Scranchester Tours

05/02/2024

1 - Eccles Cakes from made with dry-aged beef fat paired with a raw milk cloth bound Cheshire cheese from
2 - Facade of Manchester Coffee Tavern temperance tavern established 1877 to 'afford all the advantages connected with the ordinary public-house, the great and material difference being that no intoxicating liquors of any description will be obtainable on the premises' this one was the 3rd to be opened in a space of 3 months.. after 4 months they'd sold 33,420 ECCLES CAKES!
3 - 1878 Whitweek advertisement offering 'private room for ladies' and showing that a year after forming they'd opened 7 premises
4 - Elizabeth Raffald who's probably the inventor of the Eccles cake (her recipe for 'sweet patties' was gifted to an employee who moved to Eccles). She also wrote a cookery book which ran to 20 editions and contains the oldest written recipe for Macaroni cheese and the modern day iced wedding cake. She had time for a servants agency, a cookery school for the daughters of 'ladies', a coaching inn, a co-written book on midwifery and the first ever Manchester trade directory.

Today, Manchester is blessed with some amazing bakeries and coffee shops and on any given weekend there's people queueing for filled croissants and all sorts of highly instagramable bakes but, as far as I can see, there's not an Eccles cake to be seen. Not the case in London where you can find them .john.restaurant, and

07/09/2022

Kouign-Amman from . Said to have been invented in the town of Douarnenez, Brittany.
In the Breton language Kouign means cake/brioche and Amman translates to butter so; BUTTER-CAKE! . The NY times called it 'the fattiest cake in Europe' - the original recipe requires a ratio of 40% flour 30% butter and 30%sugar.
This one is rolled up Viennoiserie (croissant dough). The sugar has formed a caramelised top and the addition is of sea salt flakes to the top (and bottom) give it a buttery salted caramel flavour.
There's a few of these on the counter at their perfect with a strong cup of tea from

05/09/2022

22/07/2022

Cancellation for tomorrow's tour means there's now places available. Enter code VISITSCRANCHESTER to receive 30% off. Only valid for tomorrow's tour.
https://scranchestertours.com/eat-the-city-a-magnificent-manchester-food-tour/

28/02/2022

Get £25 off our Eat The City or Ancoats Explorer tour!! If you buy a lotto ticket (or have one you have bought on or after October 1st 2021). Tours are available to book through to December. One ticket per booking.

https://www.visitbritainshop.com/gb/en/nationallotterydaysout?icid=daou-349:bd:3:bsp:tnl:inf:in:btn

National Lottery vouchers

09/06/2021

Share your favourite place to eat in Ancoats and win two tickets for our new tour and an Axe throwing experience! 🪓

20/05/2021

Grilled flatbread with whipped Lardo . The menu changes with what's available and in season but the flatbreads have been on the menu from the start. Superb. Will defo be sampling this on the Ancoats food tour.

14/04/2021

Kathleen Drew Baker - Born in Leigh, 1901. Celebrated on this date each year in Japan as 'the mother of the sea'. She saved a whole industry and in doing so changed the nation.
She studied botany at the University of Manchester later becoming a lecturer. Once married, as a woman, she could no longer be in paid employment, however, this did not stop her. She continued as an unpaid research fellow.
She published a paper in Nature Journal on the reproductive cycle of seaweed in 1949 not knowing that her discovery would save and revolutionise the Nori industry, which was on it's knees in post war Japan.
In 1963 a memorial in her honour was built and the festival, known as Drew Day, is held in Uto, Kumamoto prefecture.
Sadly Kathleen died just a few years before the impact of her research became known. Yet her motivation was not fame but knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

29/03/2021

Taste is in the mouth of the beholder...

These little strips of paper which I hand out on the tour can give you an insight into your sense of taste and maybe indicate whether you are a 'superstater'.

They contain a substance which to some people will be tasteless, to others mildly unpleasant and to a minority absolutely horrid. The latter group would be considered 'superstaters', a superstater is much more sensitive to bitter tastes and also experiences flavour more intensely than non-tasters.

Supertasters are more likely to have disliked vegetables with bitter compounds such as Brussels sprouts and leafy greens as children and are less likely to smoke. Research has shown that women are more likely to be supertasters (this is likely to do with the fact that bitterness is also a sign of poison and the ability to detect harmful toxins is of added importance during pregnancy) a piece of research published by Nottingham University last year found that ethnicity and gender are connected to taste perception and contradicted a commonly held belief by finding that men who have a sweeter tooth than women. 

As well as genetic differences between how we perceive any of the 5 tastes; sweet, sour, salt, bitter and Umami ( also known as the 5th taste; think ripe tomatoes, anchovies, Parmesan etc.) there are all kinds of factors which determine our taste perception and how highly we rate a plate of food; from the weight of the cutlery and the shape of the plate to the volume of the music playing. Research has found that people will rate the same cut of meat significantly higher when told it is free range and organic compared to when told that it is factory farmed. 

Our brains are making all kinds of decisions about how food tastes before our first bite, an excellent example of this was when Cadbury rounded off the corners on the segments of Dairy Milk in 2013 which resulted in them being inundated with messages from customers insisting they had changed the recipe making it creamier and sweeter. They hadn't. It's just that our brains associate round smooth edges with creaminess and sweetness. 

I could go deeper into food nerdery and often do on the tour..