Speciality Food Feb/March 2024

55 LAST WORDS The final word on fine food TRIED & TESTED COCOA AND HAZELNU T SPREAD, ISLANDS CHOCOLATE A 300g jar of pure chocolate y joy. This is, quite honestly, one of the very best chocolate spreads we’ve ever smothered on our toast (or eaten by the spoonful). Free frompalm oil, and wit h a silky smooth texture, it is incredibly rich with the aromatic flavour of roasted Piedmont hazelnuts, which take up a whopping 55% on the ingredients list. These are ground to perfection and combined with Islands Chocolate’s rich, full-flavoured cocoa, grown in its own plantations in St Vincent, or on trusted partner farms in the right way. That means no slavery, living wages, zero deforestation, and a commitment to regenerative farming. islandschocolate.com MAPLE & TOASTED PECAN GRANOLA, JUST LIVE A LITTLE This granola is more than a little tasty. From the folk at Kestral Foods (behind Forest Feast), it’s part of a new range of gluten-free, no added refined sugar products. A dollop of almond butter and sprinkle of cinnamon bring warmth andmoreish-ness to this blend, made up of wholegrain oats, date juice, raisins, rapeseed oil, pecans, crisped rice cereal and salt. It’s crunchy, sweet without being cloying, and has a really delicious toasty flavour that’s a little bit addictive. Ideal for snackin g and baking, or with fruit, milk or yoghurt. justlivealittle.com PROSECCO, SEA CHANGE WINE Amulti award-winning bottle, from a family who wa nt to send out a strong eco message with the ir products. Produced in the Veneto region, us ing the Glera grape variety, this is a light, but co mplex, effervescent wine that hits with a crisp ac idity, before delivering a burst of stone fruit, an d erring into Champagne territory, with a m alty, biscuity, warmfinish. Sea Change is 100% plastic free. The brand only uses natural corks, the paper for its labels is from sustainable forests, and uses waste from the wine-making process, and each bottle is lighter than average too, to minimise its weight in transport. Sea Change’s mission is to help clean up our oceans, therefore a portion of profits is split between charities whose workmatches these aspirations. seachangewine.com THE GRAGNANO EFFECT PARTNER CONTENT THE INDEPENDENT SHOPPER Gemma Parker, EarshamStreet Cafe we have been working with for so many years that I can’t remember not working with him! Peter at Kitchen Gardens is a smallholder and mainly does veg boxes to domestic customers as well as supplying us with seasonal vegetables. I love his salad leaves in the winter. They are deep green in colour with lots of different shaped leaves, and have a spicy taste that is both surprising and unusual. The veg we order is dug up that morning, before being delivered a few hours later, so it’s super fresh and still sporting the dirt that it’s been nestling in. A pioneering business that began in Bungay, and whose products we have enjoyed using since the start is Hodmedod’s; championing British grown grains, pulses, flours and seeds. We use a lot of their YQ flour (a stoneground wholemeal flour), and also their quinoa. Over the years it’s been great to see them grow from strength to strength, in the beginning starting with just dried fava beans, which we tried and tested, to now having loads of products under their belt along with winning numerous awards. Suffolk border gives us access to so many amazing producers and growers. You can’t beat really good produce that’s only travelled a fewmiles, in terms of the carbon footprint, supporting the local economy, and quality. There is such a variety in terms of scale, from the hobby gardeners right up to the world-famous Fen FarmDairy. I was recently involved with developing a paper (and digital) guide to bring all these people together, to really show off what the town and nearby area have to offer when it comes to food and drink. We’ve run the café now for over a decade. Throughout that time we’ve always been on the lookout for new people to add to our list of suppliers and I always get excited when discovering that a new food business has started nearby. My favourite is someone M y husband and I, along with a fantastic team, run Earsham Street Café in the centre of the market town of Bungay – open during the day, and a couple of evenings a month for special taster events. We pride ourselves on making everything from scratch, even down to the jams and chutneys. I work in the kitchen with our team of chefs, designing menus based on the seasons and local ingredients - this also includes the indulgent cakes on the counter. We are lucky to be located on Earsham Street, a real ‘foodie’ destination in Bungay, with a plethora of food and drink shops offering a fantastic shopping and eating experience for visitors. Living and working on the Norfolk/ We are lucky to be located onEarshamStreet - a real ‘foodie’ destination inBungay less. Each batch of dough has to pass through bronze dies. And it is then dried at low temperatures (between 40C and 80C) to preserve the flavour of the wheat and ensure a robust, less brittle finish. This is a true labour of love. There is nothing, say the craftspeople behind Gragnano’s most famous ingredient, like bronze die pasta. It is utterly incomparable to the silky fresh filled pastas of Northern Italy, or off-the-shelf typical supermarket varieties. The combination of higher protein/gluten dough, and bronze die pressing, gives each strand or intricately contorted shape a porous, abrasive surface texture, which siphons up sauces, allowing them to clingmore closely, and for diners to derive more flavour and pleasure from their meal. This is pasta is body and bite, to be heralded as the centrepiece of a meal. Garofalo, based in Gragnano, produces multiple IGP/PGI pastas. Now’s the time to tell your customers what the real difference is between this, the good stuff, and what they can buy at the multiples. A s we’ve already discussed in this column, not all pasta is created equal. Around 400 shapes, from slender linguine and pasta, to capacious conchiglioni, can be found on shelves across the world. Approximately 200 of these are cast from the teeth of bronze dies in the verdant, hilly town of Gragnano, nearly 20miles south of Naples in Italy’s foodie powerhouse region, Campania. It is here, washed by the breeze rushing off the Amalfi coast, and shadowed by the Lattari mountainscapes, that some of the finest pasta on the planet is created. So revered is Gragnano that it’s colloquially known as the ‘city of pasta’ - its products referred to as ‘gold’. Pasta made in Gragnano, to strictly upheld criteria, was granted IGP/PGI status by the EU in 2003. So seriously do artisans take their craft here, that the Gregnano Citta della Pasta Consortiumwas founded, in a bid to guard the heritage, quality and principles of Gragnano’s most revered export. What on earth, then, makes Gragnano’s offering so special? For starters, there’s the cooler climate, ideal for the low, slow drying process this kind of pasta requires. Couple this with the town’s low chlorine water supply (leading to a purer taste), and craftsmanship stretching back at least five centuries (though some put it at 1,000 years), and you have the ingredients for something truly special. To meet stringent EU criteria, Gragnano IGP/PGI pasta must be made with the finest quality high- protein durum semolina wheat, chosen for its superior flavour. This is combined with just one other ingredient –water fromGragnano. That’s it. Nothingmore. Nothing The homeland of fine, bronze die pasta, plays host to some of the very best makers in the world