Described as a ‘nomadic Irish food experience’, The Salt Project is a food truck that traverses the country creating hyperlocal menus specific to wherever it goes.
There are many reasons why buying and supporting local produce is good. Delivering you with fresher, more nutritious food, supporting the local economy and reducing your carbon footprint while you’re at it, to name just a few. Making that even more of a no-brainer, acclaimed Irish chef Caomhán de Brí established The Salt Project in 2021 in celebration of our local Irish producers, creating menus using only local produce.
Moving around the country, The Salt Project Trailer is guided by an ethos of both sustainability and farm to fork. Their informal and relaxed dining experience encourages guests to enjoy a hyperlocal menu, created specifically with that county’s food and local small producers in mind.
The trailer will be at this week’s Taste of Dublin Festival from June 11-16 – if you’re heading!
Ahead of the festival, we caught up with Caomhán to learn more about what he does.
What is the process of creating your hyper-local menus?
It’s a nomadic Irish food experience, we work around the seasons and the location to build out our menu. It’s about more than just Irish provenance; it’s the terroir of the items, the countryside, the producers within that channel. We work backward from what a traditional menu might be. Whether I’m in Sligo or Dublin it doesn’t matter where, I’ll look at the producers and what they have at that moment. Depending on the season, we might do a bit of foraging in the area as well, whether it’s sea veg from the coast or hedgerows and things like that. I build a menu from it so it’s from what we have rather than what we want.
Why is it so important for you to create a new menu specific to each place you visit?
I’m a chef and it’s a challenge which I really enjoy, but I also think it’s so important. Number one, we have so many amazing people doing wonderful things from cheese makers to small fishing boats and obviously farms. We’re very well known for our dairy and beef so I would really only look at someone who’s doing something really special around that. For me, by doing that I actually end up having to do less around the cooking because the ingredients that we start out with are just the best.
What made you want to take on something like this, moving from place to place, creating a brand new menu as you go?
I grew up around it, from a very young age my parents brought us driving around Europe and wherever, and food was always the centre of our day, our lunch, our dinner. They were great at cooking themselves. I suppose that being surrounded by it and when I see what’s been happening with our food systems over the last 15 years, it’s sort of spiralling in the wrong direction So I just think it’s more important than ever that we really focus on what we do well rather than the race to the bottom, which is what we see on the supermarket shelves.
How do you think sourcing local ingredients can shape the future of Irish food?
For me, that’s been the number one goal and highlighting it through what we do. It’s great, people have a huge love for it, sometimes you get people who come up and think we’re another coffee trailer, and people look at the menu and then they get sucked in, which is brilliant. They know the people, the stories, the farmers, they have a connection there, even though they may not realise it all the time. That connection is so important for us.
I’ve built an app as part of what I do as well. I’ve been building up a portfolio for the last few years, from large to small producers, county by county. It’s a digital app that not only we use ourselves, but other people can use too. I think there are 400-500 producers, but you can then check within your area. It’s a different way of looking at how we stock and reinstating that connection. They look at the likes of Ballymaloe and places like that who have been doing this for a long time and it’s what we should be doing too. We can all be so busy and caught up in the pressures of the real world, but it’s important for everybody to step back and see the good that comes from buying local, not to mention the nutritional benefits of it too, which is just as important.
How does sourcing ingredients from smaller Irish producers affect quality and flavour?
It’s incomparable, I had known that from a very young age, you could be standing amongst the fields in the middle of summer, or pulling a carrot out of the ground and you give it a little rinse and just eat it raw, you cannot buy that. That’s what I want to bring into people’s lives. The likes of the Michelin star restaurants, that’s how they have operated forever more or less. I just want everybody to be able to experience that, because you can’t buy it in a supermarket.
How can we incorporate more local produce into our own routines?
I think time is a big thing, because time for all of us is probably the most precious commodity now. I think if people can find the time to take a step back and explore their local area a bit more. That’s why I think the app we launched will help people to do that. I keep finding places on my door step, free range eggs nearby and there’s an organic place up the road from me that has been there for ages but I only discovered them a year ago.
