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Showing posts with label producer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label producer. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

The organic cereal thriller | Meet the producer

Mini Magoo has always been about good food made with quality, organic ingredients. I?started the business 10 years ago when I couldn't find any cereals or snacks that I wanted to eat myself. At the time, I was a makeup artist, but I also had a strong interest?in nutrition, especially for children. I was keen to develop delicious, healthy snacks that wouldn't leave kids climbing the walls from being so hyped up on sugar. People seemed to love whatever I made – I used to have girls' nights at my house and give everyone a little bag of muesli or mixed nuts or some other treat. By the end of the night, noone would have anything left to take?home with them – they'd always eaten all the snacks. I thought that was a good sign.

We now make 21 varieties of cereal, including four granolas, muesli and porridges. We're currently making our summer Bircher muesli, which just needs soaking in fruit juice. Then we have something that's neither granola nor muesli – I call it?"granuesli".

We have a unit in south Bermondsey, London. It's a really lovely area: quiet, with lots of space and light, and a whole community of creative people doing different things. We're a team of five, and I think of us as a family. I've been watching a lot of programmes about ants recently, and I love how they work together. We're a bit like that!

We've had a stall at Borough Market for nine years now – we see about 4.5 million people a year there. We're very lucky to have direct contact with our customers on a regular basis. We get to know what they like and want. The granuesli came about to cater for children. We noticed a lot more kids have allergies these days, and we wanted to give them something tasty and healthy. That's what I love most about my job: being able to give people a good start to their day.

"Funstuff" is our gluten-free, wheat-free seed and nut mix. It was the first product I created. I developed it alone in my kitchen. The business grew from there, as I slowly?added more ingredients to my first recipe. Try experimenting with your own mix and sprinkling it over hot pineapple.

Serves 4
1 small pineapple
4 cardamom pods, seeds crushed, husks discarded
5g butter
80g yoghurt or custard
100g mixed nuts and seeds, toasted

1 Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4. Add the cardamom seeds and butter to a small heatproof dish and place in the oven to melt while it's warming up.

2 Meanwhile, remove the pineapple skin and the core, then cut it into roughly equal cubes.

3 When the cardamom and butter has melted, add the pineapple chunks to the dish and stir?until they are well coated.

4 Place in the oven for 15-20 minutes, or until you can smell the pineapple.

5 Serve in bowls. Layer the pineapple on the?base, add a dollop of yoghurt (or thick custard for a Sunday pudding) and top each bowl with 25g of toasted seeds and nuts.

Whether you're preparing this for yourself or?for several people, the equation is the same: 1?cup of porridge to 2 cups orange juice.

Serves 4
1 litre orange juice
100g porridge oats
2 bananas, chopped
80g yoghurt
40g mixed nuts and seeds, toasted

1 Evenly combine the orange and oats in four separate bowls and leave to soak overnight.

2 The oats will be creamy by morning. Top each bowl with half a banana, 20g yoghurt and 10g of mixed nuts and seeds, then serve.


Exclusive reader offer Mini Magoo is offering readers a 10% online discount on?all products. Simply enter "guardian" at the?online checkout. Offer valid until 31 July; minimagoo.com


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Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Goat's milk ice cream | Meet the producer

We've had people in tears of joy at our stall in Borough Market, London. These people are tasting ice?cream for the first time in years, because they're lactose-intolerant or have an allergy. They well up; then we well up. It's so rewarding.

Goat's milk is easier to digest than cow's milk. It does contain lactose, but only a tiny amount compared to cow's milk. It makes a great base for ice-cream – it tastes less fatty and enhances the flavours we add, such as salted caramel, honeycomb, and strawberry and balsamic. Customers think it's going to taste sour or "goaty", but it doesn't.

Greedy Goat was founded by me and my friends Mark, Toby and Tom. We'd come to Borough Market in our lunch break, have a beer and discuss what we'd make if we had a stall. Then Toby stumbled across a goat's milk farmer in Essex and Greedy Goat was born in 2011. There are about 90 Anglo-Nubian goats on the farm. We used to make the ice-cream there, but now we get the milk delivered to the "goat shack", our HQ in south London.

Ice-cream has become boring. We want to make quirky flavours and encourage people to try new combinations. We pour Matcha tea over clotted ice-cream, and drizzle olive oil over pistachio to bring out the nuttiness.

The business is growing fast. We're about to launch into delis, talking to farmer's markets about more stalls and we're also supporting a charity called Kids For Kids by buying a goat a month for families in Darfur. We're all still doing our day jobs, too, which is getting complicated. We're all passionate about this.

Salted caramel is our most popular flavour – we always sell out of it at the stall.

Serves 6

For the salted caramel
250g caster sugar
50g unsalted goat's milk butter at room temperature
125g whole goat's cream

2g salt
For the ice-cream

650ml whole goat's milk
135ml whole goat's cream
190g sugar
1 vanilla pod
75g salted caramel

1 Make the caramel first. Add the sugar to a large saucepan. Heat the sugar over a medium-high heat, whisking it as it melts. When the sugar is a deep amber colour and has a slight toasted aroma, this is the point where the caramel can go from being perfect to burnt in seconds, so keep an eye on it.

2 Add the butter, but be careful, as the caramel will bubble up as it's added. Whisk the butter into the caramel until it has all melted. Remove the pan from the heat and slowly pour in the cream. Whisk until it has fully incorporated and you have a smooth sauce. Whisk in the salt. Set the sauce aside to cool for 10-15 minutes, pour into a glass jar and cool to room temperature. You can refrigerate the sauce for up to 2 weeks.

3 To make the ice-cream, gently heat the goat's milk and cream in a large saucepan. When the mixture reaches 40C on a sugar thermometer, stir in the sugar. Split the vanilla pod with a knife and scrape out the seeds. Add them to the mixture. Whisk slowly in the pan until the temperature reaches 85C then filter and decant the mixture in a container and chill at a temperature below 4C. Chill in the fridge for 4-6 hours.

4 Remove from the fridge, mix in the salted caramel and blitz with a hand blender. Freeze the mixture in an ice-cream machine according to instructions, then place in a freezer to set for at least two hours. If you don't have a machine, place the mixture in the freezer for 45 minutes, take it out and stir and repeat. Return to freezer once more for at least 4 hours, preferably overnight.

Greedy Goat is giving readers 50p off their next scoop of ice-cream from its London Borough Market stall – simply quote "Guardian Cook offer". Valid until end of June 2013


View the original article here