Modern Meat

Earth Oven Lamb - A Meaty Celebration

So, sorry it’s been a while (not that you’re really bothered). Anyway, I’m back and this time I’m not just talking about meat, I’m cooking it too!

 

A couple of weeks ago, it was my friend and housemate Jock’s birthday. Jock is a meat man to the core. When he’s not up in Scotland shooting stags, gralloching them on the heath and eating their hearts for breakfast (little bit of flour, lots of butter, salt and pepper – so so good), he’s shooting wild boar in France and slow roasting his spoils. Ok, so it’s actually his mum that does most of the amazing cooking, but someone’s got to shoot it first right?!

 

To celebrate his birthday, Jock invited about thirty friends to his home in the Essex countryside for a medieval themed evening and lunch the next day. I nominated myself as chef for lunch on the Sunday after the party, and wanted to do something fitting for the occasion – sausage sandwiches would just not do. So, after a little bit of thinking, a little bit of reading some other people’s fascinating blogs, and a spot of talking to other food loving friends, I settled on cooking a lamb buried underground in an earth oven……

 

Sounds like a lot of effort right? Too right it is.

 

Going deeper underground - the lamb gets dressed…..

According to the internet, the concept of an earth oven has been around pretty much as long as we’ve been cooking meat. Indigenous people everywhere from the Americas, to the Middle East and The Pacific Islands have used various iterations of the earth oven to slowly cook animals and vegetables, sometimes for ceremonial reasons, sometimes because it was the easiest way to cook a whole beast. My favourite reason by a long way though is mentioned by Wikipedia in reference to Greek earth oven cooking. Basically anti-Turkish partisans during the Greek war for independence used to cook their food in ovens in the ground to avoid being detected by the Turkish forces. I’m guessing that sending up smoke signals is a surefire way to get yourself spotted if you are hiding out in the woods, especially is they smell particularly meaty and delicious……

 

So, by now you may be wondering what an earth oven is. I’ll try and explain it in simple terms, as it’s not that exciting – it’s the delicious, succulent, tender end product that’s worth talking about. An earth oven allows you to cook a large piece of meat very slowly while keeping in all moisture. It literally is an oven (well, a pretty crude one) dug into the ground. All you need to do is dig a big pit then line it with stones (they retain heat better than earth). Once you’ve done all of that, stick loads of wood in the pit and set it all on fire! I believe that there’s a pyromaniac deep inside every man, so that bit is always going to be fun.

A pit big enough for a sleeping knight is big enough for half a lamb.

After a few hours, the flames die down leaving the stones nice and hot. Once it is just down to embers and hot stones, just throw in a big piece of animal flesh (in this case, half a lamb, but a pig will do too) tightly wrapped in foil then hessian or muslin, then quickly tip all the soil back on top to starve any of the coals of oxygen, and prevent the risk of burning. Give it a few hours, and then dig it out again. Simple really.

 

The Fire crew. Right to left: Me (executioner), Jock (Knight), Charlie (Peasant), Bug (Knight)

 

Now I have explained the theory behind it, here’s how we did it: Birthday boy Jock, chef and fellow food blogger Charlie Nelson (@charlienels and http://eatmynels.blogspot.com/), party liability Bug Warr and I got to digging. It turns out that digging a five foot wide, three foot deep hole is pretty hard work. After about half an hour of labouring, the pit was dug, and so we lined it with some rather expensive flagstones that Jock had lying around in his garden. We were pretty impressed with our work, as you can see from the photos (excuse our clothing – it was a fancy dress party remember). Not much could be done for a few hours now, so off we trotted to the party to have a few quiet drinks and count the hours until our 4 a.m fire lighting escapades.

 

Come 4 a.m a group of excited and ‘well oiled’ meat lovers (that sounds inappropriate) assembled around the pit and set our well laid fire ablaze. After a couple of minutes stood in awe, mesmerised by the flames, the revellers began to drift back to the party, and their minds turned to the end product….

 

The lamb was laid in at 6.30 am, aiming for a 12.30 lunch. Gillie, Jock’s mother had bought the lamb from the local butcher the day before, and it was a fine specimen indeed. We gave the lamb a thorough seasoning and rubbed it with garlic and rosemary, but we didn’t want to overdo it, as we hopedthe flavour of the meat was going to be the key to the meal’s success. Once seasoned and rubbed we wrapped the lamb up first in foil, then muslin, then chicken wire and finally attached a couple of hangers, so we could easily remove it from the pit. Basically it was a big meaty, garlic infused parcel that I wanted delivered straight to my mouth. I would have to wait six hours though.

 

Lamb in, and pit filled it was back to the celebrations. Although the number of revellers had dwindled by this point, and the subject matter of conversation had taken something of a nose dive there was still a good crowd of people still awake at midday when the lamb was dug out and ceremoniously carried over to the dining tables to be butchered and served. Lucky there was, and all that hard work could have meant nothing had the group not been such stoic party people.

 

Ok, so finally, down to the bit that matters - what it tasted like. Finally! I feel like I’ve been writing for ages, and have barely mentioned meat, just mud and stones and fire and drunk friends.

 

Time to get hacking……

The lamb exuded a rich and aromatic aroma, very pure and incredibly exciting whether you’re any olfactory gastronome or a hungry Greek marauder fighting the Turks. The flesh itself was uniformly pink, there was no browning or caramelisation, and it appeared that no one area had been hotter than the other. The fat and sinew from the beast had rendered into the flesh causing it to take on a slightly slippery and gooey texture. This was not unpleasant, but is fairly alien to a Western palette. Charlie, my educated and astute partner in this particular meat based crime likened the texture and taste to many Middle Eastern dishes where the meat is cooked slow and low (that is the tempo…..) for a long time. I personally enjoyed the flavour and texture immensely, and I think it was well received by the rest of the lunch guests. There wasn’t much left by the end.

 

Next time I do it, and there will be a next time for sure, I think I would be tempted to leave the meat in for longer. It lost no moisture at all, so I think the benefit of cooking it longer would be more delicate and soft flesh, like pulled pork. I would also be tempted to go for some stronger spices, maybe a Moroccan influence with apricots or raisins (yes, I know some people have a problem with fruit and meat. I don’t, and it’s my website….).

 

The other thing Charlie, Jock and I considered was finishing off the meat on the barbecue. We imagined this would give us the best of both worlds. The tender aromatic meat as a result of the slow cooking combined with the caramelisation of the natural sugars due to the high heat of the grill. Just another excuse to do it again really isn’t it……

 

Until next time, stay meaty.

My First Time Behind The Counter

So, I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait for my post on makin’ bacon, something more important has come up you see….

Last week I popped into the Natural Kitchen in Marylebone http://www.thenaturalkitchen.com/ looking for some harissa paste to smear on some rather delicious looking bavette. However, that’s another tale altogether……

Anyway, while I was in there, I got chatting to Larry at the butchers counter. Obviously our conversation turned to meat, as it seems to very frequently when I talk to people. (especially if they happen to be butchers). Larry suggested that I should get in contact with Andy Jordan and John Bartlett who own the butchers concession in the Natural Kitchen. Andy is a trained chef, and spent six years working with Marco Pierre White. John is a butcher with thirty years experience. Both of them a meat men to the core.

So, after a couple of back and forth emails, and a quick jaunt from my office in Oxford Circus to Marylebone one lunchtime, it came to pass that John and Andy would happily let me lurk around, and maybe even lend a hand for an evening.

That evening came last night, so with a great deal of excitement, and a certain degree of trepidation I hopped on my bike the second I could slip away from my day job, and headed back to Marylebone for my first opportunity to stand behind the counter and “be a butcher”. I arrived, was greeted by a John and offered some whites to don - surely a seminal moment in any aspiring meat purveyor’s young life - and then there I was, at the counter, a man of meat……..

Here’s John, cleaning down the butchers block at the end of the day.

Talking to John was by far and away the highlight of the evening, and taught me a valuable lesson about the retail aspects of butchery. You can be selling the best meat in the world, at a great price, but if you’re customer service is off, then nobody’s going to be coming back for more. I know this is true for all forms of retail, but I’d argue that customer service is particularly important in retail butchery.

The reason for this is that the customer is putting their faith in their butcher. They are trusting them, not just to always supply them with meat that is fresh, but to supply them with something special, something that can’t be grabbed off the shelf in a local Tescos. There’s an intangible value added to meat bought from the butchers counter, a specialness that starts with the display, and ends long after the customer has left the store, cooking times still ringing in their ears.

A knowledgeable butcher can imbue a sense of newfound confidence in your own cooking ability, and if I can get away with sounding a bit romantic about the whole thing, can take you on a bit of a journey, widening your olfactory and gastronomic horizons, perhaps in the same way a sommelier can (well, to a certain extent).

What I mean by this, and without drifting too far from the fact that butchers sell a raw product, not a finished article (you still have to cook it you know!), is that you may walk in thinking you want a fillet, because you know it’s reassuringly expensive, but after a quick chat that reveals you’re cooking on you barbecue that evening, you walk out with an sirloin or onlget, or maybe even a Barnsley chop that will suit your needs better. A good butcher can steer you towards 40 day matured beef once he understands that you have a taste for the good stuff, or he’ll offer you a fattier blend of mince for burgers (using a good heft of chuck steak) than he would for spag bol, and he may even warn you off something completely if it’s not up to scratch. A shelf stacker in Asda can’t offer you this kind of knowledge.

I witnessed John’s attitude to customers first hand, and whether he was kindly nipping to the back fridge to find a spare veal bone for a experimental dish a regular was trying or talking to an elderly Italian couple about the veal for their ossu bucco, his enthusiasm never faltered. It’s great seeing people with a passion for what they do. I hope that I can translate the kind of enthusiasm I know I’m throwing down in this blog into something I can build a business around.

There were a couple of times when John was dealing with one customer, while another waited that I considered jumping in and trying out my sales patter, but I resisted. Probably a good thing, as my love of the cheap, tough, and tasty cuts may not have been perfectly pitched for the Chef and Butcher’s customer base. They’re a sirloin and fillet crowd!

During the evening John began to (hopefully) realise that I wasn’t a total muppet, and could lend a helping hand. So by the end of the shift I had minced 6 kilos of lamb mince, 4 of beef and had fulfilled a couple of smaller meat orders. As it turns out, I’m quite good at guessing weights, I must have retained some knowledge from my previous sideline when I was a student!

The mince order I fulfilled. Lucky customers, they get the chance to sample my “early work”.

As the evening’s business began to wind down, I helped John clear the counter back into the fridge, and took the opportunity to blag Andy and John into letting me pop in again, this time on a Saturday to help set up, and hopefully to watch John breaking down some lamb for display. Now, that’s one hell of a way to spend a Saturday morning.

So, I’ll be back at the Chef and Butcher in The Natural Kitchen soon. When I’m there, I’ll take more snaps, learn more about retail butchery, and maybe even throw some meat based advice the way of some unsuspecting customers. I had a great evening, so a big thanks to Andy and John for letting me get stuck in.

One final thing - John told me when I was there that a rather famous English actress is rather partial to their Toulouse sausages (they are indeed supremely garlicky), and shared a recipe for her interpretation of a classic French dish to use them in with him. I’m going to check with the boys, and hopefully publish the recipe with some photos in the coming weeks. Celeb recipes! It may even become a regular feature!

Stay meaty.

Modern Meat - The Inception

Hello! I know nobody is currently reading this, so it’s a bit like shouting underwater - it doesn’t really matter what I say!

I’m starting this blog because I’m off! Leaving London in September and moving to rural Nottinghamshire to do a year long diploma course at the School of Artisan Food (www.schoolofartisanfood.org), where I’ll be training as a butcher and charcuterer (with a bit of cheese making on the side).

I love food, especially meat, so surprisingly, this blog is mostly going to be about that most beautiful of things; meat! Cooking it, eating it, farming it, hunting it, curing it, smoking it, sourcing it, respecting it, understanding it, loving it and learning about it.

I hope one day to have my own retail space selling meat that matters, from good suppliers to anyone and everyone, not just people who have money to spare, but to people who struggle to feed their family every week, and need to learn that good (responsibly and respectfully sourced) meat doesn’t have to be expensive (exclusive and elitist) meat. If you know what you’re doing, what to buy (and who from) and how to cook it then you’ll never need another chicken nugget!

Somehow this first post has become a bit of a meat manifesto, it’s not supposed to be. I practice what I preach (apart from a few late night indiscretions), but don’t plan to force my ideas on anyone.

All I want from this is to start a conversation, meet some meatheads and share in something I love.

So, until my first proper post, which will be about the bacon I have just finished curing and hanging (it’s so good!) I’ll say goodbye, again to nobody….. I’m off to the Ginger Pig Butchers after work (I currently work in an ad agency, I know, sorry) to pick up a kilo of Bavette steak that I plan to slather in some decent harissa paste, flash grill on the BBQ (the BBQ’s called Eleanor, and she’s a smokin’ hot lady), rest and then serve to my hungry friends.

Nice to meat you all (I know nobody’s reading, but I’d been working on a sign-off, and it seemed a shame to waste it),

Struan