Garden to Glass
The weather seems to be on the up (after a snowy start to spring!) which means our garden is getting some serious attention. As you’ll have read from the last Garden Update we have been busy through the winter months making sure everything is ready to go, go, go. Our Front of House team are getting outside much more, planting out and foraging, resulting in some interesting produce to experiment with for our drinks list.
Below are a few recent conquests and some currently in the pipeline…
Rhubarb Verjus
A verjus is a highly acidic juice made by pressing sour fruits, or in our case Rhubarb!
We wanted to create something sour and tangy to go in our cocktails and with such amazing forced Yorkshire Rhubarb available earlier in the year we set upon discovering the best way to use it. Having developed an Apple Verjus previously, from crab apples from the farm, we questioned what else could be used in the process. Other sour fruits maybe, or vegetables even?!
Having rhubarb on the menu (in the Scallop dish) the team thought they’d give it a go and make Rhubarb Verjus. A success of course, and now present in a couple of the cocktails on our list. Below are photos of the process to take the Rhubarb juice down to the concentrated Verjus.
Foraging
We’ve been out foraging a lot recently as the sun is bringing out some really exciting things. A recent harvest of nettles have been dried and are, well, something to think about (i.e we don’t have a clue what we are going to do with them at the moment!) The pretty little yellow flowers are gorse, again something we’re currently experimenting with. Rum was mentioned, but we’ll see how that goes!
Above is rhubarb again, this time dried along with woodruff, which we now have on the menu as a tea infusion. Super tasty with a little bit of honey.
Oldstead Gin
An idea we’ve been playing with for a while now. Below are just some experimental batches with a selection of different produce from the garden. We’ll keep you updated.
You can easily keep up to date with all our experiments both front of house and in the kitchen by following the guys over on Instagram.
Our Instagram- @blackswan_oldstead
Tommy Banks- @tommybanks
Will Lockwood- Head Chef- @willlockwood92
Nick Brown- Development Chef- @nickbrown19861
Sean Wrest- Jnr Sous Chef @seanwrest1
James Banks- Owner/GM @james_banks868
Tom Banks Senior – @tboldstead