FOOD trends come and go, but if there’s one that’s showing no signs of going away, it’s our insatiable appetite for hand-crafted produce. There is good reason for this. For, artisan and craft goods are more likely than others to satisfy a growing and politicised consumer market that is interested in provenance. When people buy them at farmers’ markets sometimes they do so directly from the person who made them. Often they are handed over accompanied by tales of contented, roaming livestock or carefully cultured kitchen gardens.

Artisan food is said to be having a “boom”. The Caterer listed artisan bread, along with “craft carbs”, as one of its food trends for 2018. But it’s not just about artisan bread, or coffee, or traditional Scottish products – artisan food makers are at the forefront of experiments that are about taking the best global food ideas and creating them locally. Mozzarella from Dumfriesshire, chillies from Galloway, a vegan variation on a middle eastern snack, chocolate with less sugar – these are just some of the innovative ideas at the heart of Scotland’s artisan food scene.

Mediterranean goes local

Your Mediterranean diet need not be imported. Believe it or not, these days it is possible to get a chilli preserve made from chillies grown in Galloway, and a fresh mozzarella cheese made from the milk of Brown Swiss cows that roam a Dumfriesshire farm.

Sheena Horner, creator of Galloway Chillies preserves, is a farmer’s daughter who first dreamt up the idea of growing her own chillies when, in 2012, the only chillies she could get locally were jalapenos and scotch bonnets. Currently, she has over 600 plants. Her Chilli Original preserve, she says, is a recipe she used to make for family and friends, and which was so popular that she thought it might have potential as a business idea. “People are more interested in where food is sourced from and I can explain not only that we use Scottish grown chillies, but also the variety and how we grow them.”

The Brown Swiss cows that Gavin Lochhead keeps on his Dumfriesshire farm produce high-protein milk that lends itself particularly well to making cheese, especially the mozzarella he batch-makes each Thursday to sell under the name Kedar Cheese. The trick, Lochhead says, is to make it “as soft as you can”. “Most people like it to be soft, with the milk oozing out of it. What we make is so different from what you get in the supermarket – because what you get there usually has citric acid added to it. But we have no additives or preservatives in it – so it only lasts seven days.”

He first began producing the cheese almost two years ago, after he had learned to make it on a cheese-making course in Nantwich. “I found it seemed awfully easy to make mozzarella. Also, I noticed there was no-one else making fresh mozzarella in Scotland – so I thought there was a good market there. The big advantage, as well, is that with mozzarella you could make it and sell it on the same day. There’s no maturing period with it. A lot of our Italian customers prefer it on the same day.”

Baked Off?

Hardly. In fact, the artisan bread boom is still on the rise, and increasingly entering the mainstream. Sourdough remains a hot trend – with supermarkets these days even stocking bread that in its mass-produced way mimics an artisan style. Matt Fountain runs Freedom Bakery, which began as a project providing a work activity for prisoners in HMP Low Moss and is now based outside the prison, in the community, where it offers employment for ex-offenders. He has observed the changes in the bread market.

“Broadly the appreciation and demand for artisan bread is growing,” he says. “The food market always has its buzzwords. Whereas I feel 10 or 15 years ago, organic was a buzzword – now gluten-free and veganism, are expressing similar socio-political agendas. When it comes to sourdough I think it’s less about some of these socio-political motivations and more about a reclaiming of something utilitarian and quotidian in our early lives. Bread is consumed less and less today but was a staple. It’s about an appreciation for that simplicity.”

As well as producing great artisan sourdough bread, Freedom Bakery is also one of a growing number of food projects that present some other social good. There’s something about baking bread that provides a good task for people coming out of prison. “It’s quite creative,” he says, “but formulaic as well, and there’s a great deal of pride attached to it. I think pride and confidence are among those things you lose when you go through the criminal justice system.”

Vegan vs Artisan

Veganism probably trumps artisan as one of the biggest recent global food trends. But, the combination of the words “vegan” and “artisan” have to be a match made in foodie heaven. Not that Mateusz Noniewicz realised this was what he was going to create when he first started to make food to sell at farmer’s markets. Rather, he seems to have almost stumbled upon the snack that has taken the markets by storm – the vegan kuku, a dish that is a variation on a kind of middle eastern frittata, containing herbs and vegetables, only without the eggs.

Noniewicz was not a vegan when he started the business that he then called Grumpy Food, but recently renamed Planed Kuku. He was a grumpy ex-Frankie & Benny’s employee who was keen to create a job that wouldn’t involve working so many hours while his young son was growing up. “We were in debt,” he recalls. “And we thought we would do what we would like to do: cook for our friends and family at home.”

Early on, they realised that of all the foods on their vegetarian stall, it was the kuku that was a big hit. What prompted the vegan twist was the fact that they had a stall next to Sgaia’s Vegan Meats, who encouraged them to give it a try. But the vegan kuku is not just for vegans. “Most of our customers at our markets in Edinburgh are not vegans – they are just people who fancy a healthy option from time to time."

Sweet virtues

Among the big sellers in the artisan market are the treats. That’s not surprising, given that a small indulgence is something people are often willing to fork out a little on, even in difficult times. Michelle Wilkinson has been making her The Very Lovely Sauce Company range of caramel sauces from her kitchen in Fife, and says she wanted to make something that would make people smile. They come in a tantalising range of flavours including liquorish, smoked sugar, gingerbread and lemongrass. In the process of making them, she says, she has had her “Frankenstein” moments of crazed experimentation, as she has taken her simple base of butter, unrefined sugar and cream, and dabbled with infusing it with a range of natural flavours. Some of her experiments, she says, have “guttingly” not worked. “For example, rhubarb. It was delicious. The best. But it was just too runny.”

The idea that a treat can be healthier is at the basis of Glasgow-based Dr Neil Robson’s Rebel Chocolate, which has significantly less sugar than most chocolates on the market. Robson is a former immunologist who left his job because of a long-standing back injury. He needed to find a new way of working and, along with his immunologist wife, came up with the idea of creating healthier chocolate. “The overriding goal was that it had to taste great. People would think I’m going to eat this chocolate because it’s nicer than the chocolate I normally eat, without realising there’s anything healthier about it. It’s not a health product. It’s a healthier product.”

Rebel Chocolate is a product which chimes with these sugar-fearing, sugar-taxing times. What he has created is both an artisan product that is also a work of science, in which, he says “four different types of sugar work synergistically”. “One of the things we did,” he says, “is use lactose-free milk powder. Lactose is made up chemically of a molecule of glucose and a molecule of galactose together. And with lactose-free products what they do is add lactase which cleaves it in half and you get glucose and galactose and they are sweet. You gain sweetness just from the milk powder itself.”

The Farm Scoop

Not long ago, says Don Dennis of the Wee Isle Dairy on Gigha, he got an email from an English woman who had visited Argyll on holiday, which said that she had picked his raspberry ice cream up at a petrol station and it was the finest ice cream she had ever had. Why, I ask, does he think it’s so good? “Because,” he immediately replies, “the milk from our cows is so damn good”. They are, he observes, the only dairy in Scotland that produce milk, pasteurised the old-fashioned way, slowly at 63oC, rather than rapidly at 73oC as most milk producers do.

Artisan ice cream, produced on the farm on which the cow is milked, is a hot trend in artisan foods – but it’s also one into which, on some level, farmers have been forced. At Stewart Tower Dairy near Perth, they market their gelato-style ice cream as being “from cow to cone”, and sell it in an on-site parlour. Farmer Neil Butler says he got into making the ice cream, because “the continuing poor wholesale price of milk that was and still is offered to UK farmers.” “We decided that we were no longer content with being at the financial mercy of people in offices of large organisations that had never set foot on a farm.” There were, he says, too many middlemen – and this was their way of bypassing them. They also loved “good ice cream”.

Posh snacks

The humble scotch egg. What’s not to like about it? Well, if what you’re looking at is a supermarket scotch egg, there’s the fact you probably don’t know whether the pork and the egg comes from, or what the conditions were under which it was reared. Mark and Jacqueline Davidson first started to explore the idea of setting up their own food business after he was made redundant a few years ago. They saw that there was an opportunity right on their doorstep in the excellent free-range pork and egg producers in their local Ayrshire. The Aye Love Real Foods artisan scotch egg, made from the meat of Tamworth pigs which roam the Nethergate Larder farm in Ayrshire, was born.

It has been bowling over customers at food markets since, hitting, as it does, all the right provenance and taste buttons. Mark Davidson observes: “The scotch egg had been done so badly for so long that when people suddenly get a high-quality artisan option it proves massively popular. It’s a “wow” moment when they taste something amazing that they had low expectations of.”