BBC Archives - Farrington Oils

In May this year, when our rapeseed fields were looking their best in full bloom, Nadiya Hussain and a filming crew from Hungry Gap Productions came to Bottom Farm to learn more about how we produce our cold pressed rapeseed oil. The reason for the visit was to film a segment for Nadiya’s new series, Nadiya’s Family Favourites!

Starting in the fields, Duncan explained how he grows the rapeseed to LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming) Marque standards and how the plant grows. He then showed Nadiya the cold pressing method we use and how we bottle our oil.

As Nadiya is obviously a brilliant baker and chef (she won the Great British Bake Off in 2015) she was keen to learn more about cooking with Mellow Yellow Cold Pressed Rapeseed Oil! So she headed off to The Mermaid in Ellington and head chef, Nick Marriot put her taste buds to the test with a roast potato challenge. After cooking roast potatoes in either cold pressed rapeseed oil, sunflower oil or olive oil, Nick challenged Nadiya to identify each oil. With it’s high smoke point giving super crispy roasties and subtle nutty flavour, she easily spotted the ones cooked in Mellow Yellow!

We absolutely loved having Nadiya visit us at Bottom Farm, it was a fantastic day and watching ourselves on TV is incredibly exciting! If you didn’t catch the episode live last week, you can catch up on BBC iPlayer now: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bc26qk/nadiyas-family-favourites-series-1-1-family-days-out

Nadiya’s Family Favourites is on BBC2 every Monday at 8pm.

It’s amazing how a few consecutive days of dry weather completely changes one’s mood after the long wet winter. Fields that were water logged on a Monday morning and looking more appropriate for planting rice than wheat were, by Thursday afternoon, dry enough to start thinking about preparing the soil to plant our spring crops.

From an impatient farmer’s perspective, spring arrived around the middle of March, since when we have been working continuously. It is not just us, as all our neighbours are busy working away in their fields as everything appears to need doing at once.

The first job was to put some fertiliser on the autumn planted crops as soils warm up and day length increases, letting dormant crops realise it is time to start their long growth through spring. To achieve this growth, crops, like humans, require good nutrition to grow healthily, which is gained from the soil and some extra plant food in the form of fertiliser.

Fertiliser applied, attention turned to crops that are not yet planted. Firstly the spring beans, which were planted in pretty much ideal conditions in the third week of March. Next, it is the spring wheat this will take a bit longer to create an ideal seedbed, rather than rushing in just to get the job done quickly. We have started cultivation in preparation for the wheat, but on our heavy clay soils they can change from mud pie texture to concrete in the space of 36 hours, meaning that a mixture of perfect timing, a bit of luck and working with nature rather than fighting it is the name of the game.

In addition to being busy on the farm, we also start thinking about the new season of shows in Farrington Oils. Farrington’s Mellow Yellow is now ten years old and I have always enjoyed meeting customers at food shows, as they provide the perfect opportunity to explain to existing and potential customers why they may like to try our products. The first show of 2015 will be the BBC Good Food Show in Harrogate. We are currently putting the stand together in the office, making sure everything looks spick and span, ready to go, as well as making sure we can get it all in the back of a van to take to Yorkshire. If you are going, we will look forward to seeing you there. If not, then look out for us at other shows during 2015.

Once again we will be sponsoring the Carfest South dressings and breadmaking workshops at Laverstoke Park. A fantastic event that sells out year after year, the workshops are run by the team at Laverstoke Park and Carfest. We are also teaming up with Waitrose Cookery School for the bread making workshop. We are supplying 80 liters of oil to keep the workshops going this year as well as having a stall at the event.

Carfest South raises money for Children in Need and is supported by hundreds of volunteers from the Carfest organisers and Laverstoke Park. It’s a mega event for all the family featuring music, food, cars and much more.

We are looking forward to welcoming customers to our stall where you can try our full range.

We are thrilled to be sponsoring not one, but TWO workshops at the sell-out event CarFest South. This is the second year we have sponsored a workshop, and this year the organiser’s at Carfest asked if we would like to come back and sponsor both the bread making and dressings workshops – and of course we are more than happy to help!

Carfest aims to raise £1.5m for BBC Children in Need and is organised by a great team and supported by BBC Radio 2 DJ Chris Evans. Carfest South is hosted at Laverstoke Farm, owned by Jodie and Clare Scheckter who are passionate about producing great tasting, healthy food. The bread making and dressings workshops are so popular at the events as they get all members of the family involved, kids love it and it’s free to visitors. Farrington’s Mellow Yellow are supplying over 70 litres of cold pressed rapeseed oil for the fun part of making bread and dressings, as well as lots of other goodies from our range of rapeseed oil dressings and mayonnaise.

The volunteers will be working hard at the workshops this year as it is a sell out event and there will be 15,000 visitors to Laverstoke Park every day! We are also donating £1000 to the great fundraising efforts and we wish Carfest South and the team at Laverstoke Park a fantastic event!

For more information about Carfest, the cars, the music, the food… click here.

Great news! Following filming in May, Duncan and Farrington Oils are to be featured on Thursday 25 June at 7.00pm on The BBC one show with Plantswoman and Horticulturist Christine Walkden .

We are obviously thrilled to have this prime time exposure and anticipate a boost to sales so do make sure you have plenty of Mellow Yellow, our 3 delicious dressings and our brand new mayonnaise in stock!

In the headlines again…

Hold the front page! We’ll be featured in the spring / early summer issues of some top notch magazines.

Kiwi chef Peter Gordon (of The Providores and Tapa Room in London) is writing a piece to appear in the June edition of Delicious magazine. He visited us during harvest and cooked a fabulous and healthy meal of mussels, a hot salad, and blueberry muffins in our kitchen. Naturally, he used Mellow Yellow for every course.

Other magazines will include House & Garden Magazine and BBC Good Food Magazine.

Watch us on…

We are filming again soon, to appear in a new series of Country Lives. This series will be broadcast in the Anglia and Meridian areas, and although no date is confirmed yet, it should be later in the spring.

Award winning Dressings!

The dressings are selling well. With all this press coverage and (we hope) good weather just around the corner, perhaps it would be a good time to make sure you’re well stocked.

Mellow Yellow in the Emerald Isle.

Mellow Yellow has been available in a few outlets for a couple of years. Now following a recent visit, and forthcoming press coverage, the number of Irish customers is increasing. Duncan will attend a trade show in Dublin later this year, to build on this success.

Further Information

For orders and further information, please do not hesitate to call us on 01933 622809; email info@farrington-oils.co.uk ; or one of our brilliant wholesale suppliers, who are always happy to hear from you:

The Cress Company (Scotland); Essential Trading Co-op; F.A.Wyatt & Co Ltd.(Ireland); Hider Food Imports; Goodness Foods; Michael Bance (Leicestershire); Olives et Al.

We’re pleased to announce that Farrington’s Mellow Yellow has just won Silver in the Best UK Food category of the Daily Telegraph’s 2007 Taste of Britain awards.

Duncan and Eli collected the award last week at a ceremony held at Highgrove, The Prince of Wales’ family home. They were treated to a splendid buffet lunch featuring many of the award winners, and Duncan particularly liked the Doddington dairy heather honey ice cream.

The salad dressings arrive shortly…

The first 1,000 bottles of our award winning salad dressing (Farrington’s Mellow Yellow Blackberry Vinegar Dressing and Farrington’s Mellow Yellow Blackberry Vinegar Dressing) will be available by the end of October. We are now taking orders! Each dressing comes in a 250 ml bottle, 6 to a case, and the minimum order will be for two cases (which could be one of each dressing). Prices are:

Trade price £2.63 per bottle, which is £15.78 per case. This price includes delivery. The recommended retail price is £3.50 per bottle.

Please note that the salad dressings are currently only available from us at present!

Nigella Lawson. Our latest convert?

An observant viewer of BBC 2’s ‘Nigella Express’, (who was, unusually, not interested in either the presenter or the recipe) spotted a bottle of Mellow Yellow in Nigella Lawson’s kitchen recently. This sighting has since been confirmed by other viewers.

We assume she uses Mellow Yellow, and it’s not just there for decorative effect.

Farrington Oils on TV…

A few weeks ago a film crew visited us here at Bottom Farm and spent a couple of days filming the production process and some of the personalities. The programme is part of the ‘Country Lives’ series on ITV Central and will be shown on Thursday 25 October at 7.30pm. We understand that it will be repeated at a later date.