Natty nibbles from Compton Verney
Dec 31 2010 By Emily Bridgewater
Emily Bridgewater enjoys a crash course in making New Year canapés at Compton Verney.
Growing up in the 80s, party finger food was little more than a sad sausage roll or puff pastry vol-au-vent.
If you were at a really fancy get together, skewered cubes of cheese and pineapple would be displayed in a tin foil-covered orange, or you might get really lucky and break a tooth on semi-defrosted king prawn.
But those days are long gone and now we expect more from our canapés. The TV adverts for certain High Street food purveyors have us drooling over morsels of sticky pork belly or entire roast dinners served up in a Yorkshire pud the size of a postage stamp.
A miniature Melton Mowbray isn’t enough to make us merry anymore; we want teeny bagels, filled with cream cheese whipped by angels and salmon smoked over Audrey Hepburn’s cigarette holder. But is it possible to tickle your party guests’ taste buds this New Year without surrendering to a cellophane packet?
The answer is yes – with a little help from the “Canapés and Cocktails” course at Compton Verney in Warwickshire.
Lead by Andrew Redmond, senior head chef at the ICC in Birmingham, and his trusty colleague, head pastry chef Matt Eades, the intense day-long course arms participants with the techniques required to impress pals with canapés chicer than a Jimmy Choo slipper.
Leafing through the accompanying recipe booklet the food sounds too good to be true; after all, how would a home cook like me be able to pull off a caviar-topped crab Waldorf profiterole while shaking up an authentic Cuban Mojito cocktail?
However, Andrew and Matt comprehensively demonstrated each of the five recipes, step-by-step, before giving participants the chance to try the techniques for themselves in a well-equipped open kitchen.
“The secret to a perfect canapé is that it must be absolutely packed with flavour,” explains Andrew, who trained in classic French cuisine at The Savoy in London and has been in the trade for 24 years.
“It must be one intense shot, should be colourful and beautifully presented. It must attract the eye.”
And Andrew should know, as he and his team recently catered for the Conservative Party Conference, creating more than 6,000 immaculate canapés per day.
Our group, which was made up of nine keen amateur cooks, began by creating vessels for our finger food – and there wasn’t a Ritz cracker or factory-baked pastry case in sight. From feather-light Russian blinis to crunchy crostini, we quickly became converts to Andrew’s mantra of packing our mini morsels with flavour. The olive oil we brushed onto our slithers of baguette to create crostini had been infused with garlic and fresh herbs for extra punch.
“The number of flavours you can pack onto a canapé would be too much on a full plate of food but on something this size you can get away with it and push boundaries,” added Andrew. “Be imaginative with your recipes and make them your own.”
The quenelle of Shropshire blue with caramelised red onion and griddled pear, all piled delicately on one of the aforementioned crostini bites, was a perfect example of this philosophy. The rich and creamy cheese was balanced with the sweetness of the caramelised onion, yet neutralised by the fresh, zesty slither of pear, while the crostini provided texture and bite.
