Cooking up a bargain

What's the deal with Aldi's food campaign?Love it or loathe it, Aldi is certainly a shop of surprises, a place where unfamiliar washing powders and cornflakes are stacked alongside angle grinders and exercise equipment. Products on special offer often disappear from the shelves in the dead of night, never to be seen in the store again, writes Conor Pope.

For some, its higgledy-piggledy aisles offer endless opportunities to unearth top bargains at low prices, while for others, it is, literally and metaphorically, all over the shop, a tiresome place where inferior products are sold cheaply but still represent bad value.

Aldi has a lot more fans than foes among our readers, and when we quoted one correspondent's negative impression of the German retailer recently there was outcry on the Pricewatch blog. "I'd be lost without Aldi! It's so much cheaper. I get a good 90 per cent of my groceries there," wrote one contributor. "If you're not tied into a particular brand, Aldi and Lidl offer huge savings," came another. "The quality of the food is without doubt fantastic. I don't feel a bit embarrassed about shopping in Aldi, I feel smug," said a third.

In fact, so effusive were some of the pro-Aldi views that we wondered if the store's senior management or PR people had been submitting comments under pseudonyms, a notion we discounted on the grounds that the retailer is famously reluctant to communicate on any level with the media.

AT LEAST IT was until last week, when it got in touch about a new programme it is running which aims to prove it's possible to feed a family of four with tasty meals for a mere €10 using ingredients found exclusively on its shelves. The chef fronting the initiative is Garth McColgan, who also runs a well-regarded FoodActive education programme for children in south Dublin.

McColgan (34) worked in the Belfast kitchen of Michelin-starred chef Paul Rankin and also under Derry Clarke and Conrad Gallagher in Dublin before moving to the Four Seasons in Chicago where he cooked under the LA-based celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck.

He switched his focus from the kitchen to the classroom in 2002 when he returned to Ireland to set up the FoodActive summer cookery schools. At the summer schools, children learn to cook and understand the importance of good nutrition and the relationship between food and fitness.

Now he wants to bring that message to a wider audience and is eager to use his role as Aldi's in-house chef to do so.

"Family lifestyles today are too often geared towards rushed mealtimes and convenience foods. There is a perception that fresh groceries are costly and take too long to prepare," McColgan says, doing his best Jamie Oliver impression.

"I aim to show that shoppers don't have to pay over the top to cook good quality nutritious meals."

He believes eating in Ireland has become "a little too lifestyley" and that "food preparation has been given an elitist spin that mystifies a lot of people. Cooking should not be a mysterious activity. If you can't cook then your choices are limited, while being able to cook opens up a whole new world," he says.

"Aldi are going to afford us the opportunity to get that message across to a lot more people, and if we can make a positive contribution to the way food is perceived and consumed in Ireland then I'd be very proud of that."

He believes Aldi offers "some amazing value" but promises to be an "honest, neutral judge" when it comes to deciding which of the store's product lines he believes are of sufficient quality to go into his recipes. "I would not compromise my standards and my beliefs when it comes to preparing these recipes - and to be fair to Aldi, I don't think they would ask me to, but if they did, then we would have to part company."

ALREADY THE STORE'S management has been remarkably co-operative - when he was first approached he was asked was there anything missing from Aldi's shelves that would help him create the recipes. He pointed out that there were no fresh herbs on sale and within two days there were six different types of fresh herbs in Aldi's Irish outlets.

The fact that it is a discount store and not a more upmarket retailer such as Superquinn or Marks & Spencer appeals to McColgan's proselytising nature, and he believes the store has a broader appeal and a wider reach, particularly in some disadvantaged communities where quality food is often considered of secondary importance.

"The only way people's diets are going to change for the better in this country is if they know more about the importance of good nutrition and how to cook good food. Telling people in a didactic way what they should and should not be eating is never going to work. Showing as many as possible in an accessible way how they can cook very high quality food for very low prices, on the other hand, might."

His first recipe, published last week, was a made-from-scratch turkey burger, while next week he plans a somewhat more elaborate Indian spiced chicken with tangy cucumber salad (see recipe above).

While McColgan is being paid for his services, Aldi's appeal is such that it can get devotees to draw up menus for nothing. In the US one woman has gone so far as to design a range of meals made exclusively from Aldi ingredients, available on her website, www.momadvice.com. With each meal, she offers a cost breakdown. For hard-core bargain hunters, it serves as the perfect accompaniment to any serious shopping trip. Indian spiced chicken with tangy cucumber salad

INGREDIENTS

For the chicken:

4 chicken breasts

3tbsp plain flour

1tbsp turmeric

1tbsp ground coriander

1tsp ground ginger

1tsp garam masala

2tbsp chilli seasoning

1tbsp tikka masala

1tbsp seasalt

For the rice:

2tbsp turmeric

2tbsp tandoori spice

250g basmati rice

For the salad:

1 cucumber, peeled and seeded

4 tomatoes, seeded

zest of half a lemon

juice of a whole lemon

1tsp sugar

½tsp seasalt

60mls sunflower oil

2tbsp Coriander leaf

To serve:

1 pack mango flavoured poppadoms

1 jar raita

1 jar lime pickle

METHOD

In a bowl, prepare spice coating for the chicken by mixing the flour with the six spices and the salt. Tip the spice mix onto a plate and coat the chicken in it. Put on a roasting tray. Cook the rice according to the pack instructions, but add two tablespoons each of turmeric and tandoori spice to the water. Pop the chicken into a hot (220 degree) oven for 12-15 minutes.

In a small bowl, put the lemon juice, zest, sugar and salt and stir with a fork till the sugar and salt are dissolved. Add the oil while stirring. Taste for seasoning and add more salt or sugar as required.

Peel the cucumber and split it lengthwise to expose the seeds. Using a teaspoon, scrape out the seeds and cut into one centimetre-thick half-moons. Cut the tomatoes into four quarters and remove the seeds using a small knife and teaspoon. Slice into one centimetre- thick slices lengthwise. Roughly chop the coriander leaf. Mix the salad ingredients together and pour over the tangy lemon dressing.

Remove the chicken from the oven and allow to rest for three minutes. Carve into five or six slices and serve with a wedge of lemon. Serve the poppadoms with the raita and lime pickle, and the salad and rice in separate bowls. Get your family around the table and dig in.

Cooking Tip:The addition of spices to the rice-cooking water brings both flavour and a beautiful colour.

Eating Tip:Put everything out on the table together with lots of lemon wedges to squeeze over the food.