Bringing home the British

In the current climate of skills and staff shortages, few chefs or restaurant managers have the time to co-ordinate food tastings. Sourcing a number of different foods for a comparative tasting is a time consuming operation.

Consequently, new foods and ingredients tend to be sampled as and when they arrive at the kitchen door rather than being compared and contrasted with similar products.

This was the thinking behind Chef linking up with Food From Britain, an organisation that promotes home-grown speciality foods, to conduct an occasional series of "Taste & Tell" sessions.

Here a range of speciality foods are sampled by a panel of chefs in order to build a better picture of the tastes and their possible uses.

Chef already runs a monthly tasting of manufactured food products. The "Taste & Tell" sessions will focus on raw ingredients and speciality food items. Chef hopes this will provide a useful platform for caterers to tap the wealth of home-produced speciality foods that are now available. Further, many of the food producers featured are keen to work with chefs to develop tailor-made products.

British hams and bacons

In the first "Taste & Tell" session the panel of chefs sampled a dozen British hams and nine bacons.

Middle England Fine Foods, the food group representing the counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and Nottinghamshire played host to the event.