Botanical beauties: Behind the scenes of TUD’s most unusual degree

It’s not every day that your seven-course, open-air, forest-inspired lunch finishes under the canopy of a mature redwood tree with a mindfulness session, a cup of coconut and cacao husk tea, and a slab of Nibbed bean-to-bar chocolate, artfully tempered and jewelled with dehydrated raspberries and roses and grapes, candied beetroot stalks, mushroom-roasted hazelnuts and preserved lemon salt.

Or, for that matter, that it starts with a salad to beat all salads, in which even the hedgerow berry vinegar gel is made from scratch and the whey from the home-hung labneh has been repurposed to ferment a paired drink of rhubarb, ginger and whey booch.

This extraordinary and almost fully plant-based meal was served at the Airfield Estate at the foot of the Dublin mountains on a sunny day in May to some of the most forward-thinking food producers, suppliers, chefs and restaurateurs in the country.

The meal was conceived, prepared and presented by six students of botanical cuisine as a live documentation of their learnings. Their fascinating and delicious gastronomic performance was the culmination of a year-long culinary arts course run by Technological University of Dublin, co-located on its Tallaght campus and Airfield, which provided an outdoor classroom for thee edible gardening module.

The first of its kind in Europe, the honours degree course is designed to enable chefs grow their own produce, produce food that delivers on how we want to eat today and tomorrow, and do so with creativity and confidence.

Sasu Laukkonen of Helsinki’s zero-waste and wild food-focused Chef & Sommelier restaurant, one of the course’s international chef patrons, says that he has dreamed for a long time of being part of something like this: “Imagine a future world where chefs understand more about their most important asset – the produce.”

The seed of the idea for the course was first sown by JP McMahon, the Galway-based chef, at the inaugural Food on the Edge gathering in 2015. At the end of the two-day symposium, McMahon, Laukkonen and Matt Orlando of Amass in Copenhagen, another plant-forward Michelin-starred chef, challenged the audience with a call to action, asking everyone to consider what they might do differently for the future of food.

In that audience was Annette Sweeney, a senior lecturer in culinary arts at TUD Tallaght, where she has been forging new paths in culinary eduction with courses like an MSc in applied culinary nutrition. “They really inspired us to look at how we were doing culinary education, and one idea struck a particular chord,” Sweeney says.

“They said the chefs need to spend time on farms, learning how to grow their own food, and the farmers need to spend time in the kitchen. As educators we must listen to industry, so we decided to act, and in partnership with Airfield we designed the BA (Hons) in botanical cuisine, which we launched in 2016.”

McMahon is also a patron of the course and Aniar, his Michelin-starred restaurant, is one of several industry partners which the students visit. Others include the hyperlocal Michelin two-starred restaurant Aimsir in Co Kildare, the farm-to-fork gardens and restaurant at the Killruddery Estate in Wicklow, the exemplary organic growers McNally Family Farms, and beekeeper Brian O'Toole of Leinster Honey.

“Places like Airfield and courses like this are vital for the industry,” McMahon says. “When I see the level of detail that goes into each course and the thinking behind each dish, and even the drink that is paired with each course and the language that is used to describe all of this – it’s great to have students learning this and then ready to go out into the industry and change the industry. That’s what we need.”

The course is available as a full-time four year degree for newcomers to the industry, and as a part-time one year course for qualified chefs already working in the industry who want to upskill.

Among the recent graduates are Caomhán de Bri, who has since developed The Salt Project, a multi-stranded business that includes a nomadic food truck serving plant-forward, seasonal and hyper-local cuisine. Alumnus Alan Clarke has taken his learnings to Chicago, where he is working on projects like a hospital greenhouse and urban garden and food growing with local schools. A plant-forward restaurant called Deich Plátaí (Ten Plates) is planned for later this year.

Others have continued in education: Cara Tuohy is halfway through UCC’s post graduate diploma in Irish food culture, and has plans to get involved in local food production in the near future.

This year’s end-of-course meal was inspired by a concept of forest gardening developed by British horticulturist Robert Hart in the late 20th century. Hart developed a seven-layer model of forest gardens: the canopy layer of tall fruit and nut trees support a vertical layer of vines and climbers, surrounded by dwarf fruit and nut trees and a shrub layer of fruit bushes such as currants and berries.

At the base is the rhizosphere layer of root crops, over which a ground cover of edible plants like strawberries function as living mulch, interspersed by a herbaceous layer of culinary and medicinal herbs and companion plants.

The seven course meal served at Airfield explored and celebrated each layer of this forest garden. It began, appropriately, at the polytunnel and raised beds that had been so central to the student’s learning.

There Theresa Keane presented her ‘Connected’ course, a glorious bowl of fresh leaves, ferments and pickles inspired by the forest’s herbaceous layer and packed with diverse flavour, texture and gut-friendly nutrients. Among the many surprises were fermented rhubarb and young shoots of the Alexander plant, which had been salt-brined.

“I use the seeds all the time instead of black pepper,” Keane says. “But if you pick the stems young and peel away the outer part, you get something almost like asparagus.”

With several careers in the food industry already under her belt – as a chef, restaurateur, caterer, food scientist and educator – Keane set up her Booch+Bia food truck at the Saturday market in Gorey, Co Wexford, as a pandemic pivot to make the most of her long-held interest in gut health and the medicinal potential of fermentation.

Before starting this course, however, she had no confidence as a grower. “I realise now that I wasn’t taking the time to understand the actual plant,” she says. Her tutor in edible gardening, horticulturist Paula Pender, changed all that.

“Paula was brilliant at explaining each plant, from the soil and not just the seed. I have a garden full of stuff now; it’s only small but I can’t believe how much I have managed to grow in it,” says Keane.

Her experience is echoed by fellow classmate Niall Hill, former culinary director of The Butler’s Pantry and currently a food consultant and associate culinary lecturer at TUD. That focus on soil health, PH levels and companion planting has given him the tools to keep on learning in his own garden.

“I have 24 plants growing in my garden now,” Hill says, sounding incredulous. "My carrots haven’t worked this year, but I know how to fix that now: by planting pea shoots as companion plants.”

Hill designed and presented the third course of the lunch, entitled ‘Grounded’. Pride of place went to a black truffle lookalike that was actually a two-bite-mouthful of grilled organic Irish shiitake mushrooms, bound with McNally leeks and dusted in blackened leek ash.

With this were a vivid wild garlic emulsion for dipping, a mushroom and miso paté on a Bia Sol spent grain cracker for crunching, and a cup of earthy umami mushroom tea to wash it all down. It was as delicious as it was thought provoking, being inspired by the ground cover layer of the forest and “its network of mycelium, which allows the trees to share nutrients and water and to look after each others health”, according to Hill.

He says that his whole mindset has been changed by undertaking this course, and he is clearly buzzing with all the fresh perspectives that it has given him, even after 35 years in the business. It’s a journey that has only just begun.

“Plant forward is going to keep moving forward,” he says. “It’s the future of food.”

To read the student’s firsthand accounts of the course, see The Botanical Cuisine Digest blog (annettesweeney.wixsite.com/botanical-cuisine-di). For more information about the course, search for Botanical Cuisine at tudublin.ie.