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Kill it Cook it Eat it - Burgers

Saturday, March 20, 2010 at 01:02PM
Tags: animal species, beef calves, exmoor ponies, grass fed, lush pastures, mothers milk, pipers, red rubies, red ruby cattle
Filed in: Pipers Farm, BBC TV Series, Recipes

We start the journey with our 6 young people, all from different backgrounds, experiences and lifestyles, and introduce them to our Red Ruby cattle. Most of our cattle have been born and reared on Exmoor, where the landscape is stunning - wild beautiful, moody - but the land itself is only capable of growing heather and moorland grass: a perfect home for a vast variety of wildlife, including deer, sheep, Exmoor ponies and the Red Rubies, who all thrive on the poor vegetation. No need to buy in feed from across the world, an issue which concerns James, the vegan.

We meet John Richards whose family have farmed Ash Farm for 4 generations, drawing on a wealth of experience of stockmanship and how to manage that piece of Exmoor.

So our Red Rubies are grass-fed, hardy and live on their mothers' milk and moorland vegetation for the first 8 months of their lives. Compare this to many beef calves who spend at most 7 days with their mothers, more likely 2 - 3 days, and then are reared on artificial milk powder.

At one year old, the calves move down to the low-lying lush pastures of the Somerset Levels at Athelney. This is another amazing and ancient landscape, crossed by large drainage ditches. In King Alfred's time Athelney, where the farmhouse stands, was an island surrounded by marsh and was underwater for much of the year. Now the land still floods each winter, which naturally fertilizes the soil. Tim never spreads fertilizer or reseeds the pastures and yet the diversity of plant, bird and animal species is great. This is the natural way to manage the Somerset Levels, which means the only crops suitable for the landscape are willow for baskets and cattle. Once again we are working in close harmony with nature.

At about 3 years old the cattle come to Pipers Farm, with its small fields - home to a wide variety of plants, birds and animals - and wide hedges - natural corridors for wildlife to move safely from place to place. Like Exmoor and the Somerset Levels, Pipers Farm is more like a nature reserve, and there are no other crops we could grow without radically changing the landscape as it has been for centuries.

The fields are too small for growing cereals or commercial vegetables - the only way would be to remove these ancient hedges - and only 10% of the farm would be able to grow organic vegetables, because the land is too wet or too steep, which would lead to soil erosion.

The soil at Pipers Farm is naturally rich and the grasses in our pastures are deep rooted to draw nutrients from the soil and full of clover which is not only sweet to eat but naturally fertilizes the ground.

These landscapes which are only suitable to grow grass must be managed, or they would revert to a wilderness. Management could be by mowing, using fossil fuels, or by grazing with livestock, a system developed over centuries as the best way to manage these landscapes.

We feed a small amount of rolled barley and rolled oats to finish the cattle, all from our local feed mill, with whom we have worked closely for 20 years. We have complete confidence in them and trust them to deliver exactly what we want. We could not have the same trust in large feed mills, more of this later.

The 6 young people followed the journey of two bullocks from Pipers Farm to the abattoir, a small artisan family-run business. John and Richard are farmers themselves and craftsmen, which is clearly shown on camera. We have complete confidence and trust in their work to slaughter our livestock in the most humane way possible. That is important to us, because any stress at slaughter reduces the quality of the carcase. John and Richard show the whole process to the young people, and the cameras - not something they would be willing to do if there was anything to hide, and not something many other abattoirs would be prepared to entertain.

We then return with the carcases to Pipers Farm and meet Tubs, John and Garry in the cutting room. All three guys are highly skilled and experienced in their work and we have complete confidence and trust in them to deliver what our customers love about Pipers Farm meat - well hung, scrupulously trimmed, packed in convenient, easy to manage quantities.

Chrystella: I can't trust what's in meat anymore, that's the reason why I became vegetarian. . . . it's about welfare too.

Everything we sell we produce ourselves. We control every detail. The reason for this is we can give customers, who share Chrystella's concerns about what they are eating, the complete confidence that when they buy from Pipers Farm they know exactly what they are buying. These were our own concerns when we first started Pipers Farm, that not only did we not have confidence in what was available to buy, and we even felt unhappy feeding the chickens we were growing for a still highly reputable High Street chain to our two young children!

It goes back to the complete trust we have in our farmers, such as John Richards and Tim Morgan, to rear our stock in the best possible way and in total harmony with the landscapes, and associated wildlife, they are nurturing, as their families have done for generations.

Back to the complete trust in the feed we are giving to our animals, because we will only use feed from our local feed mill, and not pursue sources of cheaper feed which may contain ingredients which compromise our standards, and mean we cannot give the assurance we feel is so important to our customers.

Back to the complete trust in John and Richard at the abattoir.

And back to the complete confidence in all the guys who work here at Pipers Farm, the butchers, the cutting room team, the chefs, the guys on the farm and in our Exeter shop.

As shown in the programmes, we hang all our meat in the traditional way on the bone, our Red Ruby beef for 4 weeks, our lamb, pork and turkeys for 3 weeks and our chickens for 2 weeks. This is pretty unique. Hanging develops flavour and tenderness and, as Peter describes in the programme, during the hanging process, the carcase loses about 10% of its weight. Compare this to some supermarket meat which is "matured" for 21 days - taken off the bone and matured in a vacuum pack - not the same process at all. And almost all chicken available on the market are killed and straight onto the shelf.

It means every piece of meat our customers buy from Pipers Farm is not full of water so goes further and feeds more people than its industrially produced equivalent that has not been hung. To compare the price of a kilo of meat from an industrial system with Pipers Farm is meaningless - much better to compare the price per portion .

When we met Harry Lansdown, commissioning editor for the BBC in June, it became clear that, to make the programme "Kill it Cook it Eat it", we needed the 6 young people to get close up to the animals, to understand how we rear them, to pick out two of these animals for slaughter, to watch them being slaughtered, then help the butchers to cut the meat, and Garry to create the fast food; to cook and then eat the meat from the animals they had chosen and watched being slaughtered.

We all agreed that it would be interesting to do this and compare the freshly killed burger, made to the Pipers Farm recipe, with a Pipers Farm steakburger made from mince that had been hung for 4 weeks. It would illustrate clearly the taste and texture difference between the fresh killed and 4 week hung. After our meeting with Harry we did some taste comparisons at home with friends and family, including a couple of the chefs from Lords Cricket Ground who were staying here to learn more about the meat we supply them. Everyone, even some youngish children, found the difference in both taste and texture was huge, just as the six young people discovered on camera.

Kerri: I would love to be able to buy food that is nicely produced and well looked after, but for me, at the moment, because I am on a really strict budget I cannot justify spending that much more.

This is the starting point for Kerri's journey and we follow her as she understands more about the meat she is buying and feeding to her 2 small children. When Helen Osborn shows the young people what ingredients go into an economy burger, to be honest it was an eye opener to me too.

Kerri: on smelling the ‘economy burger’ mix: . . . the garlic and the onion make it smell a bit nicer, but it's kinda there as a cover up.

Kerri: I have a husband and two children. They tend to eat a lot of things that are easy to hold and things like chicken nuggets and stuff

When we came to cook our freshly killed and well hung Pipers Farm steak burgers, although the recipe was identical and the look when raw was similar, the freshly hung burgers fell apart because of the higher water content. The economy burgers from a reputable High Street chain did not in any way resemble either of the burgers made at Pipers Farm - the time spent with Helen clearly explained to all six young people why.

Kerri: so much far and away better than a cheap rubbish burger on tasting the difference between Pipers Farm steakburgers (£1.30 each) (which is 85% beef and gives one portion) and economy supermarket burgers (40p each) (which would require 2 burgers for one portion and minimal nutritional value)

Which is better value? What do you think? Let us know in your comments.