Review: Waste Food tasting menu by Paul Cunningham at Banana Block

Chefs Paul Cunningham and Melissa McCabe prepping the puffed cod skins

Joris Minne Twitter

March 11 2022 04:30 PM

You never know what chef Paul Cunningham will come up with next. Paul is the Bear Grylls of cooking. He can turn a piece of rotting bark from a woodland floor into a ham sandwich. Or something close.

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to conduct an on-stage conversation in front of a live audience of 120 in east Belfast’s Banana Block with the great food historian, broadcaster and writer Dan Saladino (his book Eating to Extinction: is nowhere nearly as gloomy as it sounds and should be read by anyone with a passing interest in food) as part of the NI Science Festival. The chat was then followed by a five-course tasting menu with a difference created by Paul and his co-chef Melissa McCabe. The difference was that each course was made from waste food.

When we saw the menu, a collective shiver went down the spines of most of the audience diners, and these are people hardened by their diets of live yoghurt, organic oats and foraged wild garlic.

Mash made from potato skins, onion bouillon created from the binned skins, yesterday’s bread, mushroom stalks and discarded fish skins all featured in the dare-to-eat-me challenge.

Sounds lovely if you’ve been living on Skellig Michael eating seaweed and gull eggs for 40 years but those of us of a more delicate disposition braced ourselves for the worse.

Paul, however, knows what to do. His Mourne Larder project where he takes diners on a mystery trek and cooks their dinner using produce from within a few miles is very popular. He’s one of the most skilled people in Ireland at foraging. His approach not only proves that extreme sustainability is achievable, but now raises awareness over when, not if, we will adjust our approach to food production and distribution.

Dan Saladino says we have reached the point where there is so little diversity in the crops we grow and the animals we raise that we are heading for disaster.

To make the point he cites many examples but none more poignant than the Lumper potato, famous for being the staple which failed so catastrophically in the 1840s and resulted in the Great Famine. Had we had a broader selection of potatoes, he argues, we would have stood a better chance of avoiding a complete blight. Many crops have been genetically altered over the last decades to grow bigger, faster and in greater volumes at the cost of losing their inherent qualities some of which included resistance to disease and blight.

Paul’s approach is to do two things: go back to the beginning and use wild growing edibles on the one hand and on the other, go to the end of the commercial food chain and use up all the waste. And this brings us back to that famous Banana Block dinner.

Five courses, each formidable, nutritious and robust had flavour and texture enough to keep things interesting.

Kimchi made with chopped broccoli stems, puffed, crispy cod skins, normally thrown out in the fish processing in Kilkeel are among the stand outs. A rich brewers’ mash grain rescued from Boundary Brewery reincarnated as an accompaniment to some left over dry aged beef and mushroom duxelles done up with a mushroom soya he makes from fermenting the fungi is remarkable for its ingenuity.

Cheese bonbons which look like arancini are made from rinds and scraps and served with a bechamel-alike made from the same waste. And to finish this off, dessert of spent coffee grounds, black banana and whey dulce de lata. Sounds improbable? It is and yet the sweetness from the heavily mature bananas, the light bitterness from the coffee and the creamy whey (he boils down eight litres of the stuff to make one litre of dulce) actually works. Makes you think about what you’re chucking into the bin.

THE BILL

Sustainable Dining at Banana Block including show £35

Mourne Larder Mystery Tour and Dinner £110