Barbeque tips

Summer is finally here, bringing with it perfect BBQ weather.
All our burgers are hand-made and our shops have come up with their own individual recipes, the following burgers can be found at the following shops.

Marylebone - Beef, marrow & parsley
Borough Market - Beef, marrow, lamb kosea
Hackney - Beef, salt, pepper, garlic & worcester sauce
Waterloo - Beef, bacon, brown sauce, spring onion, parsley & chives

The majority of our sausages will cook perfectly on a BBQ, feel free to ask your butcher when purchasing, they will be more than happy to advise. A couple we would recommend you try are our Hawksmoor Sausage, which is a pork, beef and lamb sausage and our limited edition Beef, Chilli sausage which we have just made especially for BBQ's.

Rump steak is perfect for BBQ's, however other steaks will cook fine.

Don't forget to marinade your meat, rump steak or ribs marinated in the following are delicious:

4 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
100ml Soy sauce
8cm ginger peeled and diced
1 -2 red chillies chopped
Freshly groud black pepper

Blackface Hogget

This week our shops have the last of the North Country Blackface lambs which have been grazing on the moor for a year. These will have fantastic herby flavour and are ideal for slow cook or Middle Eastern recipes.

The Ginger Pigs answer to Stargazy Pie

We were asked to make a medieval looking pie. Les the baker came up with a fantastic recipe using a hot water crust pastry filled with coarsely chopped pork with a pigs trotter staring from the top of the pastry. As the pie cooks the rich jelly oozes straight into the soft pork. These are not the smallest pies but great for a family picnic or buffet table. We can make these to order.

Burgers for BBQs

With early summer upon us and the start of some warm weather all our shops are making beef burgers to their own recipes.

Borough market are using the thick first slice of rump steak coarsely minced with bone marrow.
Marylebone (Moxon street) are making a very simple american style burger using only minced steak with a little salt and pepper.
Waterloo - Tom our and trained chef and butcher at our Lower marsh shop inside Greensmiths makes his burgers to a different recipe every day.
Hackney - Daniel and Cosmin are blending minced steak with salt, pepper, a little garlic and worcester sauce.

None of the shops use artifical flavourings or colours and don't add rusk. All the burgers we sell are perfect for the BBQ

British Pie Awards

Ginger Pig don't often enter competitions but Les our head baker and his 'angels' are making such wonderful handmade pies that we thought it only right to shout about them. The British Pie awards are being judged today in Melton Mowbray.

We have entered our pork, pork ginger and rhubarb, steak and kidney, beef stilton & onion, pork leek and mustard, pork chicken & ham pies. For more information about the awards go to http://www.britishpieawards.co.uk/

ITV1 asked us for one of our more unusual pies the Pork, Ginger and Rhubarb pie for a tasting on the David Dickinson show. This pie came about because many of our customers over the years have asked us why we don't have ginger in our sausages and pies etc so we developed a pork pie with just a little bit of stem ginger chopped into the pork. We were just playing about with the pie at the time when the first of the forced rhubarb was becoming available. One of the areas well known for rhubarb is Yorkshire where our farm and bakery is based. Although rhubarb is thought of as a fruit it is in fact a vegetable which works really well with pork, so we didn't think it too strange to be putting a vegetable in the top of our pies. The first batch of these pies were tested on our staff who absolutely loved them so we started selling them in our shops and customers seem to be loving them too!
See how they got on - 1tv1 3pm today.

All our pies are available in our shops so be your own judge, win or lose Les we think you and your team are the best!

The BBC's Countryfile and John Craven visit Grange Farm

John Craven and the Countryfile team visited Grange Farm last week to film Gareth Barlow meeting his 'farming hero' our very own Tim Wilson!

Gareth, who doesn't come from a farming background, has started his chosen career with a few sheep and uses Tim as his role model.

Meet him on Countryfile, BBC 1 on Sunday 18 April.

The Orchard

We continue to restore the dry-stone walls around the farm at Levisham.


The latest work has been encircling the young orchard of gages, damsons and plums through which we will run some of our chickens.


Marcus Cordingley, a local bee-keeper, will also place some hives amongst the trees.

Thus this relatively small piece of ground will be sustaining three types of agriculture - fruit, eggs and honey.