traditional.” Testing annually for disease means meat that’s free from antibiotics. Keeping abreast of genetic inheritance and applying that knowledge to breeding, meanwhile, helps Jan maintain the defining characteristics of rare breeds like the beef shorthorn and white park.

Being a small-scale producer isn’t easy. “You sit on a pile of debt for years and it doesn’t take much to set you off track,” Jan continues. Knowing which bulls to breed and which cows will calve without complications makes the farm more efficient, without compromising the values at its heart. All businesses need to be efficient, but efficiency does not have to come at a cost to society and the environment. Northfield strives for efficiency, but is also a model of good business practice, spanning environmental vigilance and social responsibility.

Upon arrival, the first thing we notice is the pile of silage bales, stacked high beside the tractor shed and wrapped in candyfloss-pink plastic. “They raise money for breast cancer,” Jan smiles. “I know they look a bit incongruous, but I like them. They’re recyclable and they don’t heat the silage up as much as the black ones, either.” Standing out vividly against the slate Rutland skies, they are a striking reminder that CSR isn’t just a feature of big City firms.

They host open farm days, welcoming children and adults alike into their butchery, onto their tractors and around their fields of sheep and cattle. They offer catering to local charity events, stock local produce in their farm shop and, most strikingly, having started working with neighbouring farmers in an informal cooperative, lending machines and even the odd pair of hands.

“Farming is highly capital intensive,” says Leo. “You can’t do anything for less than 20 grand and come silage time you need 10 or 15 machines just to do the work. We can do it much faster if there’s three or four of us together, with machines.” There’s no official arrangement, Leo continues. “It just came about over a curry one evening. We were chatting about what machines we had and what machines we would like to get, and suddenly the penny dropped that if we joined forces, we’d be far more efficient than on our own.”

Such fellowship is typical of Northfield Farm: a dyed-in-the-wool family business that agrees with Prince Charles’s maxim that “agriculture is made up of two words, and the ‘culture’ part of it is very important”. The age-old tradition of farming families, working together and helping each other out on the land, holds as much cultural and historical significance as those rare cattle breeds do. “Leo is part of a community up here, just as Dom is part of a community at Borough,” says Jan. Dom, the family ‘townie’ has been leading the butchery at Borough Market for some years now. “There is an interdependence of small farms up here, like there is interdependence of traders down at the Market,” says Jan.

All of this seems intrinsically connected: the rugged Rutland landscape, the farming community, the rich food heritage of Melton Mowbray, and the breeds which for centuries have been feeding Britons and acclimatising to British terrain. Jan reaches up to the kitchen shelf and pulls down a large volume: musty, beautifully bound, full of hand-drawn diagrams. “This is the farmers’ bible: Stephens’ Book of the Farm, written in the 1800s,” he says excitedly. “This is where I first read about rare breeds.”

Back then, they “weren’t ‘rare’ breeds at all, but the breeds of the time,” he continues, leafing through the pages. Yet when Jan came to establish Northfield Farm in the late 1990s, “most farmers thought I was nuts, with my white parks and my little farm shop. They were all about animals they could intensively breed.”

A quarter of a century on, it seems Jan was a bellwether. “The number of people that are now feeling this desire to have contact with the land has increased significantly.” What’s more, with farmers’ markets, farm shops, holiday lets and butchery classes all on the table, the viability of small scale farming has also increased.

“Big farms concentrate on yields. We take much longer to finish the animals, so we have much higher costs,” says Jan. Beef cattle at Northfield Farm take nine months to be born, then just over three years to reach maturity, Jan continues. That’s over two years more than your average supermarket-bound specimen. “Then we hang the meat for 28 days to age it” – so that’s four years, and thousands of pounds’ worth of feed, space and labour, before making a penny. Diversification, for the McCourts, as for many of their small scale farming contemporaries, has offered some invaluable income streams.

So, is it worth it – the expense, time and space these great, ancient animals need, when there are such easy, cheap alternatives available? Beyond their almost biblical beauty (which, walking around the farm, is truly striking: sickle horns, jet black ears, and large dark eyes set in tufty coats of creamy ivory) and their historical importance, it is difficult to see why a farmer would go to such lengths. Then you taste the meat and it all falls into place. “They have this incredibly fine marbling, which when cooked is just stunning,” says Jan. Add the maturity, and the “grassy earthiness” that comes with a cow reared almost entirely on pasture, what you end up with is genuinely exceptional beef.

It’s not just white park, of course. Beef shorthorn, Aberdeen angus, angus-white park cross and flocks of sheep all graze on Northfield’s rich pasture. At the time of writing they are still wintering in airy barns, filled with Northfield hay and dining on Northfield silage – but the moment the grass starts growing again they’ll be let out to roam.

“We reconfigured our barns recently,” says Jan, recalling how a trip up to Scotland opened his eyes to how hardy native breeds of cattle are. “They thrived so much better in more basic conditions. We came back and changed the layout, so they wouldn’t overheat and would have more air. This crew yard is a very traditional way of wintering cattle.” Much as he welcomes the input of science, he continues, there is a lot to be said for “knowledge that has been acquired and passed down over a long time”. The trick is to combine the best of both scientific enquiry, and the wisdom years of experience brings.

The llamas are a case in point. Traditionally used in South America to ward off wolves, in the UK they’re increasingly being deployed to deter disease-carrying foxes and badgers. “I don’t want to tempt fate,” Dom ventures cautiously, “but since we have had these boys, we’ve not had a single case of TB.” Sentry-like, they prowl through the fields of the farm chasing “anything small and moving.” Before that, if the cattle were even suspected of having tuberculosis – even if their test proved inconclusive – they would have to be shot and disposed of.

That would be a sorry end for any animal, but for one of such pedigree as these, to die in vain is heart-breaking. “These are family lines dating back hundreds of years. Some have been cows bearing calves,” Jan says sorrowfully. His philosophy is that “if you are going to kill an animal, you have a duty do the best you can by it – in life as well as in death.” It’s a philosophy that has informed his entire approach to livestock farming, from the genetic tests right through to his views on pasture feeding. If possible, tried and tested traditional practices should be adhered to, he says, but this should never be at the expense of the animal’s welfare, or the quality of the produce it creates.

“The term ‘pasture-fed’ is a contentious one,” explains Jan. “What the evangelism of the 100 per cent pasture-fed lobby don’t allow for is this duty you have toward the animal.” That includes how you finish it and the quality of the end product, Jan continues. “We do finish our beef on pasture and silage, but sometimes they need a little bit more.” He likens it to people occasionally needing to supplement their diets if they’re deficient in a particular nutrient, or have been ill: “It’s the equivalent of a few bowls of muesli. There’s nothing unnatural in it. We don’t add it if we don’t need to, but if we’re finishing a skinny animal, we’re producing meat that is no good to anyone.”

Like ‘efficiency’, the word ‘supplement’ can be a dirty one, conjuring up notions of refined sugars, antibiotics and other additives to cattle feed. “Much of the beef you buy in a supermarket will have been finished very quickly, on grain-based diets,” Jan points out, “but if we’re supplementing the food for our animals, it’s the tops of sugar beets combined with barley from the nearby mill.” It couldn’t be more natural, he continues.

As far as terroir goes, it’s all local produce; and as for speeding things up, the thought could not be further from the McCourts’ minds. “We’d finish our meat at six years if the economics of the market allowed us to. Six years would be perfect. It would be amazingly marbled and flavoursome – but we’d have to charge double what we do currently, which just isn’t feasible.” As ever, the gossamer balance between what is desirable and what is possible is never too far from Jan’s mind.

We head back toward the kitchen, via the curing room in which shoulders of pork sourced from their neighbouring pig farmers are being slowly cured into collar bacon. “We are one of the few places that produce collar bacon – an old fashioned, highly marbled cut off the shoulder,” Jan says proudly. Next door, the less sought-after cuts are being cooked up to make products that can be sold at the stall. “We have to use up the less valuable bits of the carcass. Only when you have shifted the last bit of lamb, pig or cattle are we starting to earn anything.” The aromas billow enticingly; rich meatiness, fragrant herbs, luscious grassiness – and our tummies start rumbling. In the kitchen, we wait to be served the edible proof of Jan’s farming philosophy. Sizzled to perfection, scattered with pomegranate seeds, and served with fresh orzo and sundried tomato salad, our lunch of roast lamb couldn’t have been more illustrative. There was tradition, in the form of the very old, very functional Aga; sparkling modernity in the form of on-trend pomegranate seeds; and collaborative spirit in the bronze-dyed orzo, sourced from an Italian family cooperative. There was the lamb: mature enough to boast the rich, verdant flavours of fresh grass, yet tender – a sign of high welfare and a talented butcher. To Northfield Farm, and to its principled blend of history and science, there could be no tastier testimony.

“THEY’RE SMOOTH AND SILKY AND CAN ABSORB OTHER FLAVOURS, BUT THEIR FLAVOUR IS ENJOYABLE IN ITS OWN RIGHT”

Image: Ed Smith

Dried pulses are essential in a kitchen larder. They’re cheap, a good source of protein and, more importantly (to me, at least), flavoursome and versatile. The likes of cannellini, coco, haricot, chickpeas, split peas and butter beans can provide both bulk and interest, and are as appropriate in warming winter stews as they are in cooling summer salads. No one should ever use the ‘I can’t be bothered with all the soaking and cooking’ excuse; as far as hands-off kitchen jobs go, soaking and cooking dried beans is right up there with whatever is, well, most hands-off.

But you know what’s even more useful than dried beans and pulses? Yep, effort sceptics know the answer already: pre-cooked beans and pulses.

So I tend to only stand by my ‘no one should use the soaking and cooking excuse’ rule around 75 per cent of the time. Beans, peas and lentils you prepare yourself may taste better, but having a jar or two of pre-cooked pulses in the cupboard can be beneficial. They’re a long-lasting staple which take precisely 10 seconds to get ready – pop the lid and tip them out.

This is only true, though, if those beans are of the highest quality, and are soft and tender, yet still fully intact. The contents of supermarket tins and packs tend to be overcooked, flavourless and mushy. Look, instead, to the options at the Market.

The French and, in particular, the Spanish seem to be particularly good at canning cooked pulses. Le Marché du Quartier’s shelves, for example, heave with pulses and Brindisa stocks supreme chickpeas (garbanzos), haricot (alubias blancas), lentils (lentejas) and, my favourite, judiónes: bulbous, ivory-coloured butter beans, which are almost dairy-like in their creaminess.

Crucially, Brindisa’s judiónes are perfectly cooked – soft, yet with structural integrity. You can use them straight from the jar mixed with roast peppers and something with crunch, like chopped celery, perhaps to go with a tin of tuna or to sit under a chargrilled octopus tentacle. You can also mix them with warm, just-boiled potatoes without worrying that they’ll turn into a mush. Moreover, they can be thrown into a seafood or tomato and chorizo based soup or a stew to warm up, again in the knowledge that they’ll still be intact when it comes to eating them.

Judiónes make a quality addition to any meal. There’s no peeling, soaking, chopping or boiling required. Depending on your dish, you might not even need to drain them – that liquor in the jar is delicious and wholesome, not something that should be thrown away.

I like beans like this because they can be either the support act or the star. They’re smooth and silky and can absorb other flavours, but their flavour is enjoyable in its own right. All of these qualities are apparent in my fennel & manzanilla judión beans with mojama recipe. The sweet anise of gently softened diced fennel and the crisp, dry sherry add layers and layers of interest, and the mojama (air-dried tuna – another excellent Spanish larder item) brings a wallop of salt and umami. But the thing that keeps my spoon returning to the bowl is the beans. You’ll need just a few slices of wafer thin mojama, a good glug of olive oil, and perhaps some crusty bread and crisp leaves to make this a full-on meal. Which, if your larder is stocked with Brindisa’s judión beans, takes barely 15 minutes to throw together.

“SOMETHING MUST BE DONE: AT THE LEVEL OF GOVERNMENT, BUT ALSO AT THE LEVEL OF ORGANISATIONS AND INDIVIDUALS”

Words: Clare Finney

More than one billion tonnes worldwide. Between 95 and 115kg per person in Europe and North America. Whichever way you cut it, we’re wasting far, far too much food. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, in rich, developed countries, we waste almost as much – 222 million tonnes – as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa, where chronic undernourishment continues to hold sway. Something must be done: on an international level, at the level of national government, but also at the level of organisations and individuals.

nibs etc. may be a one-woman band, trading out of a small kitchen in south London, but it is part of a growing movement of people and companies who are changing the public’s attitude to waste in the best way possible: by serving it to them as delicious food.

“The product is a medium,” says Chloë Stewart, the founder, director, brand manager and head chef behind Nibs etc. Her food is remarkable: knobbly, crunchy granola, sweetened and nutritionally enhanced by pulp collected from local juice bars; crisp, cheese-lusting crackers (also made from pulp that would otherwise have been destined for landfill); banana loaf from banana pulp and old, brown bananas.

“I look at fruit pulp like I look at shredded veg: if you can make something from shredded vegetables, you can make it from fruit that has been juiced.” Believe it or not, a large proportion of waste comes not just from individuals discarding surplus or past its best produce, but from the supply chain: farmers, supermarkets and producers – like, of course, those making juice.

Chloë’s mission is to spread the word about waste and encourage people to think twice before throwing things, while redirecting pulp away from landfill toward tummies, where it can actually be of benefit. Some friends have laughed at her obsession with waste: “I am a nightmare to go shopping with because I cannot buy anything I don’t need,” she laughs. But Chloë is anything but sanctimonious. She is evangelical about food waste, but she knows the best way to convert the masses is not by lecturing them, but by getting them to sample some delicious, ‘wasted’ food.

“I love the products, don’t get me wrong – but the goal is to inspire people to think differently about how they eat and cook. If they know pulp is not waste but an ingredient, then they might extend that thinking to other potential ingredients they are throwing away.” Nothing excites her more than a friend or customer messaging her to tell her they’re roasting their cauliflower leaves, or blitzing their carrot tops into pesto.

Indeed, the retail side of nibs etc. was actually born of Chloë’s recipe blog of the same name. “I’ve always loved food, but I have always cooked with what’s lying around; what needs using up. My friends have said I cook quite differently.” The blog was their idea for her to share her recipes, but it was also a means of making her cooking more productive.

The blog is still going – more intermittently, now the products have taken off, but “I think people do make that connection between the blog and the products. The point is not for upcycling or the zero-waste movement to dictate, but for it to be positive and accessible.” If people can cook, taste, and try a message, they’ll digest it far easier than if they are simply told. This same theory extends to the packaging: recyclable, biodegradable, hand stamped and with recyclable tags, it reinforces the message: ‘powered by pulp. Fuelled by fibre.’

Food waste is a serious issue. While nibs etc. has no intention of trivialising the challenge it poses, it does make the prospect of facing it a bit more fun. “The customers love the packaging. It tells the story immediately, and it’s aesthetically appealing too.” You only need to open Instagram to know nibs etc. is photogenic. As for other areas of sustainability – well, Chloë just laughs when we ask about transportation costs. “I’m on public transport everywhere, with everything that I have. Makes for great arms,” she grins.

It is important to her to grow the business organically, so as to ensure she gets each part of the business right. “I would love to broaden the product line and I would love to work with more people, but for the time being I have to focus. So many businesses address one area of sustainability and completely overlook something else as they grow.”

While larger juice joints do often send their pulp to processing plants which can convert it to fuel and energy, small urban outlets don’t have those facilities. It’d be in the bin were it not for Chloë. Now, when people spread cream cheese on her crackers, they’re spreading the word about wastefulness.

“People talk a lot these days about mindfulness, and for me valuing good food is the epitome of that. It means being conscious of what you are doing, why you are doing it, and the consequences” – be it opting for Chloë’s granola of a morning, or carefully roasting the outer leaves of a cauliflower into vegetable crisps.

“ROBERT J COURTINE WROTE THAT ‘THE ONION IS THE TRUFFLE OF THE POOR’ – THIS HUMBLE INGREDIENT CAN REALLY SING”

Batch cooking is a great habit to get into. There are certain ingredients and recipes that just make sense to cook in large quantities and then stow away as building blocks for quick after-work suppers, packed lunches or just adding the special touch to a simple weekday meal. It often takes no longer to cook a double batch and so you’ll be economising on time, effort and energy too.

In his Larousse Gastronomique, Robert J Courtine wrote that “the onion is the truffle of the poor” and I’m with him – given the right treatment and plenty of patience, this humble, ubiquitous ingredient can really sing. Fried onions, by which I mean the soft, browned onions served in your hot dog at the fair, (rather than those deep-fried battered onion rings that do absolutely nothing for me), can be absolute heaven.

Cooking the onions until golden and caramelised in a little butter or olive oil is pure alchemy, but it does take around 45 minutes to an hour and so, I take my largest sauté pan (a heavy frying pan will do) and cook around three kilos of onions in one go and I’m set up for any number of meals.

It’s best to opt for the huge Spanish onions if you can get your hands on some. We have another month or so before their season comes to an end, so now’s the time – not only are they sweeter but, weighing in at around 500g each, there’s so much less peeling and slicing to do too (though red or brown onions will also do the job).

Once halved, be sure to remove the first layer of rather leathery onion below the skin (you can reserve this for making stock) as it never softens properly. You may be a fan of the food processor or the mandolin (I’m terrified of removing a finger) but I prefer to slice my onions finely with a large knife. If you’re the sensitive sort and really prone to crying over your onions, with this kind of quantity it may be a moment to reach for the swimming googles. Breathing through your mouth helps too, so I usually crank up the volume with Barry White and have a sing along.

Set your pan over a low heat and add around 30g butter or 2 tbsp olive oil (or a mix) per kilo of onions. If you’re having problems squeezing the onions into your pan don’t worry, as they will soon soften and collapse – just kick off with half the quantity and add the remainder after about 10 minutes. Add a good pinch of salt to help bring the moisture out of the onion, enabling the flesh to sweat rather than brown too early. Give the onions a stir every five minutes or so – a square-ended wooden spoon is ideal for the job, making sure that you get right into the edges of the pan.

After about 40 minutes, once the onions begin to turn a pale, straw-y colour, you’ll need to stir regularly. The idea is to create a golden layer on the bottom of the pan each time, scraping it up and stirring it back in with the rest of the onions. Don’t allow them to catch and burn as they will taste bitter. Once the onions are a deep gold, almost copper, and have collapsed to about a third of their volume, have a taste – you may like to add a touch more salt, maybe a splash of balsamic vinegar and perhaps a spoonful of sugar too.

The onions will keep for five days in the fridge or around three months in the freezer (most usefully frozen in small portions).

How to use your cooked onions

— Make pissaladière: simply roll out some ready-made puff pastry and top it with the fried onions, herbes de provence, anchovies and black olives, and bake.

— Stir them into cooked brown lentils with roasted cumin, lemon juice and top with mint and yoghurt.

— Make a ‘gravy’ with the addition of a little flour, rosemary and red wine—perfect with toad in the hole or for veggie roasts.

— Top a piece of sourdough toast with the onions and a slice of young goat’s cheese.

— Mix with wilted spinach to serve with polenta and dolcelatte cheese.

— Serve with cheese and biscuits. Or, opt for the most traditional of all, a have a go at my French onion soup recipe.

“THICK, TOUGH, MURKY-GREEN KELP ADDS LAYERS OF INTEREST TO STOCKS AND DASHI BROTHS, PLUS A NEAR-MAGICAL VISCOSITY”

Image: Regula Ysewijn

Seaweed has been The Next Big Thing in British food, like, forever. It was, as it happens, the subject of the very first piece about food I was commissioned to write, and other more seasoned scribes began penning words on it many years before me. I suspect a common line in most seaweed pieces is a variation of “it won’t be long before we’re all eating it”. But are we? Nope, didn’t think so.

In reality, those prediction pieces you read every December and January tend to be pleas for the public to get behind foods that are not quite as popular as the writers think they deserve to be, rather than stabs at giving Nostradamus (or even Russell Grant) a run for his money. Let’s be honest, if food writers really were any good at forecasting, we’d have been demanding payment in Bitcoin for the last decade.

Does edible seaweed deserve another bump? Actually, yes it does. Forget the usual mentions of “superfood”, “high in vitamins A, B, C”, “low in cholesterol”, and so on – by far the most interesting and compelling thing about edible seaweed is the boost it can bring to a meal.

There’s real variation between the likes of dulse, wakame, laver and sea spaghetti, but they’re all united in their flavour notes, which tend to offer two fairly indescribable things: ‘umami’ and ‘the sea’. The first means the savoury, moreish quality you find in cooked mushrooms or mature, crystalline cheeses. The latter means salty, yes, but also alkaline minerality and the rock pool clarity and natural sweetness of things like oysters, urchins or a cleansing, sprightly-dressed mixed seaweed salad.

Perhaps the most salient note is that if ever you add seaweed to a dish, whether meat, fish or vegetable based, your taste buds will buzz; seaweed truly enhances and enriches – as an ingredient and seasoning it’s as useful, nay essential, as salt, lemon, dried mushrooms or parmesan.

It’s with that in mind that I (genuinely) keep bags of dried dulse and kelp in my kitchen cupboards at all times.

The thick, tough, murky-green kelp goes into stocks and dashi broths – typically my Monday night what’s-left-from-the-Sunday-roast noodle soup – and has the effect of adding layers of interest, plus a near-magical viscosity to the liquid. Once you use it, you quickly see why kombu (east Asian kelp) is such a crucial element in Japanese cuisine.

The dulse gets used in a variety of ways. I sometimes leave its burgundy strands long and just warm them through in the residual heat of, say, a roast chicken’s cooking juices, then serve those strands as an extra vegetable – I’ve seen dulse referred to as ‘vegan bacon’, and it does bring a similar joy. More often, I chop up a handful and mix it through warm and buttery items – new potatoes, carrots, mushrooms – like you would a fresh herb or some chopped spring onions. These sides are particularly good with roast chicken, beef and lamb, but also any fish centrepiece.

You might occasionally see packs of flaked dulse. This form perhaps emphasises its use as a seasoning – like Aleppo chilli pepper flakes. And thinking of this prompts me to blitz some of my (non-flaked) seaweed in a spice grinder and beat that into salted butter. Do the same. Try it. Taste it. You could stop there, using the result as a table butter, or stirring it through mashed potato or other roots, melting it over grilled white fish, pan-fried salmon or trout, or on a lamb chop or bavette steak.

Keep going, though, and mix with crumbs from the last slices of a sourdough loaf, some lemon zest, and parsley, and you can very quickly make a butter crust for fish fillets, lamb chops, baked aubergine slices or cauliflower steaks; a pleasing, self-seasoning, remarkably easy cap to a simple week-night supper. Pick up a packet of dulse and try this topping out. Seaweed is the future; it won’t be long before we’re all eating it.