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Spice & BBC Radio 4 Food Programme!

News

It was our pleasure recently to welcome Ann-Marie Bullock of Radio 4 to our Wirral premises. Ann-Marie had a full tour of Seasoned Pioneers, hearing about how it all began and watching a spice blend being made from scratch!

Here’s a summary of the show, broadcast on Sunday 17th May and Monday 18th May 2015.

The Spice Explosion

This is more than a story about chicken tikka masala. The UK’s palette is changing with a demand for far more spice and pizzazz in our menus and larders. The UK currently imports almost double what it did in the year 2000. Much of that demand has been attributed to the UK’s changing and diverse population – not only in home cooking but introducing recipes and dishes to a wider market. Travellers exploring exotic countries have also returned with a taste for spice blends. However spice is more than a simple ingredient – it can also be part of a story about identity, health, family and life.

Cyrus Todiwala travels to Easton in Bristol for the Spice Festival to meet those for whom spice is part of their lives. For him spices have been used for health as well as to bring flavour to his dishes while cooking in India and opening restaurants in the UK. He meets the man whose family fled Uganda while under the rule of Idi Amin, losing everything but their love and knowledge of spices led his father to source and share ingredients, eventually serving food and is now an ‘Aladdin’s cave’ of exotic spices and ingredients for individuals and restaurants across the South West. He meets the chai wallahs who now sell on street corners of Bristol as well as Bombay and hears about the backpacker whose craving for the Indian snacks he tasted led him to set up his own business with over 300 products and blends.

Get some fire in your belly and hear how spice plays a role in community, culture and culinary delights.

Presented by Cyrus Todiwala and Produced in Bristol by Anne-Marie Bullock.

If you missed it, you can listen to it via this link:

Do you send spices to India..?  What Radio 4’s the Food Programme found out about Seasoned Pioneers!

Prior to Ann-Marie Bullock’s visit we were very please to host Shelia Dillon and her Radio 4 Food Program.

Earlier this year, Shelia Dillon from Radio 4’s The Food Programme visited the Seasoned Pioneers team as part of her fact finding mission to Merseyside.
The Food Programme visited Liverpool, which celebrates its 800th anniversary and is European Capital of Culture in 2008, to find out to what extent food culture is part of the ‘renaissance’ that’s been taking place in the city in the last few years.
Click here to visit the Food Programme’s website or to listen again to the programme and find out more about Seasoned Pioneer’s packaging, how they source the best ingredients worldwide and whether they do sell spices to India! Unfortunately until we get Smell FM, you’ll have to imagine the smells for yourselves…

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