Most people don’t see wild venison as a particularly versatile meat, but that’s a huge misconception, especially as it makes for really great eating, whether that’s as joints, steaks, diced for casseroles and stews, or even minced for sausages and burgers or for that matter as an alternative to beef, lamb, or pork mince.

Wild venison is also low in fat, high in protein, full of vitamins and minerals, and the added bonus is that it’s free range and grass fed, which means it’s a purely natural product that has lived a happy and full life.

There are other benefits too – because deer have no natural predators in the UK, that means the population levels have increased pretty dramatically, which then has an impact on the environment in which they live, which is one reason why it’s necessary to control the population. This process helps keep the herds healthy, reduces environmental impact and provides a fully sustainable source of meat as a byproduct, which has had no human intervention at all and as a result is a 100% naturally healthy product.

Dry Cured Bacon

As many of you will know by now I’m keen to do things the right way. There’s a reason butcher’s have done things a certain way over the years and I’m no different. I’m proud of everything we stock on our shop counter and that’s why I’ve taken time to get our bacon right.

The traditional method for curing bacon is known as dry curing and that’s how we create ours – doing it properly is a lengthy process. Firstly we hang our pork shoulders for a week, so that they begin to dry out. Then we cure the meat in specially dry cure mix made with carefully selected sea salt combined with a little demerara sugar for a 12 days in our drying rooms. After which the shoulder is boned out, re-salted and allowed to mature for a further two weeks. The it’s hung to dry age for a further week to allow the natural flavours to fully develop, before being sliced ready to serve in the shop.

You see it’s important to us that our dry-cured salted bacon, is carefully crafted without compromise, to ensure that it has unsurpassed flavour and texture in each and every bite. Every rasher of our bacon is made from 100% Lyth Valley reared Saddleback and Berkshire Black rare breed pork shoulder.

And unlike intensively produced commercial bacon our bacon doesn’t contain and food additives, which means you get quality in every single slice, cured naturally as bacon should be, there is no reason why you can’t enjoy our bacon as part of a balanced diet.

Choosing to use traditional curing methods has allowed us to create a deliciously tender, slightly sweet nitrate free bacon, which is perfect for breakfast when folded into a soft white barm and served up with lashings of Wild and Fruitful ketchup or as an accompaniment to chicken or served up in a classic Caesar salad.

High Meat Content Sausages

Sausages are pretty diverse , they can be grilled, fried, baked, added to casseroles and even BBQed, but that’s where the similarity ends. The great British banger varies hugely in the ingredients the can contain. The one thing we won’t do is compromise on quality for any reason and our handmade sausages are no exception.  UK bangers must contain a minimum of 32% meat to be called a generic sausage, and generally pork sausages must contain at least 42% meat – but that’s not good enough for us.

We prefer ours that the sausages we make have at least 95% meat content as a minimum, with the average being 97%, whilst the remaining percentage to get us up 100 is where our careful choice of herbs and freshly ground whole spices comes in, with a tiny quantity of milk powder to bind everything together – that’s it totally natural ingredients.

What’s more we encase our sausages in 100% natural casings too, which allow the sausage to breathe, infusing the meat to give a rich, even flavour throughout, all of which means you know exactly what you’re getting and what’s even better still there’s no preservatives involved either.

Our sausages are filled to bursting with delicious high-quality meat from locally reared, grass-fed livestock sourced from small farms that we know and trust. We make every single batch by hand each week so you really can’t get fresher allowing the fresh farm reared locally produced meats we use to shine. We’ve taken traditional recipes and developed them in-house, taking out time to test and test again until we end up with a product we’re happy with.

We are always looking to extend our ever-developing range of sausages; we’ve always got plenty of ideas for new varieties and flavours and we’re always busy tinkering about in the kitchen working on new recipes – but if you’ve got a particular favourite that you think we should make let us know and we’ll see what we can do.

Dry-aged Steaks

There are dry aged steaks and there are properly dry-aged steaks… and ours are the latter. Our whole beef is hung for 3 weeks minimum in our special drying room, then we butcher the meat and transform it into the required cuts and age it for at least another two weeks in our dry aging cabinet In the shop, allowing it to mature and the flavours to develop and deepen before we trim into individual steaks to be served In the shop.

There’s nothing wrong with eating a fresh steak, but the connective tissue and muscle fibre remain largely intact resulting a tough and chewy product. The dry-aging process breaks down the connective tissue, making for a much more tender product, the process also removes moisture from the meat, which helps deliver a better flavour profile too.

Why bother? Well quite simply when a cow is slaughtered lactic acid builds up in the muscle and causes it to tighten up, alongside that the connective tissue and muscle fibre remain largely intact too. While you can eat freshly slaughtered meat, the reality is that it’ll be tough and have much less flavour than a cut that’s been allowed to age. When you age meat the process breaks down the connective tissue and muscle fibre, making for a much more tender product, the process also removes moisture from the meat, which in turn helps deliver a better flavour profile too.

One of the main aging processes is known as dry-aging, it’s a specialised technique that involves exposing beef carcasses to oxygen in a temperature and moisture-controlled environment for anything from a few weeks up to a number of months.

The ultimate aim of the process is to alter the flavour, texture and tenderness of the meat being aged. The balance between airflow, temperature, and humidity activates a number of natural processes including oxidisation, and enzymatic breakdown to occur which alter the characteristics.

The key to the process is to hang each piece of cut of meat individually, so that air can circulate to every part of its surface. Harmless mould then forms in a fine, even layer across the surface, much the same as it would in cheeses being matured. This slowly dehydrates the meat by removing its moisture, improving its flavour at the same time. The more water removed by the mould layer, the more intense and concentrated the meat’s flavour becomes. This mould crust also helps seal the meat, preventing any external bacteria from gaining access and spoiling the meat. Once the process is complete, we trim the mould layer away to expose the meat surface to the air for about 3-4 days before we cut the meat into individual steaks to sell to our customers.

Homemade Pies

Pies are quite simply heavenly – they’re food with a lid, a lid that you can scoff, for that matter you can devour the sides and bottom too… now steady on… someone’s getting carried away! They’ve been about for a bit of time too, pies that is… the word pie (meaning meat or fish enclosed in pasty) first appeared in the dictionary in around 1300, but the reality is we’ve got the Egyptians, then the Ancient Greeks and those infernal Romans (what did they ever do for us…) to blame for what has become a British obsession.

These days you can devour them on the go, at a footy match, in your local pub or even a fancy pants restaurant or for that matter in the privacy of your own home sat in front of the telly.  Quite simply they’re a culinary masterpiece and you can see why everyone loves a pie – you can fill them with pretty much anything you want – either sweet or savoury – and what’s more when you tuck into a properly made pie you won’t go hungry.

Homemade Pies

With all that in mind you can rest assured that we’ve done the job properly – every one of our delicious pies is handmade and cooked from scratch. We use time-honoured family recipes to craft everything from start to finish, including the light shortcrust pastry, the array of delicious fillings and the mouthwatering sauces that accompany them.

All lovingly made by members of the team in our own dedicated kitchens. But we don’t stop there because as you may well know by now everything we use in the food we serve and create is ethically and locally sourced.

All of our meat is 100% locally sourced and ethically reared on small farms less than 10 miles from the shop, and what’s more all of the vegetables we use in our pies are all sourced locally too, from small farms just across the border in Lancashire – after all the provenance of the ingredients we use is everything for us and if you’re not going to do things properly what’s the point??