Meet the Makers: Rosie Gardel

Rosie came to food sideways. She studied graphic design in London and toured Europe as an artist in residence, and it was in Venice that gastronomy got hold of her and wouldn't let go. She went home and started over.

She trained as a chef de partie at The Ethicurean in Bristol, learning the parts of cooking that happen long before anything reaches a pan: seasonality, sourcing, butchery, foraging, fermentation. It was there she also became a cheesemaker, working for the formidable Mary Holbrook, whose farm ran on rare-breed pigs, raw milk, and wild starters, and whose cheeses went to Neal's Yard Dairy. From Holbrook she learned to make cheese, and, in her own words, how to be a successful woman in an extraordinary and sometimes male-dominated world.

France came next, first as a cheese maturer, then as a student again, with a diploma in Advanced Studies in Gastronomy from the storied Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and the University of Reims. The program examined taste from every angle at once, the scientific and the cultural, the sociological and the economic, treating the table as a subject worth studying.

Fifteen years on, she's still in France. Her husband runs an organic and biodynamic farm with dairy cattle and Aberdeen Angus, much of the herd sourced from the UK and the US. They have three-year-old twin daughters, a kitchen garden, and piglets. Rosie writes recipes every day and teaches online, and she's bringing the girls up knowing where their food comes from.

Her work follows. She starts with an essay on milk, which she still finds a little miraculous, and then makes paneer from scratch in a single saucepan. That paneer goes into the saag paneer she cooks more than almost anything, and she finishes with a tomato and burrata salad built around our Chorizo Bomb.