Mary-Ellen McTague

Former head chef, Aumbry, Manchester, makes her own curd and cheese

“I really like understanding the processes involved in food that we take for granted,” says Mary-Ellen McTague. “Whether it’s making cheese or fermenting sausage or dry-ageing ham, there’s all this magical stuff that involves bacteria and time and temperature.”

At Aumbry, her acclaimed restaurant on the outskirts of Manchester, which closed last summer, McTague found time to indulge her fascinations despite the pressures of a hectic kitchen. “Every time I said, ‘Right, let’s make cheese,’ everybody would be like, ‘Oh great, here we go.’ But it became absorbed into the working day – it became part of the routine.”

She took inspiration from old recipe books, in particular The Art of Cookery by the 18th-century English writer Hannah Glasse. McTague tried her hand at various types of cheese – hard, soft and blue. Most successful was the fresh curd, or fromage frais, which became a regular feature on the menu.

McTague will open a new restaurant in Manchester, on the site of the old Roadhouse music venue, later this year. In the meantime she and her team have been staging pop-ups around the city under the name 4244. Despite their nomadic existence, they are still making cheese on a daily basis.

If anything, the process has become easier. At Aumbry, a converted cottage with a tiny kitchen, lack of space meant considerable resourcefulness. For the “inoculation” and ripening stages in the cheese-making process, McTague identified a “special place” in her kitchen at a precise distance from the stove where the milk could be maintained at exactly 32 degrees.

Now, working out of a bigger, better equipped kitchen at the Old Granada Studios, the process has become more refined. “We have dehydrators and combi ovens that we can set to really precise low temperatures, so it takes away a bit of the guesswork.”

There are now fewer disasters, such as “cheese that smelled like baby sick”, although it’s still not a wholly exact science. “There’s always going to be a bit of trial and error,” says McTague. “You’re dealing with times, temperatures and bacterial activity. Plus every workspace is different. Once you’ve figured out how to do all that consistently, then you get a fairly consistent product.”

McTague makes the fresh curd most days – in one dish, carried over from Aumbry, it’s served dusted with hay ash on a plate of snails and mushrooms. Unsalted curds are also used to make tarts and kickshaws (filled pastry), while the leftover whey, which is usually discarded in the curd-making process, has found its way into a rhubarb granita.

McTague believes making an ingredient, rather than buying it in, has changed her perception of food. “It takes recipes in different directions. Creatively, it’s good for the whole team to learn techniques like pickling, smoking, curing and cheese-making. Cost-wise it’s good too, because it means you’re throwing less away.”

She pauses. “To be honest, though, the money-saving thing is just the way I convince people it’s a good idea. You’re making something you can’t get anywhere else. It’s unique, and that’s a big part of the appeal.”

Jonray & Peter Sanchez-Iglesias

Chef/owners, Casamia, Bristol: dry-age their beef and lamb

Before Peter and Jonray Sanchez-Iglesias took over the running of Casamia from their parents just over a decade ago, the little restaurant in Westbury-on-Trym in the north of Bristol was a trattoria. The beams in the dining room were tricolore red, the tablecloths were plastic and the menu – pizza, pasta, pollo al barolo – ran to a compendious eight pages.

The name (“my house” in Italian, despite their father’s Spanish origins) hasn’t changed but almost everything else has. The beams have been whitewashed, the plastic stripped away, and there’s not a grissini stick in sight. The only thing that hasn’t been simplified is the imaginative, often ingenious cooking, which won the brothers, Peter, 29, and Jonray, 31, a Michelin star in 2009 – and their attitude towards ingredients.

Two years ago, when the spring lamb didn’t match up to their expectations – “one minute it was really tender, the next it was like rubber in your mouth” – they decided to make an intervention. “We did a bit of experimenting with dry-ageing,” says Peter.

Their process was pleasingly lo-fi. They rigged up a domestic fridge with a £10 fan from Argos to circulate the air, and a container full of salt to control the humidity, and consigned some rubbery lamb to it. “Four weeks later, we got it out and it was better – a lot better,” says Peter. “It was melt-in-your-mouth and had this real depth of flavour that you don’t normally get with lamb.”

They aged the fat separately for an extra couple of weeks, then rendered it down and brushed it over the meat before serving. “It’s kind of a cheat,” says Jonray. But the extra ageing “made a huge difference. A lot of customers said they’d never had lamb like it.” Last spring, instead of lamb rumps, they aged the superior best-end cut on the bone for an even longer period. Now they’re finding other uses for their improvised dry-ageing facility. “At the moment we’ve got short saddle of beef in the fridge,” says Jonray. “We’re ageing it on the bone for an extra four to six weeks, which helps the flavour massively.”

Much of their experimentation is driven by a desire to reduce food waste. Rather than throw away fish carcasses, they’ve started dehydrating the bones and using them as a base for sauces.If herbs aren’t up to scratch, they dry them to use in jellies or tea. “If something’s going off or we have no use for it at that moment,” says Jonray, “we need to do something about it.”

Their concern about waste is one of the reasons they opted for a tasting menu. “A lot of people said it was a trend,” says Peter, “but it means we can control everything more sustainably.”

What do their parents make of the evolution of the family restaurant?

“In the early days, they were a bit bemused,” says Jonray, “but now they’re really excited to see what’s coming up next. Last night Dad was telling someone how much the restaurant has changed and he said: ‘It’s like having a garage that used to sell Skodas, now it sells Rolls-Royces.’”

Isaac McHale

Chef/owner, the Clove Club, London: makes his own salumi

Just inside the entrance to the Clove Club, at Shoreditch Town Hall in east London, is a low door with a series of holes above the lintel. The room behind it was once a box office; now, if you peek through the holes, you’ll spy an impressive array of hams and salamis dangling from the ceiling on strings. This is where head chef Isaac McHale hoards his DIY cured meats.

McHale, who built his reputation with headline-grabbing chef collective the Young Turks, had never attempted to cure meat before opening the Clove Club in March 2013, but he was curious to try. “I’m the eternal student,” he says.

For homework, he pored over books on the subject, including Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie and Salumi. His main interest was in the curing traditions of Italy, which led him to watch “countless YouTube videos in Italian. I don’t speak Italian so I probably missed a lot of things,” he says, “but I think I got the gist.”

Every couple of weeks, a whole pig comes in from his rare-breed supplier in Cornwall. The animal arrives in three pieces – front, middle and back – and McHale and his sous chef, Tim Spedding, “break it down and make coppa from the neck, speck from the shoulder, and prosciutto or Spanish-style jamon or culatello from the back leg. With the bellies, we make a French-style rolled pancetta, curing it in red wine and salt, with juniper, garlic, bay, black pepper and rosemary.”

McHale is a stickler for detail. In the old box office, which is north-facing, with thick walls, no windows and ready-made ventilation through the holes above the door, he has rigged up a fan and a humidifier to circulate the air and keep it moist. “What you want in here is between 12 and 18 degrees Celsius and about 70-80% humidity,” he says. “If it gets too dry, the cases on the salamis harden and then they rot from the inside and burst like a balloon.”

To keep track of what’s going on inside his meats, McHale uses a horse bone, which a customer picked up for him recently in Italy. It is, simply, a white shard of bone, needle-thin at one end, which you jab into the side of a ham to capture its scent. McHale tries it out on his prized culatello – “the king of hams” – and I catch a whiff of intense funkiness. The bone is very porous, which means the smell dissipates after a few seconds and you can use it to test other hams.

All this, he insists, is not just geekery for its own sake. “If you’re a chef, you should know how to make bread or chocolate or salami. You don’t have to be a master, but you should have an understanding. It’s like being a doctor who is OK with hearts but doesn’t know what to do when you break a leg – it feels like an incomplete knowledge of your trade.”

There are more pragmatic reasons as well. “The bar has an unusual licence which requires 80% of people to be having, in legal terms, a substantial table meal,” says McHale. “Charcuterie was a brilliant solution because we could prepare it in advance and the barmen could slice it.”

The effort is doubly worthwhile because the homemade salumi at the Clove Club has become, as McHale puts it, “a USP for people who come here to eat, and for chefs coming here to work as well. Italians seem to like it too, which is encouraging.”

Stephen Harris

Chef/owner, the Sportsman, Seasalter, Kent: makes his own butter and salt

When Stephen Harris introduced a bread course at the Sportsman 11 years ago, he wanted to serve his favourite butter – Bordier, from Brittany – but couldn’t justify the cost. “As a kid I used to help my mum whip cream to go with her Victoria sponge,” he says. “I remember her saying, don’t over-whip it or you’ll get butter.” The memory remained. “I thought, I can’t afford this posh French butter, but I’ve got amazing cream from the local dairy. Why don’t I just make it myself?”

The guiding principle at the Sportsman, alongside a fervent commitment to localism, is that you don’t have to be fancy to serve high-quality food. The restaurant itself is a testament to this: it occupies a weather-beaten pub on the north Kent coast, with peeling paint outside and pints on tap at the bar. You order from the blackboard (most mains are under £20), or on weekdays you can have the extraordinary £65 tasting menu. The food is refined enough to please Michelin inspectors – it won a star in 2008 – but fussy it is not.

When it came to making his own butter, Harris didn’t overcomplicate the process. “I put some cream into a Kenwood mixer and beat the crap out of it,” he says, “and it turned into the most amazing butter I’d ever tasted.”

A decade on, his methods haven’t altered all that much. “We put chilled creme fraiche into a big mixer and beat it until the buttermilk and the solids separate. The buttermilk gets used in puddings and breads and things like that. What you’re left with is this lovely dark yellow mix of butter fat. We add lots of salt to it, then roll the butter up into a tube shape and wrap it. It takes about 15 minutes.”

Even the Sportsman’s salt is homemade, refined from seawater that they lug back in buckets from the beach. Harris also makes a seaweed butter using foraged sea lettuce. Then there’s his 18-month cured hams, homemade bacon, and the freshly baked sourdough he serves with the butter. How does he manage it all?

“At a lot of restaurants, they’ll be in at six in the morning, turning carrots or making spherified lime drops or individually picking the tears out of grapefruit segments. But that to me is a waste of time, because it doesn’t significantly enhance the flavour.” Harris would rather be out the back churning butter.

“None of this is very hi-tech,” he says. “It’s much more Dad’s Army – out in the shed with a bit of string and cardboard. We’re not very Fat Duck-y about it. We don’t have a lab or anything. But I quite like that.”

Harris makes up for his lack of technological wizardry with curiosity, passion and knowledge. “What we’re doing here,” he says, “is making butter in the way it was made pre-industrially. It comes from one field of cows eating one type of grass. You can taste the specificity. Wine-makers are obsessed by this idea of terroir, and it applies to dairy as well. You wouldn’t mix the best burgundy, would you, so why mix milk from different sources?”

The taste changes throughout the year, he says. “In spring, it’s very sweet – I’ve had people asking me if we add caramel to the butter. In summer, you can almost taste rose water, because of the flowers the cows are eating. It will change from week to week, but it’s always pretty sensational.”