Wisley passes taste test
8 October 2008
Top chef Raymond Blanc visited RHS Garden Wisley in a quest to find the best fruit in the country to grow in a new organic orchard at his Michelin-starred restaurant, Le Manoir Aux Quat’ Saisons.
The fruit tasting session, organised by Fruit Superintendent Jim Arbury, took in figs, pears and both eating and cooking apples. Raymond is tasting about 40 different cultivars of apple before deciding which to grow, as there is an ideal cultivar for each dish he cooks: ‘Autumn Pearmain’, for example, is an ideal baking apple, while ‘Dunmelow Seedling’ is excellent in mince pies.
“For every culinary purpose there is a different need,” says Raymond. “Gardeners don’t usually think of this.”
In the taste test, he rated dual-purpose ‘Blenheim Orange’ highly for its versatility, while he said the vividly-coloured ‘Striped Beefing’ had a "nice, complex flavour". Perhaps surprisingly, he doesn’t intend to grow the popular cooking apple, ‘Bramley’s Seedling’, saying it is too acid. This means, he says, you must over-compensate with sugar when cooking, instead of relying on the apple’s natural sweetness.
An unknown cultivar of fig christened simply ‘Tarring Fig Garden no. 4’ stood out for its excellent flavour: the fig tree is one of several rescued from an ancient fig orchard near Worthing in West Sussex before it was turned into a housing estate. Of the pears, American variety ‘Gorham’ was ’very perfumed’ while Raymond described ’Pitmaston Duchess’ as "the most beautiful pear I’ve seen for a long time".
The orchard at Le Manoir will also grow many of Oxfordshire’s heritage apple cultivars to preserve a regional character. It is to be planted next autumn in a project overseen by Jonathan Keyte, who worked as Senior Supervisor in the Fruit Department at Wisley for many years before joining Raymond at Le Manoir. Wisley has already provided graft material to help stock the orchard, and this is being grown on for a year before planting next autumn.