The Menu: Vegan brioche from Kinsale's Seeds bakeshop
Vegan Brioche from Seeds Bakeshop in Kinsale
One of The Menu’s most favourite of all Irish jam and preserve makers, Veronica Molloy, of multi-award winning Crossogue Preserves is setting up shop in Cork for the Christmas season, opening a Yuletide pop-up shop in the St Patrick’s Woollen Mills, in Douglas, Cork, to showcase her mind-bogglingly extensive product range that will see an astonishing 220 preserves all gathered together under one roof in what will be the Tipp business’s first ever retail experience.
The offering will include both the new luxury gift range as well as a decorative Christmas collection, and will include natural sugar-free and diabetic-friendly spreads along with traditional jams, marmalades, coulis, jellies, relishes, curds, honey and mustards, with The Menu as partial to Veronica’s renditions of classic strawberry and raspberry jams as he is ever open to her more innovative streak (blackcurrant and Irish stout).
One of The Menu’s most beloved new food discoveries of recent times has been the ever-evolving, ever-innovative range of fermented foods from the endlessly creative Linda O’Flynn and Ivo Duarte of Terra Ignis, so he highly recommends their upcoming and exclusive (six places only) special Christmas edition workshop (Dec 4), taking place upstairs at L’Atititude 51, on Cork’s Union Quay, where the intrepid duo will demo three seasonally-focussed ferments (cranberry sauerkraut, sour cherry mulled wine fermented soda and crispy fermented potatoes) for Yuletide munching, including everything you’ll need to make them all yourself subsequently at home. Cost includes a light supper of shared fermented dishes.
- Email terraignisireland@gmail.com
Darcie Mayland and Mike Parle’s splendidly monikered Lost Valley Dairy & Creamery, makers of the best new Irish cheeses in many a long moon, have just made their Christmas Boxes available for purchase on their website.
With a variety of options available, all featuring their stunning Carraignamuc and Sobhriste, cheeses, The Menu recommends the Cheese Box Deluxe, featuring a half wheel of each, along with a jar of their own Lost Valley Honey, and packaging for all hampers excludes plastic, only using waxed paper, wood wool, and recycled tissue paper and cardboard.Â
All Christmas Boxes will be sent out Monday 18th December, with delivery 19th-22nd December, unless specified otherwise.
The extremely gorgeous and ever-well-provisioned MacCurtain Wine Cellar are collaborating with chef Brian Murray and his Glass Curtain restaurant across the street for a beef-laden pop-up (December 3), with every single one of the five courses featuring Irish beef from O’Mahony’s Butchers, in the English Market, all course paired with a mix of new and old school wines selected from the very fine in-house offering.
Baker Ben Le Bon owns and operates the wonderful Seeds bakeshop, in Kinsale, with sister-in-law Ingrid Kelly, and produces splendid real sourdoughs along with a cracking range of sweet and savoury pastries also available in other retail outlets around Cork, including ABC, in the English Market and Natural Foods, in Blackrock.
Ben’s latest innovation, created with Quentin, one of his team, is an entirely vegan sourdough brioche, to stand alongside his regular brioche, a most sumptuous creation indeed.
The vegan alternative, though made without eggs, milk or yeast and only using flour, water, olive oil, sugar and salt, truly gives the original a run for its money, the olive oil not only bringing a delightfully soft texture akin to the real deal, but blessing the finished product with a pleasantly intriguing herbaceous grassy note in the background.Â
The Menu leaves it up to the vegans however to work out alternative methods for replicating traditional brioche-based pain Perdu and French toast!
- Instagram: @seeds_bakery_kinsale
