StrEATfood Awards interview

We speak to Michael Broad from Fooditude, who won the StrEATfood Dish and Plant-Based Dish of the Year awards…

How does it feel to have won StrEATfood Dish of the Year?
I'm absolutely elated! I really love this dish. From conception to execution, it's really good fun to do.

I was going for a sustainable menu item, that was the main idea for the dish itself. It’s a paratha made from Wildfarmed flour, sustainable sea bass fillets, waste chickpea water and surplus tomato kasundi.

We have a great supplier where we buy tomatoes or any kind of vegetable product that's almost at its best-before date. We buy those, make use of them in our production kitchen and whip up a nice, fresh mango sauce.

It was a project that I really enjoyed, so I'm really proud that the dish has done well. And winning two out of three awards is pretty ridiculous.

You were up against some impressive chefs too…
There has been some fantastic competition today and we've seen some tremendous dishes. Luckily, I was in the first round, so I managed to watch many other competitors turn out their dishes.

I feel elated to be stepping up against the big boys already. I've only been in my current role for about nine months, so this is something that I'm super proud of. I'm over the moon.

You could really envision eating this dish in a street food environment. Is that an aspect that you have to consider in contract catering?
Certainly, and what I also find is that simplicity is definitely the best way forward, with straightforward flavours that people want to eat and are delicious at the end of the day. There's nothing particularly technically challenging about this dish, but we've worked well to balance a lot of mixtures of textures and flavours. Building on all of those was what created the final outcome, while still keeping it quite true to what it is.

This is definitely something that we do at Fooditude and it is really important to the ethos of the company. For contract catering, this is a really important issue, because when you're catering to lots of people every day, you need to make sure there's food that everyone wants to eat, but that it's not too overcomplicated or technical.

What next for this dish now that you have won with it?
I would love to cook it for thousands of people every day, but it's not the kind of thing that's necessarily so adaptable. I'm going to have to do something with it now to adapt it in some kind of way.

A big part of what I do with the team is to develop dishes from a conceptual point, so who knows? Bao buns and parathas for everyone!


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