Festival food has come on leaps and bounds in the past few years. Forget your cheap and cheerful bacon butties or curry and chips. These have been replaced due to the demand for good quality, tasty food that is locally sourced and ethically prepared.
For most, it has been all about stripping back the menu and focusing on one dish, making sure that dish is prepared the way it should be prepared – using the best ingredients available.
Well, that’s what we do at Ethical Chef anyway. This year at Glastonbury we cooked up a chilli on a bed of bulgur wheat with local cheese, yoghurt and fresh coriander. Doing just one dish enabled us to source all of our ingredients organically, be able to cook from scratch every morning and it allowed us to cut down on the amount of waste created. This was not only to save money but because we value and appreciate the importance of these wonderful nutritious ingredients.
With an ever growing population and a depleting reserve of resources, the price of food is only going to rise and this is especially relevant to the production of meat. As a nation we are going to have to start adopting a diet which involves less meat. When we started Ethical Chef four years ago the idea was to take the chef out of the restaurant and get them into the farmers markets, where all the finest produce was available direct from the people who grew it.
Using these ingredients enabled us to cook simple dishes which showed off the flavours as nature intended. We have now taken this model and applied it to most of the festivals and events that we do. We choose one dish, and make that dish using the best local, seasonal and organic ingredients to hand. If you haven’t been to one of the many pop up street food events that are happening all over the country, then please go and see what we’re talking about. You don’t have to go to a restaurant and pay over the odds for a dish that you could create at home for a tenth of the price.
These guys are creating top quality dishes, with the emphasis on ‘cooking right there in front of you’ and are producing dishes of restaurant quality at takeaway prices
Check out the events & festivals that Deri will be appearing at www.ethicalchef.co.uk
