Once again the BBC Good Food Show and the Festive BBC Good Food Show tempted food lovers from all over the UK to experience a feast of inspiration. With a combined visitor attendance of 164,000, the shows were more popular than ever. Consumers who came to the shows for a day out, to gather ideas and inspiration and watch celebrity demonstrations were not disappointed – with hundreds of exhibitors both new and established, numerous live demonstration theatres, an area dedicated entirely to British food and endless tasting, they were spoilt for choice.

With over 300 live cooking demonstrations, tastings and debates throughout the duration of the shows hosted by Celebrity chefs such as Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Rick Stein and Oz Clarke, there was never a dull moment. The Chefs demonstrated recipes from all corners of the UK and the world, providing the public with exciting recipes and both traditional and alternative festive entertaining, and education in wine, beer and spirits tastings and advice on new and exciting tipples. The Great British Food Festival boasted Rick Stein’s Food Heroes and Henrietta Green’s Food Lovers Fair proved as popular as ever and now represent a large proportion of the shows. Its popularity displays the public’s interest in British food and the growing trend to support small, local producers. Read More »

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Coincidentally with the Good Food Show in Birmingham in November 2004 the Connemara Smokehouse announces the launch of a redesigned website.

There are several new features in this which they feel will be attractive and indeed useful to the discerning customer.

As before it features an on-line purchasing facility but in addition it also has commenced a menu of recipes using the product.

The many awards recently gained by the Connemara Smokehouse are also featured. These include the coveted Bridgestone Awards for the last three years. They are also the first company to have received the Bórd Iascaigh Mhára (Irish Sea Fisheries Board) Product Innovation Award. This award, made every two years is made “for the quality of the seafood used; product creativity; aroma, taste and texture; product packaging; artwork; storage instructions; portion size and value for money.” They have also received the “Super Food Hero” accolade from leading chef Rick Stein. Read More »

Graham Roberts

Despite a bad press, farmed organic salmon is thriving in the west of Ireland

by Vanessa Kendell – Times/Life&Style

With every click of the camera the salmon performed a different acrobatic show: leaping first in high flashing arcs through the air as a warm-up, then working their way up to an impressively swift charge through the dark Atlantic water.

I imagined that this was a display of welcome for me as I arrived at an organic salmon farm on Clare Island, in Clew Bay, off the west coast of Ireland. In fact, I discovered later, rather than being a sign of their appreciation, this is what salmon do all day, every day. Atlantic salmon are just naturally sprightly; their very name, Salmo salar, comes partly from the Latin word meaning to leap.

Farmed salmon have been given a rough ride in the media in recent months. The fish is well- known as a source of essential omega-3 fatty acids and other nutrients but, last January, people were put off eating the fish by a study that compared various toxins in farmed and wild fish and by reports that farmed fish contained high levels of contaminants.

The key word in describing the Clare Island farm, though, is organic. The salmon are raised in the cold waters of the Atlantic. They can jump to their hearts’ delight in the huge cages which are the only things keeping them from disappearing into the deep blue yonder.

And compared with conventional salmon farming, where there is 20-30kg (44-66lb) of salmon per tonne of water, Clare Island, in Co Mayo, has a mere 5kg — less than the organic standard in Ireland and the UK, which is 10kg of fish per tonne of water.

The regime also forbids the use of antibiotics and pesticides, and natural remedies are always tried first. In fact, the salmon are occasionally fed a blend of garlic and rosemary by way of a health boost and to fight off any infection. It doesn’t hurt the way they taste either.

In the interest of fish welfare, more modern medical treatments are sometimes used but the salmon are tested vigorously afterwards to ensure that there is no residue in the flesh.

The farm is said to be situated at one of the most exposed sites in the world — it sits in the middle of open Atlantic with waves of up to 7m (23ft) and an average winter swell of 5m.

David Baird, the managing director of Clare Island Seafarms, who runs the place, says: “There is nothing between us and the east coast of the United States.”

The strong Atlantic currents in this part of the ocean mean that the salmon swim an average of 20km (12½ miles) each day in cages that measure between 10,000 and 20,000 cubic metres (350,000 to 700,000 cubic feet). As a result, what ends up on our plates is a leaner, less fatty piece of fish — which is healthier for us.

In many cases the scare stories in the media about toxins in farmed fish may prove exaggerated. The substances referred to were mainly polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dioxins. PCBs are now banned in the UK but were once used as coolants and lubricants in electrical equipment. Dioxins are by-products of industrial incineration.

Once these chemicals seep into the environment, animals and fish absorb them into their systems, accumulating the compounds in their body fat. So this means that all foods, not just salmon, contain a certain level of these toxins but some nutritional experts argue that our bodies can deal with these chemicals, in moderation.

Jane Clarke, the Times nutritionist, says: “There is a downside to any food if you look hard enough. However, although organic salmon will have traces of these chemicals — as will all types of salmon — the organic farmers have to be more vigilant about other pollutants from different sources. Of all farmed salmon, organic is definitely the best one to go for.”

Further down the coast into Co Galway is the wonderfully wild region of Connemara, a breathtakingly dramatic patchwork of windswept mountains, desolate valleys, glassy lakes and windy roads weaving through the vast clumps of bracken and peaty bogs.

Graham Roberts, of the Connemara Smokehouse, in Ballyconneely, is one of the few remaining specialists in the British Isles in making smoked wild salmon and he hand-fillets each fish himself to ensure quality control.  He admits that the catch rates are low but says that his fish are unequalled in taste. “In moderation, there’s nothing wrong with eating farmed salmon but, to my mind, wild has a much superior taste and texture,” he says.

Graham Roberts, Connemara Smokehouse, Bunowen Pier, Aillebrack, Ballyconneely, Co. Galway, Ireland. Tel: +353 (0) 95 23739  Mail: info@smokehouse.ie  Website: www.smokehouse.ie

Great Taste Awards

Organised by the Guild of Fine Food Retailers, the Awards have carved a reputation over the last decade as the single most sought after seal of real quality in speciality food and drink. The Awards judging criteria are tough but scrupulously fair. The initial stages took place over six days in London at the end of July, when every entry, nearly 4,000, in 186 different classes is decanted, where necessary cooked and then blind tasted by our teams of experts. Over 150 judges are involved and it falls to them to decide which foods deliver a high enough standard to be award winners – the highest acknowledgement of craftsmanship and dedication in the making of superb food and drink.

Source: www.irishseafood.com

Connemara suits all the family, says Christopher Somerville – Times/Travel/Ireland – Sunday Times UK

As we drove west from Galway City into a smeary red sunset, my daughters caught sight of the Twelve Bens standing like dark guards in peaked helmets along the lake-streaked boglands. There was a communal intake of breath, the kind of admiring gasp I remember giving when I first set eyes on Connemara’s sentinel mountains a dozen years before.

“Oh my God,” sighed 18-year-old Elizabeth. “Look at those beautiful reflections in the lakes!” Her boyfriend Pip, 21, and 14-year-old sister Mary murmured appreciatively, too, gazing out on one of Ireland’s most stunning landscapes.

In the front of the hire car my wife Jane and I exchanged silent glances of relief. Yes, it was probably going to be all right, after all, taking three city-raised young people on a family holiday to a remote rural location in the west of Ireland.

The potential problems of taking teenagers and young adults away on a family holiday are all too clear. What if they react with contempt to the place you’ve so carefully chosen? How are they going to get any night-time action? And, most difficult of all — how on earth is the dreaded boredom to be staved off? One thing I knew for certain: I must rein back my own enthusiasm for the west of Ireland. No one else in our party had yet been to Connemara, and the surest way to put them right off the place would be to over-enthuse. They must discover its magic for themselves.

Way down a twisting side lane south of Clifden we came to Ballyconneely Holiday Cottages in the townland of Bunowen More. It was too dark to see anything much that first night. But next morning the full majesty of the view from our conservatory windows was revealed — reed-fringed Doon Lough right on our doorstep, the tall hump of Doon Hill beside it, the ruins of the Gothic mansion of Bunowen Castle silhouetted dramatically beyond, and in the distance the gold and blue peaks of the Twelve Bens outlined against a clear Sunday sky. “Fabulous view,” said Pip, sketching away on the conservatory table.

No one wanted to accompany me on the five-mile round trip walk to church in Ballyconneely. Strange, that. It was one of those fresh, breezy west of Ireland mornings. Connemara ponies put their noses over the stone walls, and a sweet tang of turf smoke drifted on the wind. The bogland rose and fell in gentle swells, scabbed with granite outcrops and spattered with the bright yellows and purples of bell heather, thyme and gorse.

In rural Ireland houses belong to townlands rather than to nucleated villages, and are widely scattered over the landscape. Ballyconneely village itself turned out to be little more than a crossroads with a pub and store (“Yes! It’s Keogh’s Bar!” proclaimed the sign painted on the end gable), the focus of all local shopping and social life, which we came to know well during our week’s holiday.

The ragged-edged peninsula where Bunowen More sits is scalloped with wonderful beaches of white sand. We soon chose and adopted “our beach” just below Connemara Golf Club. Early each morning, while the young people were still snoring, Jane and I would swim there with only a herd of seaweed-munching cattle for company.

What you do in western Connemara depends very much on the weather — and there’s plenty of that, out here where the Atlantic winds first meet the land. Weather fronts are forever marching through, one behind the other, shrouding the mountains then unveiling them, sending cloud shadows and rainstorms chasing across the countryside. That first hot afternoon we all swam in unbelievably clean, clear sea under a cloudless sky.

Within a few hours, though, the weather had turned, so that the following morning blew chill and grey. Elizabeth declared a reading day for herself and took to her bed incommunicado. The rest of us sauntered down the lane in spits of rain to Bunowen Pier and Ballyconneely Smokehouse, where we bought marinated gravadlax and picked up lemon-yellow shells on the shore. The sea was beginning to gleam again as we ate the gravadlax for lunch, and by mid-afternoon Bunowen More was back to hot sun, with the Twelve Bens cut hard and gold against blue sky.

The west of Ireland and traditional music go together like bacon and cabbage, and I’d brought along my melodeon and a clutch of harmonicas. I knew Pip was a bit of a wizard on the guitar, and had high hopes of finding a session in a pub where we could join in. That didn’t happen, as it turned out: amplified ballads for holidaymakers are more the style in western Galway, it seems. But we had a few sessions of our own in the cottage anyway, hammering away at everything from jigs and reels to blues and jingly-jangly stuff.

The home-made music was just one aspect of our DIY fun. It started out as a case of faute de mieux — the nearest town, Clifden, was eight miles off, and its pubs and small disco had limited appeal for our young city slickers. But they proved resourceful at amusing themselves. The cottage had a big TV, but it was rarely switched on. Instead there were bouts of joke-telling and singing, games of “sh’ead” (a card game that dare not speak its name), texting friends, drawing and painting the scenery, and epic, clattering tournaments of mah jong.

Not that we just hung around the house and the beach. On one day we hooked up with an old friend of mine,the Clifden field archaeologist Michael Gibbons, and went walking in the Twelve Bens — an exhilarating, tiring day of steep slopes and immense views over mountains, sea and islands.

Another local chum, the bodhrán maker Malachy Kearns, of Roundstone, gave us a great welcome, popping open a bottle of bubbly and showing us over the workshop where his drums are fashioned from beechwood and goatskin. And when Mary decided in her turn to spend a day glooming behind a book, Jane and I took Pip and Elizabeth off to stroll in the restored walled garden at Kylemore Abbey.

We introduced the youngsters to proper Guinness and we went to an Irish Night in Roundstone Community Hall, where a band of dancers and musicians whose ages spanned 70 years played heavenly tunes and danced like dervishes with the devil at their heels. Nothing we did was particularly fine-feathered or sophisticated, but the subtle spell of Connemara was well and truly woven over each of us by the week’s end.

On our last night we had a mah jong and music marathon in the Bunowen cottage. Pip had a go on the melodeon, Elizabeth finished her picture of the Twelve Bens, and Mary laughed so immoderately she did the nose trick with her mug of tea. Connemara magic, pure and simple.

NEED TO KNOW

Getting there: Ryanair (0871 2460000, www.ryanair.com) flies from Stansted to Knock from £54.98 return. Aer Arann (0800 5872324, www.aerarann.ie) flies to Galway from Birmingham, Edinburgh, Manchester and Luton from £52 return.

Murrays Europcar (0870 6075000, www.europcar.com) offers hire cars at Dublin, Galway, Knock and Shannon airports.

Accommodation: Ballyconneely Holiday Homes (00 353 1 668 3534, www.thh.ie) cost £200-£510 a week.

Erriseask House Hotel, Ballyconneely, Connemara (00 353 95 23553, www.erriseask.com), is a neat, friendly, family-run hotel. Double rooms from £32pp, B&B; with dinner, from £48pp.

To do: Connemara National Park Centre, Letterfrack (95 41054), Kylemore Abbey Garden (95 41146, www.kylemoreabbey.com), adults £7, concessions £4.

Roundstone Musical Instruments, Roundstone, Connemara (95 35808, www.bodhran.com).

Connemara Walking Centre, Island House, Market Street, Clifden (95 21492, www.walkingireland.com).

Connemara Smokehouse, Bunowen Pier, Aillebrack, Ballyconneely(+ 353 (0) 95 23739, www.smokehouse.ie).

Further information: Clifden Tourist Information Centre (95 21163, www.irelandwest.ie). Tourism Ireland (0800 0397000, www.tourismireland.com).

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/destinations/ireland/article428226.ece