Artisan Irish Supplement

SPECIAL REPORT for producers of speciality food and drink

No.3

2008

Fine Food in Ireland Your guide to the Irish speciality food & drink market INCLUDES: l Cheese l Meat l Seafood l Chocolate l PLUS: Top chef Richard Corrigan on artisan producers

In association with

at the heart of speciality food & drink

digest

welcome Mick Whitworth Editor

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hat we need,’ I said to Artisan’s art director, ‘are front cover photos that tells a story about Irish speciality foods – but without the clichés. No cows in green fields, no clear blue skies or dramatic seascapes. And definitely no Molly Malone.’

We wanted to get across to UK buyers that there’s more to Irish food than those primary products that we’ve all known for decades – the meat, the shellfish and the grass (albeit transformed Fine food buyers into butter and cheese).

In the end, since this magazine can have it all from is going out to all those retailers Irish producers: who read our sister magazine Fine great taste in a great Food Digest, as well as visitors to package Dublin’s SHOP and other trade shows this autumn, we opted to picture some of the fine Irish prepared foods currently on sale in one of Dublin’s most progressive food halls, Fallon & Byrne.

Co-founder Fiona McHugh says the business is keen to support local and regional products – provided they taste great, and almost regardless of how beautiful, or otherwise, the might look.

But a glance at the shelves in F&B or any of its upscale competitors like Avoca or Donnybrook Fair shows that fine food buyers can have it all from Irish producers: great taste in a great package. To us, that means at least two things: that it’s time for UK deli and food hall buyers to look again at Irish spciality foods – after all, good packaging also travels well – and that the opportunities for UK and Continental products in Irish stores have probably never been greater.

That’s not to discount the tough issues facing traders on both sides of the Irish Sea – the strength of the euro, the credit crisis, stumbling consumer confidence. But as in Artisan’s home market, Ireland’s fine food sector is proving resilient and, for top-end retailers, the search for exceptional products simply never stops.

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EDITORIAL Editor: Mick Whitworth Assistant editor: Heidi Ruge Art director: Mark Windsor Contributors: Peter Jump, Cliona O’Flaherty ADVERTISING Group sales manager: Sallie James Advertisement sales: Becky Stacey, Sally Coley, Diane Cox Production manager: Patrick McCarthy Circulation manager: Kate Robinson Publisher & managing director: Bob Farrand

INSIDE The shape of the market

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Distribution

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Ireland’s speciality food sector has more producers and retailers than ever.

But how are they faring as the economic climate hardens?

We look at the toughest challenge facing smaller producers

The Irish Chef: Richard Corrigan

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Prize-winning foods

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Ireland’s top chef gives us his take on the nation’s artisan food market

The Food Island punches above its weight in the Great Taste Awards

Meet the producers ◆ Cheese ◆ Chocolate ◆ Seafood ◆ Meat

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The Irish Food File A round-up of producers targeting the UK fine food sector

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GUILD OF FINE FOOD Membership secretary & director: Linda Farrand Director: John Farrand Administrators: Charlie Westcar, Jackie Micklewright Accounts: Darron Johnson, Julie Coates Published by: The Guild of Fine Food, Guild House, Station Road, Wincanton, Somerset BA9 9FE UK Printed by: Advent Colour, Hants, UK Artisan is published six times a year and is available on subscription for £30pa inc p&p. ©The Guild of Fine Food Ltd 2008

t: 01963 824464 Fax: 01963 824651 e: firstname.lastname@finefoodworld.co.uk w: www.finefoodworld.co.uk Reproduction of whole or part of this magazine without the publisher’s prior permission is prohibited. The opinions expressed in articles and advertisements are not necessarily those of the editor or publisher. The publisher cannot accept responsibility for unsolicited ma nuscripts, recipes, photographs or illustrations.

SPECIAL REPORT

Cover photographs by Dublin-based commercial, fashion and food photographer Cliona O’Flaherty. t: 00 353 87 9581048 w: www.clionaoflaherty.com

Fine Food in Ireland Your guide to the Irish speciality food & drink market INCLUDES: l Cheese l Meat l Seafood l Chocolate l PLUS: Top chef Richard Corrigan on artisan producers

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Fine Food in Ireland: the shape of the market

relationships

The UK has long been Ireland’s biggest trading partner. Now, with both countries facing tough economic times, does higher-margin speciality food and drink offer the best prospect for both importer and exporter? Artisan editor MICK WHITWORTH looks at the changing face of speciality foods in Ireland – and the scope for more fine food and drink to cross the Irish Sea.

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side from the odd flying visit to Dublin, I hadn’t toured Ireland since the early 1990s before I headed there in August 2008 to visit some of the country’s finest speciality food businesses.

To anyone returning after a long separation, the changes wrought by the Celtic Tiger – the Irish economic boom that began in the last decade and continued, with an occasional stutter, until the last year or so – are startling:

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massive urban development, industrial expansion, sprawling US-style business parks, vast road schemes.

If like me, however, you quit the main roads stretching between Dublin and Cork city and head into rural Ireland you find that some things haven’t changed.

Mistake number one is relying on sat-nav to find farm-based producers in a land of few road signs. A contour map, compass and plenty of travelling time are still the order of the day. The real Ireland,

with the quirks that draw millions of visitors every year, is still very much in evidence.

This new combination of 21st century urban sophistication and distinctively Irish tradition is visible as much in the food sector as in the rest of the country’s culture.

Food is a massive export earner for Ireland. Overseas sales reached a huge €8.62 billion last year, with Britain the major trading partner – although the

Pics: Bord Bia/Cliona O’Flaherty

Special

weakness of sterling against the euro has hit sales hard in the last year, especially in low-margin product areas.

But the domestic market for local foods is booming too, with many Irish consumers proving receptive to the ideals of Slow Food, low food miles and artisan production.

As a consequence, new businesses are springing up all the time. “Ten years ago we might have had 60 small producers on our list,” says Una Fitzgibbon, director of marketing services at Bord Bia, the country’s government-backed food development agency. “Now we have 360. So we’ve seen substantial growth. Our most mature sector is farmhouse cheese, but we’re starting to see more growth in premium meats and charcuterie, in dairy, and in organics, although that is still niche.”

“Customers [in Ireland] are becoming more and more aware of quality foods,” says Peter Ward, owner of fine food retailer and wholesaler Country Choice in Nenagh, Co.Tipperary. “It’s not as big a battle as it was a few years ago to explain the difference to them.”

Ward is also chair of the Taste Council, an industry group representing the interests of the artisan and speciality food sector and whose members include top chefs, producers, wholesalers and retailers. Launched by the Department of Agriculture in 2003 and supported by Bord Bia, its mission is “to empower and enable the Irish speciality food sector at a

AN OPEN DOOR? Opportunities for the Brits in Ireland

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Bord Bia’s Una Fitzgibbon: ‘Substantial growth’ in artisan-scale businesses

With the creation of new top-end stores like Avoca and Donnybrook Fair in Dublin and almost every main town now boasting at least one fine food stockist, it’s not surprising UK and Continental producers and distributors are eyeing the market with interest.

“Since the boom years of the Celtic Tiger, smaller, high-end stores have mushroomed, particularly in Dublin, Cork and Galway,” says Bord Bia small business manager Eileen Bentley.

Over 40 potential suppliers lined up to take part in the first Gourmet Food Hall organised by the UK’s Guild of Fine Food within the well-established SHOP exhibition in Dublin in late September. The weakness of sterling means Irish buyers can get a lot for their money right now, but in a country where localness has always been important, how open will retailers really be to goods imported from Britain?

“My feeling is they’ll be very receptive,” says Peter Ward of retailer and wholesaler Country Choice. “Our two countries are very, very close and we’ve been trading together forever. There’s already a good market here for everything from salsa to salad cream to jam.”

Ward also points out that Irish shoppers are influenced by the same TV chefs as their British counterparts. “Everyone here reads British lifestyle magazines. We have access to the London Times and The Observer and the Telegraph, and we watch the BBC. When Jamie Oliver coughs, we know about it.”

That’s confirmed by Colum Ryan, general food manager at Continental foods importer-distributor La Rousse Foods. “The UK, and particularly London, plays a large part in shaping the future in terms of food trends, and success in the UK usually means success elsewhere.”

But he also suggests potential entrants to the Irish market should recognise what the country already does well and fill in around it, not compete headon. “The best dairy, beef and lamb products come from the fertile grassland pastures in Ireland,” he says. “I know England makes fantastic cheeses but there’s been a revolution with Irish cheese recently so that gap has closed.

“Value-added products, such as game pies, terrines and sausages, definitely represent an opportunity. Game is certainly a whole area that could be exploited. There is a great enthusiasm here for meats such as venison and pheasant.”

He adds: “There are certainly opportunities for UK fine food producers. But one thing that is hampering them is the cost of transport, which is a lot higher than from other places in Europe such as France.”

At Dublin food hall and restaurant Fallon & Byrne, co-owner Fiona McHugh says the company tries as much as possible to support local and regional producers, but doesn’t operate a quota for Irish versus imported lines.

“If it tastes good, we’ll happily stock it,” she says, and while she doesn’t have a

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If it tastes good, we’ll happily stock it

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“shopping list” of products that UK suppliers could aim to provide, she adds: “We’re genuinely interested in all great-tasting products and we’re always reviewing our range.”

Another potential high-end target for UK suppliers is Avoca, a premium gift, clothing, homeware and food store that now has 10 branches in Ireland and one in the US. It already stocks a number of UK brands, says food buyer Meg Wood, and favours those that are not freely available in supermarkets, are very good quality and, importantly, are “beautifully packaged”. “Some artisan products are fine for farmers’ markets but not for a premium shop,” she says.

And any new supplier to Avoca shouldn’t necessarily expect a long tenure on-shelf, she warns. Many products are brought in on short-term deals to maintain interest among regular shoppers. “This gives customers something new to look at, so it’s good if producers have got something unusual,” says Wood.

• Additional reporting by Peter Jump.

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fine food in Ireland: the shape of the market

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strategic level to maximise its current and potential contribution to Ireland’s food and agri economy, society, culture and environment”.

No-one is yet sure how recession will affect the Irish consumer’s new enthusiasm for ‘real’ food but, as in the UK, a general tightening of belts means middle-class shoppers are flocking to discounters like Lidl and Aldi, which have around 150 stores between them in Ireland. So far, this appears to be at the expense of mainstream supermarkets, including Tesco, which owns over 120 stores in Ireland – and not yet the specialist independent.

“People are using discounters but they’re coming to us for speciality products,” says Ward. “And believe it or not, there are lots and lots of independent retailers springing up.”

He also believes catering is taking more of a hit than retail so far. “There’s a growth in people coming to us for good ingredients on a Friday or Saturday, and while they won’t pay €70 for a Châteauneuf-du-Pape in a restaurant they’ll pay €25 for a bottle from us.”

As in Britain, the economic slowdown seems to be widening the gap between price-cutters and premium stores. While Tesco, which started the current price

war in Irish food retailing, has got into at least could return to a reliance on a downward spiral with Aldi and Lidl, local, community trading. “I believe Superquinn, the most upmarket of the that in future we are talking about local mainstream supermarket chains, is economies.” concentrating on premium, quality foods, Other small producers see creating openings for bigger speciality supermarkets – even, surprisingly, the suppliers. And some retailers operating discounters – as the key to their future. under wholesaler Musgrave’s SuperValu “You do see some farmhouse cheese symbol are positively championing local, in Aldi and Lidl,” says Bord Bia small regional and artisan foods too. business manager Eileen Bentley. “It’s At the same time, farmers’ markets are very much in its infancy, and it’s very booming. “We’ve gone from 10 to 136 much the producer’s decision to go down farmers’ markets in the past six years,” that route – people are polarised in says Bord Bia’s Fitzgibbon. Ireland has a their views about it – but in the current long tradition of indoor ‘country markets’ climate producers are being driven by the where farmers pool their fresh produce bottom line, and it does get product onto and sell it unbranded. Farmers’ markets the shelf.” are generally outdoors, and while they Farmhouse products in discount vary in style they are allowing producers stores? It might be the making of some, to forge their own identity and take their but could it be the breaking of others? brands to the public at minimal cost.

Retailer Peter Ward says there are signs Some, like Giana Ferguson of right now that Irish supermarkets may cheesemaker Gubbeen in west Cork, be backing away from their commitment believe farmers’ markets will become to small producers as the slowdown bites even more important going forward. and the price war steps up. “I’m being If widespread distribution is already told that the multiples are taking their difficult and expensive, says Ferguson, foot off the pedal of local sourcing for who is also a leading light in Slow price reasons,” he says.

Food Ireland, then it’s going to become But Ward doesn’t think this spells more so as the world passes “peak trouble for small suppliers because so oil”. And with the Celtic Tiger running few of them put all their eggs in the out of energy she thinks rural Ireland supermarket basket. “I think the Irish

INTERVIEW

Food and drink have ‘national, regional and local importance’ says Sargent Food and horticulture minister Trevor Sargent (pictured right) led Ireland’s Green Party until it became part of the country’s ruling coalition last year, so you’d expect him to carry a torch for organic and local food. Artisan asked how his government and its food agency, Bord Bia, are currently supporting the sector.

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Q: How satisfied are you with the pace at which speciality food is developing in Ireland?

A: Overall I’m happy with the rate of growth.

Bord Bia has seen an increase in its small and speciality food client base from 60 firms in 1996 to over 300 firms now. Consumers are more and more concerned with high-quality, nutritious food and the speciality industry has responded to that. Farmers’ markets continue to grow in number and, I think, popularity and this has greatly encouraged on–farm production of high quality, specialist food.

To date, organic food production has been slow to expand beyond a core group.

But our commitment, through government programmes, to seek to grow the sector to 5% of agricultural production, with new incentives we have introduced to ease the transition period to organic and the emergence of some larger organic operators, offer prospects that this sector will gain momentum.

Q: What initiatives do you have in place to support new start-ups and encourage existing companies to grow?

A: My department’s main support is carried out through Bord Bia, which has statutory responsibility for promoting Irish food and drink products. It provides a range of services to smaller businesses including trade and consumer PR, marketing competency development, buyer relationship management and promotion activities.

In addition, County Enterprise Boards operate schemes to support certain capital investments by micro-enterprises employing fewer than 10 people. County Enterprise

Boards may also provide help by way of feasibility, employment and training grants for projects that have business potential. In the case of larger companies, Enterprise Ireland can offer a variety of support, including innovation and research grants.

Q: How does your approach to supporting local and regional food compare with the UK, where, for example, Defra initially supported the establishment of regional food groups?

A: I think Ireland’s historical links to agriculture and the land have defined our reputation in relation to food, perhaps in a very particular way.

Food has a national as well as regional and local importance. Exports of food and beverages were worth over €8.4 billion in 2007, which is a lot for a population of under 5 million people. Agri-food still accounts for 32 % of our net foreign earnings in the primary and manufacturing sectors and food businesses are important in every county.

Bord Bia, as a semi-state agency,

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Ireland’s historical links to agriculture and the land have defined our reputation in relation to food, perhaps in a very particular way

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Peter Ward of Country Choice (left) says some Irish supermarkets are taking their focus off local sourcing as price wars hit home

developed the concept of ‘Ireland – the Food Island’ and has also promoted the development of the speciality and artisan sector in a number of ways.

LEADER groups, funded under Ireland’s Rural Development Programme, are very active in promoting the potential of their areas and new LEADER programmes will place an even greater emphasis on food.

While we have not developed Regional Food Groups as such, over the period 20062007 the Department, with the assistance of Bord Bia, organised a series of Regional Food Fora to highlight and promote artisan and speciality foods on a regional basis. These events included presentations on marketing opportunities and regional food ingredients

by Bord Bia and specialist speakers. A panel of local food entrepreneurs shared their experiences, regional food and drink trade directories were launched and the presence of all the development agencies gave food producers a ‘one stop’ opportunity to network with the agencies and with each other.

Bord Bia identified the potential of the speciality and artisan sector as well as farmers’ markets early on and has developed a webbased centre of excellence for small businesses (www.bordbiavantage.ie ) In Ireland, we recognize the importance of local food in terms of ensuring sustainability and I see the same enthusiasm in the UK. Q: What do you see as the biggest obstacles to getting more Irish specialities into UK delicatessens, farm shops and fine food halls?

A: Distribution is perhaps the greatest

market is quite different to the UK. Most people spread their bets: they’ll supply a broad cross-section of multiples but they’ll continue to sell direct to the public through farmers’ markets, and to the independent sector.”

And what about the future for speciality food exports to the UK? If distribution is always an issue (see page 8) the strength of the euro against both the dollar and sterling has been the talk of 2008. One top cheese-maker told Artisan: “Sterling is currently at 76p-78p to the euro, where before it was 68p. At one stage it was 84p. That makes our products incredibly expensive.” Another exporter told us it had been forced to scrap an agreed deal to export to Budgens this summer as exchange rates and transport costs swung against it.

It means that both seller and buyer have probably got to accept a dent in their margins to keep the best Irish product on UK shelves. But with so much good work done in recent years to promote Irish products in the UK, Bord Bia’s Eileen Bentley says it’s important for budding exporters to keep their nerve.

“I know this is easy to say when it’s not your business, but our message would be to try to stick with it, if exporting is the goal they have been working towards,

and to fulfil orders they have committed to in the UK.” In Britain, Bord Bia is focusing its promotional efforts on the premium multiples – chiefly Waitrose – flagship foodhalls and the independent deli sector. With many high-quality artisan producers unable, in any event, to supply the volumes required by mainstream supermarkets, the arguments for getting together with UK independent fine food buyers remain powerful for all concerned. w: www.bordbia.com www.countrychoice.ie

STORE STATS Retailers in Ireland Tesco 124 Dunnes 17 SuperValu 200 Centra 492 Superquinn 23 Lidl 98 Aldi 55 M & S 18 Independents selling speciality food 400* Source: Bord Bia/industry estimates*

challenge for speciality producers in their route to market. Bord Bia has developed a number of guides for producers and has worked to promote links between the speciality sector and UK outlets. They have a very active office in London and events such as the St. Patrick’s Day market in Covent Garden heighten awareness and interest.

Q: To what extent do you welcome the growth of chains like Tesco Ireland, and how concerned are you about their impact on small businesses? Would you, for example, consider legislation to protect independent shops or speciality food suppliers from the major chains?

A: While I acknowledge that the growth of multi-national chain stores can have an adverse affect on small producers, I think the advantages presented by the large-scale supermarkets for some specialist producers need to be recognised. These retailers have afforded opportunities to Irish producers to supply not just their Irish stores but also, importantly, their overseas outlets, thus contributing to Irish food and drink exports.

I would prefer to promote a diverse range of markets by encouraging innovation and providing producers with the expertise and skills to identify the routes to market that suit their particular businesses. I have a particular interest in promoting farmers’ markets and in creating an awareness of the potential of such markets among local authorities through initiatives such as the Local Authority Forum discussion on farmers’ markets, which I held earlier this year, and through developing best practice approaches in this area.

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Wholesalers & distributors

Wheeler T

dealers

here’s no escaping it. Whether you’re talking to Irish suppliers selling only in Ireland, to those looking at export markets or to businesses in the UK eyeing up opportunities within Ireland, distribution soon enters the conversation.

As food minister Trevor Sargent tells us on page 6, physical distribution is probably the greatest barrier Ireland’s speciality sector has to overcome. And that point is reiterated by Una Fitzgibbon, director of marketing services at Bord Bia. “The biggest issue facing any small food company is finding distribution, and then managing it for growth,” she says.

For the smaller suppliers selling to the UK, cutting out the middleman and using couriers like TNT to deliver direct to shops and restaurants can be the best solution. According to Anthony Cresswell of fish smoker Ummera, one problem in securing a UK distributor to handle onward deliveries is generating sufficient sales to make it worthwhile. “A lot of distributors aren’t interested unless you can guarantee volume. If they’re only going to take €1,000-worth from you each month it’s hardly worth them putting the effort in.”

He continues: “We use DHL, which is fine. They are effectively taking the margin that a distributor would take. At the 2007 Speciality & Fine Food Fair in London, we told people that if they gave us an order over £250 it would make more sense for us to deliver direct.”

The more sensitive the product in terms of shelf life or temperature, the greater the challenge. For cheesemakers like Jeffa Gill at Durrus, in the depths of west Cork, refrigerated transport is critical. Luckily, given the remote location, Gill is able to get her unpasteurised cheeses collected by chiller truck at the farm gate, but this is only viable because the same vehicle goes on to collect from other makers in the region.

Although the UK is Ireland’s key export market, the Irish Sea is notoriously expensive to cross. At J & L Grubb, maker of Cashel Blue cheese, Louis Furno says the company has secured a highly competitive rate of around €125 per pallet to ship to England but can send the same pallet all the way to Australia for around €300.

With the weakness of sterling at the moment, pushing up relative prices and eating into margins, selling to the UK can look less attractive than selling to the USA or Asia.

Over the past year Bord Bia has developed a suite of advisory services to help firms find realistic transport and distribution options. Una Fitzgibbon says: “We’re starting to see small firms aligning themselves with good distribution businesses in the UK, which is an important part of our export development. And we have plans to take that further in the next year.”

Even within Ireland itself the logistics can be challenging, and Bord Bia has been encouraging bigger speciality companies such as Brady Family Hams and Cooleeney Cheese Co to act either as consolidation centres – that is, a central pick-up point for goods from several small producers – or as distributors too.

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Jason O’Brien of Odaios Foods says the Dublin-based distributor wants to create a new route to market for gourmet foods

Moving low-volume products around Ireland – and especially out of Ireland to the UK and beyond – has always been a challenge.

How is the speciality sector coping?

DISTRIBUTION: THE MAJOR PLAYERS Within Ireland itself there’s reasonably well-developed wholesale distribution sector – probably a couple of hundred firms of varying sizes, according to Bord Bia small business manager Eileen Bentley.

Horgans is one of the better-known names, specialising in farmhouse cheeses but also carrying other lines and managing distribution to the UK for some cheesemakers. Its customer base includes all Ireland’s major multiples and symbol groups.

Sheridan’s, the highly-regarded cheesemonger with stores in Galway, Dublin and Waterford, also distributes artisan products to Ireland and the UK. Pallas Foods is a bigger, mainstream distributor serving the foodservice sector, with national, centralised distribution.

La Rousse Foods is another of the larger operators, distributing 2,000 lines that include Continental fine food brands brought in weekly from Paris and premium meats from its own butchery.

Most of the bigger distributors, however, operate across several market sectors, including supermarkets, and there has been no dominant speciality food distributor operating solely in the Irish fine food sector. One company hoping to change this

is Odaios Foods, established four and a half years ago as a spin-off from Dublinbased mainstream bakery supplier O’Brien Ingredients.

With its slick brand image, Odaios swiftly secured top French chocolate maker Valrhona as its first partner and now distributes over 100 brands to a customer base of roughly 200 hotels and restaurants, 200 cafés and 200 independent fine food retailers – and no multiples. Director Jason O’Brien says Odaios is trying to create a new route to market for companies targeting the gourmet sector, whether that’s professional chefs or home cooks and foodies.

Phase one was to offer “the best of Irish and international products” to Ireland, and the list now includes UK brands like Southern Alps, Rude Health, Dorset Pastry and The Fine Cheese Co. “The second phase,” O’Brien says, “is to find the best that Ireland has to offer, and start sending that out of the country.”

CONTACTS horgans.com laroussefoods.ie odaios.ie pallasfoods.com sheridanscheesemongers.com

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The Irish chef Richard Corrigan

‘I’m a huge fan

of the artisan’ Ireland’s most celebrated chef tells MICK WHITWORTH why the nation’s craft producers need more public exposure – and more support from the authorities

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hen Richard Corrigan returned to Dublin this year to open an offshoot of his London restaurant Bentley’s Oyster Bar & Grill, it was seen by many as confirming the upward trajectory of Irish food and drink.

Corrigan, who achieved a Michelin star in 1998, is also chef-patron of Lindsay House in London’s Soho and is rated among the top flight of UK restaurateurs. And the man who has cooked lunch at 10 Downing Street for Tony Blair and the King and Queen of Jordan is also now a TV celebrity, appearing in cookery shows on both sides of the Irish Sea and being among the winners in the Great British Menu competition two years ago.

Does he object to the ‘celeb chef’ tag? “It just means you need more body armour,” he tells Artisan. “You need to be very careful about the whole TV cheffy world. No-one has ever said no to it – it’s a very cheap way to get your wares to a wider audience – but they always say, ‘Don’t forget your day job’.

“I don’t do product endorsements, and I don’t intend to, which means I can still shoot from the hip. The

use of a name to get products onto a supermarket shelf is a bit annoying.”

Corrigan’s approach to Bentley’s in Ireland reflects his home country’s core approach to fine food – using great ingredients but no airs and graces.

“We’re not another fine dining place, full of nappery and snappery. In Bentley’s you can have a fantastic fish pie for €17.”

On the face of it, Corrigan couldn’t have picked a worse time to open a restaurant in Dublin, with the domestic economy faltering and the exchange rate hitting spending by British visitors. “Yes, but I only realised that the day before we opened!” he jokes. “But I’m fully booked – it’s been a brilliant success. I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved.”

Restaurants will always suffer in a recession, but Corrigan says it’s the job of the professional restaurateur to “match people’s expectations” and offer value for money. “We will all just have to work harder – it’s as simple as that.”

Over the last year or so he has been touring Ireland meeting small producers like Flahavan’s oat mill at Kilmacthomas, Co.Waterford, and TJ Crowe’s organic pig farm in Tipperary, for his RTE1 show Corrigan Knows Food. It has

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I don’t do product endorsements, and I don’t intend to, which means I can still shoot from the hip

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clearly deepened his enthusiasm for home-produced ingredients like wild mussels, sea urchins and herring. He buys smoked fish from Frank Hederman (see page 24) for his UK operations but says too little Irish produce is making it across the water to London. “I think that’s where the Government and the authorities need to help get more people up and running.”

Many small Irish artisans are being held back by over-zealous environmental health officers, he says. “The EHOs have put so many people out of business, asking them to spend €30k-€40k on [upgrading] a food operation that they were only just making a living from before.”

He points to the experience of Frank Krawczyk, a Pole who has lived in Midleton, Co. Cork, since the 1980s and whose sausages and salamis have made him the patriarch of Ireland’s artisan cured meats sector, although he’s little known in the UK. “Frank is one of the finest charcuterers in the British Isles,” says Corrigan. “He’s now serving myself at Bentley’s. He’s there, ready to rock ’n’ roll, but the EHOs have been pounding him for the last 18 months. They don’t understand charcuterie at all – they want to treat it [Krawczyk’s craft business] like a meat processing plant.”

Corrigan says there’s “huge move” towards more natural, farm-produced foods, but he says this is more evident in the better supplied urban areas.

“There’s a huge lack of choice in Ireland, unfortunately, because the population is so small and scattered.”

While he doesn’t want to see the multiples “Hoovering up” food sales as Tesco, Sainsbury and Asda have done in the UK, he doesn’t tar all chains with the same brush. “I’ve had several conversations recently about Aldi and Lidl. I have to say I’ve never been to one, but a lot of them are quite supportive of Irish produce – they’ll stock an Irish cheddar rather than an imported cheddar – and I’m a great believer that we shouldn’t be too snobbish. We’re not all going to dine in Michelin restaurants and we’re not all well-heeled. Aldi and Lidl have their place.”

It would be nice to see more Fallon & Byrnes, he says, referring to the Dublin food hall opened two years ago.

“But you’re not going to do your daily shop there. And personally I would rather go and shop in a farmers’ market environment, out in the open air.”

Ireland’s artisan food sector is still in its infancy, he says, and needs support from chefs and writers like him, to re-educate the Irish public about where real food comes from. “I’m a huge fan of the artisan. I love their crankiness, I love their individualism. People like that care.

You don’t want to end up buying from big corporations.” w: www.brownesdublin.com www.lindsayhouse.co.uk FINE FOOD IN IRELAND

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Put your cheese to the test in the world’s largest international cheese competition • The 2009 World Cheese Awards takes place in Gran Canaria next June alongside the World Cheese Congress and the World Cheese Festival.

• Sponsorship opportunities available • All cheese entries will be consolidated in their country of origin and shipped to the awards.

Entry forms available February 2009.

Visit www.finefoodworld.co.uk to find out more

The global event for world cheese 12

artisan special report · FINE FOOD IN IRELAND

Prize-winning foods Bord Bia’s Maria Stokes (second left) and top chef Richard Corrigan (centre) present the 2008 Best Irish Speciality award to Mossfield Organic Farm

If the UK’s Great Taste Awards scheme is the trusted benchmark for top quality food and drink, Ireland is punching well above its culinary weight

Turning green into gold

HALL OF FAME Winners of the Best Irish Speciality trophy 2000-2008 2000 Chocolate Brandy Plums Skelligs Chocolate 2001 Smoked Atlantic Mackerel Dunn’s Seafare 2002 Cherry Jam Kilmurry Jams 2003 Pork Cranberry & Chestnut Stuffing Mr Crumb 2004 Smoked peppered mackerel William Carr & Son 2005 Spiced dry cured back bacon rashers McCarthy Meats 2006 Wild Irish Smoked Salmon Woodcock Smokery 2007 Castle Leslie balsamic reduction with sherry and fig En Place Foods 2008 Organic mature 9 months gouda-style cheese Mossfield Organic Farm

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ach year, an average of 24% of entries into the UK’s Great Taste Awards, organised by the Guild of Fine Food, are awarded gold at either the one-star, twostar or – for the exceptional few – three-star level. Yet in 2008, over 28% of products from Ireland were awarded gold, of which 28 achieved two-star gold and 14 were considered so good that the judges gave them that coveted third star. In total, just 74 foods out of 4,755 UK and international entries this year received three stars, so Ireland’s producers are clearly performing well ahead of the pack.

The close relationship between Irish food and drink and the Great Taste Awards stretches back some eight years, when Bord Bia first sponsored the award for the best speciality from Ireland. The chocolate brandy plums from Skelligs took top honours in 2000 and in the following years the selection of Irish foods awarded the Bord Bia trophy has remained a testimony to the wide diversity of food and drink produced in the Food Island.

Winners include two smoked mackerels (from different producers), a pork & cranberry stuffing, a dry-cured bacon, Woodcock Smokery’s wild smoked salmon (which also took the overall Supreme Championship in 2006), a balsamic reduction with sherry & fig (which was reserve Supreme Champion in 2007) and the organic gouda-style cheese from Mossfield Organics, which was awarded best Irish Speciality in 2008.

In 2006, alongside Bord Bia’s Speciality Food Symposium, 80 experts from the UK and Ireland congregated on the top floor of newly-opened Dublin food hall Fallon & Byrne for an intensive six hours of blind tasting. All gold award-winning entries were later judged a second time in London, but the Dublin experience indelibly etched on the minds of all those taking part the passion the Irish hold for real food and drink.

In 2008, Belfast hosted the Irish judging at the highly successful IFEX show, and it took three days and 87 judges to blind taste a record number of entries. For 2009, Great Taste Awards Ireland will be a stand-alone event and become the country’s own speciality food benchmarking scheme. All Irish entries will be judged in Ireland, with Bord Bia’s best Irish speciality automatically travelling to the UK to bid for the overall title of Great Taste Awards Supreme Champion 2009.

Global cheese challenge Buyers, chefs and restaurateurs looking to source the Food Island’s finest products trust the endorsement of gold in the Great Taste Awards – they see it as independently ‘proven fine food’.

Gold in the World Cheese Awards (WCAs) carries a similar caché: the “cheese Olympics” is where producers are tested at a truly global level and Mossfield Organics, winner of the best from Ireland in this year’s Great Taste Awards, regularly takes gold at this event too. This may explain why this year the Guild of Fine Food decided Dublin should host the first World Cheese Awards ever to be staged outside the UK. The popular retail exhibition SHOP, at Dublin’s RDS Simmonscourt in late September, was the ideal venue.

Over 2,000 cheeses from almost every cheese-making nation make the WCAs the largest international cheese competition in the world. It takes 130 judges from 15 nations to blind-taste every entry in a single morning and a jury of 12 international experts to taste every gold winner a second and third time before a new World Champion can be crowned.

For 2008, it is Ireland taking centre stage before the WCA torch passes to Gran Canaria, which will host this prestigious global cheese event in 2009. Ireland’s producers are brimming with confidence, and rightly so.

w: w ww.finefoodworld.co.uk www.greattasteawards.co.uk FINE FOOD IN IRELAND

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meet the producers:

Bord Bia

cheese

Curd instinct

Cheese-making comes so naturally to the Irish it’s hard to believe that the craft nearly died out in the face of factory-made cheddars.

But since the 1970s’ revival, the artisan sector has flourished, with dozens of quality cheeses now available country-wide Members of CÁIS – the Irish Farmhouse Cheesemakers Association • Ardahan • Ardsallagh Goat Farm • Bandon Vale • Baylough Cheese • Barba Goat Farm • Beal Cheese • Boulebane Cheese • Burren Resources • Cahills Irish Monastic Cheese • Carlow Cheese • Carrigaline Farmhouse Cheese • Carrigbyrne Farmhouse Cheese • Clonmore Goats Cheese • Corleggy Farmhouse Cheese • Coolea Farmhouse Cheese • Cooleeney Farmhouse Cheese • Cratloe Hills Cheese • Croghan Goat Farm • Derreenaclaurig • Derrymore Cheese • Dingle Peninsular Cheese • Durrus Farmhouse Cheese • Fermoy Natural Cheese Co

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artisan special report · FINE FOOD IN IRELAND

• Glebe Brethan Cheese • Gelnboy Goats Products • Glenilen Dairy Products • Glyde Farm Produce • Green Pastures • Gubbeen Farmhouse Products • Inagh Farmhouse Cheese • J & L Grubb (Cashel Blue) • Killeen Farmhouse Cheese • Knockalara Farmhouse Cheese • Knockanore Farmhouse Cheese • Knockdrinna Cheese • Lavistown Cheese • Milleens Cheese • Mount Callan • Moon Shine Dairy Farm • Oisin Farmhouse Cheese • Old Mcdonnells Farm • Ryefield Farm • West Cork Natural Cheese • White Church Foods • Wicklow Farmhouse Cheese Source: www.irishcheese.ie

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ritish delis and food halls are well aware of the Specialist Cheesemakers Association (SCA), set up to champion artisan and specialist producers, and particularly those working with raw milk, after the health scares of the late 1980s. But how many are aware that Ireland’s equivalent body pre-dates the SCA by several years?

The Irish Farmhouse Cheesemakers Association – also known as CÁIS (the Irish for cheese) – was set up in 1983, with help from the National Dairy Council, the body responsible for promoting Irish dairy produce, and its membership remains strong.

Founders of CÁIS included some of the most iconic names in the artisan cheese world – Milleens, Durrus, Gubbeen – and while a few have slipped into cheese-making history, CÁIS still has over 40 active participants (see panel, left).

By the late 1960s, Ireland’s postwar cheese market had come to be dominated by large co-operative creameries producing cheddar-style cheeses by the hundreds of tonnes. But the 1970s saw a revival in traditional cheese-making, fired by a mixture of post-hippy enthusiasm for a back-tothe-land lifestyle, the emergence of several charismatic Irish foodies with energy and vision, and a pressing need for farmers to diversify and add value in

a country that was still relatively poor, especially in its more rural corners.

Their development was aided by technical input from the dairy science department at University College Cork, which has given many of Ireland’s small cheese-makers a grounding in food safety and helped them bring a degree of consistency to their production. And the country’s major farming shows – first the Clones Agricultural Show and later the Royal Dublin Society – provided a platform for promoting speciality cheeses to both domestic and overseas connoisseurs through cheese competitions judged by international experts.

Specialist wholesalers including Horgans and, more recently, Sheridans, have ensured a route to market for niche products both within Ireland and into the UK and beyond. And among the earliest supporters of Irish farmhouse cheeses was Randolph Hodgson of Neal’s Yard Dairy who, tasting the connection between these cheeses and the land on which they are produced, keenly promoted them alongside their British and Continental counterparts.

For this Artisan Special Report we talked to several of Ireland’s top farmhouse producers, and asked Neal’s Yard wholesale shop account manager Srdja Mastilovic to pick some of his current favourites.

Wicklow: it’s the new blue John Hempenstall has been milking cows since 1977 on the family farm at Curranstown, just outside Arklow in Co. Wicklow, but only in the past couple of years has he started producing cheese, making him one of the newest members of the Irish Farmhouse Cheesemakers Association.

“We’ve only got a small dairy herd of 60 cows and we only have 70 acres, so we’ve diversified into adding value,” he says, adding: “I’ve got six children, and I was hoping to leave something that one of them might want to carry on.”

His Wicklow Blue, which was on show to UK buyers at the London Speciality & Fine Food Fair in September, is a mild, creamy, pasteurised blue-veined brie, made in 1.2kg and 150g pre-packs. This cheese collected its first award this year, from the Irish Food Writers Guild, and Hempenstall also makes another creamy brie, dubbed Wicklow Baun.

But while he has so far concentrated on soft, young

cheeses that bring a swift return on investment, Hempenstall is already starting to experiment with different cultures and longer maturation. He is fascinated, he says, by the science of cheese-making and the interaction of different strains of bacteria at different temperatures.

Already on the market is Wicklow Gold – a mild, sweet cheddar-style cheese, again made from pasteurised cow’s milk, which is available in nettle & chive, tomato & herb, basil & garlic and seaweed versions, as well as plain.

Cheese has added new interest to Hempenstall’s life as a dairy farmer, but it’s not the easy option. “What’s the definition of an artisan?” he asks.

“It’s someone who makes cheese on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, goes out in the van to sell it on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, sleeps all day Sunday, gets up on Monday to make cheese… You never need sleeping pills in this job.” e: wfcheese@eircom.net

10 OF THE BEST With over 40 artisan producers in cheesemakers’ guild CÁIS alone, UK retailers and restaurateurs are spoilt for choice. We asked SRDJA MASTILOVIC, wholesale shop account manager at London’s Neals Yard Dairy, one of the first British companies to champion Irish farmhouse cheeses, to choose his current favourites – including some not currently stocked by Neal’s Yard.

Coolea A gouda-style cheese made by Dickie Willems in Co. Cork. The Coolea (pronounced coo-lay) is a smooth and close-textured cheese.

The flavours are usually rich and sweet.

Butterscotch, caramel and hazelnuts are the first things that come to mind. After two years they become long flavoured with a savoury, Marmite-y edge.

St Tola A soft, bloomy-rinded goats’ cheese from Co. Claire made by Siobhan Ni Ghairbith. This is a cheese with huge complexity and depth of flavour. It is deceptive, because the initial sensation is one of a gentle, floral, lactic cheese. The paste is moist and slightly grainy.

Unusually, the geotrichum rind in not added to the milk but naturally develops as St Tola ages in their maturing rooms.

Gabriel A famous cheese from a famous cheesemaker, the Gabriel is a hard cows’ milk cheese made to a gruyère recipe by Bill Hogan in Co. Cork.

The texture is quite hard and grainy; it takes a long time to melt in the mouth. As the flavour builds, it grows from savoury and sea-sealty to fruity and apple-y. (Not currently sold by Neal’s Yard Dairy)

Milleens An iconic cheese now being made by Quinlan Steel in Co. Cork. Milleens was the first farmhouse washed-rind cheese to be made in this part of Ireland by Quinlan’s parents, Norman and Veronica. It is now a seasonal cheese and comes into its own in the summer and autumn. It is one of the biggest flavoured cheeses on our shop counter, wild, meaty, unctuous with a gentle, oozing paste. Smelly and amazingly satisfying.

Ardrahan A washed-rind cheese made with cows’ milk

by Mary Burns in Co. Cork. The Ardrahan has changed in texture and appearance in the last year. These days, Mary makes a slightly taller Ardrahan and as a result the cheese breaks down under the rind while remaining yoghurty and fresh in the middle. This is a rich, nourishing winter cheese. The paste under the rind is peanuty while the centre is crumbly and curdy.

Crozier Blue A creamy blue ewes’ milk cheese made by the Grubb family in Co. Tipperary. The paste is white with light blue-coloured veining.

Crozier tastes creamy and salty, with toasty, roasted nut aromas.

St Gall A hard cows’ milk cheese made by Frank and Gudrun Shinnick to an Appenzeller recipe in Co. Fermoy. St Gall is made with raw milk and develops amazing complexity after five months with long, sweet, nutty flavours and a silky smooth texture. Sometimes the cheeses have been aged to a year at which point they become fruity and sharp.

Knockdrinna A hard ewes’ milk cheese made to a gouda recipe by Helen Finnegan in Co. Kilkenny.

This is a relatively new cheese on the scene but when it’s good, the Knockdrinna is an amazingly smooth, rich and fruity cheese washed in white wine.

Killcummin An unpasteurised washed rind cows’ milk cheese made by Maja Binder in Co. Kerry.

Killcummin is a hugely interesting cheese, often with complex and wild flavours, semi-soft in texture and sometimes made with added peppercorns or seaweed. Maja is an instinctive cheesemaker – following strict recipes is not her thing and Killcummin reflects her style of cheesemaking.

(Not currently sold by NYD) Mount Callan Made to a cheddar recipe by Michael and Lucy Hayes in Co. Clare with raw milk from their own herd of Montbeliard cows. This in its self is unusual and quite special since the red and white Montbeliard cows are usually milked in the Jura mountains of France to produce Comte. An earthy, supple textured cheese at 12 months, the Mount Callan becomes powerful, animal-y and sweet the longer it ages.

(Not currently sold by NYD) FINE FOOD IN IRELAND

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meet the producers: cheese

[with Giana Fingal Ferguson. jpg, caption] GENERATION GAME: Giana Ferguson and son Fingal in the family kitchen at

Made on a mountainside “This is a 70-acre mountain farm – not a whole lot of good grazing, but enough for eight cows,” says Jeffa Gill, surveying the stony hills around her remote farmstead at Durrus, a few miles from Bantry in Co.Cork.

“We bought a ruin, really, and built a farmhouse and dairy around it.”

Gill is recalling the 1970s when, after experimenting with recipes in a pan on the Rayburn, she became one of the pioneers of Irish artisan cheese alongside producers like Veronica Steele of Milleens.

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Working with raw milk is a pleasure.

It’s a calmer, quieter process.

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Jeffa Gill: ‘One of the successes of Durrus is our location’

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In those more innocent days she made her cheese at one end of the farmhouse kitchen and used the other end for curing. Nowadays it all happens in the small, purposebuilt, EU-registered dairy across the courtyard, and Gill no longer maintains a dairy herd. “By the end of the 1980s I realised it didn’t pay to keep my own cows. So now I work with one farmer with 120 cows six miles from here, and I’ve just started buying from another.”

The Durrus continues to be made in a copper vat, cut using a cheese harp and turned and washed by hand.

Production last year amounted to just 26 tonnes, and has been cut back this year for “personal and production reasons” so it may prove a little hard to get hold of.

Retail customers currently include names such as La Fromagerie in London and Edinburgh’s Valvona & Crolla, and Gill has distribution through the likes of David South and Ian Mellis in the UK and Sheridans in Dublin. “We’re sold in a lot of hotels, and we sell in New York,” says Gill.

The Durrus is a semi-soft, washed-rind cheese, similar in style to

artisan special report · FINE FOOD IN IRELAND

Reblochon, that, thankfully, continues to be made with unpasteurised milk. “We’ve always kept ourselves well informed of the statutory requirements, and kept one step ahead,” says Gill. “We spend a lot of time thinking about what we’re making, and about the cleaning process. But working with raw milk is a pleasure because you’re not using all the heavy machinery. It’s a calmer, quieter process.”

Supplied in 1.5kg sizes for cutting on the deli counter on in the kitchen or in 380g rounds for retailing whole, the Durrus has a mild, creamy flavour, developing a stronger, fruitier tone as it ages. “It should have fruit, and perhaps be a little mushroomy,” says Gill. “John McKenna [the food critic] calls it a ‘complicated semi-soft’ because it takes a while to mature.”

The Durrus is a “very much a speciality”, says Gill, and is therefore also more expensive than the average semi-soft cows’ milk cheese – although she professes not to know what it would typically retail at. “I’m probably not very businesslike in that sense,” she says. “I’ve always dealt with distributors. I leave all the transport arrangements and costs to the purchaser, and we charge at the front gate. My children and my partner aren’t involved with the business, so it wouldn’t be cost effective for me to do farmers’ markets. And I feel very much a producer, not a retailer.”

Durrus’s remote location doesn’t make for an easy life. Gill relies on shared refrigerated transport with other Irish Farmhouse Cheesemakers Association members. “If we got any bigger we would have to relocate,” she says, but this is unlikely to happen unless her daughter decides to come into the business. “Besides, one of the successes of Durrus is our location.

This is a poor community, and from this rocky base we’ve managed to make a cheese that sells as far and wide as Japan and San Francisco.” w: www.durruscheese.com

GENERATION GAME: Giana Ferguson and son Fingal in the family kitchen at Gubbeen

Ferguson family values Five generations of Fergusons have farmed at Gubbeen in West Cork, within view of the Fastnet lighthouse, so it’s no wonder the family feels rooted in the thin soil. And with two generations now operating a variety of food businesses under the Gubbeen Farmhouse Products banner, they are strong candidates to be known as the First Family of what is surely Ireland’s foodiest region.

Cheese-maker and matriarch Giana Ferguson is the “blow-in” of the family – half Hungarian, born in England, schooled in France, and brought up for a time in Spain, she moved to Ireland when she married farmer Tom Ferguson in the 1970s.

Their son Fingal is now making a name of himself within Ireland as a producer of “squeak to tail” smoked meats and other charcuterie influenced by his Hungarian grandfather, processing about nine pigs each week that have been fed on whey from the Gubbeen cheese-making operation. One daughter, Clovisse, is a biodynamic gardener, while the other, Rosie, keeps her family’s feet on the ground by handling their accounts.

“Tom’s dairy herd is rooted in tradition,” says Giana Ferguson, “so that explains why we didn’t go into the commodity market like a lot of Irish farmers. Twenty years ago people like us who broke loose and went into value-adding were called the ‘lunatic fringe’. Now we’re becoming ‘pioneers’.”

Giana began making cheese in the late ’70s using a little of the knowledge she had gleaned as a child in Spain, not so much of techniques, she says, but of taste.

Making a cheese similar to today’s Gubbeen – a semi-soft, wash rind cow’s product – she sold her first products in the market town of Skibbereen and spent the next few years developing “a tiny name for ourselves”, which included winning awards as the Royal Dublin Society cheese competitions.

She acknowledges the role played by University College Cork in helping her and other budding

cheese-makers get started. “UCC should take a huge bow for taking on a lot of ladies, mostly with hands on their hips, and teaching them about microbiology.”

In her early days, still making a raw milk cheese, Giana caught the attention of Randolph Hodgson at Neal’s Yard Dairy, and her product began to look like a viable sideline for the family farming business.

But when the Lanark Blue scare happened in Scotland, and the health authorities clamped down on raw milk products, Gubbeen was effectively shut out of the British market. “We had to make a decision: did we want to stay in the UK? But we decided to pasteurise at that stage. It was a hard decision, because pasteurisation does change the character of the milk. So we did an enormous amount of work on developing the flavour of the rind, and we ended up with a cheese that had got its character back – but from a completely different angle.”

When Gubbeen cheese returned to the market in 1989 it took a year to be re-established, but by 1995 the business was producing at capacity, and it has remained that way. “Every bit of cheese had been pre-booked, which is lovely position to be in.”

Gubbeen has what the Fergusons call a “cheese-makers’ herd” of 114 milkers, including British Friesians, Simmenthals, Jerseys, Shorthorns and the native Kerry cow. Reared on land which, while not classified as organic, is chemical-free, they give Gubbeen around 70 tonnes of cheese a year. “I believe our cheese is the equivalent of Chateau wine. The milk must be produced at Gubbeen, and the land must be farmed in a particular way – we feel we have a responsibility not to pump chemicals in.”

Giana Ferguson always wanted a cheese that “tasted of west Cork, she says, adding: “Every now and again I make a raw milk cheese, just for my family. It’s like being a musician – you have to keep your taste buds tuned in.” w: www.gubbeen.com

Inspired to out-do Danish blue

Breda and Jim Maher are creating cheeses like Darú for the speciality market while achieving volume through high-end supermarkets

Striking the right balance When she greets Artisan at a rainswept Cooleeney Cheese Co, on the Maher family’s farm near Thurles in Co. Tipperary, Breda Maher is recovering from a weather-disrupted eight-hour journey back from the UK. Maher has good reason to be in Britain because she is one of the speciality cheese sector’s most successful exporters. The company’s camembert-style Cooleeney, available made with either raw or pasteurised milk, was the first to get into the UK with Neal’s Yard Dairy, and is now sold through Anthony Rowcliffe’s.

Its Chúlchoill, a soft, aromatic farmhouse goat log, hand-made with pasteurised goats’ milk, is sold in Waitrose stores nationwide. Its Gortnamona, a soft brie-type goats’ milk cheese, goes into the UK via Ian Mellis in Scotland. And Cooleney Cheese Co has just introduced its Tipperary Cheese Selection to the UK foodservice sector. This is a collection of four of its own cheeses, plus Cashel Blue, from J&L Grubb, since Grubb is one of several cheese-makers for which Maher’s company provides a consolidation service, making distribution to export markets more viable for small producers.

But Maher says she has “a lot of work to do” to drive sales further into the UK market after investing heavily in new production facilities over the past year or so. This includes working closely with existing distributors – Neal’s Yard, Mellis, Rowcliffe’s –to provide sampling stock and in-store promotions. “People in the UK are fascinated to think that cheeses are

coming from these individual farms across Ireland, because even in the UK, a lot of the cheeses are actually coming from co-ops.”

Breda and Jim Maher diversified into cheese-making in 1986 after the introduction of milk quotas made it impossible for them to expand their existing dairy operation. Their first significant customer was higherend supermarket chain Superquinn, which Maher still sees as the “driving force” in Ireland’s speciality food sector, along with some of the more imaginative, privately owned stores operating under the SuperValu symbol.

Maher has never ducked away from supermarket business. ”We never want to be huge, but you have to be big enough to be viable,” she says. But she has been careful to keep a clear distinction between speciality and more commodity-style cheeses. After buying the Dublinbased Dunbarra brand, which made soft cheeses with inclusions and was selling to Sainsbury’s, she has decided to keep Dunbarra as the ‘commodity’ brand. Much of the company’s output also goes into Superquinn and (in Ireland only) Marks & Spencer under their labels.

The latest product from the Mahers – whose son Pat is now in the business, managing the herd that supplies all Cooleeney’s milk – is Darú, a full-flavoured, wrinklyskinned, earthy, raw milk cheese that is being targeted at speciality stores and airport shops. w: www.cooleeney.com

There was no great history of cheese-making at Beechmont, the Grubb family farm near Cashel in Co. Tipperary, before the emergence in the 1980s of Cashel Blue – now rated as one of Ireland’s most successful farmhouse cheeses. In fact, Beechmount was a mixed farm operation before agricultural researcher Louis Grubb returned to his home farm with his wife Jane and daughter Sarah, and decided to convert the business to dairy, selling milk to the local creamery.

But in the late ’70s and early ’80s, with farming in depression, the family urgently needed to diversify.

And when Jane Grubb, a former chef, decided to try her hand at cheese she did it without any great weight of tradition on her shoulders.

After dabbling with a cheddar, she looked instead at the tonnes of Danish blue imported into Ireland each year and thought: “Wouldn’t it be great if we could do that.”

The result, after two years of experimentation, was Cashel Blue, which is now selling around 250 tonnes a year in domestic and export markets. “Cashel Blue is very different to a traditional stilton – it’s not as firm or strong,” says Sergio Furno, who married Sarah Grubb and worked with her in the international wine trade before they both joined the family cheese business five years ago.

“Neither Jane nor Louis were really blue cheese eaters, so they wanted something soft and creamy.

So Cashel Blue can easily sit alongside Stilton on a deli counter because it’s very, very different.”

With their wine-tasting background, Sergio and Sarah Furno focus on tasting and maturing the cheese, which is made in four vats using relatively large-scale but still hands-on methods. “We taste a random cheese from each

day’s production, and then keep reassessing it throughout its life,” says Sergo Furno. “We both did a diploma in wine and trained our palates to taste systematically, and we’ve adapted this to cheese.”

In the early 1990s Louis Grubb’s nephews, Henry and Louis CliftonBrowne, established a sheep flock on their nearby farm to provide ewe’s milk for sheeps’ cheese and J&L Grubb duly launched Crozier Blue. Described by Sergio Furno as “Ireland’s answer to Roquefort”, the cheese has won golds at both the World Cheese Awards and British Cheese Awards, and last year was named best international product in a major sheep’s milk cheese competition in Rome.

Cashel Blue is available all year round, although this year production has been cut back slightly because the cheese-making operation at Beechmount – which has moved from kitchen to garage to converted haybarn as business has grown – was starting to creak at the seams. “It wasn’t purpose built, so it was under a bit of strain,” says Furno.

Production of Crozier Blue, which was rather more seasonal, has also been cut back slightly to avoid flooding the market during peak production then running out again. “It was better to cut back than to damage perceptions of Crozier Blue,” reasons Furno. This year’s output will be 14-17 tonnes, so snap it up if you can get it.

In the UK, Cashel Blue is sold nationally by Waitrose, while Sainsbury stocks the cheese in Northern Ireland only. It’s also readily available to independents, with stockists including Paxton & Whitfield, The Fine Cheese Co and Neal’s Yard Dairy. w: www.cashelblue.com

Sergio Furno says Cashel Blue deserves its own place on the cheeseboard alongside stilton

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Gubbeen Farmhouse Cheese and Ditty’s Home Bakery are proud to announce their one-star gold award from the Great Taste Awards organised by The Guild of Fine Food for their

Gubbeen Farmhouse Cheese Oatcake

This is an Artisan Partnership from the well know Master Baker Robert Ditty and the West Cork Gubbeen Dairy of Tom and Giana Ferguson. Gubbeen Cheese is added to the handmade Ditty's Traditional Oatcake bringing a unique flavour of artisan food production.

Good food from the land!

Gubbeen Farmhouse Products Ltd, Schull, Co. Cork, Ireland.

T: 00 353 28 28231 / F: 00 353 28 28609 E: cheese@gubbeen.com / w: www.gubbeen.com

Multiple award winning, hand-crafted cheese from the east coast of Ireland For full details of our exquisite range either visit

www.wicklowfarmhousecheeseltd.ie or call 00353 402 91713

See us on the County Enterprise Board stand at SHOP Expo Irelands Retail, Food & Drink Event at the RDS Simmonscourt, Dublin at the County Enterprise Board Stand no. CEB40

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artisan special report · FINE FOOD IN IRELAND

meet the producers: chocolate

Treat me nice, treat me good A nation of chococolics has spawned a thriving community of specialist chocolate-makers

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hy, in a country so focused on simple, primary products are so many companies dedicated to an indulgent treat whose core ingredient – the cocoa bean – is grown thousands of miles away?

“Chocolate’s an important daily ritual for a lot of people in this country,” explains Eileen Bentley of Bord Bia, which recently ran an innovation project involving 12 Irish chocolate-makers. “And when producers look at brands like Green & Black’s they see there’s demand for high-end Irish products too.”

Tim Healy of chocolatier Wicklow

Fine Foods agrees. “Ireland has a very high consumption of chocolate – one of the highest in Europe at about 12kg per person per year – and a lot of people like chocolates that are produced locally. And then we have our wonderful flavours, like Irish whiskey and Irish cream truffle.”

There’s no great appeal to ‘Irishness’ in a brand like Blakes Organic in Co. Galway, run by Denise Gleeson, which was listed by The Guardian last year among the Top 10 Most Ethical Chocolate Companies. In fact, Blakes’ eight-strong range of Fairtrade, 100% organic bars is not even produced in

The Chocolate Garden is the new brand from Wicklow Fine Foods

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meet the producers: chocolate

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Ireland, but by a specialist maker in Chocolate Cafés, which, as the name Switzerland, with Gleeson – named suggests, are dedicated to “all things Galway Businesswoman of the Year in chocolatey”. Customers can enjoy 2007 – sourcing the raw ingredients: a hot milk chocolate or a hot white beans, whole cane sugar, raw cane, chocolate, or select any loose chocolate cocoa, milk, almonds and yoghurt. Its to enjoy as a ‘free’ accompaniment flavours include milk chocolate with to a cappuccino, then pick up a retail orange yoghurt filling and dark truffle product to take home. with cocoa nibs.

And taking this brand further into Butlers, one of Ireland’s largest and the home are the newly launched longest-established chocolate brands is Butlers Hot Chocolate Cups: individual more home-grown. The family business chunks of chocolates designed for was set up way back in 1932 by a melting into a mug of hot milk. society lady and was bought by the “There’s a special centre in it that melts Sorensen family in the 1950s. Now very nicely to give a smooth, velvety operating from 80,000 sq ft premises texture,” says Walsh. in north Dublin, its market includes There are currently 14 companyhotels and airport shops. “We have owned Butlers cafés in Ireland and two strong representation in Heathrow franchises in New Zealand. And this and Gatwick,” says marketing director autumn will see the first outlet open in Aisling Walsh, “and in England the UK, in the new Westfield London we’re in Waitrose, John Lewis, and food and shopping hall. independent delis.”

If Butlers is one of Ireland’s biggest The company – which distributes in the UK through Petty, Wood – exhibited at the 2008 London Speciality & Fine Food Fair, where Walsh said it was hoping to drive sales in independent gift shops, fine food stores and hamper companies.

To avoid treading on the toes of competing customers in these various markets, Butlers targets different speciality chocolate brands, with products at each. For airports, for annual sales in excess of €25m, Áine example, it offers a high-specification Hand Made Chocolates is becoming embossed box exclusive to travel one of its best-known niche players. retailing.

The company was established by ‘Where we’re also different from a master chocolatier Ann Rudden in lot of Continental companies is that 1999, and recently moved to new we don’t repeat flavours in the same premises in her family’s home village, box,” Walsh says. “It’s not a selection Stradone, Co Cavan, where according of just three or four flavours – every to quality control manager Derville one is different, and we use unusual McDonald, it is providing valuable ingredients like mango, chilli and salt.” employment in an area that offers few Consumer awareness of the brand in other options.

Ireland – and in some export markets – Áine’s sits in the middle tier of is helped along by the chain of Butlers Ireland’s chocolate producers between

❝

Chocolate’s an important daily ritual for a lot of people in this country

❞

Áine Hand Made: one of Ireland’s best-known niche brands

small-scale local operators and major brands, and is well placed to pursue new listings with speciality retailers in the UK. “There are lots of large companies and lots of small ones, but only a few in the middle that can handle the volume,” said McDonald.

“We are nowhere near full production after moving to a new factory last year, and that’s good because it means we can expand.”

Although its base chocolate is obviously imported, Áine’s does use butter and cream sourced locally, and also works with a locally-based flavour supplier to develop new lines. McDonald describes her boss, Ann Rudden, as having a “natural understanding of chocolate”. “She has been in the business for 17 years. She’s worked for other chocolate-makers in Ireland, she’s a master chocolatier herself, so when we’re brainstorming new ideas she’ll say, ‘No… no… no….

Yes, that will work’.”

With no additive or preservatives, Áine’s products have a relatively modest shelf life of around four months. The range includes bars, truffles and gift hampers, and has won numerous Great Taste Awards in the UK. A key difference from suppliers such as Butler’s is that Áine’s products are still produced by hand. “We handpipe – we don’t use depositors – and we hand-dip and hand-roll,” says McDonald. “But we try to keep ourselves with Butlers on price and not get overly expensive.”

Other hand-made chocolate producers include Danucci, run by Mark and Michelle Lowth, which has already made an impact in the UK speciality sector. Michelle Lowth trained as a chocolatier at the academy run by Callebaut, one of the world’s

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FINE FOOD IN IRELAND

· artisan special report

21

meet the producers: chocolate

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biggest supplier of couverture chocolate and cocoa to both large-scale and artisan producers. Danucci’s varieties include Summer Strawberry – a dark ganache made with fresh vanilla pads from Madagascar, fresh strawberries and a dash of fraise liqueur, smothered in dark Belgian couverture – and Tanzanie – dark ganache made with very rare 73% Tanzanian couverture. Danucci says only 0.12% of the world’s chocolate comes from Tanzania, making this a much sought

❝

For too long people have been eating chocolate made by big multinationals

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CONTACTS chocolates.ie wicklowfinefoods.co.uk butlerschocolates.com blakesorganicchocolate.ie danucci.com chocolateheaven.ie cocoabeanchocolates.com gallweys.ie glenstal.org skelligschocolate.com

after variety.

With so many new entrants to the chocolate market both in Ireland and in the UK, creating a point of difference is important. Wicklow Fine Foods edged its way into the chocolate market after starting out as a maker of baked waffle biscuits, then giving some of these a coating of chocolate, and later launching chocolate spreads in kilner jars. The company, which is currently seeking distributors in the UK, recently relaunched its entire chocolates range under the name The Chocolate Garden and is concentrating on flavours associated with homegrown fruits and herbs like blueberry, blackberry and mint.

“They’re all ‘pure’ ingredients, themed around the garden,” says Tim Healy.

If the move is designed to give The Chocolate Garden brand a clear market position, Healy nonetheless welcomes the number of new chocolatiers still moving into the sector. “It gives a bit of diversification and innovation,” he says. “For too long people have been eating chocolate made by big multinationals.”

Danucci co-founder Michelle Lowth trained with the Callebaut chocolate academy 22

artisan special report · FINE FOOD IN IRELAND

Butlers: long established and now a major producer

Made in Switzerland, Blakes Organic offers Ireland its own alternative to Green & Black’s

Gold in the Great Taste Awards is the independent benchmark for exquisite food and drink trusted by retailers and consumers 2009 entry forms will be available in January 2009.

Visit www.finefoodworld.co.uk to find out more

12

artisan 路 June-July 2008

meet the producers: seafood

Seafood is one Ireland’s greatest exports, with smoked salmon topping the list of specialities. We visited two of its top practitioners.

W

hen Artisan arrives at Belvelly Smoke House near Cobh in Co. Cork to meet legendary fish smoker Frank Hederman, our interviewee – who lives next door – appears to have just dragged himself out of bed. But as Hederman fixes us both a quick breakfast of strong coffee and slices of nectarine in his huge kitchen stacked with recipe books, it’s apparent that, behind the dishevelled exterior, is a man who deserves his place at the heart of Irish artisan food.

He is among the leaders of a pack of highly regarded Irish fish smokers that takes in Kinvara Smoked Salmon in Galway Bay, Ummera Smoked Products in Timoleague, Co. Cork, the Burren Smokehouse in Lisdoonvarna, Co. Clare and Woodcock Smokery in Castletownsend, West Cork.

Hederman’s UK clients include top chef Shaun Hill, now co-owner of The Walnut Tree restaurant in Abergavenny, and Selfridges in Oxford Street, where Belvelly Smoke House supplies both the food hall and in-store restaurants.

Despite his establishment client list, Hederman has never been a conformist.

Born in Cobh but schooled in Cork city, he could have followed many of his pals to university in the UK or beyond. But he ducked the option of a conventional career for the lifestyle choice of working on the fringes of the fishing industry.

For a young man in Cobh in the 1970s, when the herring business was booming, the sea was an obvious source of income. But while Hederman had “always had a few boats” and would repair old Seagull outboard motors or sell a bit of fish in nearby Midleton for pocket money, he quickly rejected the idea of becoming a full-time trawlerman.

“I went out on a 65-footer, the Falcon. It was foul weather, and I was watching the warp going ‘ping’ and thinking ‘if that breaks, I’m dead’. So at 18 or 19, I decided commercial fishing wasn’t for 24

artisan special report · FINE FOOD IN IRELAND

Taking the

cure

❝

You’ll get a few people saying, ‘I will never use farmed fish’ because they are purists. But that’s hocus pocus. We’re in business, and to stay in business I use farmed fish.

❞

me. I didn’t want the challenge or the Don’t expect 100% consistency risk. And I didn’t want to work that says Hederman hard.”

‘We’re not making He and his first wife (he is now Mars bars’. married to food writer Caroline Workman) originally took up fish smoking to regularise their income as their family grew. They benefited from early advice from two fish processing experts. “One said: ‘Don’t do volume, do value.’ Then another said: ‘When you build any factory, make sure you get the floor right, because everything builds up from there. If your floor cracks, you’ll always have problems with bacteria.’”

Hederman has clearly followed both

pieces of advice. “We started up here in a small building, then in about 1990 we built the smokehouse we have here now.

It was the first fish plant in Ireland to be built from modular [white plastic] panels, but they made absolute sense to me because they were so easy to keep clean.

We’d been here for five years, operating under the radar of the environmental health people, before they decided to visit. And when they did they were blown away by it.”

If the factory was modern, the smoking techniques were entirely traditional. Hederman has developed a system using gently smouldering wood chips rather than sawdust, which he says can leave tiny dust particles sticking to the fish, and hangs the fish on tenterhooks rather than laying them on racks. “If you lay the fish flat and push smoke across it you get case-hardening,” he says, “the same as you would if you blow air across bread or cheese. And that prevents the smoke going into the fish.”

His main aim – and you have to taste the product to appreciate how well he has achieved it – is to get an even balance between smoke, salt and fish, so that no one flavour dominates and you get “a lovely palate memory”. In the famous “London smoke” used by traditional East End curers, the smoke is too dominant, he says.

His product will never be 100% consistent, he says. “We’re not making Mars bars.” Salting and smoking times vary with the size of fillets, the humidity and the strength of the wind drawing on the smokehouse chimney.

Along with salmon, Hederman smokes his own mackerel, mussels and eels, as well as cheese and porridge oats for other artisan producers. Mackerel accounts for 25% of his weekly volume, and is supplied by Davy Connolly, the man who, decades ago now, first showed Hederman how to fillet a herring with his thumbnail, on a freezing quayside at two o’clock in the morning. “I love that sense of continuity,” Hederman says.

Organic smoked salmon, however, is his core product, with his raw ingredient coming from Clare Island Sea Farm, four miles off the coast of Co. Mayo.

For years Hederman smoked only wild Atlantic salmon but as the business grew he began using organic farmed fish out of season. This has clearly stood him in good stead since the closure of Ireland’s wild drift-net fishery in the wake of collapsing fish stocks two years back.

This action caused huge problems for producers like Sally Barnes at Woodcock Smokery, whose wild smoked salmon was named Supreme Champion at the 2006 Great Taste Awards but who couldn’t bring herself to compromise by buying farmed alternatives.

Hederman says: “You’ll get a few people saying, ‘I will never use farmed fish’ because they are purists. But that’s hocus pocus. We’re in business, and to stay in business I use farmed fish.”

Anthony Cresswell’s Ummera made the move from wild to farmed organic salmon, and now smokes meat and poultry too

had a fiery business relationship lasting Smoked wild salmon was also one 15 years and culminating in a battle of the key products being championed over whether or not to upgrade the

by Slow Food Ireland, in which both smokehouse in the face of growing Hederman and Barnes were key players alongside Anthony Cresswell of Ummera, regulatory pressure. “In 2000 we were in imminent danger of being closed down and Peter Dunn of Dunn’s Smokery in by the health department,” Anthony Dublin, said to be Ireland’s oldest fish company. As controversy grew about the Cresswell says. His father, it seems, was happy “doing war” with officialdom. But ethics of using this threatened resource, Cresswell had a young family to think Slow Food “bounced it out”, Hederman about. He decided that it made sense to says. build a new smokehouse, close to his At Ummera, Anthony Cresswell says home, that would get the authorities off salmon smokers had been urging the their backs. government to help make the fishery More than this, Ummera now has more sustainable for years. In the end it one of the few, and possibly the only was allowed to go on too long, making a smokehouse in Ireland authorised to total ban inevitable. At which point, he process meat and poultry alongside says, Slow Food “ran for cover”. organic salmon. So, while fish accounts By this time, however, Ummera had for 75% of sales, it can also produce already switched to organic farmed smoked chicken, pork and other meats fish. “We’d already foreseen something too. “Smoked chicken has taken off in like this happening,” he says. “For years the last year or two,” says Cresswell. we’d fought against farmed salmon, but we could see the writing was on the wall “We are doing 250 units per batch, and now that we have won a two-star gold for wild fish and in 2006 we had decided in this year’s Great Taste Awards that it was better to side with the angels should take off.” and switch to organic. It meant we had Everything goes through the same a head start, so when the ban came it two-oven Afos kiln, but there is a wasn’t such a crippling blow as it was clear product flow from raw goods-in for Sally.” to finished goods-out, and there is a It was not the first time Ummera had separate high-risk slicing and packing been forced by regulators to reinvent area in the centre of the building. itself. Anthony Cresswell started his The whole operation is based in career in the wine trade, setting up the a modern timber-framed building – it Corkscrew Wine Company in Kinsale could be a small lodge-house hotel in the 1980s. But when the government – nestling in woodland at Inchybridge dramatically increased the duty on wine near Timoleague. Its proximity to a seahe found himself looking for a job, and trout river means Cresswell has put in a his father, who had been smoking fish as series of settlement ponds to handle its a hobby since the 1970s, suggested they liquid waste, and in another interesting make a proper business out of it. environmental move, has installed a Brining their salmon rather than vermi-composting system too. “We dry-salting it, and smoking over use worm compositing for all our solid sawdust, they first built a strong mailwaste, like fish bones and heads. It takes order business. But the shift towards a bit of management. You need the right organic salmon – lower in value and balance of nitrogen and carbon, but for more hedged around with processing carbon we can add paper – like suppliers’ and packaging rules than wild salmon – statements!” meant they would not be able to survive It seems there’s even some danger on direct-to-consumer sales alone, so vermi-composting might become an end they started pursuing retail business. UK in itself. “A kilo of worms makes a tonne customers now include Harvey Nichols in two years,” says Cresswell. “So there’s and top London deli Mortimer & more money in worms than in smoked Bennett. salmon!”

Anthony Cresswell and his father FINE FOOD IN IRELAND

NET RETURNS Ireland’s seafood exports were valued at €360m (£285m) last year.

Just under a quarter of this went to France, the country’s biggest customer for seafood.

But its second most valuable export market is the UK, which account for €68.6m of sales.

The country is also opening up new export markets further afield, including Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and China.

WHERE TO BUY frankhederman.com ummera.com burrensmokehouse.ie woodcocksmokery.com kinvarasmokedsalmon.com mcconnellsgsf.ie smokehouse.ie · artisan special report

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meet the producers: meat & charcuterie

Cut and dried Britain is already a major market for Ireland’s mainstream meat businesses, but artisan producers have been slower to cross the Irish Sea.

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artisan special report · FINE FOOD IN IRELAND

J

ostling for space in a chiller in Fallon & Byrne’s iconic food hall in Dublin are seaweed sausages from Lo Tide, premium bacon rashers from Gubeen and Ummera and Italian sausage from J Hick & Sons Gourmet Foods: all highquality prepared meats, in similarly high quality packaging, that would sit comfortably in any UK deli too.

Yet how many of these or any other Irish speciality meat products are currently making it onto retail shelves in mainland Britain? Ironically, given the scale of Ireland’s mainstream meat exports to the UK, the answer is: ‘Very few.’

“The only name that springs immediately to mind is Connemara Fine

Foods,” says Bord Bia small business manager Eileen Bentley, referring to the small, west coast business that produces hams, smoked sausages, salamis and other charcuterie for its own shop and trade customers. “There may be a few others that are in one or two real specialist stores in the UK, but not many small producers are exporting. Fingal Ferguson at Gubbeen (see page 16) is doing salami, bacon and sausages, but I’m not aware that he’s selling them outside Ireland.”

There are a number of reasons: the familiar problem of physical distribution, the inability of artisan producers to supply consistent volumes and, with the strength of the euro keeping prices

high, the need to supply something both exceptionally good and significantly different to catch the eye of British buyers.

Which is what Connemara Fine Foods is doing. Run by master butcher James McGeough in Oughterard, Co Galway, it was one of the few Irish artisan meat suppliers to be found at the London Speciality & Fine Food Fair this year, where it shared space with its Irish distributor Brady Family Hams of Kildare, near Dublin. In the last few years McGeough has developed a range of air-dried lamb and pork that were said to be getting a “massive reaction” from visitors at the London show. They are produced by McGeough but sliced and packed by Brady, which has bigger facilities.

“I was born in London, where my dad used to run a butcher’s shop in the Edgware Road,” McGeough says. “I went to Germany for six years and did a master’s degree in butchery, and since I came back 17 years ago I’ve built the first EU-approved air-drying unit in Ireland, at the back of the shop.”

Although air-drying is not easy

in relatively wet and cool climate of Galway, it has been worth overcoming the technical and regulatory challenges to come up with a real point of difference. “If you see how many people are selling cooked ham at the London fine food fair,” McGeough points out, “you’ve got come up with a better idea.”

That point is echoed by John O’Brien, commercial manager for export markets at Brady Family Hams, which also markets the Rudd’s Fine Foods range of ‘breakfast products’: bacon, sausages and Great Taste Award-winning black and white puddings. “The reaction to our ham here in the UK has been very good – but not because it’s Irish,” O’Brien says.

“We don’t want to compete on Irishness, we want to compete on flavour.”

Brady reaches 500 independent stores in Ireland every week with its own vans, as well as selling to Irish supermarkets, and claims to be the only producer making hand-crafted cooked hams on a scale to suit the mass market. “All our competitors are factory-produced,” says O’Brien.

“On the whole, the quality ham you have here in the UK is better than we

have at home, where our product would probably be seen as super-premium.

He continues: “The Irish guys who are doing big business here in the UK are the big meat factories dealing with the multiples. There’s very little being exported in the independent sector, and ham would not be an obvious gap. But we think there are opportunities for ourselves in the quality end.”

Brady has one UK distributor at present, covering the London region, and is allowing James McGeough to piggyback on this to get into the UK market too. It looks like a good arrangement for all concerned. “James’s biggest problem is distribution,” says John O’Brian. “But we’re already putting Irish products on the shelves, so why shouldn’t we put his up there too?”

Bord Bia has been encouraging Brady Foods to look at providing a similar route to market for other small producers, and it is just the kind of partner that would be useful to many specialists – like Caherbeg Free Range Pork, owned and run by the Allshire family on their small farm near Rosscarbery in West Cork. Winner of

›

‘Provenance’ moves up the agenda

Air-dried meats have given James McGeough a clear point of difference

Irish meat exports are expected to top €1.6bn this year, with 97% of that product going to the UK or continental Europe. But the Irish food promotion body Bord Bia has said the next priority is to get the value of those sales up further by targeting the premium end of the market.

That means getting more Irish meat onto the right end of supermarket cabinets and out of the commodity area. But buyers in delis and food halls can also expect to see a change in the way Irish meat is presented to them, according to top speciality food retailer and wholesaler Peter Ward of Country Choice.

Ward, who also chairs the Irish Taste Council, says that while Ireland has been good at selling quality assured beef, lamb, bacon and pork into mainstream markets, there is scope for more differentiation between products based on where and how livestock have been reared and how their meat has been handled after slaughter.

“We’ve been good at selling primary product into the UK but there’s room for a lot more demarcation of products for the British market. They’ve just got a PGI (EU Protected Geographical Indication) status for Connemara hill lamb, and I don’t think it will be long before that’s in the UK. And in the next few years you will see people going to the Nth degree to point up the differences in the provenance of their beef, for example, based on feed regimes, or breeds, or the length of time spent hanging.”

Connemara lamb: PGI status

FINE FOOD IN IRELAND

· artisan special report

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artisan special report · FINE FOOD IN IRELAND

meet the producers: meat & charcuterie

‹

several Great Taste Awards, the business produces a wide range of free-range pork products from its own herd of around 150 happy, mud-wallowing pigs under the Caherbeg Free Range label, as well as a further selection under the Rosscarbery Recipes label using pigmeat from other local farms.

Products include roasting joints on and off the bone, rashers, bacon joints and a variety of sausage styles. Willie Allshire spent 18 months developing the company’s black and white pudding recipes. “He’s such a perfectionist, he’s a very lucky man that he didn’t get divorced in the last few years,” his wife jokes. But his persistence was rewarded last year when Caherbeg became the only Irish medal winner among 700 entrants in the European black pudding competition run by Le Confrérie des Chevaliers du Goute-Boudin.

Willie and Avril Allshire began their business with just two pigs back in 1996, having moved to Caherbeg as food lovers in pursuit of the good life. They started off in a 240 sq ft Portacabin, just producing free-range products, but after buying the nearby Rosscarbery Recipes business they were told they would need to sharpen up their processing operations. The result was heavy investment in an immaculate and impressive 3,500 sq ft meat plant on the 17 acre farm which the couple are now working hard to fill. That dream of the ‘good life’ has turned into the reality of 7am starts and 60-70 hour weeks.

Even within west Cork, competition

in sausages, rashers and puddings is tough, but the Allshires, who started out selling on farmers’ markets, have managed to secure listings with some of the best outlets for speciality food in the area. These include the SuperValu symbol store in Clonakilty, owned

by Eugene Scally, who appears to be going outside the catalogues offered by Musgrave (the wholesaler that runs the SuperValu fascia) and national cheese wholesaler Horgans to offer many local artisan foods to a receptive customer base.

“They are supposed to buy 95% of their products through Musgrave,” says Avril Allshire, “but Eugene Scally is bucking that trend. And he also recognises the need for small producers to get a decent margin.

“He is using locally produced veg and putting the producers’ names on it, he’s got over 200 varieties of cheese, and he’s increasing space in his chillers to highlight local products as well as his own. And I know people who will travel 20-30 miles once or twice a month to stock up there.”

Caherbeg currently sells throughout Co. Cork and also in Dublin, where it piggybacks deliveries with Glenilen Farm, a clotted cream producer in Drimoleague. To look at exports, says Avril Allshire, the company would have to rethink its volumes – it can’t handle any more pigs on its own 17 acres – and would have to look for a distributor.

“But if the opportunity came along – yes please! We wouldn’t turn it down.”

John O’Brien of Brady Family Hams: one of the few handcrafted ham producers in Ireland’s mainstream market

CONTACTS caherbegfreerangepork.ie bradyham.com rudds.ie ummera.com connemarafinefoods.ie gubbeen.com clonakiltyblackpudding.ie

Caherbeg’s Avril Allshire in the family’s immaculate meat factory. Exports have been off the radar so far ‘but if the opportunity came along – yes please!’

FINE FOOD IN IRELAND

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29

Irish food file Singing the blues Where there’s smoke…

Burren Smokehouse is a family-run, traditional smokehouse that specializes in exclusively Irish produce. Established in 1989, the company smokes organic salmon, farmed Irish salmon, trout, Arctic char, mackerel and eel.

At this year’s Great Taste Awards, the Burren Smokehouse was awarded two one-star golds, one for its cold smoked farmed Irish salmon and the other for its honey, lemon & dill glaced hot smoked Irish organic salmon. “We use oak to smoke our salmon and also add some peat for the hot smoking,” says owner Birgitta Hedin-Curtin.

Honey & sea spice glaced hot smoked organic Irish salmon is the newest product from the Burren Smokehouse and was due to be launched, along with new cardboard packaging, at the SHOP exhibition in Dublin in September.

The full range of products is sold in Burren Smokehouse’s retail shop in Lisdoonvarna, Co. Clare. The company supplies fine food retailers in Ireland, the UK, France and Germany. t: 00 353 65 707 4432 w: www.burrensmokehouse.ie

Prized porkers Willie Allshire and his wife Avril raise Irish Angus pigs at their smallholding in Caherbeg, Rosscarbery, which they use to make black and white pudding, dry cured bacon, dry cured ham and a variety of sausages.

Willie Allshire used to run a printing and stationery business near Cork City, but gave up his city life to rear pigs in Caherbeg in 2000, with the help of his wife and two sons William (12) and Maurice (10). The business has gone on to win numerous awards, including a gold award in France at the European Black Pudding competition organized by Confrerie des Chevaliers du Goute-Boudin.

At present the products are sold in shops along the east coast of Ireland. Although they are not yet available in the UK, Allshire says he is interested in finding a distributor and will deliver further afield. t: 00 353 86 824415 w: www.caherbegfreerangepork.ie

Cashel Blue is a creamy blue cheese, which is handmade on the Grubb family farm in Co. Tipperary.

Jane Grubb first began making Cashel Blue in 1984 with the intention of selling just to the Irish market, but the subtle flavour of the product gave it international appeal, particularly among cheese-lovers who are less keen on harder, stronger stiltons.

Cashel Blue is sold at farmers’ markets

artisan special report · FINE FOOD IN IRELAND

w: www.cashelblue.com e: info@cashelblue.com

The ethical choice

Hey diddle, diddle…

Gerry and Mary Kelly’s Moon Shine Dairy is an organic farm situated on the shores of Lough Ennell, Mullingar. The couple use biodynamic farming techniques and produce their Kelly’s Organic fresh cows’ milk cheeses, probiotic yoghurts and yoghurt drinks in accordance with the cycle of the moon.

Soft cheese made by the dairy is sold plain (called Grace) or in flavoured varieties including Una, blended with sun dried tomatoes & olives, Brid, with nettles & chives, and Aine, with cracked black peppercorns. Yoghurts are sold in natural, strawberry, vanilla, Forest Fruit, peach and blueberry varieties, while yoghurt drinks are available in vanilla, strawberry, peach and blueberry. Next year, the company hopes to extend its product range to include hard cheese and fresh milk.

Odaios Foods and Pallas Foods distribute Kelly’s Organic products in Ireland. The company says it is currently looking for distribution in the UK. e: info@kellysorganic.com w: www.kellysorganic.com

Family fortunes Crossogue Preserves was founded in 1995 by Veronica Molloy who started the company from the basement of her family home in Co. Tipperary.

Molloy was taught how to make preserves by her mother-in-law, Nancy, and many of the 85 jams, marmalades, jellies, curds, chutneys, relishes and coulis produced by the company are based on family recipes that span generations.

All are produced in small batches using traditional methods and without the use of artificial colourings, flavourings or preservatives.

Avoca stores, the Kilkenny Group, Butler’s Pantry and the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Powerscourt, Co. Wicklow all stock products made by Crossogue Preserves. The company also specialises in hampers and gift sets in presentation boxes and packaging. t: 00 353 504 54416 w: www.crossoguepreserves.com

30

and by speciality shops and food halls in the UK such as Neal’s Yard Dairy, Harrods and Selfridges. Popular in the United States and Ireland, the twice gold-winner at the World Cheese Awards has even proved successful as far afield as Melbourne, Australia.

Cashel Blue is moulded into wheels of 1.5kg variable weight and is also available portioned in 350g and 175g packs with variable maturities.

Established by an organic farmer from Tuam, Co. Galway, Blakes chocolate is totally organic and made from ingredients supplied by Fairtrade co-operatives.

Founder Denise Gleeson sources raw ingredients such as whole cane, raw cane, cocoa, almonds and hazelnuts from small Latin American traders in the Dominican Republic, while small farms in Peru supply sugar. To manufacture the chocolate, Gleeson uses a small fine chocolate company in Switzerland.

There are eight varieties in the range: milk chocolate, dark chocolate with chopped almonds, milk chocolate with coconut filling, praline, extra dark chocolate, milk chocolate with orange yoghurt, dark chocolate cocoa chocolate with cocoa nibs, and milk chocolate with whole hazelnuts. Each variety is made with a minimum of 38% cocoa.

Blakes chocolate is distributed to delis and independent shops in Ireland and throughout the UK. The company was named by The Guardian as one of the top 10 ethical chocolate companies. w: www.blakesorganicchocolate.ie

Start spreading the Booze Boozeberries founder Michelle Power got the inspiration for her Boozeberries Classic Irish Liqueurs from an old family recipe. The artisan berry liqueurs are made in small batches and infused in the bottle with whole wild fruits.

The company, which is based in Tulow, Co. Carlow, has its liqueurs bottled by one of the largest independent spirit producers in Ireland.

Sold in three flavours – Tangy Blackcurrant, Fragrant Wild Blueberry and Zesty Wild Cranberry – the products can be enjoyed on their own or in cocktails or desserts. They are used by a number of restaurants in Ireland, including l’Ecrivain in Dublin, which serves 35ml of the Wild Blueberry Liqueur with 175ml of champagne to make Blueberry Bubbles, and Fleva restaurant in Kilkenny, which uses the liqueur to make Chocolate & Boozeberries Timbally.

The liqueurs are available all year round and sold in pack sizes of 6 x 350ml bottles. They are distributed in the UK by Cotswold Fayre. t: 01491 629802 w: www.cotswoldfayre.co.uk

Beyond the pail

Up in smoke Chef’s favourite Frank Hederman has supplied smoked salmon to leading lights in the food industry including Richard Corrigan, Shaun Hill and Rick Stein. The company has also been chosen to provide products for prestigious events including the Ryder Cup and the Queen’s 80th birthday celebrations.

The Frank Hederman smokehouse is based at Belvelly, Great Island, Co. Cork. Now in its 25th year, the company buys organically farmed Irish salmon, which is raised in the Atlantic off Clare Island in Co. Mayo and, when in season, sources wild salmon too.

Within 24 hours of harvesting, the salmon are filtered and cured using a dry salt cure before being hung in small batches in a traditional timber smokehouse, which Frank Hederman says is the oldest in Ireland. The fish is then bathed in beech wood smoke.

Frank Hederman also smokes mussels, silver eel, and mackerel and hot smokes salmon, sold plain or with chilli dressing. The salmon is packed in sides or random weighted (300g-500g) unsliced pieces. The company provides retail packaging and says it will also supply gift boxes if required. t: 00 353 21 48 11 089 w: www.frankhederman.com

Fine flavours Bunratty Fine Foods is part of Lios Na Grai Foods, a family-owned business that supplies gourmet fare to the Irish and international markets. Established over thirteen years ago in Lios na grai, Co. Limerick, the business has since expanded and moved to Nenagh, Co. Tipperary.

Operated by William Hogan and his family, Bunratty products include Italianstyle breadsticks, wild flower honey and extra virgin olive oil made from coldpressed Arbequina Spanish olives. Great Taste Awards-winning traditional jams, mustards, relish and oatcakes are also available. t: 00 353 67 33 053 w: www.bunrattyfinefoods.com

Silver Pail Dairy is a family business that was founded in 1978 by Michael Murphy. His daughter Thea now helps to run the business with her father, making Corrin Hill dairy ice cream and frozen yoghurts in Fermoy, Co. Cork.

Launched in 2004, the Corrin Hill ice cream range is made using cream and milk, without adding vegetable oil or water. The products are also free from artificial colours, flavours or preservatives. Instead, puréed strawberries, quality toffee and chocolate, pure vanilla extract and natural mint essence is used to flavour the range.

The dairy ice cream is sold in 1 litre tubs and 125ml tubs. Corrin Hill Natural Frozen Yoghurt is also available and contains less than 3% fat. The yoghurt can be served as a low fat alternative to ice cream or as an ingredient for fresh fruit smoothies.

The Corrin Hill range is available in stores throughout Ireland. The company is currently looking to extend distribution to the UK market.

Ruddy good breakfast meat Traditional Irish breakfast products made by Rudd’s Fine Food are all hand-crafted and based on traditional Irish farmhouse recipes.

Based in Birr, Co. Offaly, the company produces pork sausages made with herbs and spices; thick cut rashers of bacon that are dry-cured by hand and contain no added water; traditional black and white puddings; and Roulade Of Pudding, containing both black and white puddings, steam-cooked.

The pork sausages were named Supreme Champion 2007 at the awards held by the Associated Craft Butchers of Ireland, thanks to their high meat content and coarse-cut, meaty texture. e: info@rudds.ie t: 00 353 45 86 36 50

w: www.corrinhill.ie

A convert to organics Breaking the mould Since it was first established in 1986 by Breda and James Maher, Cooleeney Farmhouse cheese has grown from being a small family business run from the farmhouse kitchen into a well-known Irish cheese company, employing 13 people and operating from a 10,000 sq ft production unit.

The first cheese produced by Cooleeney was a soft, white Camembert-style cheese made using milk from the family’s herd. It remains Cooleeney’s most popular product. Also available are a range of 12 different cheeses, including a range of speciality goats’ milk cheeses.

Selling originally on the Irish market, the company now exports approximately 60% of its product to the UK, mainland Europe and the US. Cooleeney’s cheeses are supplied to both foodservice and retail customers.

Over the years, Cooleeney has won a number of awards, including one star-gold at the Great Taste Awards 2008, a gold award at the Shop International Cheese Awards 2007 and Best Irish Farmhouse Cheese at the 2006 British Cheese Awards. t: 00 353 5044 5112 w: www.cooleeney.com

Ralph Haslam has been running his family farm outside Birr, Co Offaly, since 1972 and converted to organic farming in 1999. But it wasn’t until 2004 that his business truly took off, with the introduction of organic cheeses.

In October 2005, a year after beginning to make cheese, Mossfield Organic Farm entered the World Cheese Awards and was awarded two gold and one silver medals. “When we won the gold medals in the World Cheese Awards, it opened up everything in terms of access to markets – particularly overseas,” says Haslam.

All of the cheese produced is handmade using milk from the farm and is suitable for vegetarians. Young and herbed cheeses are sold after three months of ripening, while whole mature cheese is aged for at least eight months.

At present, the farm is able to produce 350kg of cheese per week but with the opening of a new plant this year, this will rise to 2,000kg and should enable the farm to diversify into other dairy products. w: www.mossfield.ie

The perfect cure Hams from the Brady Family are handmade using fresh Irish pork to a secret, age-old method. Established in 1978, the County Kildare-based company specialises in traditional Irish hams and breakfast meat products.

The cooked ham range comprises whole traditional, crumbed, smoked and glazed ham, which come on and off the bone. A range of pre-packed ham is also available.

Water with a distinctive peaty content from the company’s own well is added to the ham during the curing process, which the Brady Family says brings a special flavour to the hams that “is unique and reminiscent of older times”.

Brady Family’s new breakfast range includes sausages, thick cut rashers and black and white puddings. e: info@bradyham.com t: 00 353 45 86 36 50 31