We catch up with Pat Bingley, Co founder and Managing Director of Eaten Alive and he tells us about his loves of Plumbs and his new favourite Toastie.
1. What time did you get up this morning?
About 7, I’m on a little family break this week so I got up and had a surf, my favourite way to start the day!
2. How do you take your coffee?
Filter, I’m actually a tea guy (strictly builders), but I love good quality filter coffee, when you get all the fruity complexity and balancing acidity along with the bitterness.
3. What do you usually have for breakfast?
I don’t generally eat breakfast, but if I do it’s porridge with banana (from Gail’s of course!)
4. How do you and GAIL’s know each other?
I first remember cycling past your newly opened King’s Rd store, I was starving and saw a big pile of delicious looking bread in the window. I pulled over and got a delicious cream bun, full of salami and cornicions and butter – yum!
5. What’s the first food you remember loving as a child?
My first really gluttonous memory was when I was about a 6 or 7, I found a plumb tree at the end of my grandparents garden, groaning with perfectly ripe plumbs, sweet sour and so juicy; I snuck off to that tree and ate plumbs every afternoon for a week, I must have eaten a hundred!
6. Have you ever baked bread? How did that go?
Urrgh what a question, I have made some good bread, but I’ve never quite nailed a 10/10 sourdough, or even a 8/10 for that matter (this is major sore point).
7. What does the smell of freshly baked bread remind you of?
When I lived in France, the bakery sold freshly baked, warn pain au chocolat from the side window at 4am. On your way home from a night out, the whole town smelled of fresh baking and it drew you in like wobbly bees to honey.
8. What do you spread on your toast?
Unpasteurised cultured butter, I love the complex, almost cheesy flavour and the slight tang of acidity, contrasted with the cool richness.
9. For us, bread is the fundamental thing. What’s fundamental for you?
Cabbage, oh we do a lot of cabbage, tons and tons of cabbage.
10. What’s in your ultimate sandwich?
Well kimchi of course! Cured and roasted belly pork, with kimchi and our smoked Sriracha sauce. Or better still, bbq brisket with kimchi, we loved it and will be coming regularly!
11. If we could give you a lifetime supply of anything we make, what would that be?
I love simple sour doughs, so to have a life time supply of Gail’s delicious brown sour dough would be heaven.
12. We work with three primary ingredients. Six if you include time. What are the main ingredients in your life and work, concrete or abstract?
We specialise in pickling via fermentation, so the invisible and infinite microbes, whose hard work we rely on to make our products must be ours.
13. What would you do fo a living if not this?
We were chefs at first and still are, so I think I think I’d have a beach restaurant doing simple grilled dishes and good times in front of the waves. Maybe one day.