James Golding Kitchen Confidential

The gardens at The Pig in Hampshire and now in Somerset provide chef James Golding with summer produce that is full of colour and flavour

Cooking With

Early summer is when home-grown produce really comes into its own. A lot of our ingredients come from our own kitchen gardens, so they feel really celebratory. One is sea kale – long, crisp stems that look a bit like white rhubarb, but taste more like a cross between celery and asparagus. It’s a British delicacy that is back in favour, having been championed by chefs like Mark Hix and Jeremy Lee. The plant generally lives along the coast, but we’ve been growing it from seed in our gardens. We force it like rhubarb, keeping it under cloches so it grows in the dark. It makes the stems pale and tender. It’s great served simply, asparagus-style, with melted butter.

Peas and beans are sweet and young now. We grow several different varieties including a purple podded pea that can be eaten whole. Lots of purple vegetables go green when you cook them, but we’ve found with the peas if we blanch them quickly, they keep their colour, so they look great in a salad with goat’s cheese, bitter cress, toasted hazelnuts and a rapeseed vinaigrette.

The fruit cages are bursting with early fruiting raspberries in June, and there should be gooseberries a go-go too, provided the sawfly have kept away – we plant garlic to deter them. Gooseberries are perfect for fools and little individual tarts, and also used in sorbets, syrups and compotes.

We grow a lot of edible flowers – borage, edible chrysanthemums, and bitter cress that has lovely little white petals. Tiny basil flowers are great with a crème fraîche and treacle tart. And kale is flowering now, putting out white or orange-yellow blossom, so we use that, too – scattered over a braise, say, to enliven the dish. Last year we also grew exploding cucumbers. They are spherical, about the size of a golf ball and spiky. When they get fully mature they really do explode, but pick them young and they have a delicious flavour, great in salads. Or we make a pickle with bay and juniper to serve with our home-smoked salmon (thepighotel.com)

Who i'm using

We get the fish from Glenarm in Northern Ireland (glenarmcastle.com), which has a fantastic organic fish farm. We work with some amazing suppliers at the new Pig hotel in Somerset, like Ruby & White Butchers in Bristol (rubyandwhite.com), and Bartlett & Sons butcher’s in Bath (01225 466731). We have our own herd of fallow deer too. You can see them in the grounds from the restaurant – now that’s local sourcing.

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‘We grow a lot of edible flowers. Tiny basil flowers are great with a crème fraîche and treacle tart’

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