May Fly on the Corrib Lake Galway

This was a programme I was involved with - how to fish with the May fly in Galway the west of Ireland

The May Fly © Kevin Thornton

May Fly© Kevin Thornton

The crew having a laugh at me on a typical Irish May day - great weather!! ©Kevin Thornton

My self and Fred the guy who cooked the Brown Trout in the Independant©Kevin Thornton

The Burnt Brown Trout in the Independant????© Kevin Thornton

Placing the May Fly on the Rod © Kevin Thornton

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May 25, 2015

Pig's Head in Poitin

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May 19, 2015

TTIP TALK FOR THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT BRUSSELS 12TH MAY 2015

I am worried about food production in general and especially TTIP and the effect it will have on our beautiful green island I am worried it will TIPP us further away from Natural Food Production

In our a lifetime, we take in a massive amount of food additives and preservatives.

And increasingly, that means we are taking in a massive amount of e-numbers too many to take in – in more ways than one.

Modern food production is so far removed from nature – it’s frightening. A small number of multi-national companies are controlling how we eat, when we eat and what we eat.

The world’s largest seed producer used to deal in chemical warfare. It manufactured Agent Orange that was used in Vietnam War.

After it lost its market in war, it re-branded itself to sell its chemicals as “agrochemicals.” These multi-national companies are selling the theory that their way is the way forward – the way to feed the world. They are waging war against the seasons.

This makes no sense – and we all know that it is not sustainable.

The fact is we are so far removed from nature – from the natural cycle of life … we are in danger of forgetting the seasons.

I don’t want multi-national companies controlling what I eat. It should be my choice. It should be your choice.

It might seem like we have little or no control, but we can solve this problem by reconnecting with the natural cycle that is involved in food production. By choosing to eat food only locally grown seasonal food and by remember the seasons . The thing is our little planet Earth has its own natural rhythm and that rhythm IS – the four seasons.

We should not be eating strawberries in December, strawberries that have been “force-grown “Laced with Chemicals in some greenhouse thousands of miles away.

Let’s stop for just a second here – how many times have you bought a punnet of strawberries and been disappointed that the taste doesn’t match the delicious appearance?

That never happens when you buy local strawberries, in season.

We should wait! We should look forward to the first strawberry of the year in June – the strawberry that bursts with flavour

I come from Cashel in Tipperary and I have lots of food memories that are interlinked with the seasons. When I was growing up, every year, around Easter, a guy in a horse and cart came around the houses selling baby chicks.

We kept the chicks in the back garden, they fed on worms and also from the scraps from our plates.

At the end of the summer they were ready for eating, and our job was to pluck them.

Those chickens had their own natural life cycle.

We don’t live in that world anymore – we live in a changing world.

But there is no reason we cannot help our children and grandchildren to understand the difference in flavour between force grown food and seasonal food.

Each season is exciting for me, but if I had to pick a favourite season, it would have to be Spring.

While I feel a responsibility to my kids and my grandkids and to the planet, I know that I can only be responsible for what I do myself.

As chefs, we are always wanting to try new things – there’s a danger here of getting carried away and forgetting about the seasonal nature of the food we work with.

Just because we can get things out of season doesn’t mean we should.

You are what you eat – we say it so often, but we don’t really mean it, we don’t really stop to consider it.

Food production is a matter of life and death (and of our survival as a species).

Our beautiful planet is a tiny one in the overall scheme of things.

It has its own natural rhythm and we need to reconnect with that rhythm.

We need to reconnect with the rhythm of the forgotten seasons

TIPP THE BALANCE BACK TO NATURE

KEVIN THORNTON

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November 17, 2014

Bog Butter

http://www.thevideo.me/mdztbghoimje

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November 12, 2014

Andrew Zimmern Bizzare Foods

Andrew's Top 5 for Ireland Video : Bizarre Foods : Travel Channel http://www.travelchannel.com/video/andrews-top-5-for-ireland

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October 27, 2014

Venison with Valhrona Ssauce

Venison with Valhrona Sauce ©KevinThornton2014

Ingredients; 4 persons

4 Noisette of Venison at 150g each

4 Chocolate Tuile

20g Hazelnut Oil

Fresh Dried Chilli Powder

Parsnip Cones

50g Crushed Black Pepper

50g Fresh Ethiopian Coffee Beans, Crushed

Sauce;

200 g of Valrhona

1l of Veal stock

½ l of Venison Stock

100 ml of Dry Sherry

50ml of White Balsamic Vinegar

5ml Hazelnut liquor

5g of Raspberry Juice

3 Diced Shallots

4g Crushed Black Pepper Corns

1g of fresh green chili

5g Sea Salt

Drop of White Wine Vinegar (if necessary)

Ingredients Parsnips

4 Parsnips Still water

Olive Oil

Sea Salt

Fresh Milled Pepper

Method Venison;

1. Marinate the Venison overnight in the fridge

2.Heat a copper pan season the venison and sauté until golden brown

on all sides, remove and place on a trivet and cook in a hot oven for

5 minutes, remove and return it to the heat and sprinkle with crushed

black peppercorns and crushed coffee beans, Flambé with hazelnut liqueur, remove and rest for a few minuets before carving. Remove each end from the Venison to give the perfect cut, also allowing you to taste, before finally serving.

Method - Sauce;

Heat a pot rub with olive oil. Sauté the shallots, ensuring not to color them as you cook.

Add the dry sherry and the freshly crushed black peppercorns; cook for two minuets add the raspberry stocks reduce by 1/2.

3. Roughly chop the chocolate add 3/4 of the chocolate to the sauce, keeping the other remainder of the chocolate for later. Add the cocoa powder and stir gently constantly to make sure that the chocolate is not lying on at the bottom of the Pot, Taste make sure it is not too bitter cook for a few minuets. Remove and pass through a fine strainer.

4. In another pot add the White Balsamic Vinegar add the Chocolate

Sauce, Taste, Correct the Seasoning. Add the Remainder of the Chocolate, add the chili

Stir gently, Taste and Correct the Seasoning, Finish off with 5 g

of Shallot Butter and Serve.

To Serve;

Place the potato on the plate and arrange the cones on the plate, sprinkle with fresh dried chili and cocoa powder, Sauce the plate and arrange the venison on the plate and serve.

©KevinThornton 2014 #thorntonsrestaurant

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August 15, 2014

Bog butter celebrity chef Kevin Thornton's latest trend

Bog butter: celebrity chef Kevin Thornton's latest trend #John Murray show#RTE 1

Chef Kevin Thornton of renowned Thornton's Restaurant in Dublin

Celebrity chef Kevin Thornton has revealed his latest food trend - bog butter©kevin thornton #Thornton's Restaurant

The chef, who owns Michelin starred restaurant Thornton’s on Stephen’s Green, said he recently tasted bog butter which was 4,000 years old.

He is now working to develop his own version of the traditional spread.

Thornton told RTE’s Kathryn Thomas today that he is constantly pushing his own boundaries as a creative chef.

“If I was to have a food trend, my food trend would be bog butter. We had some two weeks ago and it was nearly 4,000 years old.”

“I buried some butter in the bog, and I’ll do some research and go back in six months and check and see what stage before the butter turns.”

During his research into the history of the archaic delicacy, Thornton has discovered two reasons as to why butter was buried in a bog.

“One[reason] was to preserve it and the other was to thank the gods. They were offering the bog something special in the butter because the butter was maybe eight to ten kilos which was a big thing.”

“You’re talking about two churns of milk which 4,000 years ago would have been a huge amount of milk.”

Thornton discovered that the butter is

“I was really excited about it. We tasted it. There’s fermentation but it’s not fermentation because it’s gone way beyond that. Then you get this taste coming down or right up through your nose.”

“Because it’s a historical thing and you can’t really take it, I decided to bury some myself.”

“It’s coming to a slate near you.”

- See more at: http://www.independent.ie/life/food-drink/food-news/bog-butter-celebrity-chef-kevin-thorntons-latest-trend-30502392.html#comments

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August 13, 2014

The journeyman: Kevin Thornton's project in Ethiopia

The journeyman: Kevin Thornton's project in Ethiopia By Maggie Armstrong

He's known as much for his fiery attitude as he is for his flair in the kitchen. But that's just for starters, as Maggie Armstrong discovered when she talked to chef Kevin Thornton about the community initiative he is involved with in Ethiopia, and the extraordinary photographs he has taken along the way

Published 02/08/2014 | 00:00

Black & White © Kevin Thornton

A lot of celebrity chefs do charity. Sometimes, celebrity chefs do charity to add to the celebrations as their various culinary ventures balloon and bugle-sound. It's not that they don't care. But helping others is a well-advised way to undercut the relentlessly middle-class form of excess and pomp that being a celebrated chef involves

Charity looks good, and it suits the megalomaniacal character type. Or so the preconceptions go. Kevin Thornton throws this preconception into disarray. He's been going to Lalibela, Ethiopia for seven years.

When I interviewed Thornton for this magazine in 2012, I thought his trips to Ethiopia were just for decoration; sprigs of garnish atop his various other culinary ventures, with two Michelin stars and a TV career behind him. A nouveau 'White Man's Burden', to which I gave passing mention to flesh out a profile piece about him and the delights he offers in Thornton's on St Stephen's Green. But it turns out he has gone deeper and deeper in.

Thornton has gone so deep into tribal life, breaking from the tourist trail with several cameras and an investigative mind, it's an achievement to have made it back. Here he is on a sweltering day inside his restaurant, avid, intense and hushed as ever.

Hair-gelled, with the look of an older commis chef, the famous name embroidered on his chef whites is the only reminder of his importance in the exploding niche of Irish gastronomy.

We've met to discuss what he's doing at the Electric Picnic, which we forget to do. Information is on page 13.

Thornton ploughs a lonely furrow next to other Irish chefs. Of course, he's a driven entrepreneur, a compulsive artiste. He's a contrarian with the press, sending back every question like an undercooked dish. And he is full-on sweary, the man who famously threw out a customer for wanting something less than what he was given (chips, Thornton will be annoyed to read once more).

But otherwise he's different to the boys. He's lean, sinewy, ascetic. He doesn't drink much. He's a chef patron, who backs his own restaurant with his decisive wife Muriel at the helm. He runs a "Zen kitchen", or so he says. And now, this expedition into Africa looks to be more defining than anything else he's done.

In a conversation peppered, doused and flambéed with "don't put that in", and "don't put that in either", and "don't, please - I'll get in shit", Thornton even convinces me that what he is doing isn't charity, it is love.

Thornton was born 57 years ago in Cashel, Co Tipperary, where he worked from 12 as a cook, kitchen porter and in abattoirs. As an apprentice he was fascinated by the bodies of cows. The sight of four stomachs being carved open filled him with wonder.

He left school after his Inter Cert to study catering and then went hitchhiking around Europe. He worked in vineyards, and made and sold beads on Paris's Left Bank. He used to have dreads. His right ear is pierced; the stud has a black and white swirl, the Taoist symbol for yin and yang: balance.

A Swiss girl pierced it for him in her house when he was 18 using ice cubes and a sewing needle. When he came home to Cashel, with long hair, a beard, hoop earring and sandals, his father Ned, a truck driver, would cross to the other side of the road.

"He was embarrassed about me. I fought to get on with him. I worked hard to make him see me as a person, not as a restaurateur or chef or shit like that," he says. Despite, or perhaps because of his father's reservations, he opened his first restaurant in 1989, and got a Michelin star.

Ned has died and his mother, Rita, who was a dressmaker, is living in Cashel. He has two sons, Edward and Conor, three grandchildren and an "excellent team" of 20 in Thornton's.

About seven years ago, man-about-Dublin Trevor White suggested Thornton talk to Brody Sweeney of O'Brien's Sandwich Bars about his foundation. Connect Ethiopia creates business and trade links between Ireland and Ethiopia. Entrepreneurs like Thornton educate and mentor small food and hospitality businesses.

Thornton went to Ethiopia and opened a cookery school for chefs, teaching Ethiopians what Irish chefs were taught when Thornton helped set up the DIT Culinary Arts degree in 1985.

It was in a straw-bedded hut in the Old Abyssinia Coffee House that he fell in love with Ethiopia. A young girl was making coffee on a cast-iron roasting pan. The rich-smelling beans were pounded in a pestle and mortar and water boiled with charcoal and incense. As Thornton describes the process, hands grasping the air, you can see the curious young boy in the abattoir. "Then they get the third filter and they hand it to you. Really f***ing amazing," he says.

He could have left the brief at cookery schools, but the earth under the Sub-Saharan sun tantalised him. The crops grown were limited and the landscape was "wrecked", but it was the perfect climate for growing peppers, courgettes and carrots. He felt annoyed by the people's lack of drive. "There's all this land around and it looks like shit. And why does it look like shit, you know? Get off your butt and be proud of it. So I went out and I dug it up," he says, like the enemy of Zen.

He planted a garden and taught chefs skills that wouldn't go amiss in some other countries I can think of. "The whole idea was for something new in life. Why not all plant a seed?" He has since worked with 10 businesses and opened two chef schools and two farms and is working on an abattoir, a library and cheese-making facility. The girl in the Old Abyssinia Coffee House has gone on to open her own coffee shop.

This all involves navigating the authoritarian structures of a coalition government that has been in power since 1991, when the country was wrecked by famine.

So it isn't charity in the New Testament sense, which the Victorians adopted and which is alive and well in business circles today. Thornton is more a self-help guru.

"I'm not a goody-two-shoes. I don't go to poor areas because I'm not interested. It's not my job. I'm not qualified to go and feel sorry for people," he says.

Thornton qualifies the rant, saying he's not interesting in giving material things. It makes him cringe when Westerners tip over-generously or hand out money in Ethiopia. "I wasn't going to give them anything, unless they'd earned it. If you give people something for nothing, they have no respect for you."

There is nothing more stiflingly boring than being made to look through someone else's holiday photographs. But these are okay. As Thornton wades through the hefty stack on his coffee table, they even become engrossing. They are more like tableaus, story books pulsing with descriptions of ancient traditions. They are far from the stock, clichéd, tourist shot of the woman with the plate lip in front of the mud hut.

There was the bull-jumping ceremony in Turmi village, where women from the Hamer tribe are whipped by a teenage boy so he can prove his manhood. The 16-year olds' wedding which he hustled an invitation to, and then had to insult patriarchal sensibilities by not mingling with the men but with the women, because they would be cooking.

The blood drunk fresh from the cow's pierced neck that's "like a rich cream, a warm cream, and as it goes down, there's just a little hint of salt". (Pictured above.)

The pictures go on display at Electric Picnic.

He went to the Oma Valley, a protected area where he was required to take an armed guard. "I used to get really sick, you know I'd be tripping out for two weeks." You'd be what? "Hallucinating. Don't say that. Well, you can if you want." There is a very high risk of infectious diseases in Ethiopia. Thornton is rigid about the times he eats, swallows 12 cloves of garlic a day and Muriel puts him "in quarantine" when he's home.

I am curious as to why he doesn't just stay in his comfort zone of Lalibela, helping people and surely being feted by locals.

"I wanted to learn more about Ethiopia and about the people. I felt that I could offer more if I understood them more."

What does he think about the lavish way we live in Ireland? (It is lavish, compared with an Ethiopian farmer's diet of adura bread, chilli paste and coffee.)

"Yeah, it's kinda sick."

Oh?

"The West is f***ed."

Has Ethiopia connected him more with Ireland's disenfranchised, Ireland's homeless?

This makes him uncomfortable. He walks past homeless people on his trip in from Ranelagh every day and knows some of them. "The last few weeks, stuff going around this area, all the overdoses. When you see things like this poor 25-year-old guy dying, your heart bleeds. For his parents.

"Ethiopia is very different; it's the beginning of life. They have their own sad things there too, and maybe I haven't learned enough. I saw this guy with a mental disability, 28 or 29, just roaming in the mountains. Singing and going around in circles. Who's looking after him, you know?"

I ask how he feels about being best known as a celebrity chef (the term is passé; they are more lifestyle brands now). He looks at me as if I've just offered him a bowl of expired blood. "I just do my work," he snaps.

"Andy Warhol said everybody will have their 15 minutes of fame. And it becomes celebrity? Bullshit. We're here today, gone tomorrow. We're passing through."

He tells me about a bronze sculpture he's been making from a tuna fish carcass. He's filled it with wax and it's going to be displayed in Thornton's, his first sculpture. Does he run such a luxurious restaurant because exquisite food suits rich tastes, or because he simply likes crafting and creating things, and this just happens to cost time and money? Or in other words, now that he has Africa, what use to him is Thornton's?

"We've been discussing this actually. Sometimes, this is not us," he glances nervously at the oyster walls that look so gloomy and executive on this fiery summer day. "I'd love to have a place that's stripped. And that's on the water. Like, I want people playing f***in' shit hot music," says the grandfather. "Raw. Really raw. F*** everything. Back to basics."

Speaking of shit hot music, Thornton's son Conor's band, Voxx, are playing at the Electric Picnic too. Conor has a wild, wavy fringe and his Twitter byline says: "I blow my load over the status quo, here we go".Kevin loves them.

Kevin Thornton brings a taste of Africa to Electric Picnic, August 29-31, 2014, with a demo of injera bread of Lalibela, Ethiopia, and sorghum, a gnocchi-like dish made in vegetable shells. Theatre of food at the Mindfield stage is a gathering of top chefs, baristas, mixologists, brewers, bakers and bloggers who discuss, debate and demo great food. Theatre of Food will be located beside Mindfield,  behind the main stage.

Irish Independent

- See more at: http://www.independent.ie/life/the-journeyman-kevin-thorntons-project-in-ethiopia-30469523.html#sthash.WowPeKU3.dpuf

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