The Sandrock - Winners at the Pub Food Awards 2007

The Publican Pub Food Awards 2007

We are proud to announce that we have been choosen for an award in the 2007 Publican Pub Food Awards by a panel of judges made up of representatives from The Publican Magazine and category sponsers Heinz. We were choosen as winners for the "Pub Food Innovation of the Year" for our 'Guest Chef Nights' which I'm sure most of our regular customers will already know about. We would like to thank our hosts from Heinz for making it a fantastic evening and we are looking forward to being able to return the favour at a guest chef night in the new year, details of which will be annouced soon.

For those of you who haven't heard about our 'Guest Chefs Nights', we ask a regular customer with a passion for food and cooking to come up with menu ideas and recipes for a themed food evening. The themes can be any style of cooking (for example Japanese, Game or Morocan) but the guest chef must have experience of cooking meals from their choosen theme.

All of the guest chefs have experience with cooking for friends and family but cooking 10 courses for 45 people is quite different so the planning, preparation and order of the courses is very important. We try to teach the guest chefs how to prepare as much as you can in advance and how to get out 450 courses in the space of 3 hours, which is by far the hardest part of the experience.

We have found that because of the diversity of the themes we have learnt recipes that we would never of had a chance to cook in the past and every chef has passed on little tricks they have learnt to make the dishes as authentic as possible, so it has been a great learning experience for both the guest chef and us.

This article was published by Caroline Nodder, editor for The Publican following an interview with Carol and David

Caroline Nodder(Left), Editor for The Publican with Carol

After we won the award the following articles were published in the Publican

The Morning Advertiser Pub Chef Awards 2005

The competition to find the Pub Chef of the Year 2005 has started with 12 category cook off's being held at the Meat and Livestock Commission headquarters in Milton Keynes.

Our landlady and head chef Carol Haime was able to reach this years final in the "Beer with Food" category, matching an oriental seafood platter with Enville Ginger, a real ale from the West Midlands.

The five finalist were selected from hundreds of entries after impressing judges on paper with a dish recipe and method. Judges also looked at their pub's menu and information about what they believe constitutes good pub food and beer.

We will be holding a "Beer with food" night at the Sandrock very soon, please keep an eye on our events section for the date.

The dish and the beer

Carol chose to cook an Oriental seafood platter matched with Enville Ginger. Enville brewery can be found in the countryside just outside Brierley Hill, Dudley. It is a small family brewery which produces many fine real ales, many of them are made with Honey instead of sugar, which is made by the owner Will Cort. Enville Ginger is a traditional cask ale brewed with honey and fresh ginger, it is pale in colour and is light and refreshing with a slight ginger warmth in the aftertaste.

The Dish consisted of a large king prawn wrapped in rice noodles and nori seaweed and deep fried with a soy sauce, ginger and garlic dip; seared scallops, marinated in olive oil, garlic, ginger and soy sauce on a bed of stir fried vegetables with chilli, coriander and orange juice; a Thai crabcake, fresh crab meat with lemongrass, chilli, coriander, tamarind and lime juice.

Carol decided to use Enville ginger with this dish as it complements, and it is complemented by, the food and clears the palate between the different elements.

More pictures from the day are available in the picture galleries

Following the Pub Chef Awards our local newspaper 'The Farnham Herald' did an interview with Carol and printed an article. Unfortunately the article cant be scanned on to the site but I have included below, the text, I will put the full article up here shortly.