By the time an ingredient reaches one of our kitchens, many of the decisions that determine how good our food can be have already been made. At our recent annual GAIL’s Craft Community lunch in the Cotswolds, we brought together some of the people making those decisions every day.
Henry Astor | Bruern Farms | Heritage Grains | Cotswolds
Henry chooses to grow wheat as part of the wider ecology of his farm rather than as an isolated monocrop. The fields, hedgerows, cover crops and wildlife all have a place in how he farms. His wheat is grown with the health of the whole farm in mind, long before it becomes flour for our bread.
Tim and Sam Jones | Lincolnshire Poacher | Raw-milk cheesemakers | Lincolnshire
Tim and Sam are utterly dedicated to the wellbeing of their dairy cows, who graze on open pasture that is never treated with fertiliser, resulting in sweet, rich milk. Every day, that milk is translated through the cheesemaking process, an expression of the soil, weather and feed at a particular moment. They cloth-bind every wheel of Lincolnshire Poacher by hand, maturing their cheese slowly because they know time imparts the best flavour.
Josh and Lisa Puddle | Momo Kombucha | Raw and unfiltered kombucha | Brixton, London
Josh and Lisa choose not to pasteurise their kombucha after fermentation. It demands greater care and shortens its shelf life, but preserves the living cultures they believe make their kombucha what it is.
George Hughes-Davies | Daily Dose | Cold press juice | Cambridgeshire
Frank Homann and Joyce Pucheu | XOCO | Single-variety cacao | France
George sees possibility in fruit others might reject, pressing imperfect apples and berries into juices rather than allowing them to go to waste. Frank has built his approach to chocolate around single-variety cacao, growing for flavour and using ancient grafting methods to reproduce the varieties he values. Eli’s family has spent more than three decades cooking organic fruit in traditional copper pans. Patrick uses fermentation to preserve fresh produce and develop flavours that weren’t there when he started. He too chooses not to pasteurise, keeping the living cultures that gave Eaten Alive its name.
Eli Gifford | Tea Together | Traditional, organic jams | Le Touquet-Paris-Plage, France
Pat Bingley and Glyn Gordon | Eaten Alive | Artisanal kimchi, sauerkraut, hot sauces and pickles | Battersea, London
None of these decisions were inevitable. In many cases, they make life harder. They require more patience and more attention, and come with greater risk and uncertainty. Sometimes they produce less, sometimes they cost more.
And yet these are precisely the decisions that give their food its character. By the time their ingredients reach us, they already carry years of knowledge, judgement and choices about what was worth protecting along the way.
Look closely and you see very different people doing very different things. What we recognise in all of them is judgement. They know their craft better than we ever could. They know which decisions matter to their food and they protect them, even when an easier choice is available.
That’s why who we work with matters so much to us. We can develop recipes, create new dishes and bake every day, but our food begins long before it reaches our kitchens. Choosing the people who grow and make our ingredients is one of the most important decisions we make.
And when we find people this good at what they do, we want to give their craft a bigger table.
