Nominate your favourite chippy chip or 5*creamy mash in the 2016 Mighty Spud Awards

Chef Paula McIntyre is leading the search for the best potato dishes that Northern Ireland has to offer in the inaugural Mighty Spud Awards 2016. The awards are part of an ongoing campaign to support the NI potato industry, while also recognising excellence in the hospitality sector. There will be four nomination categories – Mightiest Chip, Mightiest Mash, Mightiest Potato Innovation and Mightiest Healthy Potato Dish.

Food outlets including restaurants, pubs and takeaways and their customers have four weeks to nominate a potato creation that they believe should be hailed as mighty. Following the closing deadline, Paula along with Food NI’s Michele Shirlow, Angus Wilson (Wilson Potatoes) and Michael McKillop (Glens of Antrim Potatoes), owners of two of Northern Ireland’s top potato brands, will form an expert panel to shortlist entries and crown one winner in each of the four categories.

At the launch of the Mighty Spud Awards, Paula McIntyre, Chef, said:

“The Mighty Spud Awards is a fantastic initiative developed by a group of Northern Ireland’s hard-working potato growers, processors and packers. The group continue to work tirelessly to shine a light on the healthiness, versatility and value of potatoes.

“The campaign focuses on hailing the potato as mighty, not humble. And what better way to do that than showcase the culinary talent that exists in Northern Ireland. The spud is more than just a bit on the side – whether it is triple cooked chips, creamy champ or decadent potato gratin, it is impossible to imagine mealtimes without it,” continued Paula.

Nominations are now open and entries can be made via www.mightyspud.com/awards Entries will close at 12 noon on Monday 15 February. Following the nomination process, entries will be shortlisted for tasting and four winners will be announced. Join the conversation on Twitter @MightyNotHumble

For further information please contact Annette Small at Morrow Communications on 028 9039 3837 or email a.small@morrowcommunications.com

Year of Food and Drink was given a marvellous boost last week by Tesco Northern Ireland in the shape of a £500,000 promotional campaign to showcase our fantastic food and drink.

Tesco already spends upwards of £500 million annually on purchasing local food and drink and has helped many smaller companies, including artisan enterprises, to develop sales here and also to win their first business with the leading retailer in Great Britain. Tesco’s purchases of local food and drink was just £50 million in 1997.

I was delighted to be present at the announcement by Cliff Kells and his team at Tesco and to support the retailer’s tremendous commitment to our £5 billion food and drink industry, our biggest manufacturer and an employer of around 100,000 people across the ‘farm to fork’ supply chain.

It’s an immensely encouraging initiative that will present excellent opportunities for smaller companies in particular to develop sales and to impress the Tesco top team with the quality of their products and the strength of their commitment to business. I hope they will seize the opportunities being provided by Tesco.

What Tesco brings to our year-long campaign is unrivalled reach for our companies, both large and small and across all industry sectors.

The retailer has 57 stores here and deals with 800,000 customers every week. They will be highlighting our superb food and drink to shoppers by means of a series of initiatives and promotions in store.
Tesco plans to spotlight on local producers and products, giving the public here an unprecedented opportunity to get to know producers and to give shoppers more opportunities than ever before to sample the quality and innovation of local products. This will increase awareness of local products and provide producers the opportunity to increase sales.
Tesco’s carefully structured campaign includes promotional branding support for Year of Food and Drink, more than 200 supplier sampling days in stores, 12 “sampling fairs” for artisan businesses in particular and 12 Food NI cookery demonstrations. Smaller artisan companies will be invited to run ‘pop-up’ shops in Tesco store foyers. This is a unique opportunity so far only offered by Tesco.
There will also be an extended advertising campaign involving producers on U105fm radio, 12 live on-air product tastings, 24 ‘meet the producer’ videos and 24 competitions posted on Tesco’s local facebook page, TasteNorthernIreland. In addition, digi-social flyers will be circulated to 300,000 shoppers every month and there will be a new promotional mural at Belfast City Airport showcasing local food

With Northern Ireland embarking on the ‘Year of Food and Drink’, Belfast City Council once again will place the ‘Focus On Food’ at a major one-day conference, which will help further drive the city’s culinary renaissance and examine the importance of food and hospitality to the local tourism industry.

The conference – organized with support from the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (DARD), through its Northern Ireland Regional Food Programme, and Tourism NI – will take place at St George’s Market on Tuesday 23 February. The keynote speaker will be top chef and food writer Valentine Warner.

According to Tourism NI, in 2014 overnight visitors to Northern Ireland spent an estimated £751 million, of which approximately one-third was spent on food and drink. In addition, £282 million was spent by Northern Ireland residents on tourism day trips; of this, approximately 40 per cent was spent on eating out.

“The aim of the ‘Focus On Food: Our Recipe For Tourism Success’ conference is to see what more can be done to maximize the economic benefit of food tourism, not only for Belfast, but the region as a whole,” explained Councillor Deirdre Hargey, Chair of Belfast City Council’s City Growth and Regeneration Committee.

“It will look at the long term development of food tourism in the city, and is designed to promote Belfast’s food tourism message; inspire the industry to collaborate and create new visitor experiences; engage producers, farmers, fishermen, chefs and outlets to better promote the food message to visitors; encourage the use of local produce and enable those in the industry to share experiences, challenges and opportunities.

“Last year’s conference was a huge success, with a key message being the desire for more events which allow the industry to network and collaborate. Delegates all agreed that that the conference helped to maximise the food tourism potential of Belfast and the region, with three-quarters of them saying that they made new partnerships and business contacts as a result of attending the event. A number of emerging themes and recommended actions were identified, and the council has taken these on board over the last year,” continued Councillor Hargey.

“Progress has been made on a number of fronts – through initiatives led by ourselves, through activities being planned as part of Year of Food and Drink and through industry collaboration, product development and a range of industry-led initiatives. Not the least of our achievements has been Belfast earning two Michelin stars!

“The huge appetite for foodie events was clear when we held the first Twilight Market at St George’s in November, which attracted more than 17,000 people and generated more than £600,000 for the local economy. Many of the city’s restaurants also benefited from the Twilight event and reported a subsequent increase in footfall and sales. As a result, plans are being considered to hold seasonal Twilight Markets throughout 2016.

“In addition, Visit Belfast is currently facilitating a new industry planning group and we are currently finalising our plans for a number of other culinary events in 2016 to celebrate Year of Food and Drink,” concluded Councillor Hargey.

The conference is organized with support from the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (DARD), through its Northern Ireland Regional Food Programme. Agriculture Minister Michelle O’Neill said: “The conference will be a significant cornerstone event during the 2016 Year of Food and Drink. It is an opportunity to celebrate our food and drink successes and capitalize on these through trade and consumer communications.

“It will offer the hospitality sector, producers, tour operators and tourism-facing businesses the opportunity to network, build on existing and new relationships and increase the number of local producers supplying produce to the Belfast eateries.”

The conference is also supported by Tourism NI. Board member Angelina Fusco said:

“Year of Food and Drink 2016 is a great opportunity to harness the benefits of our successes in the food and drink sector, to drive quality, innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship and support growth in export food sales. Tourism NI is co-ordinating a series of dedicated industry and event roadshows across Northern Ireland. We’ve also produced toolkits, brand guidelines and templates to support the industry which are available on www.tourismni.com.

“We have supplemented our annual Tourism Events Fund with an additional scheme specifically for food and drink experiences at events and are leading on an integrated plan to maximise the PR and communications opportunities at home and further afield. Our aim is to inspire our industry, boost Northern Ireland’s destination reputation and grow our ability to attract visitors who will make a significant contribution to our economy”.

To register for the ‘Focus On Food: Our Recipe For Tourism Success’ conference, visit www.belfastcity.gov.uk/belfastfood. Attendees can also keep up to date with developments on Twitter, by following @belfast_food or #belfastfocusonfood

Year of Food and Drink, which launched at the start of January, features breakfast as its theme for the month. Sam Butler enjoyed an award winning breakfast at Newforge House, Magheralin and met the Krazibaker bringing new life to griddle breads.

This is what an award winning breakfast looks like. It’s a traditional Ulster Fry that has earned Newforge Country House at Magheralin recognition from top Irish food writer Georgina Campbell as the ‘Best Country House Breakfast’.

The breakfast is the favourite of John Mathers, chef/owner of the stylish country house for the past decade, a successful business he runs with wife Lou. His approach to breakfast – and all meals served at the hotel – is underpinned by a commitment to the best ingredients that are all locally sourced and cooked simply and carefully to ensure outstanding taste.

“The Ulster Fry is seen by some people as being stodgy. It shouldn’t be. It can be a great way to start to the day. Our Ulster Fry is prepared without fat. We use a small amount of rapeseed oil from Harnett’s in Waringstown to cook the ingredients from suppliers all within a few miles of the hotel. This means the products are fresh and we know where they come from. Provenance is immensely important to us and so we depend on sourcing products that we can count on to be tasty and wholesome,” he adds.

“We source eggs, for example, from our own free-range hens. The yolks are a rich orange colour and full of flavour. Our bacon is dry-cured and comes from Hannan Meats in Moira. The thick pork sausages are from Martin Madden’s butchers in Lurgan and use natural rather than synthetic casings. We cook the sausages slowly to get a golden colour.

“The potato and soda breads are from a local bakery. We coat these lightly on one side with Abernethy handmade butter from Dromore. The spicy black pudding is from Gracehill, near Ballymena. The tomatoes are roasted. We never ever us baked beans in our Ulster Fry because they make the meal soggy and overcome the flavours of the other ingredients. Mushrooms, also a bit controversial among purists, are available. These are lightly cooked in rapeseed oil.

“Food is central to the Newforge House experience. As well as our small and select network of local suppliers, we source seasonal produce from our own gardens and orchard for our daily changing dinner menu. The orchard provides fruit for our homemade desserts, chutneys and preserves,” he adds.

Guests can also enjoy Clandeboye Estate Yoghurt from Bangor, Armagh apple juice and porridge from White’s in Tandragee.

This attention to detail and excellence in sourcing ingredients has earned the boutique hotel as string of culinary awards including ‘Irish Breakfast Awards National Winner 2014’ and Good Food Ireland’s ‘Culinary Haven of the Year 2014’. The influential Restaurant Association of Ireland said it had the ‘Best Hotel Restaurant in Ulster 2014’ and the local Licensed and Catering News said it was the ‘Best Guesthouse in Northern Ireland 2014’.

Newforge House is also listed in Ireland’s highly influential Blue Book of Irish Country Houses, Historic Hotels and Restaurants this year, with the likes of the famed Ballymaloe House and Castle Leslie, both based in the Republic of Ireland.

A five-star Georgian country house, Newforge was originally the family home of John Mathers. It took two years to transform the distinctive Georgian house into a luxury establishment that maintained its distinctive exterior. It opened in May 2005 and has fulfilled John and Lou’s aspiration to create a luxurious country house in tranquil and relaxing surroundings, a home from home based on superb hospitality and excellent food.

Family and friends told Mark Douglas that he was crazy to give up a steady job to start his own business. But the Dromore baker was determined to push ahead with his plan to bring traditional griddle baking to markets and other events around the country. And Krazibaker was born.
Over the past two years he’s been successfully raising awareness of the taste benefits of traditional griddle baking of soda and potato bread as well his potato apple, which earned him a Great Taste Award last year, at farmers’ markets here.

A baker by trade over 30 years, Mark Douglas is now part of an enthusiastic group of talented artisan foodies to be found at markets across the province.
He’d like to bring his expertise to the successful St George’s Food Market, also in Belfast, but sadly there’s no room there for newcomers, which is a shame because the market would benefit greatly from his expertise and his free and easy exchanges with customers keen to know how he bakes traditional breads the way their grandmothers did. He’s even been recruited by Tourism Ireland to demonstrate his skills to a selected group of VIPs and food writers in London.

Krazibaker specialises in “anything that can be baked freshly on a griddle” The breads are all baked with local ingredients such as Neill’s Flour, Drayne’s Farm buttermilk and Armagh apples. None of them need yeast or preservatives. There’s little point in adding preservatives because all the breads he bakes sell as quickly as he lifts them from the hot griddle on his market stall.

“I served my apprenticeship as a baker and subsequently sharpened my skills and knowledge working at several local home bakeries including Moira Bakery,” he says. While Northern Ireland, unlike Great Britain, has managed to preserve a heritage in home bakeries, I noticed that griddle baking at farmers’ has been declining steadily. The days when traditional breads like potato cakes and soda farls were regularly baked in many homes have long gone. It’s a skill that appears to be dying, and that’s sad because griddle breads are tastier. This led me to attempt to do something to keep the technique alive.

“What also encouraged me to set up my own artisan business was my experiences visiting markets around Europe. I saw that most sold artisan breads brought into the markets from bakeries elsewhere. It seemed to me that baking on site might just appeal to shoppers now more concerned than ever about how the food they consume is produced. I decided to give it a go at local markets. And it’s worked.”