Menu: Country Sourdough, street eats and top bananas
Many bakeries give out free portions of their own sourdough starter to kickstart your baking journey, including Blistered Bread (blisteredbread.com), in Letterkenny, Co Donegal.Â
However, the Daily Apron Cafe & Bakery, in Lurgan, Co Armagh, is going one step further with a San Francisco sourdough masterclass (September 25) for the classic “sour” bread that was The Menu’s first introduction to proper sourdough, in San Fran, back in the 90s, a most startling and wonderful experience indeed. Participants will take home a portion of their own starters (“Betty” and “Betsy”) and The Menu recommends making it part of a weekend trip to experience some of the splendid food offerings now available north of the border.
A real local favourite of The Menu’s, Wildflour Bakery, in Innishannon, Co Cork, is turning one and is devoting an entire day (September 11) to the celebrations, offering music, food, and drinks at a special bakers and bread-lovers gathering with one of the co-founders of Wildfarmed. Wildfarmed is the very splendid regenerative farming collective founded by Groove Armada’s Andy Cato working with farmers to improve soil health and grow without herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides, and it is where Wildflour supremo Chris Fahy sources much of his wheat.
The Menu had been keen to spread the word about Giselle Makinde’s Bananitas from the moment he first wrote some time back of her successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, which raised the €14,500 she required to help purchase specialist equipment for her Dublin-based zero-waste foods brand, Cream Of The Crop’s new snack, Bananitas.
Bananitas take up to 2t of surplus bananas each month from Fyffes’ ripening centre in Balbriggan to produce a 100% natural, healthy, zero-waste snack inspired by her childhood memories of growing up in Brazil.
Cream Of The Crop helps to fight food waste by using surplus ingredients that would otherwise end up in landfill (although, full credit to Fyffes, which converts surplus product into biofuel) to create a range of zero-waste products, also including a wide variety of gelatos and sorbets.
The bananas are perfect other than their failure to meet the stringent specification criteria of the supermarkets — the giant multiples being one of the most-egregious links in the food chain when it comes to creating food waste, responsible for creating sinfully enormous amounts each year — and Giselle dehydrates these still-ripe and fresh bananas and coats them in chocolate, though The Menu confesses he was anticipating “worthy” rather than “wonderful” when he first sat down to sample.
The little nuggets of dehydrated banana are coated in 70% dark chocolate and The Menu was quite blown away by his first taste; the sugars of the fudgy, chewy banana now amplified to a deep, complex richness that is akin to molasses, coming together in an immaculate union with the slightly bitter, fruity cocoa of the chocolate in a fashion that only demanded The Menu immediately sample another.
He hasn’t stopped eating them since and predicts a very special commercial success in the marketplace for Bananitas, a delightful product that is 100% natural, gluten-free, vegan friendly, and high in fibre.
The product is a prime example of the kind of new thinking required to reorientate a too often dysfunctional food system without any sacrifice of flavour or the pleasures of eating.
