Depressing though it is, the recession has brought some unexpected benefits for Britain's food lovers. With commercial property prices dropping, independent restaurateurs and producers find they can now afford premises, and young cooks have been trying themselves out in projects with low entry costs – pop-ups and street food, for example – but some are exploring a new direction. There has been a noticeable movement of food lovers researching complicated processes, building their own equipment and even developing businesses fuelled by little more than enthusiasm and ingenuity. It runs in parallel with a rising interest in traditional crafts, with a swelling, almost political desire to cut food businesses out of the food chain. It's geeky, obsessive, web-driven and, above all, fun – this is the new Food DIY.
The ice cream queen
Kitty Lindy Travers doesn't strike you as the sort of person who'd chase down car thieves on her bike but she's very committed to her Italian "Ape" three-wheeler. "I did it up as an ice cream van. The sides lift up and I'd serve from the back of it at farmers' markets. It was very cute." When kids stole it from outside her flat, they can't have expected Travers, her sister and brother to saddle up and comb the streets of Lambeth. "I caught a load of kids driving out of a garage having the time of their lives. It was great to get it back but they'd already cut out everything I'd built in to it. I never got the freezer back."
Travers, 33, hasn't let much distract her from an obsession with ice cream. "It started in the south of France when I was 16. I was working in a horrible hotel and I went to this cafe for breakfast every morning. It was full of old ladies eating ice cream from beautiful glasses. I remember thinking what a shame it was that there was nothing like this in London."
She found her feet when she saved enough money to attend the Institute for Culinary Education in New York. On her return to London she got a job as a pastry chef. She continued to experiment with ice cream flavours at home and later, when business in the van began to pick up, in a "borrowed" restaurant kitchen late at night.
Her recipes change constantly as fresh ingredients become available or inspiration strikes. Her personal take of "local and seasonal" also encompasses whatever is currently good in London's ethnic markets so, after Christmas in the Highlands, her menu now includes a rich cranachan ice cream made with Skye single malt, a heather honey and oat praline, and a zinging little sorbet made from sugarloaf pineapples found in Dalston's Ridley Road market.
Ice cream making is now a full-time job. "I'm teaching ice cream making at the Welbeck School of Artisan Food," she says, but she's most excited about her "shed", a disused greengrocer's she spotted while cycling home. "I just popped in and asked the neighbour if he was using the space." Her obvious enthusiasm swayed the landlord and, as soon as she's had a water supply installed it will become "…my dream really. Like a lab, a place I can just experiment with my flavours and be as happy as a pig in an ice cream shop."
The home cheese maker
Andy Mahoney, 29, had always been a cheese lover. Like many "curd nerds", he got interested when he made his first simple ricottas but it wasn't long before he began building a cheese laboratory in the spare room of his small south London house.
Most traditional cheeses rely on a period of maturation (perhaps in caves or monasteries) to ensure that a particular strand of bacterium is always present so the cheese takes on its desired characteristics. Mahoney chose to replicate these conditions in his tiny lab using equipment built from cheap domestic fridges and a bewildering array of electronic additions.
There's only space for one or two cheeses at a time and the process can take months but the system is producing data and ideas – everything from the perfect temperature to cut curds to a new cheese halfway between a camembert and a wensleydale which he's christened "wensleybert".
"It's all a massive experiment. I like the idea of having a farm but the reality of milking cows and making cheese every day… I'd last about two weeks."
How do Mahoney's cheeses taste? At a recent "underground farmers' market" his haloumi was a spectacular hit with notoriously picky foodies. It might be a while before you can buy one of Mahoney's cheeses commercially but there's every chance that Britain's next exciting cheese discovery will come from a pimped fridge in Dulwich.
The mobile wood-fired pizza man
Jack Harrison is a 51-year-old career chef with six children and the look of a man who has stood at enough ranges. When his last business, a critically acclaimed gastropub in rural Leicestershire, went to the wall, he began casting around for a life change. "I got interested in wood ovens on a holiday in Switzerland and thought I'd build one at home for parties but couldn't find a place to put it. Then one day I was driving down the M6 behind a horse trailer and I thought, 'Why not build one in that?'"
A good wood-fired pizza oven runs at temperatures around 400C, can sear a pizza into crisp perfection in 90 seconds and is massively built using bulky materials to store the heat. Harrison had never built one before but the internet is awash with drawings, plans and blogs from enthusiasts who have built bread or pizza ovens in their gardens.
"I researched oven construction, materials, thermal mass," he says. He discovered the techniques of shaping and moulding the cooking chamber over a tonne of building sand sculpted into a mound. From his home near Melton Mowbray he travelled the country in search of arcane materials such as fireproof cement.
Harrison initially took the trailer to farmers' markets around the Midlands because, he says, "no one else was doing anything like it". His pizzas, which would taste fantastic in a posh urban pizzeria, are a sensation in a raid-sodden field and people began asking to book him for weddings, birthdays and other events.
"Wherever I go," he says, people are fascinated by the oven and now people are asking me to build them." This year he'll be working on his first commissions to design and build ovens in customers' gardens.
"I never felt that restaurants were my calling – though I was quite good at it. I kept getting out of the business but it drew me back in. I'm so happy I've gone in this direction. It's taken on a life of its own – kind of pulling itself along now without me having to push it."
hotrockspizza.co.uk; tel 07971 810 777
The salmon smoker
At nearly two metres tall, wearing a bright yellow oilskin and high reindeer skin boots, Ole-Martin Hansen stands out anywhere, perhaps nowhere more so than in a rainy back alley in Stoke Newington, north-east London. His office and smokery is a tiny, brick lean-to on the back of a converted semi-industrial building. Inside the low, whitewashed half-arch, a few sides of salmon hang, beautifully loose-wrapped in greaseproof paper, and a door through to the inner chamber is festooned with metres of flexible aluminium foil pipe.
The 30-year-old Norwegian says: "My grandfather, Leif Lydersen started a smokery in Norway in 1923. They say he supplied salmon to Queen Maud. She was a really cool queen. She was hot, plus she built a cinema in her palace to watch animations. I built this from studying his notebooks."
Smoke is generated in a garden chimenea ("I got it half price – £20") and channelled through the draped ducting into the next room where a space the size of a very small caravan has been walled off with plywood.
"I can hang around 50 sides here," says Hansen, pointing out the domestic fans that circulate the smoke and the tiny fan heater that keeps the humidity down. "All of this stuff is being connected to a computer so I can control it from my iPhone. You can create something out of stainless steel to German engineering standards. You can buy them, but everything that comes out will be the same. But it shouldn't be about consistency; it's about beautiful variations."
Hansen arrived in the UK six years ago to pursue a degree in sound design, "but I met my girlfriend and we want to make a baby so I needed a job". He now produces 60-80 sides of salmon a week which are snapped up by restaurants, retailers and direct customers via a website. His ambitions stretch to urban smokeries in Paris, Barcelona and New York and more. "I want to establish a network of local fishermen in Norway. I'm going to take their photographs and then offer people the ability to choose their own fisherman. You'll know the actual guy who catches the fish you've ordered. You'll be able to look on Google Earth and see exactly where he's fishing."
Hansen points proudly at two sides of special "Queen Maud cure" salmon hanging near the door. "Those are going to the Norwegian ambassador for a special dinner this evening."
hansen-lydersen.com; tel 07411 693 712
