Different look, different flavour
12 05 2008
Steph in Roker was asking how our Scots Grey differed in appearance and flavour from that of a commercial broiler chicken. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any photos of the cooked cockerel, but I thought a photo of a leg of pork from one of our Berkshire pigs might prove enlightening in showing the differences between “shop” pork and home-produced pork. This is a leg of pork we ate a couple of weeks back. The meat is darker and has noticeable marbling within the muscle, which means it’s both juicier and more flavoursome than leaner commercial pork. At the same time, the flavour is much more “porky”—in other words, you know you’re eating pork just as when eating one of our cockerels we know we’re eating chicken. Commercially produced, shop-bought chicken and pork tends to be lean, watery to start with and then dry as the water cooks out, and lacking in clearly identifiable flavour. Some people like that. The boys and I don’t.
Now that’s pork! We’re having free range Berkshire ribs for dinner, mmmmm my mouth is watering.
Thats a good demonstration of what we should be eating and what the supermarkets have got people use to. Your pork looks amazing and looks like it should taste great too.
And if i wanted to get some of your finest pork on my table how would one do this?
All the meat from the next batch of porkers for late July slaughter are already sold or allocated for us. We’re keeping two piglets back from the current litter for pork in October but two half pigs are for us and I think the OH might have potential buyers for one, possibly both, of the other halves. After that, nothing until next year.
Remember, we don’t generally finish porkers to sell as meat. We tried that, but people were even more unreliable than they are with live pigs (eg ordering half a pig, then saying on the day of collection that they only want a couple of joints and some chops). Instead, we keep one porker for us and a second porker to pay the bills (feed, diesel, slaughter, butchering, etc.)
If you want Berkshire pork in Aberdeenshire, then you either have to get in before our friends and the OH’s work colleagues to get one of the four half pigs we do a year or buy a couple of weaners off us to fatten yourself.
you have an e-mail hopefully
Not yet! You have a googlemail address and my ISP’s spam filter tends to kick those in to touch before they even get to the spam filter on my Mac. I might have to turn the ISP one off—but that means a deluge of crud…
I gave away a pack of our home-reared GOS sausages the other day -
just so someone could get to savour what a ‘proper’ sausage should taste like: our tasty bangers being packed with - ooerr, Heaven forbid - simply REAL MEAT, herbs & natural seasoning!
Said recipients were literally shocked that a ‘real’ sausage is so radically different from the ‘usual’ sausage (ours actually enjoy flavour, texture etc etc) to the extent they’ve vowed to only buy from our excellent local butcher in future as we cannot supply more, ourselves.
Viva transforming people to love & savour, the true taste of real food…..!
I prefer to cook people real meals as a way of showing them what real food should taste like. Far too many people don’t know how to cook and end up ruining good food. Sausages, for example, should be cooked long and slow but most people try to rush them with ill-effect.
I’d love to have done that Stoney -
but as the bloke was here to replace my exploded Rayburn chimney I wasn’t able to offer anything hotter than a salad I’m afraid…!