Softly softly

If there is one skill every chef needs, it is the ability to write an appetising menu. Carefully designed and well-written, it will lure the most cautious diner into ordering an extra course at lunch or to splash out at dinner. Naturally, you must also be a good cook, but half the battle is won if the customer feels spoilt for choice because they want to order everything from the menu.

One important element in creating an appealing menu is the ability to capture a sense of seasonality. It may be bucketing with rain outside, but who can resist choosing summery dishes to escape into a warm, sunny world for a few hours?

Consequently, the arrival of high-quality soft fruit should, in theory, make a chef's life a little easier as aromatic fraises des bois (wild strawberries), plump raspberries and luscious cherries will sell themselves before any thought has been given to how to serve them.

The British soft fruit season is being extended little by little each year as an increasing number of crops are grown under glass and in polytunnels in the spring and autumn. According to Simon Brice, a soft-fruit grower in Kent, there are now five times as many polytunnels in the UK as there were two years ago. Add to this the new varieties of soft fruit bred for their capacity to fruit early or late in the season, and you will find an indigenous crop that is competitively priced from early June until late September.

However, it is the quality and flavour of the fruit that matters to chefs and this can be affected by many factors. "We sell several different varieties of redcurrants to the markets," explains Brice. "Jonker van Tets, in particular, has a superb flavour. However, last year we experimented with a new variety - its flavour turned out to be not as good as our other redcurrants and before long the suppliers were refusing to buy it as they had so many returns [from chefs]. We grubbed it up. It's not worth our while growing something that doesn't taste decent."

Nino Sassu, chef and joint owner of Assaggi, a 35-seat restaurant in London, always serves his summer fruit simply, in classic Sardinian style. White currants are folded into mascarpone with sugar and rose water, for example; or delicate slices of buffalo ricotta are topped with fresh berries before being drizzled with hot abbamele, a Sardinian speciality made from honey that has been cooked with pollen (contact Italian Foods and Beverages on 0181-877 0903 for abbamele).

"I also garnish a lot of my puddings with a generous mixture of the best summer fruits I can find," explains Sassu. "I particularly love fraises des bois when I can get them, but all too often they arrive dead, mouldy and soft. You have to have eyes in the back of your head when it comes to suppliers."

Despite such trials, common to most city chefs, he manages to create a wide variety of tempting puddings, ranging from blueberries baked in a fragile almond tart and served with vanilla ice-cream to strawberries, puréed and diced before being folded into a cold light cream soufflé.

Ironically, Wendy Hubbard, chef and joint owner of Druimard Country House on the Isle of Mull in Scotland, also suffers from travel-weary summer fruit. "We are very limited by what we can grow on the island," says Hubbard. "We simply can't grow raspberries, currants, gooseberries or tayberries successfully over here."

Although the Hubbards have a good arrangement with two local market gardens on the island that grow much of their fresh produce, including superb strawberries, there is no getting around the weather. Mainland suppliers will only deliver as far as the ferry, and fragile punnets of redcurrants or raspberries rarely survive the untrained rough handling, never mind the long hours in a hot van.

"We try to keep true to local produce, and one fruit that grows beautifully here is alpine strawberries, so we do have some compensations," laughs Hubbard.

Chris Colmer, chef at Ynshir Hall in Eglwysfach, Powys, tries to ensure that most of his produce is Welsh. The hotel's garden supplies him with all the gooseberries he needs, while a local pick-your-own farm supplies him with loganberries and raspberries. Like Sassu, he has found the fraises des bois (which in his case come from Birmingham market) lacking in fragrance and not worth the cost.

"I like to try and develop dishes that meet new demands," explains Colmer, fresh from devising his latest creation - a pudding for diabetes sufferers. Raspberries, strawberries, redcurrants and blueberries are covered with a hot mango and peach tea and left to cool. They are then served cold with a chilled lemon grass pannacotta that has been made from semi-skimmed milk and sweetened with saccharine. "The tea brings out the sweet, floral nature of the fruit," he enthuses.

For a hotel, soft fruit can add a spectacular touch to breakfast. At Ynshir Hall, apricot blinis are served with roasted strawberries and Greek yogurt - for the roasted strawberries, the berries are dusted, whole, in icing sugar before being tossed in a hot non-stick frying pan with a squeeze of lemon juice and pan-roasted on the top. Home-made jams include a gooseberry/strawberry mix, the gooseberries solving the problem of low pectin levels in strawberry jam.

Soft-fruit supremo Germain Schwab, chef-owner of Winteringham Fields, a restaurant with rooms in north Lincolnshire, is continually striving to produce exquisite food from local produce, whether it be a delicate summer fruit salad for breakfast, or an intensely flavoured home-made raspberry chutney.

Schwab has an enviable range of fruit at his fingertips. Morello and sweet black cherries grow in his gardens alongside apricot trees, loganberry canes and gooseberry bushes. In the village, Mrs Noel grows redcurrants and blackcurrants for his kitchen, while a local farmer grows the raspberries. Everything is picked when at its best, and the excess is preserved for the winter months. Blackcurrant jelly will be added to a venison sauce, apricot morello jam will be served at autumnal breakfasts, while home-made wild cherry liqueur will be added to all manner of puddings.

Schwab thinks nothing of taking his brigade out to pick wild cherries, elderberries and blackberries. "I've discovered three different varieties of wild cherries in our local forest," he explains. These tiny, wild, sour cherries are macerated in kirsch with some sugar syrup. Once mature, the maceration is particularly good added to an omelette soufflé that has been baked in the oven before being filled with lightly cooked summer fruit, flavoured with a dash of maraschino and wild cherry liqueur, flipped over and finished with icing sugar.

Nothing is wasted in the Winteringham Fields kitchen: lemon-scented blackcurrant leaves are infused into a sugar syrup to make a delicate sorbet, loganberries are added to soufflés, gooseberries are stuffed into sea bream, while their leaves are wrapped around it (see recipe), black cherries are added to duck or pigeon sauces, and morello cherries are used in intensely flavoured puddings and velvety ice-creams.

It may be hard work for the chefs, but every element of the summer is captured on the menu in a way that cannot fail to appeal to the diner.