A bottle of Sussex sparkling wine

We had a family celebration over Christmas. It was a good excuse to buy a bottle of sparkling wine from Nyetimber, a Sussex vineyard. We had their Classic Cuvee. It was expensive - £32 a bottle – but beautiful, elegant and understated. If this wine were a film star, it would be Grace Kelly.

Nyetimber is one of several Sussex vineyards which are developing an international reputation. Their success is down to a blend of soil, sunshine and science.

The chalk soil of the Downs is similar to that of the Champagne region in France, producing wines with similar characteristics. The sunshine comes courtesy of global warming, raising temperatures and making it easier to grow grapes in the UK. The science is the specialised knowledge and technology needed to produce top quality wines. Put them together and you have something very special.

You can’t visit the Nyetimber vineyard, but you can buy its wines all over the country. We get ours from Waitrose in Lewes.

A squid on the beach

I went to the beach in Brighton today. It was sunny and very breezy. People sat defiant on the pebbles looking out to sea like ships’ figureheads.

I went to Sea Haze, a fishmonger's on the beach. It’s housed in an arch of the promenade above and, after the blustery seafront, it felt cool and cloister-like inside.

There was a neat selection of locally caught fish - stripy mackerel, pink gurnard and a-piano-just-fell-on-my-face plaice, but I went for a squid. I had some chorizo I wanted to introduce it to.

Back at home, I made a fry-up of chorizo, courgette, cooked potato, squid and spinach. It wasn’t pretty, but it was very tasty, the earthiness of the chorizo contrasting nicely with the otherworldliness of the squid. 

A small goat's cheese

It felt like Spring this week – violets appeared in the wood, weeds sprouted in the veg patch.

I went to the cheese shop in Lewes and bought one of my favourite local cheeses: Chabis made by the Golden Cross Cheese Company. It’s a fresh unpasteurised goat’s cheese.

Chabis

The cheese is covered in a downy coat of white mould. Inside it is delicate, creamy and ethereal. As it ages, it gets gooier and fruitier.

I like to eat it torn up in a salad. This week, I made mine with air-dried ham, tomatoes and basil - not very seasonal, but extremely good. 

A violet patch in the woods

Sussex credentials: Excellent. The cheese is made on the farm using milk from their own goat herd. 

A slice of chorizo

I had some time to kill in Brighton’s North Laine a few weeks ago. I found myself in the Brighton Sausage Company’s shop, and after browsing for a few minutes, I came away with some merguez sausages.

They proved to be very tasty, and since then I’ve been back several times to try more of the Sausage Company’s wares. I particularly like the semi-cured chorizo.

Semi-cured chorizo

This is cooking chorizo. It is delicious fried and served between soft billowing bread; it goes very nicely with an egg; plus it is a reliable shortcut to an excellent dinner. We use it to make paellas, stews, and improvised cook-ups. Pig fat, we salute you.

Sussex credentials: Very good. Their pork comes from free-range Sussex pigs.

Price: I paid £2.50 for four semi-cured chorizo sausages. 

Chorizo sausages - lined up and ready for sizzling

A handful of cobnuts

A few weeks ago, we bought some cobnuts from a local fruit farm, Maynards. Like many absent-minded animals before us, we stored them away and then forgot all about them.

On finding them again, we decided to eat them as soon as possible, instead of waiting until everyone arrived for Christmas.

The cobnut season ends in October so they’d already been in store for at least a month. They might be losing their freshness...

Cobnuts

They were delicious. I had forgotten how lovely fresh nuts could taste. The cobnut is a cultivated hazelnut, and is sold fresh unlike most other nuts which are sold dried. This means they have a lovely milky, delicate sweetness.

Over the last few weeks I have sprinkled them on salads (see above), soups and so on, but if I’m honest they are best eaten just as they are.

A slice of toasted cheese

I woke up this morning with the rain tapping on the window, and the wind frisking the trees. It could mean only one thing: the toasted cheese season had started.

I’m a big fan of melted cheese. It’s a hang-over from my childhood, but it has stuck with me like molten cheddar to a grill.

In the fridge, I had some Sussex Charmer – a local variety which has become a regular in our cheese box.



Sussex Charmer - very nice melted

Sussex Charmer

This cheese is a hybrid - a cheddar crossed with a parmesan.

You get the flavour of the cheddar first and then, just as you are contemplating the superiority of British farmhouse cheese, the zing of parmesan comes through, dragging you to the valleys of northern Italy and forcing you to admit that the Italians know a thing or two about cheese as well.

I cut mine into slices and grilled it on some toast. It was delicious – like cheddar just back from a holiday in the sun.  

Sussex credentials: Excellent. They make it in Sussex using milk from their own cows.

Availability: It's available online or from lots of local shops. I bought mine from Cheese Please in Lewes.

The first mackerel of spring

The swallows have been back for almost a month now. They arrived only a few days after the wind started blowing from the south. They’ve been busy renovating their nest in the garage and I love the way they make clicks as part of their call. They are like airborne dolphins swooping around the house, gobbling insects on the wing.

I’ve had to wait a little longer for the arrival of another spring migrant – the mackerel. They tend to arrive in the Channel in mid-April but it was only last week that they showed up on the slab at Terry's, the fishmongers in Lewes.



Two Sussex mackerel

Mackerel

Several cookery writers (Nigel Slater, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall..) say mackerel is one of their favourite fish, and I used to be slightly ashamed that I didn’t feel the same way. Grilled mackerel, with nothing added, just doesn’t do it for me. However, now I’ve been experimenting with the fish a little I can see why it is so well loved: it works really well with strong flavours.

I cooked these two using the recipe in Slater's The Kitchen Diaries for mackerel with cumin and lemon. The contrast between the earthy cumin, the sour lemon and the oily mackerel made for a very tasty supper. Another simple way to cook a whole mackerel is to slash it, smear it with harissa, and grill it for a few minutes on each side.



One cooked Sussex mackerel

Did you read about mackerel being taken off the list of sustainable fish? Apparently, they’ve been over-fishing them off Iceland. The Marine Conservation Society, a charity which monitors this sort of thing, says you should make sure your mackerel is caught locally using traditional fishing methods.

Sussex credentials: Very good. These mackerel were caught off the Sussex coast.

Availability: You can buy locally-caught mackerel from Terry's in Lewes.

A lovely lunch from the Sussex Produce Company

On Sunday we had vine tomatoes, olive ciabatta and slivers of preserved pork for lunch. The sun was shining through the windows and it could almost have been Tuscany, except that all the food was from Sussex, the preserved pork was bacon, and it was actually pretty chilly outside.

We bought the food from the Sussex Produce Company’s shop in Steyning.It's the first time I've been there and I was impressed. It's a feast for the eyes and (eventually) the stomach, yet not a great strain on the wallet. Ideal.

Vine tomatoes from the Sussex Produce Company

Vine tomatoes from the Sussex Produce Company

These tomatoes looked glorious and tasted pretty good too. They were tangy and juicy, if a little woolly around the edges. If I had been in Italy in the summertime, I’d have been disappointed. However, as I was in Sussex after a horribly long winter, I thought they were remarkably tasty.

Olive ciabatta from the Farretti Bakery

I’ve chewed my way through lots of sturdy artisan loaves recently and, as a result, I was a little disorientated by this bread at first. It was so light and springy, like a delicious cloud. The crust wasn’t hard, the flavour wasn’t sour, and the olives clearly weren’t grown in a local orchard. I loved it.

Rare-breed bacon from Garlic Wood Farm

Unsmoked back bacon from Garlic Wood Farm

Garlic Wood Farm has Tamworth and Gloucester Old Spot pigs which rootle in woods and meadows, feeding on acorns, wild garlic and other natural delights. As a result, this bacon was really meaty and flavoursome – proudly porky in fact.

Sussex credentials: The vine tomatoes and the back bacon are Sussex born and bred. The ciabatta is hand-made in Sussex.

Availability: From the Sussex Produce Company on Steyning High Street.

A steak of Sussex beef

In India, cows are sacred. In parts of Kenya, they are a status symbol. In the UK, they are the subject of our most grisly food scandals: BSE, foot and mouth, and the current mystery mince fiasco. I’m not exactly sure what this says about us, but it’s bad. We have taken too little care of our cows.

Here in Sussex we have a cattle breed to be proud of – the Sussex – and this week I thought I’d try some of its meat. It is a beef breed, adapted to the demands of grazing the Weald. This means it does particularly well on poor pasture, staying in good condition even when it’s cold and muddy underfoot. It’s a very British sort of cow.

Sussex beef rump steak

I bought this steak from the Offham Farm Shop. It came from an animal reared on the farm, grazing on Hamsey and Offham brooks just outside Lewes. I also bought a similarly-priced supermarket steak for the purposes of comparison. I cooked both steaks in the same way (fried with oil). The supermarket one was more tender, however the Offham Farm Shop one was juicier and tastier especially next to the fat.

How Sussex cattle can turn grimy grass into sublime steaks is beyond me. It’s a natural miracle. They certainly deserve our respect, if not our veneration.   

Sussex credentials: The best. A Sussex breed, born and raised in Sussex.

Price: I paid £19 per kilo.

Scallops from Rye Bay

There’s not much in season at the moment - the odd sprig of purple-sprouting broccoli, some curly kale - so thank goodness for scallops which are best harvested at this time of year. Rye, in East Sussex, runs a Scallop Week in February and although I didn’t make it for the festival, I went over there last week to taste the moveable mollusc myself (this is their excellent video of a scallop swimming)...

I don’t know if you saw Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s programme about scallop dredging a few weeks ago? His main message was that we should only buy diver-caught scallops. Rye’s scallops are dredged, but there are sensible restrictions in place to protect other sealife. If anyone knows where you can buy diver-caught scallops in Sussex, please let me know.



Rye Bay scallops ready to be eaten

Rye Bay scallops

I bought these scallops from Market Fisheries on the bridge heading out of Rye towards Camber, and I fried them with some garlic for a few minutes on each side. They were so white, tender and otherworldly that if you’d told me they were unicorn testicles I might have believed you. Top notch Sussex seafood.

Sussex credentials: Very good. They are harvested in Rye Bay.

Availability: Rye fish shops including Market Fisheries and Botterells.

A crusty loaf

Do you remember that BBC advert where Gary Rhodes scaled a cliff to tell some campers cooking sausages, “The secret is not to prick them”? 

I was reminded of it watching the Great British Bake Off when Paul Hollywood kept insisting that another piece of accepted culinary wisdom – leaving bread to rise in a warm place - should be overturned. He claimed that if you leave dough in a cool place it will have more flavour because it will rise more slowly.

I have to admit that I didn’t take either man seriously at the time, but I used Hollywood’s advice this week when I made some bread with stone-ground flour from Imbhams Farm Granary and he may have a point...

Bread made with flour from Imbhams Farm Granary

Sussex Seeded Bread Mix

This bread mix is made up of wheat grown in West Sussex and lots of seeds including linseed, sunflower and sesame. There is also a packet of yeast included, so the only ingredients you have to measure yourself are the oil and water. It’s bread-making made quick and simple – the dough only needed 30 minutes to double in size. However, the resulting loaf, although crunchy and nutty, was a little disappointing in flavour.

Sussex Bread Flour

This is 100 per cent West Sussex wheat. Taking Paul Hollywood’s advice, I tried adding less yeast to the dough and leaving it somewhere cool so that it would rise more slowly. It took 2 hours to double in size and once baked it had much more flavour. We are talking sturdy, wholesome, farmhouse bread with a gloriously biscuity crust. Mr Bake Off was absolutely right. Perhaps now I should stop pricking my sausages?

Sussex credentials: The wheat is grown in West Sussex. It is ground into flour in Haslemere, Surrey, which is just over the West Sussex border.

Availability: Imbhams flour is available online or from farmers’ markets.

A bottle of bubbly

Sussex vineyards have become so successful, that it's now possible to go on a little wine tour of the region (provided you make a few phone calls first). My brother and I decided it was high time we took this opportunity to sample our home-grown booze. We went to the Bolney Wine Estate in West Sussex which runs tours and tastings.

English sparkling wine (consumed)

Still Wines

We tasted three of the Bolney Estate’s still wines. My favourite was the Lychgate White. The tasting notes said it had “flavours of lychee and passion fruit” balanced by “a crisp, spicy acidity.” However, I have to admit that the first thing that went through my mind was: “Oh yes, I could drink quite a lot of this.” On deeper reflection, and following lengthy discussions with my tasting partners, we agreed that it was clean and fresh with a lovely fruity flavour which reminded us of gooseberry – or was it grapefruit? Either way, it’s a great wine.  

Sparkling Wines

We tried four of the sparkling wines. The Blanc de Blancs is the most celebrated, having won a top award earlier this year. It’s 100 per cent Chardonnay and is made using traditional methods. It was very classy, but it wasn’t my favourite. I knew what it was going to taste like before I tasted it, whereas the sparkling red Cuvée Noir was much more exciting. It was velvety yet lively - like being gently tickled by an old friend. Delicious.

Sussex credentials: Excellent. The wine is made on-site with grapes from the vineyard.