Crystal Palace Local

Our first newsletter of 2012, so here’s wishing you all a very happy (although belated!) New Year, we hope you all have a great one.

We have some very exciting news to impart: the first of our fresh meats has now arrived and I shall be popping up to London Bridge tomorrow to collect some game from East Anglia, in readiness for you meaty weekend!

Below you shall find some details of our meaty goodness.

Chicken
Chicken, Label Anglais from just outside Harlow in Essex. This breed is used by the likes of Heston Blumenthal at The Fat Duck and his pub, The Hinds Head, and Giorgio Locatelli at Locanda Locatelli. They will be whole birds with giblets so you can make your own gorgeously rich sauce! Label Anglais is a derivative of an ancient English chicken breed, the Cornish Red and quite similar in flavour to the AOC (Appellation d’Origine Controlee) birds, Poulet de Bresse. The birds live until they are about 95 days old and are dry-plucked.

Beef
Beef, 21-day aged pure breed Aberdeen Angus beef from Kent. 4oz burgers, tasty mince that doesn’t leach water when you try and brown it (!), thick sirloin steaks, rolled sirloin for roasting.

Lamb
Romney Marsh Lamb from Kent, one of England’s older breeds of sheep. Cutlets, mince and rack of lamb. Personally I prefer lamb mince in chilli than beef mince! Also coming next week (a week today), from a southern Scottish farm, are shanks and diced shoulder from the Lleyn breed of sheep.

Pork
Gloucester Old Spot pork from Kent. Not just pork cuts like tenderloin and belly strips but dry-cured smoked and unsmoked bacon, and proper sausages: pure pork but with 80% meat with the rest being pork fat and additions such as leek and chilli. Also arriving today will be smoked and unsmoked back and streaky bacon.

Game
Perhaps more exciting than the chickens, beef, lamb and pork, on Saturday morning I’m collecting end-of-season game from Radwinter Game. Gilly and Jeremy of Radwinter are based about 5 miles outside Saffron Walden in Essex. They process game from shoots in Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. However, the game coming this weekend is from their own shoot on their own farm from the 21st of this month! Arriving will be partridges and pheasants (breast fillets and whole birds), rabbits and hare; also venison in sausage form with garlic and herbs, wild mushrooms and chestnuts. Don’t forget the next opportunity to get such fresh game birds will be when the season kicks off again late in the year, although frozen ones are available in many shops throughout the year!

Although none of the farms we’re getting our meats from are certified organic, they have a ‘better than organic’ approach to rearing their animals. For example, no antibiotics are used unless the animals are sick and they eat what they used to eat before the intervention of modern-day intensive farming methods. And the animals are truly free range; the chickens are ‘forced’ to roam their fields by virtue of their feeding and watering stations being moved around the fields. Importantly such an approach results in meat like you may have never tasted before.

In 2–3 weeks’ time we will also begin offering an ordering service where you can order the more special cuts that we may not stock, such as whole legs of lamb for that special Sunday roast, or simply to reserve some goodies from our shelves.

If you do pop in and buy some meat over the next week, we would really appreciate your honest feedback, as we’ve not been able to taste everything!

Thanks and we hope to see you soon,
Manish and The Team at Good Taste Food and Drink

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Good Taste Food and Drink 28 Westow Hill Crystal Palace London, London SE19 1RX

Our telephone:
020 8761 7455