Espresso: Fallow Chefs - How to Use Creativity to Solve Problems - The Banana Split Problem

0:00Yes, yes, people. So, The Hungry Reading List is here. right if you listen to the podcast regularly you know i love reading i think books are the most beautiful thing in the world as stephen king said they're teleportable magic or something like that these books i whittled down my gargantuan bookshelf into 46 absolute 30 bangers the link is in the show notes to get the list whatever and it'll also make you a subscriber to our weekly newsletter which i think is sick so yeah get your fucking books buddy

0:35At the beginning, we used the word sustainable, but I think everyone else started using it and it kind of lost, like when all the big banks started saying that they were sustainable, planting a couple of trees somewhere or a bit of carbon offset. We didn't feel like it was appropriate to keep saying the word sustainable because we went through a B-Cup certification and we do really genuinely, passionately care about it. We always have. I'd say our proudest dishes are all the ones that have that deeply rooted, sustainable sort of mantra running through them. I think for me, it's Codshead. I find it incredible that you can get something that, like we created a supply chain for the Codshead because when we first got it, it was trim.

1:19Now we get it as a direct product from the ships and we never know how much is going to come in, which is an absolute pain in the ass. But it depends on what they've landed. and you know they still you know they still land a lot of cod so we get them from different ships all over the place now we pay for them now whereas we didn't before so it means that it's actually you know a food source which is is now well and truly in in the system and other people are using it as well which is you know a really positive thing i think um not that we were first people to use fish heads but like cod heads on that scale we take a ton a week um so 100 it's created a it's created a market for that um i think for me um i think it's always about one thing that happens now quite like the banana dish at row did you did you taste that it's unreal so that was um but that was one of those things where um alexandra just for listeners like that is just describe because it looks like a banana yeah it's a banana parfait with a beautiful like fresh banana jam inside and it's served with the banana skin and a nesquik banana caramel because it didn't have enough like fake banana flavor so we made it a bit more like nesquiki um it's to answer my favorite dish on all of the menus um and i love that dish because it took us two and a half years it was on the original fallow menu as a banana split right we never met we never managed to make the skin edible um and then was that was that what how come it's just too hard to make it taste good right we're never going to put something on just because it's sustainable like some some places like oh this is foraged or this is you know it's like great it tastes like something like that um so like it always has to taste banging otherwise it still won't go on the menus just because it's a sustainable product but um this banana dish alex had said to us from premier if you find a use for bananas we can supply you with basically any four it's the biggest waste product bananas and bread the biggest domestic waste product we can we can we can supply you with black bananas green bananas any banana you want, wonky bananas, two big bananas.

3:26So she said, you can make a load of money off bananas if you can create a dish for it. And that's what stimulated a two-year process of trying to get the skin edible enough to serve on the dessert and use the entire banana as our signature dish. And eventually, Zhao, our executive pastry chef, he cured it in sugar, a sugar syrup infused with vanilla for two weeks, and then it completely breaks it down, scraped it down, like flash fried it at 170 and then refried it and dried it. And it's like, it's like a beautiful banana vanilla crisp. So yeah, that's a good example of where it's like, you know, we've taken a product which we knew was surplus, second class bananas from our supplier.

4:14We've worked really, really hard with that product to get it, you know, to the point where it's like absolutely delicious and then we put it on our menu and it makes a good GP, but it's also absolutely delicious and it's combating a little bit of food waste as well. It's a win-win-win. It's one of those situations we strive for. I think it's not about the, with regards to the food waste and the consciousness, it's not specifically about just what we're utilising on a daily basis. It also goes back to that training and mentoring thing. We have now 100 chefs who are working with us. it's about it's our responsibility to give them to train them not for their whole their whole development but we're definitely impacting on these guys careers it's our job to impact we're trying to just impact some of the stuff that we've learned over the last five years and hand that down to the chefs below us because if all of the chefs that are coming through are thinking about it and doing some of the things that we're doing it's only going to be better for the food chain and create a more sustainable environment in the hospitality industry as a whole we're not saying look at all the difference we've made using all these cod sets look at all the difference you made because it's it's fucking tiny right in the grand scheme of things but if those 100 chefs can take something from what we what we're doing and input and then do the same and then do the same and do the same to all the people that are working with them in the future that's gonna that will make a bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger difference longer term thank you so so much for listening it honestly means the world to me i hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and go and have an amazing day let's be having ya if you want the fun episode it will be in the show notes the link will be in the show notes the full episode thank you so much please leave your friends as well it means the world to me

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