A day in the life of a Harlech development chef #Blog

Sam Elliott
4th August 2017

Where to start? We are all very busy people within the company but we try once a month to get two days where we can all be in the Harlech HQ development kitchen together, talking food, testing new products or generally just cooking up a storm! This month we were looking at seasonal dishes for the specials brochure, dishes using the new Callebaut Mona Lisa range and a starter using some of the Sosa products.

Mona Lisa

This is the sample packs being put together in order to give some of our clients an insight into these amazing products. I think that most pastry chefs in kitchens these days are looking to increase the aesthetics of their dishes without having to put hours of laborious preparation into it. These products are perfect for that (plus they look awesome on Instagram!) We can see here the range is very high-end with items such as transfer sheets for your petit fours, sphere decorations as well as various cups, cigars and curls. All of the products are made from very high quality chocolate, tempered properly to withstand more heat and humidity. The beauty of these products is not only do they make a dish look amazing, we also offer demo days and workshops with HB ingredients, thus giving pastry chefs who want to re-create these products in their own kitchen the insight and training to do so.

The picture to the right was a dish done by the senior development chef here at Harlech HQ, Steve Williams. He has made a chocolate marquis and made use of three of the products we sell to make for a beautiful dish. He has used the Callebaut Mona Lisa spheres and decorated cigars, along with Welsh Maid vanilla ice cream which is sat on a bed of crispy freeze-dried raspberries and popping candy from our SOSA range. He made the tuille and sliced the blackberries himself! I promise he is usually a lot happier than he looks in the picture.

Seasonality

A big part of our job is to look at what products are in season and what we can do to create a beautiful dish using them. We have access to the French markets and London markets once a week which gives us access to not only amazing products, but also the knowledge that comes from their market reports.

This dish screams summer, the lamb coming to the end of its season can be relatively tough, we opted to cook it sous vide (use of a water bath to give it a slower cooking process thus breaking down the sinews and giving a much more even and throughly cooked product). The lamb came from our Bwydlyn Butchers and is verified Welsh Lamb (you don’t get much better anywhere else!) Like everything we do we like to look closely not just at complementing flavours but also flavours/textures that contrast the dish but still work. When looking at this dish it was quite sweet, the peas, fevs and onion Soubise all being naturally sweet, so we added the raspberry and watercress to give the dish a sharpness with the slight peppery flavour coming from the leaf. Raspberries being at the height of their season gave a beautiful fresh flavour along with the refreshing pea purée.

Going back to our day-to-day work, we offer the ability to help chefs who may be struggling for inspiration, or even just want a change of direction, that we, as seasoned chefs, can help with the businesses menu development. We keep on top of the market reports, seasonal reports and current food trends to be able to stay on top of our game.

Sosa

I think most chefs will agree (and be slightly jealous) of the products that we get to use on a day to day. We have access to the full range and offer demo’s either in your kitchen or at our development kitchen. With the market forever changing, chefs want to be at the forefront of innovation and these products allow them to create dishes and products that some of the best kitchens in the world are making. Our demo’s include everything from hot and cold espuma’s, spherification, agave bubbles, passion fruit mayo and airbag scratchings. We also stay on top of the training necessary for these types of demo’s and regularly go on training days to keep up to date with the products. This is more like a chemistry set than a chefs larder but it makes for some beautiful dishes being created. A few products you can see in the picture are isomalt-a diabetic sugar used for decorations and tuilles, crispy raspberry coated in Cocoa butter, perfect for chilled desserts to add an extra crunch. We also have various aromas and flavour compounds along with some of the best powdered food colouring’s on the market.

The dish to the right was made by Steve Griffiths (so many Steve’s!), it is a salmon tartare surrounded in a gel made from cucumber chlorophyll and a setting agent called vegi gel. The sesame crackers were made using maltosec, sesame and water,  the ponzu caviar made using a seaweed extract called agar-agar to give it an extra dimension. He served it with cured salmon and some pickled cucumber for added acidity.

So all in all, we have a great time whilst doing our job, we aim to give the best to our customers and this requires every one of us to keep on top of what is going on in the wicked world of food, an industry that is forever mutating and changing direction. It helps that we are all from very strong backgrounds but also that we have a strong passion for everything food related and this shows in our work. We want to pass this passion on to our customers as much as humanly possible.