their dark materials
the chicory challenge brings out the best in some young chefs
It’s not every day you get invited to judge the ‘Chicory Challenge’. At first I thought it might be a contest to see who could stuff down the most chicory in an hour. Or perhaps to judge a selection presented by proud chicory farmers, each holding his or her endive/chicory aloft like gas lighters at a prog rock concert. But no.
It seems that whilst our continental cousins wolf down about 5kg of endive/chicory a year per person, we in the UK manage only a measly 200g. Frankly I’m surprised it’s as much as that. Chicory is a bitter vegetable, although undeniably attractive. Mostly it gets eaten raw with blue cheese and pears in a salad, or wrapped in ham then baked in a cheese sauce. After that my particular mental recipe bank for chicory goes blank. In the Netherlands there are more than 500 chicory farms though, and there are nearly 3,500 hectares of land devoted to growing chicory.
And so the chicory growers association of the Netherlands, eager to get into a new and largely untapped, market have turned their eyes to the UK. The challenge was to devise new and exciting recipes for chicory, submit them for initial judging, and then to have a cook off of the final three in Holland itself. This was to be preceded by a slap-up dinner in Amsterdam and the next day a tour of a chicory farm outside the town. As one of the judges it was to be my onerous duty to travel with the teams and find something, anything, to do of an evening in Amsterdam. The Challenge was supported by BDF Newlife, the UK’s leading child health and research charity and all the recipes entered are to be published in a recipe book to be sold in aid of the charity.
The meal was in Five Flies a rather charming, if disturbingly named, place made out of a number of ancient houses knocked together. In the classic Dutch way it had staircases that were more like ladders, plus low beams guaranteed to crack your head open as soon as you dropped concentration. Up at the very top, in a room where you rather expected Anne Frank to pop out of a cupboard any second, the food was surprisingly good and modern. Carpaccio of beef with steak tartare, followed by a very fine piece of Gurnard fish and finally an enormous hunk of veal steak perfectly cooked and packed with flavour. Fag breaks required going all the way downstairs between courses and you could tell the smokers by the large bumps on foreheads acquired courtesy of the low beams on the way back up. After dinner the mob went back to the hotel while I and a fellow bon viveur went out drinking.
The next day dawned bright and early, a bit early for those of us that been out sampling Amsterdam nightlife, and we trooped listlessly into a coach for a ride out to the chicory farm. Holland doesn’t believe in diagonals or curves and so the one hour ride, if plotted, would look like an Etch a Sketch drawing - I swear that the sun went all around the coach six times in that hour and for all I know we may have only travelled a few miles from the city centre. Soon, too soon for those dozing fitfully in the back, the farm appeared through the drizzle and mist.
It would be easy to be all cool and bored about a chicory farm, but I have a weakness for production lines, that I suppose probably indicates some kind of latent autism. In the late summer and autumn, the roots are dug up from the fields, the leaves are trimmed back and the roots are cut to about 20cm in length. After a cold storage period, the roots are planted in dark, forcing chambers and watered with a hydroponic solution, which cascades through to carefully nourish them, as well as get visitors’ feet wet.
The chicory forms over about four weeks and when grown the trays are carted off to the finishing production line where a giant guillotine chops the chicories off. These are then transported by belt to the people who trim and size them for the different foreign markets. Speed is important as the chicory discolours in the light. The remains are fed to the cows, so it’s a very eco-friendly operation.
It was then off on another magic bus ride to the place where the chefs’ skills would be tested. This turned out to be the tutorial kitchen of Chantal Veer, a bright and forceful TV chef with the hairstyle we used to associate with skinheads’ girlfriends back in the 70’s. She wasn’t drinking snakebite though and her kitchen had that attractive and effortless cool style the Dutch are so annoyingly good at. Here the contestants finally got cooking their recipes while I wandered about like Lloyd Grossman on Masterchef until the other judges’ sarky comments made me get back to the judging table.
There were three finalist teams; two pupils from Waddesdon Church of England School in Aylesbury, Peter Timmins, 18, and Chloe Brown, 17, with their food technology teacher, Amelia Stephenson, then two pupils from Acklam Grange School in Middlesbrough, Sean Cottingham and Hannah Williams, 16, with their food technology teacher, Tracey Quinn and last but not least amateur chef Susie Carter, who works for Hampshire Fare. By the way, Food Technology is I think what my crumbly generation used to call Domestic Science.
While they cooked, we the professional foodies ruined our appetite with some of Chantal’s excellent cakes, and what remained of our judgement with bottles of red wine. Woken from a coma on the sofa I joined the rest about an hour later for the final judging.
Susie Carter won the £5,000 top prize with her recipe for chicory tarts with goats cheese and thyme, mainly because as well as being tasty it had the chicory to the fore with no attempt to disguise it in sauces or otherwise. This was chicory for the chicory fan, although the other two recipes ran it close. After that it was back via innumerable right angle turns to Schiphol airport with our chicory senses enhanced.
You can find out more about chicory and its untapped versatility here and we have the winning recipe here.
