Most chefs will tell you that cooking professionally isn’t just a job – it’s a lifestyle. Long unsociable hours and intense working environments mean it’s often a sheer love for food that make the downsides worth it. Of course, there are plenty of upsides too; once you’ve put the hours in and mastered the craft you can start getting creative, coming up with original dish ideas and watch diners swoon over plates of food that you’ve prepared. But for Tommy Banks, the Michelin-starred chef at the helm of The Black Swan at Oldstead in Yorkshire, it seems running one of the best kitchens in the UK simply isn’t enough. By focusing on produce and ingredients from his family farm, he’s not just cooking the food – he’s planting, growing, harvesting and transporting it, too.
‘If a chef wants to put a pea dish on the menu, they’ll ring up their supplier every week and order in a few kilos of peas,’ he explains. ‘For us, we need to think about that dish in January, work out how many we’ll need during the season and sow the right number of seeds. Then you’ve got to think about rotations, so not all the peas are ready to harvest at the same time, and the sheer space needed to grow them – we planted 1.2km of pea plants this year just so we'll have enough for both The Black Swan and Roots [Tommy’s second restaurant in York] in the summer, which together can use up to eighty kilos of peas a week when they’re in season.’
What Tommy’s doing isn’t your run-of-the-mill kitchen garden set-up; this is full-scale farming. He, his team and his family plan months (if not years) in advance, ensuring they have, say, 6,000 onions ready to harvest in the summer just for one dish that’s going on at The Black Swan for a few months. He reckons he serves around 50,000 covers across his two restaurants every year, which means he’ll need to grow 50,000 Crapaudine beetroots if he’s to offer everyone his signature dish of beetroot cooked in beef fat. ‘It’s so far removed from just ordering ingredients in, and it takes a lot to get your head around.’