Flavour of life

May 9 2008 by Jane Hall, The Journal

Michelin-starred chef John Burton Race’s new book promotes using fine quality local produce at its seasonal best. Jane Hall found out more.

IT’S 8am on a sunny May morning. The thermometer is already pushing towards 18°C and chef John Burton Race is standing on the banks of the River Dart in south Devon.

He is enjoying the river-meets-sea view and the unexpected warmth of the sun. It’s not just his body temperature that is rising on this spring morning, however. So is his temper.

The 50-year-old has a talent for the controversial. Fellow chefs, ex-wives and moving his family to France for a Channel 4 series have all famously fallen victim to his acid tongue over the years. Today it is local food and the need to break the stranglehold the supermarkets have on the public’s buying habits, that is causing John’s blood pressure to rise. It’s a subject that is currently closer to John’s heart than normal. His new book, Flavour First, is all about getting the best from the best ingredients. And for John, food doesn’t come any better than that grown, reared, caught and made within our own borders.

Except so little of what most of us eat is genuinely British – or local for that matter. It’s not just the supermarkets that are set to get a John Burton Race tongue lashing in the next 30 minutes.

He’s not as impressed as he would like to be with the farmers’ markets that have sprung up across the country and are credited with nurturing a newfound desire among consumers for local produce.

“I don’t want to buy olives and chocolates when I go to a farmer’s market,” he laments. “I want to buy celery and peas and asparagus in season and beans and broccoli and strawberries and raspberries when they are plentiful, cheap and full of flavour. I want to see the fruit and vegetable growers and the meat producers all showing off their wares, not talk to someone about their Mediterranean olives. That’s not local. I could go on and on,” he adds with a sigh of exasperation.

It was a subject he had waxed lyrical about the previous day at the Hexham Book Festival when he spoke to a receptive audience about the ethos behind Flavour First.

A slave to the bank holiday travel timetables, John had been forced to exit stage left promptly to catch a flight home, curtailing his time for Press interviews. Hence the mobile phone conversation now being conducted between The Journal in Newcastle and John’s altogether more scenic riverside ‘office’ in the picturesque coastal town of Dartmouth.

It is here – when not appearing on such shows as ITV’s I’m a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here and BBC2’s popular Kitchen Criminals – that he runs the Michelin-starred New Angel restaurant (just re-opened after a bitter divorce from wife Kim saw the eaterie go into receivership before being saved by an internet entrepreneur who reinstalled John as chef again). A shop window for local, regional and seasonal produce, John states proudly: “Ninety three per cent of what we use in the restaurant is local.”

Good food has always been a passion for him. But it wasn’t until he took his family to live in France for 12 months that he really caught the local food bug. His progress was charted in Channel 4’s French Leave and then in Return of the Chef when the family came back to England and settled in Dartmouth. “I went to France because I was bored with the food scene in London where we were all doing these pretty little towers using ingredients from all over the place.

“I said to myself, ‘why don’t I go and look at where all these ingredients are coming from?’ as the quality wasn’t all that good. I went to France to try and discover who was doing the best. I quickly discovered that what is happening is that the French are pushing everything to the UK that they don’t want. We, on the other hand, export all out best stuff.

“I also looked at the quality of the farmers’ markets. In France things come and go in season. There are many reasons why seasonal is best, the first being that the goods are plentiful, secondly they are at their cheapest because they are abundant and thirdly they are at their best as far as taste goes.”

That was in 2003. Five years on and John’s belief in the buy local, use local, eat local mantra currently being promoted by The Journal as part of our Taste North East England initiative, shows no signs of diminishing. Unexpectedly, he is familiar with The Journal’s food and drink campaign, having heard about it first on a recent visit to Newcastle fronting ITV’s Britain’s Best Dish and then again on his Hexham trip.

“What your paper is doing is very good; every newspaper should be doing what you are, “ he says. “There has to be a starting point. One individual like me won’t change something, but once the public knows what at the moment is being forced upon them to eat, they won’t accept it.” He says 50% of good food is about the raw ingredients. “The rest is down to the recipe and skill of whoever happens to be cooking.”

Which is why he is not a fan of supermarkets. Not that he has always been adverse to them.

“Fifteen years ago they were a good idea as they introduced people to different ingredients from around the world.

“One thing about the British is we aren’t as insular as the French; we travel all over the world and we have always been like that.

“But while supermarkets were a good idea they now have a monopoly and the little shops that used to sell local goods, have gone. As a kid I can remember walking down to the local shop and buying vegetables with my mum. Now you can’t. Everything in the supermarkets is packed in fours or sixes. Shoppers load up their trollies with their weekend groceries, but there is so much they can never eat it all, and anyway, three days later all the food has gone off because of the way it is packaged.”

Now on his soap box, John moves on to perhaps his two greatest bugbears – the great labelling issue and the plight of farmers.

“If there are two things that really make me fed up it’s that the Government has virtually annihilated the farming industry – did you know that most of our milk now comes from France and Poland for God’s sake? – and that much of the meat labelled as British in supermarkets isn’t. They get away with it by butchering the meat in this country, which apparently then makes it British.

“What I wish for more than anything is to see a reversal back to genuinely British and genuinely local.”

While John is not afraid to criticise farmers’ markets, at the same time he admits to being “pleased and proud” to witness their growth, bringing as they do the best of our seasonal produce to consumers.

“It makes it so much easier to create a great dish if you start off with fantastic raw ingredients,” he says. “I love the idea that you should be able to taste before you buy, as they do in Europe. How often have you been tempted by a fine-looking peach on a supermarket shelf, only to find once you have bought it and bitten into it, that it’s hard and acidic?

“You should be able to feel, smell and, where possible, taste food so that you know what you are buying. I choose fruits in season and use various methods to preserve them when they are at their best. It enables you to give more variety to your cooking throughout the year without resorting to imported produce that has been picked before ripening and is lacking in flavour.”

John says fundamentally Flavour First is about “making the most ingredients when they are at their freshest, tastiest and cheapest. It is about appreciating fine fresh fish and good quality succulent meat. It is about identifying the best ingredients, buying them in season and transforming them into great-tasting dishes.”

Flavour First by John Burton Race is published by Quadrille at £20.

I don’t want to buy olives and chocolates when I go to a farmer’s market