We are now at the stage of wanting to check out the opposition. Who is doing what, how are they marketing it, how much are they charging for it, and, most importantly does it taste any good? My general ethos is to try to attain the highest standards I possibly can, so I thought I would start with the best. A trawl around the internet for farmers producing high quality, mail order meat soon lead me to Huntsham Farm, home to Richard Vaughn. Richard is the 2015 Farmers Weekly local food Champion and supplies chefs such as Marcus Wareing, Heston Blumenthal and Michel Roux. He produces Middle White pork, Longhorn beef and Ryeland lamb, all traditional, British rare breeds, which are slowly reared on his farm. After slaughter the carcasses are hung for considerably longer than usual, then cut to the customer’s specification before being packed and sent.
I had ordered half a pig and half a lamb, but he had not had any lambs killed in the previous couple of weeks, so today I took arrival of the pork. My first thought was that it was a very small box for half a pig! On opening the polystyrene box I was immediately reassured that the meat was well chilled. It had been delivered at 9:30am, having been sent the previous day, but I didn’t get home until 12:30 to deal with it. The meat had clearly come from a much smaller pig that the modern hybrid pigs that we currently rear, and the pork is fattier. On cuts such as the belly you can really see the difference between a modern pig and a traditional rare breed with the cut from Richard’s pig only half the thickness of one of ours. Our pigs are reared on what I would call a ‘semi-intensive’ system. They are bred outside then come to us at weaning weighing about seven kilos, and look about the size of a cat. They will stay with us for around 18-22 weeks, with a preferred live weight at killing of 115kg, thus gaining the best part of a kilo every day. You would expect a carcass weight of just over 70% and a retail weight of cut meat of 55-60%, so of the 115kg of pig, around 65kg will end up in the supermarket. My half pig from Richard weighed in at 15.65kg, excluding the stock bones and offal, but will probably have lived for nearly twice as long to attain half the weight.
I unpacked the meat and laid it out on the kitchen table, noting down the cuts and weights, before selecting what was to be eaten fresh – all the joints had a best before date of a week in advance, the sausages 5 days. Sausages were selected for a mid-week meal and the top end of the leg selected as a joint to roast. I’m looking forward to seeing how it eats
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