The village showing bottle in bid to woo 
food lovers

But now foodies too are beating a path to Thixendale, a village of just 109 people, which is staking a claim to being the most artisanal in the Wolds, as it prepares to hold a local food producers event.

On November 6 the free tasting event will give people the chance to talk to the village’s three producers – and others from nearby – and sample some of their award-winning food and drink.

Jennie Palmer, who runs Yorkshire Rapeseed Oil with her husband Adam, has organised the event. She said: “There’s a lot of people very local to us that don’t know anything about what we do. I just wanted to put together an event so people have a look, have a taste – know what’s happening on their doorstep.”

The press to make the oil from their crops went in at their farm on a hillside outside Thixendale in 2008, the year they got married.

Just a few years ago reaching for a bottle of rapeseed oil may have raised eyebrows, but constant exposure by celebrity chefs like James Martin and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall means it has entered the mainstream.

“We can tell at farmers’ markets if something has been on telly,” Mrs Palmer said. “The majority of our customers have already tried it, used it or heard of it. People are definitely more aware.”

Their range now features 17 products including dressings, mayonnaises and flavoured oils. “It is purely sold through independent retailers,” said Mrs Palmer, who used to run the wardrobe department at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough. “That was our decision; we like knowing our customers and getting to meet people.”

The Chilli Jam Man, aka Simon Barratt, the Palmers’ neighbour, will also be taking part in the event. Mr Barratt moved from Pudsey to Thixendale in 2011 to build on his and his friends’ shared passion for all things food, after having stalls opposite each other at York Farmers Market.

A mortgage broker until the credit crunch and then a night shift worker in a gravy factory, he found himself on the dole in 2009 and decided to make a few pots of chilli jam, trying to recreate some of the hot smoky flavours he had experienced in the five years he lived in Australia in the late 90s.

His friends all told him he couldn’t do it, but watching Fearnley-Whittingstall on TV knocking up something in his kitchen and having it on sale on a stall the next day convinced him it was a goer. He now turns out around 35,000 bottles, with wife Bonita, who is about to have a baby, and clocks up 30,000 miles – and gets heckled – as he drives to and from food shows in his Chilli Jam Man van.

Fizzing with enthusiasm, he says Sainsbury’s has just launched a product that features the hottest jam in his range, containing Bird’s eye chillies, while the phenomenally hot Bhut Jolokia is an ingredient in Yorkshire Dragon Chilli Sausages, a new brand by Real Yorkshire Food “made with belly and shoulder – none of the funny reclaimed bits”.

Another new product, Chilli Jam Mulled Cider, a combination of ginger chilli jam and Somerset cider, will be coming out this Christmas.

None of his jams can be bought at a supermarket, however. “I just don’t want to compromise my product. As soon as you start speaking to them, it becomes price, price, price,” he said.

“I use Aspall’s organic balsamic vinegar as it’s the only one which doesn’t have caramel sulphate in it. The best way you can make sure you survive as a small company is to work together – we share delivery costs and just create products between us. I’m a great believer in trying to create a synergy together.”

The third local producer is Julia Medforth, who creates homemade gins and liqueurs using locally-sourced fruits, some based on recipes she is given at the shoots her husband runs at Raisthorpe Manor on the outskirts of Thixendale.

The business started in 2008 and now employs five local people.

She said: “I made some batches of my grandmother’s raspberry gin recipes to serve at the shoot. The gin was a roaring success and everyone encouraged me to scale up and bottle it and a little business emerged.”

Ms Medforth is particularly proud of her sloe port – “the smoothness of the port cut through with the bitterness of the sloes” – which took second prize at the Beverley Food Festival. Her sloe sherry came first.

“Thixendale is just a hotspot,” she added. “We are all in it to make premium products at a good price that support the local community.”

[email protected]