It’s allotment week this week, so we’re looking at how and why  chefs are embracing the grow-your-own concept.

Freshness leads to competition edge in the kitchen

There are certain foods which all agree  are sublime when absolutely fresh. They are usually best served practically nude with maybe just a whisper of oil, butter, or salt to spare their blushes.

We’re talking of smart, elegant ingredients such as artichokes or asparagus. But not only. The most flavourful potatoes I’ve ever eaten were pink fir apples, dug up less than an hour before we greedily consumed them. In Bamburg one sweltering day we enjoyed a tomato and watermelon salad sitting beneath the windowsill of the restaurant where the fat, juicy, tomatoes were being cultivated.

Chefs are obviously aware of this. At the top of their profession there is intense competition and one weapon in their armoury is a superlatively fresh ingredient, or an ingredient which is hard to come by.

The historic kitchen garden

The idea isn’t new and there are some truly historic, established gardens to prove it.

At Gravetye Manor, for example, construction started on the walls of the kitchen garden in 1898. It was three years before the last slab of Sussex sandstone was fixed into place. The gardeners at Gravetye still use many of the same methods used over a century ago. This month, George Blogg, executive head chef has announced he’s moving on after ten highly successful years, and owners Elizabeth and Jeremy Hosking, are saying ‘George will be a hard act to follow’. Whoever replaces him will certainly be a chef who delights in using what is grown outside his or her kitchen door.

Chef, Chris Eden, on the other hand, is a relatively recent arrival at Gidleigh Park, and his whole ethos is produce-led. His garden salad changes daily to reflect the vegetables available from the garden.

But home-produced produce isn’t only about freshness. Fine ingredients can also be preserved. Eden, for example, uses his plump gooseberries to make chutney to go with local cheeses.

It’s not just about freshness… it’s also about preserving

James Chatfield, head chef at The Small Holding in Kent also finds preserving a helpful solution. His allotment is small – just one acre – and it might yield only eight artichokes in one week. Artichokes rarely ripen all at once. So instead of simply steaming them whole and serving with butter Chatfield gets creative. He uses a provençal method, artichauts barigoule, to pickle the artichokes as and when they are ready to be harvested. The artichokes are simmered in a mix of white wine and white wine vinegar to which flavour is added in the form of fennel seeds or bay leaves. Just prior to serving a choke can be roasted cut-side-down and used as a garnish for fish. If the harvest has been disappointing Chatfield makes these preserved artichokes go even further by dicing them finely and mixing them into a beef tartare or a remoulade sauce.

Growing your own is sustainable

At The Ethicurian just outside Bristol, the Pennington brothers inherited some converted greenhouses and a fine walled garden. As they explained after setting it up, “we didn’t start by wanting our own restaurant. We were more interested in encouraging sustainable food, but actually having our own restaurant is a great way of doing this.”  They were proud to say they were fully self-sufficient in salad leaves all year round, thanks largely to oriental varieties planted by gardener, Mark Cox. Protected from frost in polytunnels, they actually thrive in a cold winter. Cox used a no dig method which involves heaping more manure and mushroom mulch onto beds before planting. This method locks up carbon and enables the brothers to hit their emissions targets. But it’s hard work making a sizeable kitchen garden function well on an ongoing basis and lives move on. After over a decade last year The Ethicurian closed its doors finally.

And it’s visionary

The Pennington brothers were visionaries. At Heckfield Place chef, Skye Gyngell and head grower, Jane Scotter work together also in an innovative and far-seeing way. Their nursery at Heckfield Place was the first, in 2020,  to become fully biodynamic. Like Eden, Gyngell is also excited about salad leaves, for her,  the pinnacle of freshness is a newly harvested lettuce, drooling white sap.

For all these reasons, the kitchen garden needs to be the beating heart of the menu

And finally, at The Pigs they declare that their kitchen gardens “are the beating heart of the operation”. On their website they state that the kitchen gardens influence everything they do. In fact they are so proud of them that they offer daily tours to visitors.

Whether to achieve spanking freshness, specialised ingredients, or to help achieve sustainability, the competitive chef’s potager is definitely a growing trend.

For a post about the kitchen garden at Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir, follow this link: https://saucydressings.com/blog/raymond-blanc-vegetable-garden/