Verveine is 'Smoking!'

Our local award winning fish restaurant, Verveine in Milford on Sea High Street, was featured in an article in The Independent today.  Looks like David Wykes, Chef/proprietor and Hampshire Chef of the Year, is now making a mark for Milford on Sea on a national scale with his imaginative and flavour full cooking. All sounds very tasty to me!

No wonder they have won five major awards in the past two years.

Here is how Verveine was featured in the article:

"Although there's plenty of smoking going on in London – on the roofs of Mayfair, where Mark Hix and Richard Corrigan smoke their salmon, on the balconies of bistros and in the bars of speakeasies elsewhere in the capital – nowhere can it be more prevalent than the New Forest, where both Lime Wood and The Pig, the area's most-acclaimed restaurants, have their own smokehouses.

However, they can't hold a candle in variety to the fumes generated by David Wykes, chef-proprietor of nearby Verveine, tucked behind a fishmonger's in Milford on Sea. He smokes flour, eggs, butter, lobster shells, parsnips, celeriac, potatoes, vanilla – and chocolate, which is a huge trend among the artisan chocolatiers of New York and Chicago, but not generally available here.

"I'm working on smoked chocolate and cep-powder truffles at the moment," says Wykes, who believes smoking his lobster shells gives a deeper flavour to bisques, and favours smoked butter to wrap into mash. "We also have a smoking gun for infusing food under glass cloches," he adds, reporting that rapidly infusing herbs, flowers and spices with this latest culinary tool results in "wonderfully aromatic" dishes such as elderflower-smoked scallops and rosemary-scented spinach.

The gun comes out again at Verveine with a siphon charger to infuse alcohol. "Smoke is fed in, the top is screwed on and charged with nitrous oxide. This displaces the oxygen in the container and forces the smoke into the alcohol. Brandy smoked with elderflower is truly beautiful, as is red wine with oak smoke.

"We're also putting a screw-top Kilner jar on the table 10 minutes before the customer arrives; the jar is filled with smoke and pork skin transformed into smoked bacon crisps. The customer opens the jar as the first amuse-bouche, to enjoy with an apple-and-sage espuma."

Wykes is also burning hay to make smoked-hay ice cream and infusing brandy with cigar smoke for the ultimate digestif, perhaps cognisant that smoked spirits are a major feature of the London cocktail scene. The British vodka-distiller Chase reports that it has had to double its production of smoked vodka to cope with the increased demand for smoked Bloody Marys, and there are plenty of London bars that wield a smoking gun to inject instant fumes into bourbon or rye.

Wykes believes we've missed a beat by turning our backs on our culinary heritage for the past 60 years: "We never picked up our cultural identity after the Second World War, when smoking food was massive, although in those days it was mainly used as a preservative. It wasn't realised there's more to it than that – smoked food tastes so much more alive, less one-dimensional. It has more edge."

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