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Innovators: Giving the people what they want

Dublin’s The Little Ass Burrito

Wed Mar 26 2014 - 01:00

Several sharp food entrepreneurs are responding to recent trends with niche and original products, giving the people what they didn’t yet know they wanted.

Philip Martin of Dublin’s The Little Ass Burrito (below) is on a mission to bring Mexican food to Ireland. In order to expand beyond Tex Mex to proper Mexican tacos, he needs proper Mexican corn tortillas, so he is setting up Europe’s first authentic corn tortilla factory, Blanco Nino, which will use Irish-grown corn. What will make it authentic is the Mexican process of nixtamalisation which involves cooking the corn in a limestone solution overnight. This boosts the corn’s nutritional content and gives fresh corn tortilla’s their unmistakeable aroma.

Julie Murray of Dublin city’s first micro-roastery, Cloud Picker Coffee, happened to walk by Forest Avenue, a café in Dublin 4. while it was being renovated . Sandy Sabek of Forest Avenue was looking for a coffee supplier and a happy relationship was borne. When Forest Avenue first opened, they didn’t own a fancy espresso machine. Instead they offered a different Cloudpicker Single Origin Coffee every week, served as individual dripper brews for a more nuanced and complex flavour profile, together with a clipboard providing background information on that week’s coffee’s origins. “I prefer the making information available rather than forcing it upon people,” When former attorney general John Rogers semi-retired to his Boyne Valley farm, he thought that tapping into the growing Irish market for cold-pressed rapeseed oil seemed like a viable business venture.

He didn’t know then that the award-winning oil that he and son Jack made would be pressed from an altogether different seed called camelina. Newgrange Gold Camelina Oil is high in vitamin E, omega 3 (three times more than rapeseed) and omega 6, something the judges of Great Taste Awards 2013 didn’t know when they awarded it three stars for its taste alone. The product was also winner of the most sustainable/environmental product at SHOP in the RDS.

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