Leeds Sauce: Trio of artists bottle the flavours of Leeds into a sauce for Leeds 2023 - and this is what it tastes like

The Popeye Collective - artist Freddie Yauner, architect Kiran Gill and creative communications consultant Eddie Blake - worked with different communities in the city to gather ingredients and get their thoughts on the flavour of Leeds.

As part of a project commissioned for arts festival Compass Live Art, with support from Leeds 2023, the trio have bottled up the flavours synonymous with the city into a rhubarb ketchup - Leeds Sauce.

The sauce was handed out during a pop-up event at Kirkgate Market in November and Leeds Sauce is making a return later this month, with people invited to taste it and share their feedback during a Leeds 2023 event.

Freddie, an artist by trade, told the Yorkshire Evening Post: “The people of Leeds are utterly wonderful. We were amazed by their generosity and were also really excited by the multiculturalism of the city. The majority of people, when we asked them what the flavour of Leeds was, after racking their brains they often said beer!”

The Popeye Collective creates interactive projects, largely around changing attitudes towards food and farming, and was commissioned by Compass to create the sauce for its November festival.

The festival’s director, Peter Reed, said: “We were really captivated by this project. There’s lots of Yorkshire food, but Leeds doesn’t really have a named food.

“There was a hook there that we thought audiences of Compass Festival would really get on board with. We wanted to spend two years asking the people of Leeds - if Leeds was expressed through a condiment, what would that taste like? The journey that presented to us was really exciting.”

The Leeds Sauce recipe is made up of waste rhubarb collected with Bramley Elderly Action in Pudsey, sugar infused with white rose petals picked with primary school pupils in Headingley and vinegar made with beer from every pub on the Otley Run.

It is infused with ginger inspired by an archeological dig on the side of the Tetley’s Brewery and the salt has been collected door to door from communities around the city.

“It’s truly delicious,” Freddie said: “But it’s quite an extraordinary experience the first time you eat it - because of the colour, and then because rhubarb in itself has an earthy, bittersweet flavour to it.

“It looks like it should be a sweet condiment, but it tastes largely like a ketchup, with quite a bit of ginger running through it. Every flavour has a story behind it.”

The Popeye Collective will host a free pop-up event at the Leeds 2023 hub in the Trinity Leeds shopping centre. Anyone can drop in between March 16-19 to be a part of the tasting panel and fill up a bottle to take home. The team would also love for a local chef or small business to develop the sauce and work with the rhubarb suppliers to take the idea further, anyone who is interested is asked to email Peter via [email protected].

Freddie added: “There’s an extraordinary opportunity for somebody to develop this sauce and continue its legacy. And we’d love for that to happen.”