He does like a bit of Norfolk...

0Before opening The Hand and Flowers, I spent 14 months working at a restaurant called Adlard's in Norwich. The chef, David Adlard, was one of my culinary heroes – he was one of the first British chefs to win a Michelin star.

David's cooking was a superlative example of the way many chefs cook in East Anglia: solid, ingredient-led and honest to their surroundings (with a dash of great British eccentricity thrown in for good measure!) It was a great education for me as a young chef getting to grips with British ingredients, not least because Norfolk grows some of the best produce in the UK – from arable crops to foraged veg, and farmed poultry to game.

Norfolk – the part of East Anglia with which I became most familiar – has the most beautiful, rugged coastline. On my days off from the restaurant, there was nothing better than walking the dogs through villages of flint cottages, heaths of gorse and along wintery shingle beaches. This part of the North Sea, on the north Norfolk coast, is of course famous for its shellfish – such as Cromer crab (below) and Morston mussels, and is one of the better known sources of rock samphire – a delicious weed found on muddy marshland. If you aren't familiar with it, samphire is almost like the asparagus of the sea: meaty yet sinewy in texture and with an intense, salty flavour. Pull the green flesh off the woody stalks and you're left with a versatile ingredient to season salads or garnish fish dishes. I like to wilt it down in butter and fold it through spinach or cabbage.

There's a quiet, more relaxed way of life in Norfolk (even in Norwich) than anywhere else I've worked in Britain. Nothing seems pushed or under pressure. Soon after we moved there, we needed a chimney sweep to make our wood burner usable, so I called a guy who had been recommended to me. He said he'd be right with us ... in a couple of weeks' time. But I quite liked that!

Stories like this belie the scale of commercial farming in East Anglia, however. Much of the region is hardcore farming country. Coming from the west of England where the landscape is more undulating – the rolling Cotswolds, the Malvern hills – Norfolk's landscape was a shock to the system. It is flat – almost industrial – farmland, across which you can see for miles and miles.

There's a well-kept, almost manicured quality to the fields of crops – perfect whiskers of wheat and barley shivering in the breeze, and canary-yellow stretches of oilseed rape glowing as far as the eye can see. The oil from rape has become a prominent ingredient for British chefs – a dry, powerful and slightly bitter flavour that, while not an equivalent to olive oil, is certainly an interesting, homegrown alternative.

In Britain, the standard of fresh produce sold in supermarkets is incredibly high and much of it is grown in East Anglia; the region is highly trusted in its ability to supply good-quality ingredients consistently.

Norfolk turkey is also pretty famous, but I'm a massive fan of the free-range chickens raised at Sutton Hoo – an Anglo-Saxon burial ground (and they taste as cool as they sound). And given these are farming communities, game – such as wild rabbit – is often seen as vermin, so there is perhaps a less squeamish approach to eating them. Rabbit stew, anyone?

Whether you're growing veg in your back garden or you're a large-scale arable farmer, producing fruit and vegetables in East Anglia is a very seasonal exercise.

The land is open to the elements: in summer there's nowhere for crops to hide from the sun, and in winter they are battered by winds. This makes for four very well‑defined seasons, and produce with stunning flavours. A good example is its gorgeous summer fruits: with no surrounding hills the clouds are blown quickly away by the winds, and the fruits are given a long ripening time in the sun to turn sweet and juicy.

Posted By: DrDublin, Apr 14, 09:23:21