Starting Up with Steve Brown @ Daylesford Cookery School

Ever since moving to the Cotswolds two years ago to take up the position of head tutor of the Daylesford Cookery School, Wilderness festival has been high on my list of things to do.

Like Daylesford, the team at Wilderness (the annual music and art festival at Cornbury Park, near Charlbury) are incredibly passionate about great food and are full to bursting with ideas for exciting, innovative ways of exploring the boundaries of food, music and culture. It’s no surprise then, that when our paths crossed and we discussed the possibility of working together on this year’s festival, all involved were extremely excited.

I have been in love with Daylesford for many years now and I feel incredibly fortunate to spend my days cooking produce from our organic market garden and 2,350-acre organic farm. Not only this, but also having this wonderful opportunity to share our love for food with others on a daily basis is hugely rewarding. Now that we have the chance to bring The Cookery School to Wilderness in 2015, there will be a whole new audience to share our passion with on a number of topics that are incredibly close to our hearts.

The Wilderness Cookery School with Daylesford will host a huge variety of hands-on cookery classes over the four days, making the very most of the experts that work on the farm to bring a programme that will include The Secrets of Cooking, The Market Garden, Food To Make You Happy, DIY Feast and Daylesford Surf & Turf, among many others.

This will see many of the Daylesford team on hand at Wilderness to share their knowledge on organic growing, fantastic, simple cooking and the artisanal skills that we practice each day on the farm.

Naturally, all of the ingredients that we will be cooking together at Wilderness will be sourced from Daylesford; from the organic fruit and vegetables to the rare-breed lamb and beef as well as dairy produce from our creamery and artisan bread from our bakery.

For us, the quality of the ingredients is fundamentally important to each dish and we are hugely excited about sharing these ingredients with those attending the festival.

The course that I am most excited about is The Footprint of Food. This will be one of two free classes that we will be offering over the weekend where we will be working with our environmental scientist, Tim Field.

Tim looks after all of Daylesford’s sustainability and is as inspiring as he is knowledgeable. During this free event, Tim and I will discuss what it takes for food to make it to our plates and we will be cooking up (and tasting) the most sustainable dish that we can create from the ingredients around us at the time.

What’s incredibly special about this is its unique nature and the fact that this dish will probably only be created once – for those who join us on the evening… super exciting!

It’s not only ethics and wonderful ingredients that we plan to talk about though… health and wellness will also be high on the agenda with Hydrate, a fantastic course focusing on cold-press juicing, smoothies and nut milks. I think that this will be a great addition to the weekend’s offering and will hopefully be well received after a weekend of reveling.

The calendar promises to deliver on many different levels.

Above all else, I am most looking forward to sharing the principles and techniques that we are so passionate about at Daylesford and to give students an informative, fun and interesting glimpse into our world. We hope that you can join us.

All of the team at Daylesford is very much looking forward to meeting you at Wilderness.

TRY IT
The Cookery School is at Daylesford near Kingham. Call 01608 731620 or see daylesfordcookeryschool.co.uk 
For more on the festival, go to wildernessfestival.com