The Menu: A look back at the best culinary achievements of 2022

However, the sunny side of that particular coin toss means what was already a cracking little shop has morphed into a magnificent space selling superb Irish and judiciously imported fresh organic vegetables and fruit along with a dizzying range of other sustainable and delicious foodstuffs and home products, including a superb range of specialty Irish food products, with every single product sold first evaluated to assess its environmental credentials ever before it gains space on the shelf. The sisters, working with brother Jamie, have also created a seriously comprehensive online shop, further amplifying their reach beyond their West Cork redoubt. Organico is The Menu’s Irish Food Emporium of the Year.

Product of the Year

As ever, The Menu spent his year eating for Ireland, making this once more, the hardest category of all to judge, his heart and belly torn in myriad directions. Some foodstuffs however stood out proud from the crowd.

The Menu is a long time fan of Mike Parle and Darcie Mayland’s evocatively monikered dairy operation, The Lost Valley Dairy, based in Inchigeelah, in West Cork, and he particularly relishes their raw milk Carrignamuc cheese, a truly splendid addition to the Irish Farmhouse Cheese canon. The more recent addition, Sobhriste (Irish for easily broken, fragile, brittle), is another superb cheese, which The Menu first tasted this year, with notes of fermented country butter and a sweet, lactic tang with a pleasant damp plaster mustiness to the rind that combines for a creamy, nutty mouthful. Quite gorgeous! Watch this space in future years to come when The Menu has a strong feeling Linda O’Flynn and Ivo Duarte of Terra Ignis may well take prime spot for he absolutely loves their range of fermented products using wild, foraged and cultivated organic, local, seasonal produce, resulting in a whole smorgasbord of vibrant, new, life-filled probiotic flavours to pep up your dishes, with top billing going to their oak bark fermented ketchup.

At the beginning of June, The Menu went out on a limb predicting the eventual winner of this category and tasted nothing since to change his mind.

He then described Ballyhoura Mountain Mushrooms’ Shiitake Bites, as the culinary equivalent of crack cocaine and still holds fast to that description for they are highly, highly addictive.

Shiitake Bites are BMM’s own superb Irish grown shiitake mushrooms subjected to the appliance of proprietors Dr Lucy Deegan and Mark Cribben’s science, using their years of experience as food scientists to apply a comparatively new technology, ‘vacuum frying’ (frying in a pressurised environment, as if frying chips in a pressure cooker— The Menu knows you will never be stupid enough to attempt this at home!), which prevents burning or browning, resulting in a crispy snack that renders anaemic all other competitors in the crispy fried snack market, yet still contains 15g of fibre in every 54g pack, nearly half the RDA and only 20% fat, less than half the fat of regular crisps.

They are as light as a feather, and gentle pressure under tooth has them imploding into powdery shards as if they were savoury meringues, a most delightful textural experience, and the flavour is quite extraordinary, down to what is possibly nature’s greatest of all natural flavour bombs, the fungal umami of mushroom, in this case, the shiitake, an especially vigorous example of same. Ballyhoura Mushrooms’ Shiitake Bites are The Menu’s food product of 2022. 

• ballyhouramushrooms.ie

Food Hero of the Year

At the beginning of 2022, The Menu predicted it would be a big one for Blasta Books founder and longtime Irish cookbook editor Kristin Jensen, but even he was surprised at the stunning successes (detailed in last week’s column), for both her book imprints, Blasta Books and Nine Bean Rows, winning both national and international awards and acclaim. Do we need another cookbook publisher, says you? Well, yes we do, when it is Kristin, a woman who gets the fact that food is so much more than garnering ‘Gramable gourmet gorgeousness to enhance your online presence and that, nowadays, food, both its production and consumption, needs to be even more concerned with social justice, environmental awareness and ethical decision.

Kristin is determined to promote alternative voices and real diversity in food writing, to create books of substance and value without losing any of the blissful pleasure of eating.

She also just happens to be one of the nicest people in the Irish food world. Kristin Jensen is The Menu’s Irish Food Hero of the Year.

Back in March and April of this year, The Menu got involved in a fundraising effort, Bia do Ukraine, with two great Irish food stalwarts, the brothers Sheridan, Seamus and Kevin, of the nationally renowned cheesemongers, to send a truckload of Irish provisions to the US humanitarian organisation, World Central Kitchen, then operating in Poland and right up to the frontline of the war in Ukraine, after the heinous Russian invasion of their sovereign neighbour.

It was an introduction proper to Jose Andres whom The Menu, to be honest, had been more familiar with as a Michelin-starred US celebrity chef and erstwhile culinary comrade of the late Anthony Bourdain. But shortly after moving to the US from his native Spain in 1990, Andres, aged 21, began volunteering with a Washington-based non-profit, DC Central Kitchen, tackling hunger and poverty in the local community.

In 2010, following the massive earthquake, Andrés volunteered in Haiti as part of the humanitarian relief response. Out of this visit, Andrés founded World Central Kitchen, a non-profit organisation to provide fresh meals in response to crises anywhere in the world. WCK has since organised first responder teams of chefs and volunteers to organise and run mobile kitchens delivering meals all over the world. In Puerto Rico, in 2017, WCK served more than 2m meals in the first month immediately after Hurricane Maria.

Within hours of the initial Russian invasion of Ukraine, WCK were serving hot meals to fleeing refugees and operating along the Ukrainian border in Poland, Romania, Hungary and Moldova. WCK teams were even cooking and distributing meals and food supplies in the heart of Ukraine itself. By the time The Menu first wrote about them in May, WCK’s Ukrainian mission had cooked 10.3m meals and shifted 5.8m lbs of food since arriving.

Speaking on the phone to some of the frontline workers in Poland and the Ukraine was a powerful and often emotional experience and proof positive that for all the evil in the world, there are equal amounts of awe-inspiring humanity and good if you know the right place to look for it.

Back in May, The Menu spoke to Kyle Coppinger, a WCK Field Procurement Associate, who had been working 18-hour days for over 50 days with not a single day off.

“We are very focussed on nutrition and creating balanced, nutritious meals,” Kyle said, “but certain elements are not on a nutrition chart: heart, soul, love, things like that. Food is ‘home’, it changes everything just for a moment, and when we interact with some of the [Ukrainian refugees] we are serving, if we can get a recipe from them, we will do everything we can to replicate that and bring them a taste of ‘home.’ It doesn’t change the fact they may have lost their home, may never go back, but it can transport them there in their minds, just for a few moments.”

World Central Kitchen and all who ‘sail with her’ are The Menu’s Food Heroes of the Year.