School for artisans

MONITOR:A new school of artisan food production that has opened in the UK could show us how it's done, writes HUGO ARNOLD

STARTING A FOOD business is supposed to be one of those dream jobs. Like owning and running a restaurant, it’s something many of us think about, few do and even fewer find success. Yet the growth of food businesses in recent years would suggest it has become more than a dream for quite a few, and the trend is set to continue. Bord Bia points to 60 small food businesses when it was established in 1994; today there are more than 350.

The real struggle for anyone contemplating this path is what to make. “Me-too” businesses abound. The success of the Irish artisan cheese sector encourages many to consider this route; the same is true of jams. So – how to innovate?

The opening late last year of the School of Artisan Food in the UK (pictured above) has certainly made the task easier. The courses run there currently cover breadmaking, butchery, cheesemaking, preserving, and brewing.

Housed in newly converted buildings on the Welbeck estate in Nottinghamshire, the one- and five-day courses are geared towards individuals who want to understand the artisan approach, to experience in a hands-on way how to do things properly.

This autumn the school plans to launch a two-year diploma programme, geared not just to the practicalities of how you make something, but how to set up and run a business. By way of illustration, Alison Swan Parente, founder of the school, is responsible for the production of Stichelton.

Stichelton is a raw-milk blue cheese styled, with the guiding hand of Randoph Hodgson, owner of Neal’s Yard Dairy, in the mould of what some Stiltons used to taste like before they converted to pasteurised milk.

Looking for an organic stock herd in the Stilton area to create such a cheese was not easy. There are not many, but Swan Parente had one, and so a new cheese was born.

I have been a consumer of Stichelton since the early days. It started, to my mind, as quite a clumsy cheese, loose in texture and uncertain about its flavour profile. But over time it has grown into a thoroughbred. It now has an elegant moistness, a rounded creaminess that is cut with complexity and an earthy, farmyard sweetness that puts it up with any artisan blue cheese you care to mention.

Swan Parente’s vision for the school is vocational. She says: “It is a practical help to those people who sit in offices wondering what it might be like to do something different with their lives.” The diploma fees are £7,000 a year, but bursaries will be available. Swan Parente is determined that as broad a cross-section of people as possible can attend.

The school is in the business of reintroducing the craft into food production, something that has been lost, but she is quick to point out, is being rediscovered with speed.

Taking up artisan food production and making a living out of it can be a huge challenge. Baking and selling bread as it used to be is not easy when sliced pappy white bread dominates so many supermarket shelves. But here the Welbeck estate has already had success, getting their bread – a bread that is artisan and slowly prepared – into local schools. Over time, the local school children have come to like it. Love it, even.

A cheese room, allowing students to indulge in the crucial art of affinage is one of the more recent developments, but says a lot about the intention of the school. This ageing of cheese is a crucial stage in the process. Something many retailers in this country need to learn about.

• See schoolofartisanfood.org