As the rain poured down at home in the Dales the Blue Pig Company attended Askham Bryan Colleges Lambing Sunday. Thankfully York stayed lovely and dry for the event which attracted plenty of visitors.
We had another great BBQ and hope all our customers enjoyed their day. We will see you again at another event.
The Blue Pigs Black Pudding is fast becoming one of our customers favourites.
We keep our spice mix to ourselves but are happy to divulge the odd secret.
Our black puddings are baked in the oven, in loaf tins, ready for you to grill, fry or bake.
By slowly baking rather than boiling, the pudding has a beautifully intense depth of flavour and a meaty texture.
The pudding is happy to be frozen for 3 months so you cooks don’t run out.
Wrap the prawns in pancetta covering the prawn completely.
Use small wooden skewers or toothpicks to secure, or if your clever, tuck the pancetta in at the ends.
Season with a small amount of black pepper.
Warm up the griddle pan and cook until the pancetta is very crispy.
Dip in a sweet/chilli sauce of your choosing.
Heavenly.
A quick and easy winter to spring soup dish with extra bite.
Fry off 4 rashers of diced pancetta.
Remove from the pan and fry off a small onion and some garlic.
Dice a whole Celeriac and add to the pan.(you could add some celery for a sharper taste)
Use a good quality low salt vegetable or chicken stock to cover and simmer until soft.
Whiz it up until thick and smooth.
Season with a little black pepper.
Swirl in some cream.
Liberally scatter your pancetta.
You can replace the Celeriac with Peas for an even quicker soup.
There are so many recipes out there, each telling you a different quantity of ingredients, but always taste as you go along and create your own masterpiece.
The Blue Pig Co. will be returning to Askham Bryan College (York) 19th March 2017 for its popular Lambing Sunday event.
We will be offering Bacon/Sausage and Burgers sizzling hot straight from the BBQ between 10am-4pm.
See you there.
We grew up looking at the Scotch egg as humble party or picnic food but apparently its origins are shrouded in mystery. Typically in the world of big retailers, Fortnum and Mason claim to have invented them in 1738. They sold them as a portable snack for rich coach travellers. Scots themselves say it was the crofters equivalent of the Cornish pasty. That is to say it was a highly portable food for workers.
Britain has a long food heritage of pinching good food ideas from where ever they could so a Moghul dish of minced meat and a boiled egg – Nargisi Kofta – could easily have travelled home from the Raj. After all India lead us to Kedgeree, Chutney and Indian Pale ale which provides fond memories to this writer from my student days.
Our modern foodie culture sees a resolutely working class food now gracing the tables of Heston Bluemental restaurants and numerous delis. In the USA they serve them warm with dipping sauces. They are very good warm if you have never eaten them that way.
So whatever or where ever the Egg devil came from what could be a better way of using sausage meat than as a wrapping for an egg?
We are always looking for new ideas for cooking our products, after all that’s the whole point of making them. We contacted Richard the chef at The Craven Arms Giggleswick, a prodigious consumer of Blue Pig Black Pudding to see what he is currently doing.
The answer I am pleased to say is a black pudding scotch egg served with home made piccalli.
As a big supporter of local and seasonal food we would reccomend a meal at the Craven Arms, our black pudding travels less than two miles to get there! View their website at www.cravenarmsgiggleswick.co.uk for more information and menus.
Time for tea now, I’ve got the sausage meat and black pudding, a hen has just walked past, but how do you make piccallili?…………..
Chefs will tell you that the front end of any animal is where the best flavour can be found. The shoulder of pig does more work than a hind leg as its a little known fact that they carry more of their weight at the front than the back. This means that the shoulder has lots more muscle groups and more areas for fat marbling. So imagine the tastiest bit of pork, dry cured and then smoked over oak.
We have a smoked collar joint which is essentially a boned and rolled shoulder, cured and smoked like our other bacons. However if you take it in the piece rather than sliced you can treat it like a gammon. Soak it over night covered, in cold water, then boil in fresh water or bake just like you would with a gammon. You can cook it with the skin on for the crackling or remove the skin and glaze with treacle for the last few minutes of baking. Eat it hot with baked potatoes and cabbage or cold with crusty bread and pickles. Good with cold beer, wine, mulled or otherwise. On Halloween, Bonfire night or….. or…. is it too early……christmas?
Quite simply in flavour terms the best eating you can get and in value terms unsurpassable.
We thought you might like to see this. In some of the hilly bits of our farm we always get Harebells growing in late summer. This year there seems to have been a profusion of them for some reason. We would liked to have taken a long distance view of their drifts but the colour is such a pale and delicate blue it defeated the camera. This close up shows just how pale the blue is but in the flesh, as it were, they seemed to shimmer across the top of the grass.
No we are not talking about either the dance or the relish. Although that might be more interesting. In this case SALSA stands for Safe And Local Supplier Approval. We have recently been “approved” by the SALSA scheme.
Essentially we now have a paper trail that shows how our production systems are safe and fully traceable. We can literally trace a sausage or slice of bacon right back to the pig they came from. We can show how we control all the risks that can occur during the production of the food we make. We know you can have death by acronym but the heart of it all are HACCPs – Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points. These describe in minute detail not only how we make things but also how we make them safe and wholesome. We also have full ingredient and allergen declarations.
This scheme is like an assurance scheme for business who would like to retail our products. But for us its more than that. It also shows we have gone the extra mile to make sure all Blue Pig products are are safe and wholesome for all our customers. Thats pretty fundamental for a food business and we believe it matters that we can show we care enough to be better than bog standard.