Bringing Home the Bacon… Pre-Launch

Very excited to announce that our bacon, after months… nay, years of trial and development is nearly ready, and the first official batch will be available for sale from this Saturday 26th February 2011 at Abbottsford (Slow Food) Farmers Market and Geelong (New Town) Farmers Market and on Sunday at Melbourne Showgrounds and Mount Eliza. For this week only the bacon will be at a special pre-launch price and we invite your feedback before the official launch later this month.

We didn’t want to run with the herd when it comes to bacon, we wanted to make something quintessentially British, something perfect for the ‘bacon butty’ and ‘Full English’ breakfast (Irish, Scottish or Welsh, of course), but also a chefs bacon – unbrittle with delicate flavours, perfect for dishes like Balmoral Chicken or to wrap around our chipolatas in pigs in blankets.

Prepare yourselves for Pacdon Parks Streaky Bacon, Unsmoked and Dry cured with English Herbs.

The free range, female pork belly is dry cured by hand with sage and mace to our own recipe and not bulked up with water or injected so the resulting bacon does not leave pools of water in the pan on cooking as does some mass produced bacon and is less brittle, deeper in raw colour much like pancetta with subtle herb flavours.

Come along to the Farmers Markets and try this weekend. We are sure you will love it as much as we do.

Consider Lard

Once ubiquitous and now derided, there are many good reasons to cook with lard. Does it feature in your kitchen?
writes Oliver Thring of the Guardian UK

Thanks for getting this far. A headline like “Consider lard” will cause many readers to click away in horror, feeling arteries fur, strokes striking, the tempting of fat and fate at the sight of this four letter word. Lard ranks among the most reviled foods in the western world. As Roy Hattersley came to know its very name is a playground metonym for fat. Once, it was the great cooking fat of Europe, from Shetland to Gibraltar and east beyond the Caucasus, in China, Mexico, in South America.

In Ukraine they have a festival devoted to it. Polish immigrants caused a UK shortage in 2004. If your ancestors came from these islands they likely opened their lard-ers and ate bread, lard and salt for countless breakfasts. And not many of them died of obesity. For thousands of years there has been lard wherever there were pigs, and there were pigs, broadly speaking, wherever there weren’t Muslims.

It’s a supremely versatile fat. Because it smokes so little when it’s hot it’s perfect for bringing a golden shatter to a chip or a fritter – only dripping, lard’s bovine equivalent, does a better job. (A specific kind of lard is also called dripping, but let’s not muddle things.) Its large crystals of fat make lard unsurpassable in baking: a pastry crust made with lard – or half-lard, half-butter, as Delia recommends – offers a stunning flaky shortness, that gently encompassing roundedness that wine buffs horribly call mouthfeel.

Before the second world war Britons ate lard without guilt or fear. Its disappearance from our kitchens parallels a surge in the national waistline and an upswing in the cosseted maladies of fat. It’s worth remembering that the very people who so trumpeted the benefits of factory margarine – which we now know caused considerably more harm than good – were the same who lambasted lard and denied its natural glories.

By any estimation, lard is a healthier fat than butter. Gram for gram, it contains 20% less saturated fat, and it’s higher in the monounsaturated fats which seem to lower LDL cholesterol (the “bad” kind) and raise HDL (the “good”). It’s one of nature’s best sources of vitamin D. Unlike shortening it contains no trans fats, probably the most dangerous fats of all. Of course it has more saturated fat than olive oil, but in her splendid book Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, Jennifer McLagan points out that even its saturated fat is believed to have a neutral effect on blood cholesterol. And would you want a pie crust made with extra virgin?

Leaf lard, the highest-quality, surrounds a pig’s loin and kidneys. (Roast pork loin, incidentally, gives the best crackling.) Next in value are the fat on the animal’s back, appropriately called fatback, and the the soft fat from around the internal organs, which has a more pronounced porky flavour. There are two main methods to make or “render” lard: wet and dry. In wet rendering you boil the fat in water. To dry render you simply melt it in a dry pan and skim off any crunchy bits of meat and skin. (Salted, these become the world’s best scratchings.) Wet-rendered lard has a clean, neutral flavour and a high smoke point, while dry-rendered is a nut-brown colour, smokes at a lower heat and tastes faintly of well-roasted pork. The industrial lard of the supermarkets may well have been bleached, deodorised, emulsified and otherwise fiddled with, but homemade or small-scale lard is likely to be be excellent. A kindly butcher might well give you a load of hard pig fat for free to take home and render (unto) yourself.

The best thing about lardy cake is its counterintuitive lightness – the fat brings the dough a refreshing, silky fluffiness. The cake originates in Wiltshire, which was always Britain’s best pig county. In central Europe they cut fatback into cubes and salt it for stews. The Italians cure lardo with rosemary and spices in the coffin-shaped basins of the Carrara marble mines. This lardo di Colonnata is a sublime antipasto, wrapped round prunes or figs, melted over grilled bread, or served with salt and honey. A melting smear of cured, flavoured lard is a wonder over a steak, and a lot of Mexican cuisine (don’t laugh) is unthinkable without lard.

Assaulted by food company propaganda and disillusioned by decades of conflicting advice, many people are returning to diets unsullied by fads and dogma. That lard is both “healthier” than butter and yet so despised shows the empty logic of the standard position. The fat amply qualifies as “real food”, that definition popularised by Michael Pollan as “the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognise as food”. Indeed, its history and heritage make it seem more valuable than ever when you consider what the lard hath given.

Pea wet, the amber nectar of the gods

As I often do, thinking about British Food, my brain stumbled across ‘Pea Wet’. A skeleton from my culinary closet, but actually something I quite hanker after, now that (as the crow fly’s) its 16,426 kilometres away.

Pea What??? I hear you say. David Barnett of the Bradford Telegraph and Argus gives some insight into working class British Food and magical Pea Wet in his article ‘Pea wet, the amber nectar of the gods’

Enjoy


I was most perturbed last week to see a feature in a Sunday broadsheet’s food magazine about the popular musician Badly Drawn Boy, under a headline along the lines of “And we ate a pie in a bap”.
I wasn’t perturbed through any righteous sense of healthy eating, but rather because Damon Gough had, at a stroke, stolen all my childhood memories of food which I had, at some point in the future when I become as famous as Badly Drawn Boy, hoped to be interviewed upon myself.
Gough grew up in Bolton, a mere steak pudding’s throw from my stamping ground of Wigan, and the two towns obviously share a great deal in terms of cuisine.
I still remember the minor diplomatic incident which was caused when I did, in fact, partake of a pie in a bap while working in Preston – less than half an hour’s drive from my hometown but a million miles away in gastronomic terms.
There was a veritable horde of rubberneckers at my desk as I sat down to enjoy a nutritious lunch of a meat and potato pie sandwiched between a buttered barm cake (that’s a teacake to you Tykes).
Someone (it may have been the woman who was to become my wife) muttered incredulously about “carbohydrate overload”, but to be honest I couldn’t really see what was causing all the fuss.
As to the aforementioned steak pudding, only available in the best fish and chip shops, we used to, like Gough and his mates, refer to it as a “babby’s yed” (translation: baby’s head), due to the gentle dip in the top of the suet which bears a striking resemblance to the depressed fontanelle of a new-born child whose skull plates have yet to move into position properly.
Wiganers aren’t called pie-eaters for nothing, and dinner (never lunch) was invariably a savoury pastry of some description – eaten straight from the paper bag if outdoors, or on a plate awash with an Oxo if the luxury of a dinner-time indoors was available, generally in front of Pebble Mill at One or the Amazing World of Kreskin – Canada’s premier magician and mentalist.
For a change (every other day, for example) it would be off to the chippy, where a wet mixture was usually the order of the day. A wet mixture comprised chips, peas, and the amber nectar of pea wet, which as far as I can gather, is only available in Wigan. Pea wet is, as the name suggests, the juice from the peas (which doesn’t work if the peas are too mushy). Sometimes you would have a wet mixture with scratchings (scraps of batter) or, if you were saving money, chips and pea wet was always an option – especially as the pea wet was free.
Another money saver, which I personally hated, was to take a pile of oven-proof dishes to the chippy and get your order in them so you didn’t have to buy styrofoam trays. Good for the environment too, kids!
These days, of course, it’s all pak choi butties with a side order of rocket and pine nuts for dinner, which I’ve suddenly started calling “lunch” for reasons I don’t really understand.
Perhaps a steak pie swimming in Oxo wasn’t really the healthiest meal a child could have, but there are days when I’m staring at a limp, cold sandwich filled with two or three slices of tasteless white meat that I couldn’t half go a wet mixture with scratchings. Now if only they’d bring back the Amazing World of Kreskin…

Burns Night – Hunt for Wild Haggis

In the run up to Burn’s night (25th of January) I thought it would be a good thing to tell the truth about the Haggis!

Contray to popular belief, Haggis is NOT sheep’s pluck, suet, onions and oats with seasoning encased in a sheep’s stomach… the Haggis is an ancient and mystical beastie native to the Scottish Highlands.

In the Highlands of Scotland, a hairy, nocturnal creature, no bigger than a grouse, scuttles around the mountains and hills. Hunters have been searching for the highly elusive Wild Haggis (Haggis scoticus) for centuries, but only the most skilled trackers and trappers can catch the source of the country’s (in)famous national dish. (There are a few domestic haggis farms in the Highlands and in Australia, but fanciers insist that the meat is vastly inferior to that of the wild haggis.)
The wild haggis is a shaggy, four-legged mammal with one set of legs longer than the other. While this feature allows the animal to quickly tromp around the steep mountains and hillsides of its natural habitat, it is a double-edged sword since it restricts the wild haggis to movement in just one direction. There are two different varieties of haggis, one with a longer set of right legs that can only run anticlockwise, and one with a longer set of left legs that can only run clockwise around the Highland hills. The two varieties co-exist peacefully, but they cannot usually interbreed in the wild, since a male of one variety must turn to face the same direction as a female of another variety in order to mount her. When turning, the male haggis often loses his balance and tumbles down the hill before he can breed. On the rare occasions that the male haggis is able to accomplish this incredible balancing act, the offspring produced from a union of two haggis are so unstable that they often tumble helplessly down the hills and right into a hunter’s net.

Some Haggis-ologists speculate that the Haggis is related to the Australian duck-billed platypus, being a descendant of migratory platypuses who found themselves trapped in Scotland during the last ice age and evolved to become highly adapted to its cold, damp weather.

To catch a Haggis it is advised to disguise your scent with liberal amounts of whisky, and then adopt a stumbling gait, swerving from side to side, so that the animal won’t see you coming. Many stores in Scotland also sell Haggis Whilstles. It is claimed that “in skilled hands this whistle can perfectly mimic the mating call of the Haggis.”

The enduring myth of the haggis still contributes to the Scottish tourism, according to a poll, a third of US visitors believe the delicacy to be an animal.
The poll of 1,000 US visitors to Scotland found 33% thought haggis was an animal; 23% said they came to Scotland believing they could catch one.

The Haggis became the Scottish national dish after Rabbie Burns immortalised it in the famous poem Address to a Haggis and is now traditionally eaten on Burns night… what lies on the 25th of January.

Please click the following link for the how’s and why’s of a Burns Night Supper http://www.pacdon.com.au/2010/01/22/burns-night-supper-the-how%E2%80%99s-and-whys/

The Secrets of Suet, Shredded and otherwise

In the run up to Christmas we were inundated with orders for Suet as Australia’s cooks hunted find a stockist in order to make their traditional Christmas pudding… How strange that such a basic and traditional ingredient has become so hard to find and superseded by alternative fats that simply don’t do some recipes justice.

So what is suet?

Traditional suet is the dense fat which surrounds beef kidneys now very hard to obtain in its natural form as many butchers no longer get the kidneys intact. Be that as it may, the type of suet most recipes call for is shredded. Suet is a traditional ingredient used for both sweet and savoury steamed puddings and is used in the making of mincemeat (fruit mince). It is also sometimes used to feed birds!

Because suet has a high melting point, it serves to keep the structure of pastries even after the dough has begun to set, leaving hundreds of tiny air holes. The result is a light and smoothly textured pastry, whether baked or steamed. When butter or margarine is substituted for suet, the results are often much heavier and greasy. Suet does not have any meaty taste it just imparts a rich flavour, so is suitable for both savoury and sweet dishes.

Despite the propensity for “healthy eating” which is prevailing at the moment, true Traditional English dishes that require this ingredient include Steak and Kidney Puddings, Roly Poly Puddings (both sweet and savoury), Spotted Dick, Traditional Christmas (plum) pudding and Steamed Suet Puddings.

@ Pacdon Park, we use Shredded suet it in both our Black Pudding and Haggis and so generally have some in stock but please do give us notice to secure we have ample stock.

Facts Sheet…

Suet has a melting point of between 45° and 50°C and congilation between 37° and 40°C. Its high melting point makes it ideal for deep frying and pastry.

Suet should not be confused with beef dripping, which is the collected fat and juices from the roasting pan when cooking roast beef.

Due to its high calorific content, suet is used by cold weather explorers to supplement the high daily energy requirement needed to travel in such climates. Typically the calorie requirement is in the region of 5,000-6,000 KCals per day for sledge hauling or dog-sled travelling. Suet is added to food rations to increase the fat content and help meet this high calorie requirement.

Suet had one of its first mentions in a recipe of 1617 as a key ingredient for ‘Cambridge pudding’ served to students at that university.

Shredded Suet (clarified beef fat) is much more consumer friendly than fresh suet, which is time consuming to use and prepare, and involved removing the fat from beef, clarifying it over heat, and chopping (mincing) it ready for use.

The Truth about Lard

Australian culture is so fat-phobic we demonize some of the very foods that are best for us, and among those foods is homemade lard. The supermarket bought stuff isn’t worth bothering with, it’s hydrogenated to make it shelf-stable and bleached to make it appear whiter. What I’m talking about is lard from the fat of well-raised, free range pigs.

Not only does lard make the very best pie crusts, it’s lower in saturated fat than butter. Technically lard isn’t even a saturated fat, like olive oil, it’s high in heart-healthy monounsaturated fat, and it’s one of the best dietary sources of vitamin D. It also contains no trans-fats. If there’s fat to be avoided, trans-fats are the ones.

At Pacdon Park we dry render all the natural lard needed to make our pork pie pastry. We know exactly what goes into our food, which is why we know you’ll love it!

British Revolution on the move…

23 August 2010 – Murray Now (http://murraynow.com.au/news/post/british-revolution-on-the-move/)

You may recall in Issue 3 2010 Murray Now Enews a story of a couple of young Brits determined to take on the culinary revolution of British food in Australia.

The Pacdon Boys from Bunaloo have gone from milestone to milestone. Murray Now contacted James Arrowsmith one of the young founders of Pacdon Park to do a follow up as we wanted see how things were progressing since our last article.

“We found we picked up new sales, and real interest in our product from further afield as a result of the Murray Now eNews article, especially out in the western communities of New South Wales, which was brilliant,” James said, “Most importantly these were areas that were not aware of our product and they wanted to come and see for themselves, so they made their way to Pacdon Park to purchase our product in person.”

At the moment the boys are getting ready to move Pacdon Park out, from their current facility in Bunnaloo to their new facility at Nicholas Vineyard, Pericoota Road, 4kms towards Barham on the Moama side. The Vineyard is on an old dairy site and is currently being fitted out with small goods in mind.

A new black pudding machine is currently being built, something that gets the boys excited as well as satisfying the traditional black pudding customer. British gourmet enthusiasts and travellers alike will be keen to learn this new site comes with a shop front where you can buy Pacdon’s products straight from the people who make it.

As James Arrowsmith explains, “we’ve had to move, we reached our maximum output where we were. When we first started this venture we were quite green regarding the needs heading into the future. We now know so much more about the industry and our vision for the future with Pacdon Park food production. We will be better placed to do higher volumes of produce, it will improve delivery of goods both in and out and situating ourselves close to better infrastructure will help us be a more efficient business.

To James this move means Pacdon Park food manufacturers will be the closest NSW small goods operators next to Victoria.

What really amazes Murray Now about these guys is the way they market themselves. The Murray Now team has seen firsthand how far the original story was taken. Pacdon Park boys have got the blogging bug! They are true promoters of the word viral marketing. The Murray Now eNews database is in the thousands, these guys just kept it going with Pacdon Parks’ blog section – “the Pig Pen” on their website and their facebook “Pacdon of Bunaloo” No wonder their sales are up!

Keep up the good work boys.

‘Poms behind Pacdon Park’ in the Weekly Times

July 7, 2010
THREE young Brits have brought the authentic tastes of their homeland to Australian tables, writes SARAH HUDSON

“For a couple of naive Pommy blokes in the middle of nowhere we’ve certainly made waves,” says James Arrowsmith, with a broad Lancashire accent.

“When I think back to when we first started I think, ‘gorblimey’.”

Making waves is most certainly an understatement when it comes to James, his business partner, chef Peter Tonge, and their company Pacdon Park, which specialises in gourmet traditional British pork products.

Based out of a converted dairy on a 1000ha pig, beef and sheep farm at Bunnaloo in southern NSW, the 20-something lads have, since 2008, made a range of pork pies, sausages, black pudding, haggis and smallgoods that have earned them industry plaudits and represent a remarkable story of success and hard work.

Pacdon Park is the brainchild of James, who has learnt the ropes of the business from the ground up, even converting the dairy himself, making the pie machine, learning pig butchery from a DVD, seeking seed investors, and schooling himself in smallgoods with the help of Peter.

“I was massively naive and green,” he says. “But I’m pleased as punch that I have made as many mistakes as I have because I have learnt so much from them.

“Before I started I’d never even made a sausage. But we are Brits who have grown up with this food since we were knee high to a tick … and now the best chefs in Melbourne want our stuff.

“When it’s your own business and you’re working for yourself you get a certain urgency or calling about what you do.”

That calling started back in 2002 when, back home in the UK, James put his business studies degree on hold for a gap year in Australia.

Short of funds, he decided to stay at Pacdon Park property at Bunnaloo, owned by his godfather Anthony Haworth.

“I came for one week but stayed six months. I just enjoyed it so much – I loved the lifestyle,” James says.

“Everything was just so much bigger. In the UK, we get such little portions, but here the steaks were huge and we went to a vineyard and came back with two boxes of grapes rather than a little stem.

“I come from a hilly, dry-stone wall area and here there’s huge gums and dead-straight roads and flat areas. It’s big-sky country.”

James learnt the ropes of the farm, right down to welding, and driving tractors.

But it was the pigs he developed a soft spot for.

He returned to the UK to take up his business studies but each European summer returned to Bunnaloo and Pacdon Park, each time chatting with his godfather about his growing desire to use his pigs to make products.

“We talked about pork pies because it’s the little things you miss when you are over here. And being a Pom I wasn’t used to Australian sausages.

“They’re generally pork in the UK not lamb or beef.

“I talked to a lot of ex-pats as well and it really hit me that people here didn’t understand pork pies.”

In 2006, he brought his mate Peter Tonge to our shores and together they set a mad program of developing Pacdon Park products using the property’s pigs and local ingredients.

With just a few pennies to their name, James raised $100,000, learnt on Google how to make a pork-pie machine, grabbed a copy of British food doyen Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s DVD on pig butchery and sourced traditional old recipes.

James admits initially Aussies had to be educated about eating a cold pie, which they make using their own pastry from rendered lard and which includes coarsely-ground pork shoulder.

“Brits are about warm beers and cold pies and people don’t understand that here,” he says.

The business’s ascendancy last year earned them a NSW marketing award and now the duo can’t keep up with demand, particularly for their black pudding, which uses, among other ingredients, double cream, suet, spices and, of course, blood.

“It’s our most asked-for item, the most in demand,” James says. “It’s because you can’t get good black pudding in Australia. It’s too vinegary and mass-produced.”

Pacdon Park’s range of five British-inspired sausages include Lincolnshire, plain or sage, Somerset, which contains apple and cider, and a Yorkshire leek variety.

They also make gammon, black bacon and gala pie, which is baked in bread tins to give it a loaf appearance and contains a seam of hard-boiled egg.

Their dedication and success has clearly been hard won. Last Christmas, James says he worked 48 hours straight to keep up with demand.

“Believe me, over Christmas if you’d told me I’d be doing this in two years I would have said ‘no thank you’,” he says.

Each week he travels to Melbourne for farmers’ markets and says they have just opened a shop in Moama, 60km south.

While James admits he does miss a “good spell of drizzle”, British TV and English country pubs, “I’m creating everything I miss from home”.

“I love my job and I’m proud of my product and I never thought we’d have achieved so much,” he says. “Even though it’s been hard to make a quid, it’s a great lifestyle.”

Read the artical and see the photos @ http://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/article/2010/07/07/205621_country-living.html

Why should you use the best ingredients?

Its simple, the best tasting food contains the best tasting ingredients.

At Pacdon Park we only use the very best ingredients, locally grown, free range and organic where ever possible. When looking at each of our honourable products, you can see why.

Listed are some of the keys assets to our range

Beautiful British Bangers

- Natural Skins
- Coarsely Ground, Free Range, Female Pork Shoulder (the same meat you’d have in your roasts)
- Our own pre mix (Top secret and the essence of the sausage, not the naff stuff bought in by most butchers)
- Apple and Cider, grown just down the road
- Sage, grown by our neighbours at their vineyard

…. We understand that some just aren’t fans of pork, whether that be for religious or simply porkist reasons, so we do make excellent ‘Boarder Country Lamb, Red Gum Honey and Rosemary Sausages.’

- Locally grown lamb shoulder, on or off saltbush, coarsely ground of course
- Rosemary, grown by our neighbours
- Red Gum honey, collected by Bee’s Buzzing around Deniliquin

A little about red gum honey-

Red Gum is a common Eucalypt found in Australia that produces one of the darker premium varieties of honey. Having a relatively higher level of antioxidants compared to the rest, red gum honey has a thick constituency, a bold taste (like buckwheat honey) and a distinctive aroma which I believe fans of strong honey varieties would find it appealing. It’s also a favourite ingredient in bread baking and meat marinades.

Misunderstood Best Black Pudding

- Top quality Bacon
- Organic Oats
- Double Cream straight from the dairy

The Humble Pork Pie

- Australian Organic Flour (unbleached)
- Coarsely Ground, Free Range, Female Pork Shoulder
- Dry Rendered, preservative free, natural Lard, made in house from the back fat of free range pigs.

Many people read the word Lard, and say “oh dear, oh no, fatty!” but don’t let Lard scare you.

Australian culture is so fat-phobic we demonize some of the very foods that are best for us, and among those foods is homemade lard. The supermarket bought stuff isn’t worth bothering with, it’s hydrogenated to make it shelf-stable and bleached to make it appear whiter. What I’m talking about is lard from the fat of well-raised free range pigs.
What you don’t know about lard
Not only does lard make the very best pie crusts, it’s lower in saturated fat than butter.
Technically lard isn’t even a saturated fat, like olive oil, it’s high in heart-healthy monounsaturated fat, and it’s one of the best dietary sources of vitamin D. It also contains no trans-fats. If there’s fat to be avoided, trans-fats are the ones.

Murray Now – E-Newsletter 2010/3

Pacdon Park have today featured in the ‘Murray Now’ e newsletter as their lead story

‘Murray Now’ is the regional brand for a government initiative and partners that actively promotes and co-ordinates investment attraction within 21 local government areas that call the Murray region home. By offering a united approach, matching business needs with local expertise and opportunities Murray Now is perfectly placed to put out the welcome mat. The region is dominated by three major regional centres, Albury Wodonga in the east, Echuca-Moama in the central sub-region and Sunraysia, Wentworth and Mildura in the West. In addtion, there are a number of major towns including Deniliquin and Corowa in NSW and Swan Hill, Cobram and Yarrawonga in Victoria.

 

Follow the link below to read the story in full

 

 

http://murraynow.com.au/news/e-newsletter/issue-3-2010