So how good does food have to be to win one of theses?
HARRIET ARKELL joins the judges of our most prestigious food awards to find out
JusT As I’m about to say I found the marmalade a little too sweet, the woman to my left sniffs deep into her plastic thimbleful, closes her eyes, and pronounces: ‘I’ve got tamarind coming through on the nose.’
I’ve been invited to Dorset to help judge the Great Taste Awards for the first time — and, frankly, it’s terrifying.
Like many people, I like to think I’m a bit of a foodie: a lifelong obsession with cooking, an expensive food magazine habit, and an even more expensive restaurant habit (though children have temporarily put the kibosh on that).
But sitting down at a table of turbofoodies and being invited to pass comment on the artisan products assembled before us makes me realise that I know almost nothing compared to the experts that I’m surrounded by.
The room is packed with the finest palates in the land. I spy Frances Quinn, who was the 2013 winner of The Great British Bake Off, legendary food writer charles campion, harrods’ director of food Bruce Langlands, James Golding, renowned chef at celebrated hotel The Pig, food journalist and TV presenter Aggie MacKenzie (how clean Is Your house?), and Lucas hollweg, who describes himself as ‘food writer and greedy man’.
Aggie is on my table. It turns out she was head of the Good housekeeping Institute before she was scouted to go on telly, so she knows her stuff. As does silvija Davidson, the food writer and chief judging coordinator whose nose for a flavour has stunned me into silence.
next to silvija is Glynn christian, one of the first ever TV chefs (remember Pebble Mill?) whose idea it was 21 years ago to call it the Great Taste awards. (‘It was going to be Good Taste, but I said NO, it has to be GREAT Taste,’ he tells me.) next to him is Lucy Kaplan, who runs harrods’ food hall.
We’ve all been invited to the Dorset headquarters of The Guild of Fine Food, which organises the awards, to help whittle down the final 120 entries to a shortlist of 50 ‘Golden Fork’ winners.
FrOM these, a supreme champion will be chosen, to be announced in september at the hotly anticipated ‘Golden Fork’ dinner in London — aka the foodie Oscars.
John Farrand, MD of The Guild of Fine Food, tells us the 120 we’ll be judging have already been creamed off from the 10,000 foods and drinks submitted for the awards at the start of the year.
‘The products you will taste have been past 400 judges on 45 judging days — so they have already been rigorously tested,’ he says. ‘This is day 46, and I would ask you to think beyond easy crowd-pleasers.
‘challenge yourselves, and find the very best examples of their type, even if they are not necessarily your favourite thing.’
everything we taste is anonymous. Knowing which brand we’re sampling, or even seeing its smart packaging, might sway our verdicts.
The products just have a simple name, such as ‘semi-soft cow’s milk cheese’, plus a code number.
We’re also asked not to tweet photographs or even describe what we eat too clearly, for fear of giving the game away before the results are out next month.
First up on our table is a brace of cheeses: the ‘semi-soft cow’s milk’ one, and a seductively molten english blue. Little slivers are cut and handed round on paper plates, and I watch Glynn and silvija, who’ve done this for decades, as they study its appearance.
‘Beautiful tetilla shape,’ they agree, and my A-level spanish means I know what they’re on about. (It’s shaped like a small breast — a sort of cone topped by a nipple.) Then they sniff it, several times, with thoughtful pauses in between.
And finally they take bites — not greedy gobbles like they do in Masterchef, but small, decisive nibbles. ‘Perfect consistency,’ they nod, jotting down their scores. ‘Fabulous relationship between the rind and the cheese.’
The blue cheese nearly finishes off Glynn, a dapper, charming chap who set up a well-known deli named Mr christian’s in London’s notting hill in 1974, before a media career beckoned.
Groaning with pleasure, he grins from ear to ear before pronouncing it
perfect’. And Aggie agrees with him in a reassuringly down-to-earth style. ‘It smells like my granny’s milking room in Scotland,’ she says. ‘Delicious.’ Next come little plastic thimbles of tea-infused fruit jam, which smells invitingly of bergamot but loses it somewhat in the taste, followed by an intense spiced vinegar.
Every now and then, a row breaks out on one table or another as judges disagree on the merits of something they’re samping. Voices are raised (‘I completely disagree — it’s the mustard seeds you can taste!’). Extra sample slices are cut from a cake no one can agree on. Occasionally, Silvija, as senior judge, is called upon to adjudicate or to decide whether a powdered green tea has been brewed correctly by the hard-working team in the kitchen.
Everything we try is delicious — but it has to be to have got this far.
Actually, not quite everything. One herbal tea we try splits our table down the middle. The woman from Harrods and Aggie both love it, but I don’t, and neither does Silvija or Glyn.
‘It tastes like medicine,’ splutters Glynn, and he’s right: it makes the roof of my mouth throb in an entirely medicinal way. But Aggie and Lucy are
in raptures. Thankfully, we’re soon on to the paper plate we’ve been eyeing up since we started: it has six lime-infused dark chocolates laid out on it.
‘Now this is what cacao smells like: musty,’ says an approving Silvija, inhaling deeply. ‘Beautiful.’
The chocolates really are delicious — a dark chocolate shell so thin you wonder it doesn’t break, filled with intensely lime- flavoured caramel that hits you with a rush when you bite into it. (Later, when I get home, I spend hours googling to find out who makes them.)
I can’t imagine how anyone could object to such chocolate perfection, but Aggie isn’t so sure.
‘I’m more of a KitKat person, to be honest,’ she says.
This, Silvija tells me, is the beauty of Great Taste. The products are tested by so many different palates, from the most refined senior judges to people like me with a more domestic sense of what tastes good, that those which make it through to be awarded stars really are the very best.
My favourite of everything I tasted that day?
A chicken, ham and leek pie that was so good it had the whole of our table swooning. The minute the results are out and I know where I can buy them, I’m placing an order!