Made in Britain Food Champion of the Year: Gigha Halibut

Gigha Halibut from the Isle of Gigha, Argyll won £10,000 prize as the Made in Britain Food Champion of the Year

Country Living magazine features local food producers every month - the Made in Britain Awards were launched by the magazine, together with Waitrose and Farmers Guardian, to reward those who are creating the best-quality and most innnovative foods, while keeping traditional skills alive. Five food producers of the year each received £5,000 from Waitrose to develop their business. The overall Made in Britain Food Champion, Gigha Halibut, (selected from these five) received an additional £5,000. Seven finalists were given the chance to have their product stocked in local branches of Waitrose. The Farmers Guardian Best Farm Entrepreneur will also receive £5,000 from Waitrose.

 

Buying fish is a minefield for ethically minded food lovers. We know what we're not supposed to eat, but the alternative is often a compromise between taste, sustainability and food miles. Thank the stars, then, for Alastair Barge, who persevered in his quest to raise sustainably farmed Atlantic halibut, on the Inner Hebridean island of Gigha. "It's a totally guilt-free meal," says Alastair, whose passion for his product and his environment has made him one of our top five Food Producers of the Year. "Wild Atlantic halibut is an endangered species. We are doing our bit to save it."

 

There's no trade-off between conscience and quality with Gigha halibut. It has the same combination of firm flesh and delicate flavour that makes wild halibut so versatile, its opaque white meat sliding off slate-grey skin in succulent mouthfuls. "It stays in prime condition for a week and is excellent roasted, grilled or fried," Alastair says proudly. He first tried hatching halibut 18 years ago with his late father, Ronald Barge, who pioneered land-based salmon farming (as opposed to sea-cage farming) near Loch Fyne in the 1970s.

 

When Alastair joined him, farmed halibut was being talked of as the next big thing. "Compared with other white fish it has a high flesh to bone ratio, and grows well in the water conditions around the Scottish coast," he explains. "We thought it was going to be easy. But the early stages were tricky."

 

What he and other fledgling halibut farmers hadn't banked on was the difficulty of converting eggs into viable fish. "The eggs are tiny and have to survive in a fragile saltwater environment," says Alastair, whose marine hatchery - the only one in the UK - is still based at Loch Fyne in Argyll. "At six months old the fish is the size of a thumbnail; after a year it's robust enough to move to tanks on Gigha. If we'd been doing it for financial gain we'd have stopped, but I had enough faith to continue."

 

After a 14-year struggle to perfect his hatching methods, he founded Gigha Halibut at a defunct salmon farm on an island that has been owned and run by its community since 2002. As part of his environmental commitment, he's installing a direct supply of renewable electricity from the island's own wind farm, and he maintains high water-exchange rates and low stocking densities to return clean water to the sea. He also uses organically certified fish food based on trimmings from fish processors. "We're converting a byproduct of the fishing industry into a sustainable, high-quality food."

 

Halibut are the largest of the flatfish; in the wild they can grow to over 2 metres long and weigh more than 250kg. Gigha Halibut are less of a mouthful, just 3-5kg when harvested at three years old. They're sold via wholesalers and fish box schemes across the northern hemisphere, and Alastair hopes that every fillet advertises the clear blue waters and pristine shores of the place from which it came. "I would like to think that each fish going off the island is a brochure for Gigha," he says. "That's one of the things that drives me on."

 

Gigha Halibut (01700 821226; www.gighahalibut.co.uk)

 

Find all of this year's Made in Britain Awards winners here 

 

---

You might also like...

 

Country Living's online recipes

 

8 bread recipes from bestselling UK magazines

 

Organic foods for Christmas

 

Subscribe Save up to 47%