Food and drink: the rise and rise of Scotland's artisan superstars

Mediterranean goes local

Your Mediterranean diet need not be imported. Believe it or not, these days it is possible to get a chilli preserve made from chillies grown in Galloway, and a fresh mozzarella cheese made from the milk of Brown Swiss cows that roam a Dumfriesshire farm.

Sheena Horner, creator of Galloway Chillies preserves, is a farmer’s daughter who first dreamed up the idea of growing her own chillies when, in 2012, the only chillies she could get locally were jalapenos and Scotch bonnets. Currently, she has over 600 plants. Her Chilli Original preserve, she says, is a recipe she used to make for family and friends, and which was so popular that she thought it might have potential as a business idea. “People are more interested in where food is sourced from and I can explain not only that we use Scottish-grown chillies, but also the variety and how we grow them.”

The Brown Swiss cows that Gavin Lochhead keeps on his Dumfriesshire farm produce high-protein milk that lends itself particularly well to making cheese, especially the mozzarella he batch-makes each Thursday to sell under the name Kedar cheese. The trick, Lochhead says, is to make it “as soft as you can”. “Most people like it to be soft, with the milk oozing out of it. What we make is so different from what you get in the supermarket – because what you get there usually has citric acid added to it. But we have no additives or preservatives in it – so it only lasts seven days.”

He first began producing the cheese almost two years ago, after he had learned to make it on a cheese-making course in Nantwich. “I found it seemed awfully easy to make mozzarella. Also, I noticed there was no-one else making fresh mozzarella in Scotland – so I thought there was a good market there. The big advantage as well is that with mozzarella you could make it and sell it on the same day. A lot of our Italian customers prefer it on the same day.”

Half-baked?

Hardly. In fact, the artisan bread boom is still on the rise, and increasingly entering the mainstream. Sourdough remains a hot trend – with supermarkets these days even stocking bread that in its mass-produced way mimics an artisan style. Matt Fountain runs The Freedom Bakery, which began as a project providing a work activity for prisoners in HMP Low Moss and is now based outside the prison, in the community, where it offers employment for ex-offenders. He has observed the changes in the bread

market.

“Broadly the appreciation and demand for artisan bread is growing,” he says. “The food market always has its buzzwords. Whereas I feel 10 or 15 years ago organic was a buzzword – now gluten-free and veganism are expressing similar socio-political agendas. When it comes to sourdough I think it’s less about some of these socio-political motivations and more about a reclaiming of something utilitarian and quotidian in our early lives. Bread is consumed less and less today but was a staple. It’s about an appreciation for that simplicity.”

As well as producing great artisan sourdough bread, The Freedom Bakery is also one of a growing number of food projects that presents some other social good. There’s something about baking bread that provides a good task for people coming out of prison. “It’s quite creative,” he says, “but formulaic as well, and there’s a great deal of pride attached to it. I think pride and confidence are among those things you lose when you go through the criminal justice system.”

Vegan vs Artisan

Veganism probably trumps artisan as one of the biggest recent global food trends. But the combination of the words “vegan” and “artisan” have to be a match made in foodie heaven. Not that Mateusz Noniewicz realised this was what he was going to create when he first started to make food to sell at farmers’ markets. Rather, he seems to have almost stumbled upon the snack that has taken the markets by storm – the vegan kuku, a dish that is a variation on a kind of Middle Eastern frittata containing herbs and vegetables, only without the eggs.

Early on he realised that of all the foods on his vegetarian stall, it was the kuku that was a big hit. What prompted the vegan twist was the fact that he had a stall next to Sgaia’s Vegan Meats, which encouraged him to give it a try. But the vegan kuku is not just for vegans. “Most of our customers at our markets in Edinburgh are not vegans – they are just people who fancy a healthy option from time to time.”

Sweet virtues

Among the big sellers in the artisan market are the sweet treats. That’s not surprising, given that a small indulgence is something people are often willing to fork out a little on, even in difficult times. Michelle Wilkinson has been making her The Very Lovely Sauce Company range of caramel sauces from her kitchen in Fife, and says she wanted to make something that would make people smile. They come in a tantalising range of flavours including liquorice, smoked sugar, gingerbread and lemongrass. The idea that a treat can be healthier is at the basis of Glasgow-based Dr Neil Robson’s Rebel Chocolate, which has significantly less sugar than most chocolate on the market. Robson is a former immunologist who left his job because of a longstanding back injury. He needed to find a new way of working and, along with his immunologist wife, came up with the idea of creating healthier chocolate. “The overriding goal was that it had to taste great. People would think I’m going to eat this chocolate because it’s nicer than the chocolate I normally eat, without realising there’s anything healthier about it. It’s not a health product. It’s a healthier product.”

The Farm Scoop

Not long ago, Don Dennis of the Wee Isle Dairy on Gigha got an email from an English woman who had visited Argyll on holiday, which said she had picked his raspberry ice cream up at a petrol station and it was the finest ice cream she had ever had. Why, I ask, does he think it’s so good? “Because,” he immediately replies, “the milk from our cows is so damn good”. It is the only dairy in Scotland that produces milk pasteurised the old-fashioned way, slowly at 63oC, rather than rapidly at 73oC as most milk producers do.

Artisan ice cream, produced on the farm on which the cow is milked, is a hot trend in artisan foods – but it’s also one into which, on some level, farmers have been forced. At Stewart Tower Dairy, near Perth, its gelato-style ice cream is marketed as being “from cow to cone”, and is sold in an on-site parlour. Farmer Neil Butler says he got into making ice cream because “the continuing poor wholesale price of milk that was and still is offered to UK farmers”.

“We decided that we were no longer content with being at the financial mercy of people in offices of large organisations that had never set foot on a farm.” There were, he says, too many middlemen – and this was his way of bypassing them. They also loved “good ice cream”.

Posh snacks

The humble Scotch egg. What’s not to like about it? Well, if what you’re looking at is a supermarket Scotch egg, there’s the fact you probably don’t know whether the pork and the egg comes from, or what the conditions are under which it was reared. Mark and Jacqueline Davidson first started to explore the idea of setting up their own food business after he was made redundant a few years ago. They saw that there was an opportunity right on their doorstep in the excellent free-range pork and egg producers in their local Ayrshire.

The Aye Love Real Food artisan Scotch egg, made from the meat of Tamworth pigs which roam the Nethergate Larder farm in Ayrshire, was born. It has been bowling over customers at food markets since, hitting, as it does, all the right provenance and taste buttons.

Mark Davidson observes: “The Scotch egg had been done so badly for so long that when people suddenly get a high-quality artisan option it proves massively popular. It’s a ‘wow’ moment when they taste something amazing that they had low expectations of.”