Pitch perfect: How this no-waste chef feeds Ireland's rugby heroes — sustainably
The At Rd, Chef Photo: Chaney Mcgeehan Centre Blanchardstown, Performance Gareth Irfu Preparing Performance Sports Dublin Maurice Food Campus, Irish At Irfu High Snugborough High
It’s 6.30am and I’m standing in the kitchen of the IRFU’s High Performance Centre in Dublin 15.
Head performance chef Maurice McGeehan, known as @TheNoWasteChef on Instagram, is talking me through an attractive collection of ferments, pickles, and infusions in large jars on a shelf.
There’s parmesan rinds in oil, preserved squeezed lemon halves infusing some cold pressed virgin rapeseed oil, herb stalks in vinegar, a jar of white kimchi, and jars of pickled daikon, fermented beetroot and cauliflower trimmings.
Not quite what you might expect to see feeding Ireland’s elite rugby stars.
“I have all the ferments and infusions front and centre,” he explains, “because they’re always a discussion point for people and it helps inform and create awareness about food waste and sustainable practices and gut health, and just simply cool ways to preserve food.”
Since 2020 the Donegal man has been feeding Ireland’s national rugby stars, from the 15s to the 7s and Under-20s teams.
The Gaeilgeoir and father of four has a background in fine dining and corporate catering that proved to be the perfect training ground for this specialist job.
While nutrition and flavour are front-and-centre, his imaginative menus are something of a talking point, underpinned by a radical approach to zero-waste cooking.
Maurice and sous chef Alan Reilly have been here since 6am and there’s already three trays of focaccia dough rising.
The bread is made with whey from their homemade cottage cheese, and is flavoured with dillisk and kale stalk powder, two by-products of the kitchen.
Breakfast of jumbo oat porridge, with fruit compote made with the overripe fruit from the fruit bowls around the office, is laid out for the early birds.
Over the course of the morning analysts, coaches, nutritionists, physios and managers will drop into the dining area for porridge, coffee and a chat before they start their day.
The Women’s 15s are in camp today, though I won’t see them until lunchtime when they appear, hungry and upbeat, after a hard morning’s training.
Communication is one of the most important tools in Maurice’s role. A close relationship with the squad is as critical as the one he has with the performance nutritionists and coaching staff, helping him to understand the players, inspire them and also keep them happy and excited about their food.
“We create variety with our menus and serve a lot of world cuisine (using Irish produce as much as possible). This gives the players more of an exposure to different ingredients and styles. The key to nutrition is getting in as many different varieties of food and ingredients as possible over a week. From a gut health perspective you should get as close as you can to 30 plants into you over the week, and each colour has a different function. We’re also using different cooking techniques, and showing players many different types of menus and dishes that they may have never seen before, to bring that variety.”
Players frequently express surprise over dishes Maurice and Alan have prepared.
“They say, ‘If I’d seen something like this on a menu while out for a meal it wouldn’t have been my first choice, but now that I’ve tried it, I definitely want it again’. Occasionally we can get players to eat ingredients that they wouldn’t have liked previously, just by making the food visually appealing and/or being cooked in a way that they haven’t tried before. Some of the young players coming in might not have had as much variety, so it’s really important for us to keep the menu interesting so they want to try new things.”
Maurice also enjoys hosting cookery classes for the teams.
“They are a great way for me to connect and get to know the new players a lot better while cooking and chatting with them; and they get to know more about who I am and my food ethos. There has been a lot of new players coming into the High Performance Centre over the last couple of years, and cookery classes allow me to spend time with them and are a great way for me to get to know them through food.”
Recently he has begun making videos for the Women’s 15s, showing dishes they will be served from the raw ingredients to cooking techniques through to the finished dish.
Some of the players are very good cooks and love good food. Others are eagerly improving.
“I’m so impressed with them. Every so often, someone will tell me [their cooking] was a disaster,” he says. “They ask for tips, learn from their mistakes, improve their skills and know what (not) to do again.”
Team meals are served in the HPC dining area with its open kitchen; a bright, spacious room overlooking the indoor pitch, shared by players and staff.
“There’s no hierarchy here,” Maurice explains. “Everyone mixes with everyone, eats the same food, sits together, and on more than one occasion, burst into singing while enjoying their food, when we matched the music with the food. There’s great craic and banter there, it really feels like the heart of the HPC, like the kitchen is the heart of a home.”
The art on the walls was one of his lockdown projects, colourful food photographs representing all the food groups with posters of Irish fish, butcher’s charts and a bespoke map showing Ireland’s specialty ingredients. There’s everything from Dublin Bay prawns and Waterford blahs to Limerick ham and Northwest boxty illustrated.
“Some of the Wexford players have been asking about the Wexford strawberries though… I can’t believe I forgot to put them in,” he grins. A large slogan reads, Eat well, feel well, stay well, play well.
A fresh salad bar and drinks fridge, stocked with a smoothie of the day — today’s is pickled ginger and banana kefir — sits beside the hot food counter where Maurice and Alan talk players through the day’s offering.
Today’s menu has a brunch theme: piperade, a Basque tomato and pepper stew with eggs, kimchi sweet potato hash, pan fried chicken arayes (home made pita breads filled with minced, spiced chicken), babaganoush (aubergine dip) and that fluffy dillisk-flecked focaccia are among the offering.
A colourful vegetable salad is a dupe for Thai papaya salad, with one significant difference; Maurice has used raw Irish broccoli stalks in the place of papaya. Shredded and dressed with fish sauce, chili, mint and lime, you can hardly tell the difference.
The kitchen’s “engine room” is out back, and had to be expanded after Maurice’s arrival, when large walk-in cold rooms were added to facilitate his no-waste ethos.
There’s currently 120 kilos of ferments in one cold room and the shelves hold everything from sauerkraut and overripe fruit to stocks, probiotic cottage cheese, fish skins and salmon belly.
Brazilian kitchen porter, Janio, is busy behind the scenes and Maurice chats away to him in Portuguese.
Maurice’s wife, Priscila, is Brazilian, and the couple owned a contemporary Irish restaurant in Brazil for three years after an extended stint in London.
Upon his return to Ireland he took up the role as executive chef at Airbnb’s EMEA HQ, in Dublin, an exciting and challenging job that saw him lead a team cooking for over 55 different nationalities.
“We needed to cook the food there the way they would have had in their home countries. One of the best things about my eight years in London was working with international chefs in different places and learning from them how to cook their [traditional] dishes. I was able to bring that back with me to Airbnb, while creating a sustainable segment to the food operation, minimising food waste.”
Many of the recipes he serves the players today were developed throughout his career, and have been tweaked to meet the demands of performance nutrition.
Leftover whey is mainly used for breads and soups now, meat is cooked as normal then the fats rendered and skimmed off before serving; dressings use yoghurt or peanuts instead of heavy dressings such as mayonnaise or oil-based vinaigrettes.
In the Performance Kitchen two very important appliances — dehydrators and a Robot-Coupe for grinding — rarely have a day off.
“The dehydrator prevents a huge amount of waste,” Maurice explains, presenting me with a chewy, sticky piece of toffee-like banana from one of its trays.
Alan is currently dehydrating overripe bananas which will be ground into banana spice that can be added to pre-fuel snacks to boost the carbohydrate content and enhance the flavour.
Traditional kitchen waste, like kale stalks, scallion trimmings, red onion skins, spinach stalks and pineapple cores are routinely dehydrated and reused.
Kimchi becomes kimchi jerky and powder, but is also used in the salad bar. Fruit and vegetable pulp collected from the juicer is repurposed to add fibre and flavour to things like flapjacks after spending 14 hours in the oven at 80º, and coming out like a silky apple sauce.
Maurice likes to use different techniques to bring out a variety of flavours from single ingredients.
“This is flavour profiling,” he explains.
“At different stages of ripeness you get different flavours of ingredients using different techniques, without adding other ingredients; for example, dehydrating a banana that is extremely ripe, soft and blackened, with a high sugar level, for 12 hours at 80º until crisp, will give you smokey whiskey notes, with hints of clove and cinnamon. This is a great flavour profile to use in our pre-fuel snacks and has additional carbs which is always good for pre-fuelling.”
Pineapple core powder, a great source of the anti-inflammatory enzyme bromelain, is added to smoothies.
“We make spinach stalk powder. Ground kimchi jerky becomes a natural MSG powder type replacement to add flavour to dishes, dips and salads, and it’s also a good source of probiotics.”
He bakes beets in their skins for 16 hours so they retain all the flavour and nutrients, and makes squash-seed dukkah and tapenade.
There’s kefir and kombucha, crisped up salmon skin snacks, beef jerky, and oxtail bone marrow for high collagen French onion soup. Preserved parmesan rinds are baked into gluten-free croutons.
They make their own seasonings and grind all their own spices, from Cajun to fajita seasonings, zaatar, ras el hanout and their own recipes for seasonings for roast pork, beef and chicken dishes.
In the pantry, spices range from the familiar to the unfamiliar: sumac, togarashi, dillisk, juniper berries.
Two tubs of fish waste catch my eye — hake skin and salmon belly. “For me, these perfectly reflect how we can be sustainable in performance nutrition and catering,” Maurice explains.
“There’s three types of collagen, and one comes out of the fish skins — mainly in the scales and then you have the salmon bellies which are high in fish oil and a good source of Omega three as well.”
Both will be cooked for up to 10 hours over a low heat before being strained to deliver a sticky stock.
“All the collagen has come out and all the fish oil has risen to the top, leaving us with this nutrient-dense stock and we then add aromatics. So I do a few things with this, like fish chowder and a fricassée. Going back to the performance chef role, how do you make food healthy? Well, how do you make a fricassée without adding cream to it? And butter? Well, this is how you do it. You use the fish oils like you use butter and you use the fish stock like you use cream, and you make a velouté as a base and finish the dish with some low fat Greek yogurt just before you serve.”
The low-waste food movement is gaining momentum across the globe with people like Douglas McMaster of Silo doing headline work, but Maurice began this work even before his Airbnb days with Alan, and well before food waste came into vogue around 2019.
“We were ahead of the curve. Chefs need to change their mindset. I do this at home with my family too. I’m always interested to hear what other chefs have to say about food waste from places they work; it’s great to hear good things but unfortunately it’s frustrating to hear about some of the practices and how much waste is created in our industry.”
Here, menus are designed weekly in consultation with each team’s performance nutritionist, according to the week’s training plan, allowing Maurice, who is undertaking an MSc in Applied Culinary Nutrition in TUD Tallaght, to deliver the right foods for high intensity days, match days and recovery days.
He draws inspiration for recovery snacks by chatting to the players at the start of camp about where they’ve been eating, their favourite restaurants or anything they enjoyed eating since they met last.
“I would always ask what kind of food they enjoyed the most since they were last in camp and think what could I pull from that to make a post-training snack. Ramen is popular and we use three different stocks: chicken bone stock, pork bone stock and pork neck stock combined. Then we add noodles and shoyu eggs, as well as the various meats and fish depending on what kind of ramen it is, to make it as authentic as possible. Ramen is as great for recovery as it is a good source of protein, collagen and carbohydrate.”
When devising new dishes he has a few considerations: What’s the nutritional need? What’s the requirement? Is it a moderate, recovery, or a high intensity day?
“On a moderate day we would ease off on carbohydrates. And let’s say there was a real high intensity day then you’d try to get as much carbs in at every opportunity, even post-training snacks and we do pre-training high carb snacks too before the high intensity start.” He adds: “With the recovery menus, we introduce a lot of anti-inflammatory ingredients; a lot of turmeric and ginger gets used, as well as certain spices, and as many different coloured vegetables as we can incorporate into the menu.”
Maurice has fun with these, getting creative and dreaming up functional treats like a banana bread French toast with banana caramel that he made for the Women’s post-training snack or a high-carb banana muesli bread he created during the World Cup, when he was in France feeding the squad.
The culture here is unreal. Everybody gets on and everybody immensely appreciates the food too.”
If the rugby teams’ successes are shared together, so too are the losses. “It cuts us as much as the players across all teams, and you can feel it. You know everyone, you work with them, you know the effort they’re putting in, you know what they’ve gone through to get ready and the challenges and the difficulties and it hurts sometimes. But that’s the whole bond that we have in here.
“I hope the food we’re producing is helping the players to reach where they need to be, the heights they need to get to, keeping the creativity and fun in line with the nutrition they require.”
Maurice believes the IRFU’s Performance Kitchen is only getting started, too. “I think we have the potential to continue developing the food offering aligned with the performance nutrition, and I see exciting times ahead.”
Wondering what’s on the menu? Maurice’s Instagram account often shares the squads’ meals at @TheNoWasteChef.
- Thai style pork dumplings with tomato, soy, chilli, and cumin sauce, topped with scallions and black sesame. A balanced (carbohydrate/protein) post-training snack that was very popular.
- Spicy miso and beef ramen with shoyu egg, nori, and fresh raw leeks. A great dish to aid recovery.
- Kansas-style barbecue 16-hour slow-cooked pork shoulder, paired with reduced-fat mac and cheese made with Parmesan, and topped with purple slaw. A nice and light snack, and a fun way to get the carbs in before a big day’s training.
- A pre-fuel, high carb morning snack for the women’s 15’s - banana-bread French toast, honey caramel bananas with a little cinnamon. An enjoyable way to get fuelled up for those big intensity training days.
- Focaccia pizza, a popular high carb snack for the Sevens squads this week. A really light and fluffy focaccia topped with crushed San Marzano tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil, basil, and black olives. Served with a basil and roasted garlic yogurt.
- A post-training snack that went down a treat with the team: beef kofta in a turmeric pita pocket, with hummus, chilli and tomatoes, and a pickled red onion and herb salad.