A few times a year, I get offered the opportunity to compère the chef demo stage at a food festival or a show. It’s hardly something to base a career around, more of ‘a jobby’ (somewhere between a job and a hobby) but this basically means hanging around the stage like a soupy groupy, introducing celebrity chefs with my ‘show voice’ and making sure they rumble along nicely over their allotted slot.
I get a bird’s eye view and a microphone, so have the chance to ask the chefs lots of questions, without being dragged away by my embarrassed husband or bored children.
At the moment we are over half way through Manchester’s 18th Food and Drink Festival and I have been asked to MC the stage at The Hub in Albert Square on both Saturdays.
Last week, the line-up included Ukrainian food writer Olia Hercules, Head Chef at The Midland French, Adam Reid (who was standing in for Simon Rogan) and Chef Patron of Manchester House, Aiden Byrne.
I just thought I’d blog a few photographs and pass on some tips about the dishes they made.
The magnificently named Olia Hercules is a recipe writer and food stylist of Ukrainian descent. She contributes to The Guardian, has been named by The Observer as a Rising Star 2015 and is promoting her new book Mamushka; Recipes from Ukraine and Beyond.
For her demo, Olia showed how to make varenyky - Central Asian dumplings, but Ukrainian style with pork belly. She knocked up the dough before the audience arrived to give it time to rest – although I think it would have been good for her to show how the dumpling dough was made.
She mixed an egg with 150ml of water before gradually adding enough flour (300g-ish) to form dough, which she kneaded until it became firm and elastic. The dough was left for 20-30 minutes to help the gluten relax.
Olia then minced some pork belly by hand and chopped up around the same amount of onion for the filling which also included a knob of butter. The dumpling dough was rolled, filled and primped until they look like the ones on her Instagram feed.
Next on the bill, Adam Reid, head chef at The French, Simon Rogan’s Manchester outpost at the historic Midland Hotel. Thankfully the audience didn’t seem too bothered about Adam standing in for the expected Rogan and there was a full house.
Adam is the current title holder of MFDF’s Best Chef award 2014 and has been heading the kitchen team at the French since it re-opened two years ago. Rogan’s style of cooking throughout all his venues (including L’Enclume and Fera at Claridges) encompasses seasonal vegetables which have been grown on their own farm in the Cartmel Valley, foraged leaves and the freshest, top quality meat and fish.
Adam demonstrated how to cook ‘Plaice with Smoked Scallops, Onion Textures and Sea Asters’. As you’d expect, this included some methods that would be a little trickier for the home cook to replicate (he had a smoking gun and there was talk of protein fixative powders).
He did pass on a few useful tips though, such as immersing delicate white fish in a warm bath of unsalted butter to finish the cooking, English rapeseed oil is their culinary lubricant of choice and the best way to deep fry onions to avoid any bitterness. He also revealed that they preferred to sauce fish dishes with chicken stock based sauces rather than fish to add complementary but deeper base notes.
The final chef demo was with a very focussed Aiden Byrne, who had brought along his head chef Shane. Aiden chose to make a dish of many components ‘Hare with Salsify, Chicory and Pommes Anna’, none of which involved any foams, spumes, emulsions and chemical frippery you’d expect ,but it would still be a tall order for a home chef.
Aiden warned any vegetarians to look away as he was keen to go into bloody detail about butchering the hare, showing how to separate the loin from the bone, get decent steaks from the legs and even use the rib cage for tiny cutlets. He piped raw chicken mousse on top of the seared loin and studded it with smoked foie gras as Shane simulaneously prepared the vegetable accompaniments in an artful display of kitchen ballet. Clearly anticipating each move in an act they’ve rehearsed many times before, trays, plates, pans and cloths were laid before Aiden mere seconds before they were needed.
Once cooked, the final dish was laid out before members of the audience who were invited up to sample them – they descended upon the plates like a pack of starving wolves.
So it’s all happening again tomorrow from 1pm at The Hub in Albert Square with chef demos from Iberica’s Cesar Garcia, Harry Yeung from The Yang Sing, contender for Manchester’s Best Chef 2015, Volta’s Alex Shaw, and Simon Shaw, Chef Patron of El Gato Negro.
Here’s the full line-up. See you there, I’ll save you a seat.
Thank you so much to Tony Worral for giving me permission to use his images.To see some more photographs from the Manchester Food and Drink Festival, please visit Tony Worral’s Flickr stream.
