Catering Tips & Ideas
Recipes, event ideas, and catering guides from our kitchen in Redruth.
41 articles
If you have never hired a location caterer before, the whole thing can look opaque. The call sheet shows times. The contract shows numbers. But what actually happens on the day? Here is a complete walkthrough of a typical Salt Wind Catering film catering day in Cornwall, start to finish.
Devon does not get the same press as Cornwall when it comes to filming locations, but anyone in the industry knows it punches above its weight. Dartmoor's wild granite tors, the rolling green of the South Hams, and the dramatic cliffs around Hartland have all been on screen, repeatedly.
5am call. Pitch dark. Cold rain horizontal off the Atlantic. Forty crew arriving in convoy expecting hot food, strong coffee, and a kitchen that is already running. Breakfast on a film set is the most important service of the day, and the easiest to get wrong.
Standby catering is the quiet workhorse of a film day. It is not the hot lunch service that everyone queues for. It is the constantly-replenished hot drinks station, the fruit bowl that never empties, the bacon roll that appears at 10am when the focus puller is running on fumes.
Feeding an international cast and crew on location in Cornwall is less glamorous than it sounds and more precise than you'd think. Here is what a full day on set actually looks like from the catering truck, and the small details that keep a German TV production running on time.
It is the first question everyone asks and the one most caterers refuse to answer properly. The honest answer is: it depends on several things that are genuinely important to understand before you book. Here is what actually drives the cost of catering in Cornwall, and the questions you should ask any caterer before you sign anything.
A proper Cornish pasty is not a pie. It is not a "pasty-style" snack from a service station. It is raw skirt steak, sliced waxy potato, sliced swede and onion, seasoned well, folded into shortcrust pastry and crimped along the top. That is it. No pre-cooking. No gravy. No added vegetables. This is the recipe.
Cornish fudge is sold at every gift shop in the county and most of it is not worth eating. Properly made fudge, with actual Cornish clotted cream, butter and sugar cooked to the soft-ball stage, is a completely different thing. It is dense, slightly grainy in the best way, and rich without being sickly. This is how it is made.
Stargazey pie is a Cornish legend, a deep-dish fish pie with whole pilchards or sardines baked into the pastry so their heads poke through the crust, gazing upward at the sky. It comes from Mousehole in West Cornwall and is traditionally eaten on Tom Bawcock's Eve, 23rd December. This is the recipe: fish heads gazing out of a golden pastry crust, just as they should be.
Where the saffron bun is a celebration snack, the saffron cake is a keeping cake, a large, enriched loaf studded with currants, mixed peel and cherries, fragrant with saffron, that improves over several days wrapped in greaseproof paper. It is the cake that sat on every Cornish farmhouse table for generations. This is the proper version.
September in Cornwall means the hedgerows are full of damsons and the orchards are dropping windfalls you can barely give away. This chutney uses both, sharp Bramley apples and tart damsons slow-cooked with cider vinegar, brown sugar, onions and warm spice. It jars beautifully, keeps for a year, and is what a Cornish ploughman's is built around.
Vegan & Plant-Based Event Catering Across Cornwall Every event has vegan guests now. Whether it's two people at a birthday, half the team at a corporate lunch, or an entire wedding party, plant-based catering isn't niche anymore. It's expected. The problem is how most caterers handle it. A sad side salad. A plate of hummus and carrot sticks while everyone else eats properly. A token veggie option that's clearly been thrown together as an afterthought. That's not catering, that's an insult....
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