3 days ago
Meet the chef who's bringing the taste of Jamaica to Cumbria
As part of our Meet the Chef series, we're talking to some of Cumbria's finest about their lives in and out of the kitchen. This week, it's the turn of Jeffrey Schooler who runs Yardies with his wife Charlotte
Fed up of the anti-social hours they had to work and its impact on their growing family, Jeffrey Schooler and his wife Charlotte have turned their dreams of running a Jamaican street food business into reality.
It was on Christmas Day 2016 when they both went off to work in a hotel leaving their five-year-old daughter with her grandparents that they realised they wanted to change their life.
The idea of Yardies, a pop-up specialising in authentic Jamaican food, had occurred to them earlier in the year when they served jerk chicken and fried dumplings at their wedding (they met shortly after Jeffrey, a pastry chef, came to the UK to learn about British food).
'We were already thinking about serving street food then…so we bought the jerk pans (half barbecue/half smoker) and thought we could keep them for when we set up our business,' said Charlotte. They started doing a few pop ups and attended Lancaster Market twice a week while carrying on their day jobs at Broadoaks Country House Hotel in Windermere. 'It just escalated from that, it took us a couple of years to set it up and then we just went for it,' said Charlotte. Their first street food event in Cumbria was Windermere Lights Switch-On equipped with just a gazebo, jerk pan, burner and table.
(Image: Sheenah Alcock)
'The markets gradually took over,' said Jeffrey, talking about how the Lakes Hospitality Show at J36 was a breakthrough and led to them attending Taste Cumbria events.
They both clearly remember the day in April 2018 when Jeffrey handed in his notice to concentrate solely on Yardies - as it was also the day Charlotte found out she was pregnant with their third child. 'It was a gamble with a young family,' she said.
Initially friends and relatives helped with prepping food at their home near Windermere. They added an extension with a larger kitchen where they did a lot of takeways during the pandemic and then four years ago they started renting a unit at Plumgarths, near Kendal, where they have storage and a large prep kitchen.
'We literally work and spend every penny on the business. I knew what I needed so if it's not the equipment I want I will wait until I can afford it. We didn't borrow any money, we work an event to pay for another event. We were chasing ourselves,' he said. 'A lot of what I do is replicate the food of my childhood,' he said, talking fondly about his grandmother's outdoor kitchen in Jamaica where he grew up.
Jeffrey says the jerk pans are absolutely essential to create authentic Jamaican jerk chicken.
'You can have the same marinade and everything and put it in the oven and it will taste different, without the jerk pan it's oven chicken! In this area it's very hard to find Jamaican food, we struggle to get the amount of scotch bonnet that we need because we make everything here, all the rubs, marinades, all of it. We didn't want to water down the flavour, we wanted the depth of flavour so if Jamaican customers come to us they get the depth of flavour they are looking for, the flavour of home, we didn't mute it,' he said. To get the authentic flavour Jeffrey goes to an open market in Birmingham (where he also visits family) twice a month to buy Caribbean products including the 25kg of scotch bonnet he needs in the peak season.
'The flavour you get from scotch bonnet is like no other. We are not after spices that will blow your head off. If scotch bonnet is not in your food you can tell. It can be nice but there's something missing,' said Jeffrey.
