Читать книгу The Irish Farmers’ Market Cookbook - Clodagh McKenna - Страница 32

Olivier Beajouan and his partner, Maja Binder, are a marriage made in gastro heaven! They live and work in Castlegregory, overlooking the Atlantic, in a commercial kitchen, smokehouse and dairy, which was built and renovated entirely themselves. Maja produces Dingle Peninsula cheese and Olivier makes Irish seaweed-based products. Their separate passions come together in Maja’s cheese, which is flavoured with Olivier’s seaweed.

Olivier came to sea vegetables through a course he was taking in shiatsu. As part of the course he studied nutrition and foraged for wild food in the forest and sea. He became fascinated by the possibilities of seaweed and of reviving the seaweed food culture. He started out making seaweed pâté, but as his success has grown he has expanded his product base to include a sensational tapenade of sea vegetables, pickled kombu, and my favourite: spaghetti-shaped seaweed marinated in fresh ginger, tomato and vinegar. It is wonderful with fresh taglioni, a drizzle of olive oil and grated Desmond cheese. Olivier also produces fantastic fish sausages with lemon, spices, seaweed and onion. They taste great and are very low in fat.

Traditionally, seaweed was washed, cut into strips and cooked with boiled potatoes and bacon, or used in soups and stews as a thickener. It sustained communities throughout the famine, but people stopped eating it regularly when other vegetables became more readily available. Today, thanks to producers like Olivier, seaweed is enjoying a renaissance as a vegetable in its own right.

Maja made cheese in Italy, the Swiss Alps and Germany before coming to Ireland to produce hard and semi-hard cow’s milk cheeses. Maja follows the ancient Irish tradition of flavouring cheese with seaweed. Her gold award-winning Dilisk cheese is flavoured with dark red sea grass, which speckles the cheese’s pale yellow hue and adds a hint of salt.

Maja uses raw cows’ milk, all from one herd, to make the cheese. Like all the great cheese producers, she believes you cannot get the individual flavours that make a cheese unique to a particular place if you don’t use unpasteurised milk. When she first started selling the cheese, customers were unaccustomed, and a little scared, by the mould that grows on the outside of the cheese. However, the cheese tasted so good they kept coming back. Next time you’re at the farmers’ markets look out for raw-milk cheeses and seaweed products.

Maja and Olivier with all their fantastic cheeses.