A perfect pairing

The perfect pairing

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Katy Taylor and Joey O’Hare are a dynamic duo with a passion for seasonal, local, vegcentric cooking. We pull up a chair to find out what’s going on the menu at their soon-to-be opened supper club, Husk, located in an old cowshed at their home in Thorington.

For many young professionals, lockdown was a time to reflect on what they had achieved, what they might change, and, potentially what they might do next. Joey and Katy were no exception, but for them the thought process and decision making was pretty straightforward as they had long dreamt of moving to the country to set up their food lifestyle business. “We both live for food and love entertaining. Our favourite thing is pouring over cookbooks, inventing recipes, and pairing food with wines.” They are a definite match for each other and, in 2020 launched Joey and Katy Cook, a freelance food consultancy specialising in seasonal cooking that is focused on mainly vegcentric or vegan recipes, but also embraces sustainable meats and fish. A year later they moved to Walnut Tree Farm in Thorington where a disused cowshed will soon be transformed into a food hub where they plan to host supper clubs, and run cooking and fermentation courses.

With nearly thirteen years’ experience under her cooking apron, Joey is well-known on the London food scene. She was highly commended from the Ballymaloe Cookery

School, a working biodynamic farm in Ireland, and graduated from Westminster Kingsway College with a Culinary Arts degree, before working as a chef at a variety of London restaurants and private homes. After taking time out to complete an English Literature degree, in 2015 she returned to the kitchen and made it to the final twelve of Masterchef, The Professionals. With this accolade came the confidence and connections she needed to start her own vegcentric supper club, Hare on the Hill, where she perfected the idea of a shared dining experience and indulged in her love of hosting.

Katy, who continues to work for Lily’s Kitchen - one of the first pet food companies to use natural and organic ingredients - makes for the perfect sous chef as she has a wonderful sense of the subtleties of flavour, picked up from cooking courses on her travels around Mexico, India and Thailand, and loves planning menus and putting together wines that complement the dishes. She has also started experimenting with roasting, smoking and curing locally sourced sustainable meats such as lamb and venison, and a recent cure for a pork belly that had been rubbed with herbs, crushed garlic and black pepper and then trussed and hung for two months before being turned into lardons and charcuterie, sounds delicious.

Joey and Katy are bubbling over with ideas for Husk and, while they wait for the work to be completed on the cowshed, are enjoying trialing new recipes and wines from local merchants. “We recently made a smoked scallop roe taramasalata and a fermented

about food

chilli hummus topped with crispy lambcetta which worked so well with our homemade rosemary, rye and red onion focaccia. And the main course of venison and walnut stew stirred through with our grape molasses and pink pepper pickled quince went down a treat.” The ingredients for their menus will be reflective of their Suffolk surroundings, whether it be cheese from Fen Farm, freerange pork from Blythburgh, grains and flours from Hodmedods, fresh fish from Pesky, apples from their own orchard or wild gooseberries foraged from the overgrown meadow behind the house. Both are also mad keen on pickling and preserving, and jars of home-pickled jalapeños, walnuts and damsons jostle for space next to their blood orange marmalade and rose-hip sweet chilli sauce – all of which will be used to top some wonderfully creative dish. As well as the suppers, future plans include running cookery and fermentation courses, and they are hoping to eventually have a couple of guest bedrooms so diners can retire replete. Having guests all sitting together, sharing dishes, trying new wines and swapping stories is central to the experience they are aiming to create, and if their starter of baked goat’s cheesecake with a parmesan and brown butter shortbread crust, served with pea and basil salad and a crisp Pouilly-Fumé is on the menu, count us in!

For recipes and ideas, follow them @joeyandkatycook www.joeyandkatecook.co.uk