Young Farmer Sharp - Guest post by Michael Sharp

As the son of Farmer Sharp, I sometimes find myself in food related conversations before I know it. 

I was in a pub the other night, and when I should have been dancing and chatting up the girls, I ended up sat at the bar talking to a farmer for half an hour about sheep, farming and food. Food must just run in my blood. 

These conversations don’t just happen just with food industry people either. I often find myself in debates with people - like in one instance, there was a girl at college determined she was going to be a vegetarian, using the justification of ‘killing animals is wrong’, but all the while walking around in leather shoes. Knowing what I know, this got my hackles up and we battled it out about the production of leather for the entire lunch hour. Can’t blame the lass as she was totally uneducated about food, and probably thought a potato came from a tree. 

I’m assuming that she can’t be and most certainly isn’t the only person in this group (uneducated about food), and obviously this needs to change if people are to lead better, healthier lifestyles. If I can learn, so can everyone else. They just need a good teacher.

Pulled mutton shoulder - Recipe

Recently, seen that sometime cook Tom Kerridge on the TV with pulled shoulder of Lamb (only joking, he is good value, a lot of man for your money).

Here's my more traditional pulled mutton shoulder, which I think is a much better choice for the very slow cooking methodology required for pulled meat.

An essential requirement for this recipe is a renaissance quality mutton shoulder (only available from proper butcher farm shops or farmers markets). 

The great thing about this recipe is that ewe can do a full mutton shoulder and have it for a few days or use part of the shoulder and this will do just as well.

The classic accompaniment for sheep meat, lamb or mutton is anchovies. As the anchovies are salted that’s the first of the seasoning requirements, the second (and second only to the anchovies) is the garlic then, after those two in importance comes the rosemary.

So here’s the plan;-

1. Get the shoulder or part shoulder fat side down in a very hot cast iron frying pan and brown all of the shoulder that you can to the point of nearly burning, then make deep incisions to insert the anchovies,  garlic and rosemary. 
2. Rub plenty of proper sea salt if necessary brushing the outside lightly with water so the salt will stay put, and grind some fresh black pepper in as well and put it all in a pre-heated oven at about 150-160 Degrees Celsius for just under an hour per lb.
3. It is ok to either sit the shoulder on either a bed of nice veggies, like fennel or parsnips, or (as I like it) to have nothing underneath so you get a fantastic gravy to warm the leftovers in the following day.

Also as an aside, in my mind no sheep meat dish is finished without a little mint sauce.

Cured and Smoked Herdwick Mutton

There has always been a rich tradition of curing and smoking sheep meat wherever flocks of sheep were kept. The same applies to flocks of goats.  Cured meats are the old fashioned version of a fridge - keeping protein wholesome and long lasting.

Mature Herdwick wether, are castrated male sheep which were kept to an older age. They have a deeper flavour, a dark, tight, grained texture to the meat and were sometimes used to cure. 

They give a bigger leg than a ewe (a mature lambing female) and one of the things about curing is that older animals have a more appropriate ph for curing. The older legs cure more successfully and have a much more complex flavour profile (which is one of the reasons why the best Prosciutto’s are made from older animals).

It’s normally assumed that this product was produced in times gone by in the “continental way” of producing air-dried fancy salami, but this is a wrong assumption.

Cumbrian cured mutton isn’t produced this way and one of the reasons for there not being an established tradition in the UK of Italian style salami curing is the good old British weather and there is nowhere better to understand this than in Cumbria - it never rains in Cumbria (honestly, if you ask the millions of visitors we get to the lakes you will get probably get different comments about the weather). ;-)

The high humidity does mean that there isn’t the possibility of making any air-dried product that would be safe to eat. However, in this day and age there is an ever growing group of artisan salami producers and wholesalers who do quite nicely with a little technological help.

The cured mutton is to be cooked as you would do your ham and eggs for breakfast or for dinner at night. To add additional shelf life to the cured leg (and I guess extra flavour), it is (was) smoked, not in a purpose-built smoke house but in a smoke box built in to the back of the chimney. These disused stone smoke boxes can be found in many old farmhouses all over the lake district.

These Herdwick hams are not the mild flavoured gammon ham we have become accustomed to today, and as with all the things that aren’t mild or insipid it is an acquired taste. In my opinion though, it’s an amazing one. In the past, there also wouldn’t have been the consistency of product expected by the modern consumer, but maybe, just maybe that is part of the hams’ charm.

Mutton

Read my most recent POST on Borough Market's blog

Radio Sharpie - Flavour profile of meat

The Wild Lake District

It is assumed by tourists who come to the picturesque Lake District that it is a natural untamed environment  - not a bit of it! 

Within the UK, our environment has been shaped by centuries of food and forestry production and the Lake District is no exception to that - the hill sides were deforested to accommodate the iconic and stout Herdwick sheep. Some of the best lamb and mutton in the world (and as an expert I say that without fear of contradiction) is produced from the Herdwick sheep. In Elizabeth I’s time Herdwick mutton was known as the Queen’s mutton and was the best ewe could get!

Zwarble vs Herdwick

This week I saw for the first time Zwarble sheep in detail and up close. Strangely fond of black fleeced sheep. They are good looking and as my grandfather said "like a decent table leg on each corner, not coming out the same hole", good overall confirmation (good fleshy carcass) and very solid.

I have to say though, they are nowhere near the much vaunted, and the much venerated Herdwick sheep of the Lake District who in the last few months and after several years have achieved the PDO (Product Designated Origin) status - Slow Food at its European best.

If you were to buy both a Zwarble meat and Herdwick meat, the Herdwick would win hands down.