Western Daily Press (Saturday)
It’s time to fine-tune some festive favourites
Martin Hesp sees how Food WorksSW is helping one top brewery create its winter fare
Christmas has come early to one of the UK’s leading food and drink innovation centres. Somerset-based Food WorksSW has been helping one of the region’s top breweries to create this December’s festive menu in its state-of-the-art kitchens.
For the past couple of years Butcombe’s development chef, Jasper Prickett, has taken his team to this remarkable facility in Weston-super-Mare so that they can work on and fine-tune the festive dishes which will feature across the 80 inns owned by the brewery during the Christmas period.
It’s not the easiest of challenges, partly because Christmas fare is generally regarded as the most traditional of cuisines. The development of a summer menu would allow for an almost clean slate, but the midwinter festivities demand an array of elements which have featured on menus for decades, or even centuries.
Being a development chef is one of the most interesting and challenging jobs in the culinary world – especially at a time like this when the price of everything is rising week by week.
Basically, he or she must act as a culinary innovator, responsible for shaping menus and ensuring that a consistently good dining experience will be enjoyed across a range of establishments. In Jasper’s case, this is made more complex by the fact that a brewery like Butcombe has a range of public houses which cater for different markets with differing price ranges.
After taking this into consideration, Jasper blends culinary artistry with business acumen to create dishes which will captivate a range of palates.
Needless to say, he must stay ahead of culinary trends and experiment with ingredients, flavours and cooking techniques so that staff across the range of inns can craft unique and memorable dishes. He also has to collaborate closely with suppliers, kitchen staff and management to source ingredients and optimise the work that will go on in the kitchen.
It’s no mean task – ultimately, a development chef will play a pivotal role in elevating a brand’s culinary identity and maintaining its competitive edge.
“When it comes to the Christmas menu, a lot of the conceptualising I do is down to the feedback I get from my colleagues and also customer feedback.
There’s a lot of reviewing of previous sales of dishes. What works, what doesn’t work?”
I put it to Jasper that this must be a particularly difficult time of the year for a person in his role because each festive season he must come up with something fresh and new.
“Absolutely! But then, we are in a country where people like what they like – especially at Christmas – so when customers book for a Christmas party or a festive menu there’s probably a certain expectation. They want to see certain items – a turkey, a nice fish dish, a good traditional pudding. So a lot of the decisions we make are dictated by customer expectation.
“But there’s always an element of flexing the familiar tunes – it’s down to us to try and make a change here or there or put a little twist on things just to make it sound interesting and, hopefully, stand out from our competitors as well.
“So that’s my job at this time of year. I am taking familiar comforting classic dishes – like a sticky toffee pudding, for example, and reinventing it a little bit – but not so much that people don’t recognise it. So we’ve got a spiced sticky date pudding with
Christmas spices in it and we serve it with a gingerbread spiced ice cream. It has a little nod to that festive kind of flavour profile. We do much the same with the main courses to make it stand out.
“At this time of year, you need to – I won’t say ‘play it safe’ – but let’s say, appease people’s sense of familiarity and comfort. So, we’re not experimenting on our customers.”
I mentioned to Jasper that I’d just seen the price of the free range turkey my family has ordered for Christmas lunch and it was a great deal more than a much larger bird cost last year. Price increases like these must be a nightmare for a development chef.
“Yes, it is a challenge,” replied Jasper. “Obviously we have our margins and we have to hit our budgets and so on. But then, at the same time, we really want to make sure we are offering value for money. That’s a big thing for us – value for money. I don’t mean reducing the menu to offer something cheap. I mean enriching the customer experience. So they might have parted with £40 for the three courses – but they’ve gone home knowing that it was a fantastic meal and a good experience.
“We want them to feel happy to return next year. If we were offering something really cheap it would mean sourcing inferior products – and that is not what Butcombe Brewery is about.
“We put quality first, so for example we only use British turkey. We pay a little bit more so that we can always say with confidence where our ingredients come from. It will be British and for the most part will be sourced locally within the South West.
“That’s really important to us. Free range chicken, free range pork – all of our beef comes from the same butcher who buys from the same collection of farms, so full traceability and sustainability are always at the forefront of our decisions. That’s a big part of our brief when we come to develop menus as well.”
So, a tall order indeed, especially when it comes to making sure all the chefs working in the various kitchens in all those 80-plus pubs are using the same ingredients which appear on similar menus. It’s not surprising the brewery hires the development kitchens at the Food WorksSW on a regular basis.
Jasper explained that occasionally when he’s developing a certain dish he might ‘borrow’ one of the kitchens owned by the brewery – but obviously he can’t do that when it comes to working on an entire range like a Christmas menu. By inviting executive chefs down to the facility, situated just off the motorway and within Weston-super-Mare’s Enterprise Area, Jasper is able to bring entire teams together to work on new
menus and hone their skills on the new dishes.
“Food WorksSW is very helpful to us, partly because the place is full of some very good top-of-the-range equipment,” says Jasper. “It’s a space we’ve been using a lot. The building, the logistics, the space itself and the equipment is really useful to us. It means I do not have to impose on the day-to-day operations of any of our own kitchens.”
Zoe Plant, new product and innovation manager at The Food WorksSW, is proud of the facility’s growing reputation: “It really is the perfect place to test out your seasonal menu changes,” she says.
“Our commercial kitchen has an amazing array of equipment that you will find in any pub restaurant or hotel kitchen. This gives companies like Butcombe the freedom to develop and perfect dishes for their menus as well as invaluable training opportunities
for chefs.
“We also have our outstanding dairy, drinks and bakery specialist kitchens which allow companies big and small to come in, experiment and develop food and drink products with our state-of-the art equipment. We occupy a large space just off the M5 so we also have the added bonus of a range of meeting rooms which can be used to showcase products to key staff members, stakeholders or suppliers.”
This might all sound a little technical, but it is the story of how our favourite food reaches our plates in the ever-changing world of hospitality. Either this story, or one like it, might well have a part to play in your festivities this Christmas.
Find out more about the facilities at Food WorksSW at www. foodworks-sw.co.uk and
Christmas at Butcombe Brewery at butcombe.com/christmas.