Menu: Mid-term baking lessons, sea salt caramel bars, and some of the finest cheese in the world
The Cupcake Guy, Graham Herterich, offers a family-friendly solution to passing the midterm with an online bake-along
Yet another year in Irish food that shall remain somehow as ‘unfinished business’ for The Menu as the Dingle Food Festival which also plays host to the prestigious Blás na hÉireann awards is reduced for the second year running to an online-only event as a result of the predations of the pandemic. This annual beano is close to being The Menu’s most favourite event of all in the Irish food calendar, the one that bookends yet another year of saddling Neidín to travel the highways and byways sampling the finest fare to be found in the land.
Blás na hÉireann’s work continues unabated however as Artie and Fallon Clifford and their team have done Trojan work once again to ensure the all-Ireland awards recognising top food producers from all of the 32 counties have yielded yet another splendid roll call of winners, including 40 winners from Cork County alone.
This year’s Supreme Champion is the Wexford-based food family whom The Menu first encountered in a very early incarnation at the Dungarvan West Waterford Food Festival quite some years ago as Fiona Falconer and clan were embarking on the food journey that has finally led them to this most worthy accolade. Working from their sustainable permaculture smallholding, they grow and forage a range of produce to create a wonderful array of dressings, syrups, chutneys and other snacks and The Menu shall be featuring their winning entry, a delicious-sounding So Sloe Jelly, in the coming weeks.
He shall also be running the rule over Temptation Patisserie’s Sea Salt Caramel Bar, for two young sisters, Kate and Ruth O’Hara, have managed to pull off an extraordinary feat in winning Best Artisan Product a mere 12 months after first setting up their fledgling business, in Mountmellick, Co Laois. What’s more, the siblings are entirely self-taught, producing luxury artisan chocolates and pâtisserie made with premium quality and ethically sourced ingredients in small batches, specialising in hand-painted chocolates, bars and bonbons. Temptation Pâtisserie were also winners of this year’s Blas na hÉireann Best Start-Up award.
The very popular Food On The Edge (Oct 18/19) is managing to return with more than a hint of the corporeal about its programme with a blended symposium that mixes live speakers with others joining in online, and the venue for those turning up in the flesh is very wonderful. Airfield Estate, in Dundrum, in Dublin.
Confirmed speakers include Garima Aurora, the first Indian woman to win a Michelin star, and Mark Best, the star Australian chef featured on Netflix show, Chef’s Table. The event also features an onsite Artisan Village. Tickets (virtual and on-site) on the website.
Dublin-based The Cupcake Bloke, Graham Herterich, delivers a Halloween Virtual Bake-Along (Oct 30), ideal midterm fare for young families. The first 100 to register receive a free bake-along kit.
The Menu is a great fan of the goat, a wonderful animal, criminally underused in this country, making, as it does, for a most wonderful source of delicious and sustainable meat and, better again, superlative dairy produce, most especially cheese. The Menu of course is nothing without his Irish farmhouse cheeseboard and any chance to add a further name to his rollcall of one of the finest ranges of cheeses to be found anywhere in the world is always very welcome indeed.
Larry and Anne Maguire produce fresh goat’s milk, yoghurt and cheeses at Galway Goat Farm, in Dunmore, near Tuam, Co Galway. And The Menu’s recent sampling kicked off with a superb goat’s yoghurt, balanced, a gentle citric tang balanced by sweet lactose sugars and a rich, creamy mouthfeel that had The Menu instantly pairing it with wild blackberries from the freezer, honey and almonds for a breakfast that would serve equally well as dessert.
Their range of cheeses begins with a fresh goats number, light, citric and a perfect and willing workhorse for all manner of recipes requiring, in no danger of overpowering tarts, parcelled pasta fillings or even cheesecakes for those who tread warily when it comes to the more outré, funkier flavours sometimes associated with goat’s cheese — absolute ambrosia for The Menu yet inexplicably challenging for certain delicate types of whom The Menu secretly despairs!
With An Rolla Dubh (The Black Log), we are now entering territory favoured by the truly converted, for this aged, ashed, rinded goats’ cheese log, handmade from single estate pasteurised goats’ milk in small batches, though light and fresh when young, is worth holding off until it reaches its prime (three to six weeks) and matures into a firmer, slightly chalky texture that dissolves in seconds into a rich, peppery cream.
Several years ago, The Menu tasted an aged Tomme-style cheese from St Tola which was quite divine and he’d greatly welcome more of the same from any of the goat’s cheese producers in the country — a cheese aged for a minimum of three months. The Galway Tom is just that, a three-month-old aged Tomme-style round cheese with a wonderfully generous fat content (28%), it melts on the tongue, its goaty tang, leavened by nutty flavours and a pronounced sweet finish. The Menu had to hand a jar of figs poached in PX sherry: paired with An Rolla Dubh, it was close enough to a dessert; married to the Galway Tom, it actually was dessert!
