Catering Tips & Ideas
Recipes, event ideas, and catering guides from our kitchen in Redruth.
98 articles
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.
From Our Kitchen
Cornish Recipes — by Elowen
Traditional Cornish pasties, saffron buns, crab linguine, stargazey pie and more — written by our pastry chef for home cooks who want the real thing.
Recipe
Cornish lamb is some of the finest in Britain — the animals graze on coastal clifftops and moorland pasture, which gives the meat a clean, mineral sweetness. This is a simple, honest braise: shoulder of lamb slow-cooked with swede, carrot, potato and rosemary until the meat falls from the bone. It is a winter dish and it is exceptional.
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.
Recipe
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.
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Recipe
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.
Recipe
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....
Hot Food & Crew Catering for Construction Sites Across Cornwall Construction crews in Cornwall work hard, start early, and need proper food. Not a vending machine, not a petrol station pasty at 6am, and not losing half an hour of productive time sending someone off-site to find lunch. Salt Wind Catering delivers hot breakfasts, lunch buffets, bulk pasties and crew catering direct to construction sites across Cornwall. We turn up at the time you need us, feed your team, and leave. No...
Buffets & Pasties Delivered to Your Stand at Cornwall's Agricultural Shows The best stands at Cornwall's agricultural shows have one thing in common: they give people a reason to stop, stay and talk. And nothing draws visitors onto a stand like proper food. Salt Wind Catering delivers ready-to-serve buffets, Cornish pasties and grazing platters direct to exhibitor stands at the Royal Cornwall Show (4th–6th June 2026) and Stithians Show (13th July 2026). We bring everything to your pitch...
Recipe
Curing salmon at home is easier than it sounds and the result is spectacularly better than anything you can buy. This version uses Tarquin's Cornish Gin — made in Wadebridge from foraged botanicals including fresh-picked violets — along with lemon zest, dill and salt. The cure takes 48 hours and produces silky, jewel-coloured salmon that keeps for up to 5 days in the fridge.
Recipe
Elder trees flower in Cornwall in May and June, lining the lanes and hedgerows with clusters of cream-white blossom that smell like the best version of summer. Pick them on a dry, sunny day and you have the base for a cordial that tastes nothing like the supermarket version. This is one of those recipes that makes people ask if you actually made it yourself.
Recipe
Cauliflower cheese is a British institution. Made with Cornish Yarg — the nettle-wrapped semi-hard cheese made near Penryn — it becomes something else entirely. The yarg melts into a sauce with a gentle creaminess and a slightly earthy, herbaceous note from the nettles. This is a proper side dish or a main event in its own right.
