Salad dressings for success

I was born in London but spent my childhood summers on a farm in West Cork, Ireland. Coming from the inner city, I was fascinated by how it all worked; probably my first leanings towards the Slow Food movement, and the reason that, when I visited the Isle of Wight 30 years ago, I never left.

I worked in restaurant kitchens, then I had kids and started cooking from home, supplying local farm shops with everything from biscotti to granola, and hummus to soups – that was a great basis for looking at food production in a different way.

I soon decided that I wanted to make my own product from the roots up. Because we live on an island, it's harder to compete with mainstream products, so you have to push the boundaries a little. I decided that salad dressings would be a good way to to work with what I had access to: they aren't as formulaic as you think, and you can use myriad ingredients.

Initially, I made all my dressings with local rapeseed oil from a farm down the road, where my kitchen is now based. After some experimentation with flavours, the idea of making fruit-infused vinegars presented itself. Fruit vinegars are very effective at balancing out rapeseed, which is often overpowering, but then I started to leave oil out of some dressings altogether, opening them for different uses. For example, the blackberry and balsamic and bay and juniper are particularly good for reductions, as they seem to enhance instead of overpower. I now make 14 different dressings – spiced fig being the most popular. I love to use it in our Sunday bacon sandwiches, and it's also delicious with feta.

The slow food ethos really inspired me when it came to setting up Wild Island; the vast majority of my ingredients come from the Isle of Wight. When you use good-quality, local ingredients, you take the time to think about the best ways of using them, how they might work well together and making sure that you do them justice. Over the past three years, I've tried to let the business grow at the right pace, so I can continue to make it all myself at the same quality as when I began. At the moment, I make somewhere between 350-400 bottles a week, supplying 16 shops on the island and 35 on the mainland. My husband Gerard helps me with the logistics and figures so I can focus on the recipes, and Izzy and Sophie, my daughters, help me with the bottling.

The name Wild Island is a tribute to all the places I love on the Isle of Wight; spots that wouldn't feature in a guide book. I have a mental scrapbook of happy memories that mostly involve the more rugged and rural parts of the place, and I really feel that the labels, and the flavours of the dressings themselves, reflect that.

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This article was edited on 3 March to correct Nuala's surname to Grandcourt from Roberts.