Feast days in Ayrshire

(Image credit: PAUL WALKER)

last updated 30 November 2017

I always enjoy coming out into our walled kitchen garden, meeting guests and having a chat while I’m picking some ingredients or getting inspiration for accompaniments. The gardeners do a fantastic job: Annemarie Mitchel follows a proud line of head gardeners – Gertrude Jekyll designed the formal Italian garden. It’s a constant battle to keep the rabbits and birds off the crops – but I think the gardeners’ greatest threat is us chefs!

In the fruit cages, we have gooseberries, which arrive first in the season, followed by strawberries. Then come raspberries and tayberries (a cross between raspberries and blackberries). We also have redcurrants and blackcurrants. When the blackcurrant leaves are at their best, just as the fruit arrives, we pick them to make a blackcurrant leaf sorbet – you infuse them in the syrup before freezing it. It has a subtle blackcurrant flavour but is white. It goes beautifully with a blackcurrant soufflé, dark and light.

There is also a Victorian glasshouse with an old fig tree, which provides enough to accompany the odd cheese plate, and grape vines. We’re not about to make Ayrshire wine, but I have used them to make a grape jelly, as an alternative to redcurrant jelly in the winter months, for example to sweeten red cabbage. There are also nectarines, peaches, apricots and physalis growing in there, and tomatoes, of course. The gardeners usually grow some chillis for me too. Of course, each fruit crop comes at once, so we make the most of them when we have them, using them in dishes or making jam or chutney.

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We have a herb garden with some unusual varieties – garlic, chives, borage, bronze fennel (which has a dill flavour), buckler sorrel (with sharp acidity) and red-veined sorrel (better for its aesthetics). In our polytunnels, we grow shallots, onions and wet garlic (which gives you a lovely, subtle flavour). We have peas and leeks, and lots of root vegetables, which this part of Scotland is known for such as carrots, parsnips, snowball turnips and golden beetroot. Again, I tend to infuriate the gardeners by picking them small, when you can just blanch it and it looks wonderful on a plate.

I come from Stranraer, in Dumfries and Galloway, the southern part of this cape, so I’m proud of the area. I’ll choose local ingredients where I can – I think guests increasingly enjoy eating local food as part of the experience – but only if the produce is the highest possible quality. The area is probably best known for ‘Ayrshire tatties’, the epicure’s new potato variety. You see them as you drive in to Glenapp from Glasgow, growing right down to the seashore at Girvan, or further south at Drummore. The Girvan Earlies are delicious with some spring onion and butter – the sea air adds something to their flavour.

Ayrshire is lamb country, rather than beef-rearing land – the area right here, around Ballantrae, is particularly good for lamb, they have plenty of room to run around and I think the hills improve the muscle tone, which means rich meat. The grass is lush and the farmers use kelp as well, either in feed or to fertilise the soil. Clash Farms in Port Logan on the Rhins of Galloway (the peninsula south of the Ayrshire coast) rears pedigree saddleback pigs, which goes into our sausages. There is also an abundance of game, including roe deer here on the Glenapp Estate. My supplier buys venison from one of the guns on the estate, so it comes full circle.

Being coastal, Ayrshire has excellent fish and I’ve really upped the amount of seafood we serve here at Glenapp Castle. There’s a local boat, which drops lobster and crab pots along the coast and my main fish supplier is in Ayr. We have wonderful turbot and halibut here – but Relais & Chateau, which we're part of, has a policy of not using overfished species, so we have to buy farmed halibut. However, cod is off the list now, so we can buy that wild. Guests can use the hotel’s boat to go out mackerel fishing off Ailsa Craig – if you catch some, I’ll pan-fry it skin-side down and serve it with a potato and beetroot salad with a raspberry vinaigrette. Down in Stranraer we have Loch Ryan, Scotland’s only wild native oyster fishery – this year, they held their first oyster festival, in September.

While this isn’t beef country, it is a great dairy region – again, because the grass is so green. We have some good cheeses. There’s a new soft, white, fresh cheese called Paddy’s Milestone (another name for Ailsa Craig, the domed island visible from the hotel and home to tens of thousands of puffins, guillemots and other seabirds – guests can visit it on The Glenapp Castle boat). We also have a farmhouse cheese from Loch Arthur Creamery, which is a collective for people with learning difficulties near Dumfries.

In terms of drinks, the William Grant & Sons Distillery is just up the coast, where they produce Hendrick’s gin as well as whiskies – we often put on events with Hendrick’s, and we do an afternoon tea with Hendrick’s cocktails. Gin seems to be the big thing now – there’s also a new distillery in Newton Stewart, south of here, producing Hills & Harbour gin (with fir and seaweed botanicals). There are a couple of craft breweries in the area – Portpatrick and Sulwath – who produce good ales. And, if the sea is calm, it only takes an hour by boat to reach Campbeltown on the Mull of Kintyre, where you’ll find Springbank malt whisky distillery.

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