The Menu: You'll be the winner if you check out these award-winning foods
Sally Barnes, of Woodcock Smokery, winner of the Irish Food Writer’s Guild Lifetime Achievement Award
Even though the country is once more opening up, the Great Release arrived too late to permit an in-person gathering of the Irish Food Writers’ Guild for a lovely luncheon and ceremony to recognise the recipients of its annual IFWG Food Awards. This is one of the most prestigious of all food awards on this island as winners are selected anonymously by Guild members and only informed after they have won. Over the years, the honours roll has grown to represent one of the most comprehensive and august of all gatherings of all who make Irish food so special.
Though the ceremony may again be virtual, the awards themselves are as relevant and as important as ever for taking the temperature of the Irish food world and winners were as follows:
- Eoin Cluskey’s Bread 41, in Dublin 2, which bakes superb organic long-fermented bread from grain freshly milled in their Dublin 2 bakery each day. bread41.ie
- Calvey’s Achill Mountain Lamb — an old Menu favourite for their superb lamb which they take entirely from field to fork, managing each stage of the process themselves from farming, to slaughter to butchery to retail. achillmountainlamb.ie
- and Coolfin cheese, an alpine-style cow’s milk cheese of impeccable quality and flavour from the foothills of the Slieve Aughty mountains in East Galway.
The Drink Award went to All About Kombucha, also glowingly praised in this column in recent years, for a wonderful take on a health beverage that combines genuine nutritional benefit with superb flavour allaboutkombucha.ie
The very splendid Stefan Griesbach of Gannet Fishmongers was awarded the Notable Contribution to Irish Food Award, not only for the superb range of fish and seafood he has sold in Galway since just before the turn of the century but also for his sterling evangelism in educating his consumers about his sustainably sourced produce. eatmorefish.ie
Rock Farm Slane won the Environmental Award for Carina and Alex Conyngham’s inspirational mixed organic farm and eco-tourism business, in Co Meath rockfarmslane.ie
While food activist organisation Our Table was the thoroughly deserved winner of the Community Food Award. ourtable.ie
The Menu is hard-pressed to think of a more deserving recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award than winner Sally Ferns-Barnes, who was also The Menu’s Food Hero of the Year in 2021, not only for her superb craft as a fish smoker but also her sterling work as a valiant custodian of a vanishing tradition. woodcocksmokery.com
Initiatives to help the victims of the war in Ukraine are springing up all across the land, not least in the food world: Ballymaloe head chef, Dervilla O'Flynn and Aishling Moore head chef of Goldie fish restaurant, create a delicious four-courser for an evening (March 15) at Ballymaloe House. Supported by local producers, tickets are €100 pp and 100% of proceeds go to charity. Tel. 021 4652531
The Menu will be joining chefs Jess Murphy (Kai, Galway) and Damien Grey (recently awarded a second Michelin star for his Dublin restaurant, Liath) and Cork farmer Louise Crowley on stage for “Is There An Irish Cuisine” (March 19), in the Festival Quarter at the National Museum of Ireland, in Dublin’s Collins’ Barracks, Saturday, March 19 as part of St Patrick's Festival, chaired by broadcaster Suzanne Campbell and sponsored by the National Dairy Council.
It all promises to be a most entertaining and lively debate, with focus on sustainability in farming especially topical in the light of current geopolitical developments, and takes place with a backdrop of the festival food village including live music events.
stpatricksfestival.ie
Further details irishfoodwritingawards.ie
As the old saying goes: 'if apples are silver, then pears are gold' — for the sublime and unsurpassable qualities of a perfect pear will almost always leave an apple in the ha’penny place. The Menu loves a good apple, perhaps a crunchy Elstar, with its crisp, tart zing is a most superb fruit and there is all manner of exquisite variety of texture and flavour to be found amongst those Irish heritage varieties still remaining, if you can even find them any more.
But give The Menu a good heritage pear, most especially one that has been resting in the kitchen, maybe even in a brown paper bag.
But, says The Menu, why bother choosing at all between the two when you can have both, which is exactly what is on offer in Lacystown Gardens & Nursery’s very splendid freshly-pressed apple and pear juice.
Philip Tallon blends a variety of his own apples with his own conference pears to produce a balanced, fulsome juice that just begs to be slugged back by the gallon.
Somehow, The Menu manages to stay his hand the better to try the precious nectar in other ways, his finest iteration being a cocktail that works as well ice-cold as it does served up as a hot toddy, combining the aforementioned juice with homemade ginger and clove syrup and truly splendid Longueville House Apple Brandy.
facebook.com/Lacystown-Gardens-And-Nursery-180264382598362/
