5th April 2018

The Great British Bake Off is only two months away which will soon put the nation into a baking frenzy. However, as Bea sets out her baking equipment and products in the kitchen there is a slight difference with the ingredients that she is using.
The shelves in her living room are lined with several cookbooks that she wrote with celebrity chef Phil Vickery. “I’m much more a ‘behind-the-scenes’ person whereas Phil already had his celebrity status and following, it’s a perfect combination,” she explains as she pours herself a glass of water.
She pulls out her latest cookbook, Ultimate diabetes Cookbook with the front cover, gluten free recipes were clearly just the beginning as she carries on exploring her ‘free from’ cooking path.
The book has already won the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2018 and is representing the UK in the Best in the World in the Health and Nutrition category; and with Diabetes UK commissioning the culinary duo to write another recipe book.
The journey has been long, complicated but always interesting. She puts aside her set of measuring spoons as she grabs her mother’s silver tablespoon and before we can start baking her gluten free chocolate chip cookies, Bea reminisces on the twists and turns that helped make her career.

Flavourful firsts
“My brothers and I thought it was quite a normal Sunday breakfast to have scallops, big, juicy stuffed field mushrooms and all manner of seafood.”
Bea recalls as she tells me how her foodie father would wake up early in order to get to the fishmongers on Saturday morning. “My father was partial to tripe and onions, jellied eels. Offal featured heavily in our family meals.”
Food was plentiful in the Harling household, her mother, being Irish, would emphasise that life is all about the food as she served a young Bea her favourite dish; stewed eels in a vinegary, white parsley sauce.
It was her family meals that gave her rich and diverse influences on her own take on food. “I was a typical teen, into fads for food. I was vegetarian one week, no red meat the next. My poor mum, but she was smart because she told me to just cook for myself then.”
At the age of twelve where Bea began to cook for her family and was able to develop her pallet. Being able to be exposed to such diverse food also fuelled her curiosity towards what we would consume, she became fascinated in the science behind food.

the mad food scientist
Learning from a young age wasn’t the only factor that helped blossom her career.
After achieving a first in Food and Consumer Sciences, she started her career in Marks and Spencers, where she was at the forefront of developing products and stylising recipes for M&S own food brand.
“It’s very much like fashion design. You have to design the product, present it, let the buyers pick out what they want to keep or discard and then redesign it.”
From reviewing and researching food she became inspired to write and trained with the National Magazine Company, writing food columns for the Daily Telegraph and BBC Good Food.
She settled at the Good Housekeeping Institute where she ran commercial projects for their food and product centre.
Bea only started to fully explore her gluten-free fascination when she carved her career path at Nestlé. Managing the culinary test kitchen, she guided sensory taste panels to find the perfect combination of textures and flavours and created gluten-free recipes such as a vanilla and raspberry cake filled with fresh, crushed berries and light whipped cream.
Using her scientific expertise, she worked alongside chefs, nutritionists and other food experts, further fuelling her experience and knowledge.
And by chance, this is where she met Phil Vickery, who was asked to also share his gluten-free knowledge and become the face of the products; the pair found that they had string culinary chemistry and they haven’t looked back since.

the dynamic duo
In 2012, Bea made the decision to leave Nestlé and pursue her passion. She became joint director with Phil Vickery and created Seriously Good Food Ltd where they focus on creating recipes for healthy eating. “I wanted to interpret the mind-boggling overload of food health information coming at us, from every media platform, and write it into something that makes sense to ordinary people,” she said flicking through her cookbook, showing me the recipes.
Diabetes UK has asked the dynamic duo to create a second cookbook, she felt thankful that she could produce something that has credibility behind the recipe.
“I am much more interested in a more difficult challenge than every day normal recipes and cooking.” Squires Kitchen has labelled Bea as the ‘perfect tutor, after such positive feedback from her ‘Free-From’ baking classes.
Delicious own column writer, Rebecca Bourdeaux, attended the class and said Bea was able to arm her with the knowledge to adapt recipes confidently to her dietary needs.
Bea and Phil are now sharing their knowledge with food services, hoping to reach a mass market of restaurants to enhance their menus with a ‘free-from’ option. As they start prepping for their next book, Phil recalls the battles that Bea fought with Diabetes UK with a certain recipe involving a certain avocado that had to be left out.
“She has a dogged determination not only to check but to challenge everything.” Certainly, there will be more battles ahead of her but with her determination, her expertise in food science and thirst to educate the general population, I would have to take a bet and say that Seriously Good Food Ltd is in a seriously good place.