Often on a Thursday morning you’ll see me coming out of the Club and heading for the butchers shop clutching a bottle of wine. It’s not what it seems, honest! It’s a key ingredient to our sausages that I make around there.
Our sausages are pure meat, with a few herbs and spices. The fat in the meat absorbs the wine and gives them a lovely moistness as well as a good flavour. Making them like this is quite skill because the meat has to be ground to just the right texture then the mixture worked, a little like kneading dough, to bring it together. Each batch is different, requiring a different amount of grinding and more or less wine – hence my need to take the bottle with me!
Paul Bowyer has worked closely with us to source the right meat and come up with the right cuts for many of our dishes. A good case in point is our dry-aged sirloin steak which makes a regular appearance on the specials board. This has a lovely depth of flavour and tenderness which is achieved by leaving the meat to hang for 28 days at between 1-3 degree Celsius. As well as tasting better, it is less bloody so more suitable to eating medium rare, the way we like to cook it … or really rare if you like! My personal favourite is our Tagliata; rare steak cut into strips served with Parmesan shavings and peppery leaves. It’s delicious.
Paul and his team deal with our varied requests with patience and good humour (…their skill in handling the sausage machine to get the desired length is legendary!!) and we consider ourselves very lucky to have such great butchers as next door neighbours.
Nicola (Sous chef)