ABOUT FOOD AND OUR PRODUCTS

I grew up with a passion for and knowledge of our traditional breeds of farm animal and what products they were used for. I had a growing realisation added to by my restaurant experience that we had an incredible variety of agricultural produce in this country, but compared with some of our European cousins very few small processors to match it. Add to this a situation where agribusiness was destroying the farms and environments necessary for the small producers to survive and where the increasing dominance of supermarkets was destroying the infrastructure of small producers in the high street and the situation boded ill for food. If you go to France, Spain or Germany you can find small bakers, charcutiers, or traiteurs in many towns and villages where you can buy decent food ready to go. What could you get here? A rubbish pasty from a garage that gave you heartburn. However the situation is changing - for every action a reaction. The success of the London restaurant scene in the 80's and 90's has led to scores of well trained chefs wanting to run their own businesses or be involved in some way or to just make a difference. Look at what has happened to cheese in this country. From a position of almost total dominance by industrial manufacturers, the artisan cheese maker has hit back resulting in an array of farm and artisan cheese to match and even better any European country. This has resulted from a greater understanding of food but crucially by being championed by a few farsighted people (hats off to Neals Yard)

The bread revolution that has happened primarily in London, has been chef driven by chefs who couldn't get the good bread they wanted to use in the restaurants and so made their own. Many influences have driven them including immigration into London; the sight of markets and shops abroad piled with truly rustic looking bread; the bread renaissance in the United States which had a similar story to our own vis-à-vis bread. My journey to bread began exactly that way, being unable to source bread for a restaurant I worked in ('dell ugo) in the early 90's and so made my own. At another restaurant owned by AWT I met a gifted baker who'd worked in California for three years and so an interest was born. He introduced me to many Californian books on the subject. I loved the fact that you could create leavens from organic apple or grape skins, and that rye created more vigorous leavens than wheat flours. I began to wonder what had happened to our British recipes and what we did in this country prior to the introduction of compressed yeast. Interestingly by initially reading Elizabeth David and cross-referencing the biography and reading Eliza Acton, I discovered that we had indeed had traditions of leavens in this country. We built leavens using brewers yeast and unpasteurised ciders and beers. We used old dough additions and created barms. I have tried to follow this through today in our bakery. Our sourdough starter is a barm and was initially seeded using brewers yeast. We keep it vigorous by using rye flour, and use it as a base for many of our naturally leavened breads

I loved the sticky sweet tooth of the British and adore the cakes that we made. This is one thing I think we've kept alive - a fantastic sweet baking tradition - I think kept in part alive by the dear old WI. At the bakery we make Lardy cakes, which I love (we use half butter) and Eccles cakes, which I also love, as well as an array of other British specialities.

Our savoury tarts utilise cheeses where we can that are only made in Norfolk - we now have some great producers here which 10 years ago simply weren't available. Ellie Betts at Ferndale Farm in Barningham near Holt and Catherine Temple of Wighton near Wells-next-the-Sea, as well as locally produced Jacmar goats cheese that we get through the Good Food Cellar in Aylsham.

I love pork and all its associated products. For me it is the versatile meat par excellence and the range of products one can make using it is simply astounding. We started by making pies but I am massively interested in making more products from it. We make many pies at Christmas time for most of the major London department stores (see our list of stockists).

For some time I have being trying to integrate our small family farm into our business. We spend a lot on pork and produce a reasonable amount of waste food i.e. vegetable peelings and trim and bread back unsold from markets and so it seemed obvious - we could produce our own pork for our products and thus control the quality of our ingredients and recycle some of our waste. With our own pork we are starting to create other products that we are also interested in such as black puddings, white puddings, terrines, dry salted bacon, sausages, rillettes, brawn, hams etc. (see the bacon blog for how we made it and what books and websites I got the information from). This has allowed us to create a chain from field to plate where we can control both the quality and the provenance of all that we produce. We believe passionately in creating products rooted in this country, using local foods and culturally British tastes and flavours. Not everything we do is strictly British as its nice to have the freedom to make what you like but it's a cultural ethic we try to stick to. We are selling our sausages at events by griddling them and serving them with our homemade chutney and focaccia rolls. We also sell them online but because they have no preservatives, we freeze them as soon as they are made and dispatch them frozen. I hope to start selling boxes of our pork products online about twice a year. The idea is that we will rear pigs to mature around Easter and Christmas time, so that we can then turn it into all the items of charcuterie I am interested in and send it out to customers, so each customer will receive some sausages, rillettes, black puddings, ham, dry salted pickled bacon, terrines, a pie etc. If you are interested in this please click to go to our Limited Editions page where you will find details on this.

We also provide an outside catering service sticking to our ethos of local produce, intelligently used, so if you are planning a party or event we can do it for you, using produce from our bakery, from our farm, and from our multitude of local suppliers/producers and friends. Whatever you want be it roast suckling pigs, a shoot breakfast or dinner, using our own sausages and dry salted bacon, through to a much more sedate affair in your own home or venue; we can do it. Why don't you have a look at our sample seasonal menus on our outside catering page and see if there is anything we can do to enhance your event?