Sustainability with plenty of flavour
At Hindsgavl Castle, we have a strong focus on sustainability, and we aim for great taste with a clear conscience. This means that in the kitchen, we practice less of “the usual” and more of listening. Both to what our guests are asking for and to the current trends of smaller portions, less meat, and more vegetables. Our chefs prepare small, delicious dishes for you, from scratch, with quality ingredients and great passion – based on many years of experience in aligning expectations and reading our guests’ needs and desires.
From garden to gut
Is there anything better than freshly harvested, home-grown vegetables? Many of our ingredients come from our large kitchen garden, covering about 10,000 square meters, and are used all year round. Here, we grow vegetables, herbs, fruits, and flowers – both edible and for the castle’s decorator. We also have 8 beehives that supply the castle with the sweetest honey from the fields around us. In addition, we harvest walnuts from the large, old trees in the castle park, which also contribute to the kitchen’s pantry.
Everything we produce in the kitchen garden is used – either fresh, when in season, or preserved by pickling, bottling, dehydrating, fermenting, so the joy lasts all year round.
Satiated with less food waste
At Hindsgavl Castle, we see it as our duty to minimize food waste as much as possible. This is one of the reasons why our lunches are not typically served as the traditional buffet, but with open kitchen stations in the restaurant, where the chefs prepare the food as needed. This way, only the necessary amount is produced, thereby avoiding the significant food waste that a buffet can easily result in – while ensuring delicious, freshly prepared food for our guests. Good food is the most important thing for our Head Chef Ulrik Nielsen:
“We all have to learn new balances between the amounts of meat and vegetables, but the starting point is always good flavour. The beauty of this format is that we open a dialogue between the guest and us by bringing the kitchen to the guests. We get an immediate response and get to test whether our thoughts and ideas hit the mark.”
To get tangible data from our many different food situations, we have implemented the eSmiley scale system. We measure food waste within preparation, guest service, plate clearing, inventory, and staff meals. Based on this data, we set specific targets for further reducing food waste. In the process, we involve our employees, who each have different roles in the implementation of eSmiley, to raise awareness and work even more purposefully with food waste.
The many dimensions of sustainability
The kitchen at Hindsgavl Castle is actively working to incorporate the new parameters of sustainability that are constantly emerging – so we not only strive for less CO2 and food waste, but also incorporate perspectives such as health, biodiversity, aquatic environment and nature in general.
However, in a large kitchen like ours, which feeds more than 100,000 people annually, it is difficult to completely avoid food waste. The vast majority of food waste is sent for incineration in biogas plants. Here it is converted into a biomass, which is then converted into electricity.
You can read about our procurement policy and our waste policy here
