Martin's ribs

Waterloo butcher Martin has been swatting up on the Ginger Pig meat book, and has chosen one of Fran's delectable recipes to prepare for his Waterloo customers.

Jacob's rib - or short ladder ribs - are big meaty beef ribs, providing bags of flavour and succulence for a fairly small sum.  Martin has taken the hard work out of Fran's spiced rib recipe and rubbed the ribs with the spice mix for you, meaning they're ready to be glazed and oven baked (or, fingers crossed, cooked on the BBQ). His marinaded ribs will be available for the next two weeks so hop to our counter in Greensmiths, Waterloo, if you fancy putting some in your face.

Here's the recipe if you want to make them at home.
Recipe by Fran Warde, from the Ginger Pig Meat Book.

Serves four

For the ribs
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp salt
8 individual Jacob's ladder ribs
Vegetable oil for baking tray

For the glaze
25g butter
25g sugar
2tbsp white wine vinegar
1tbsp Worcestershire sauce
Juice of half a lemon
2 tbsp ketchup
1 tsp mustard
2tbsp honey

1. Mix together all the spices, garlic powder and seasoning, place in a resealable plastic bag, add the ribs and shake the bag to coat the ribs. Leave them in the bag, in the refrigerator, to marinade overnight. Remove them from the fridge at least an hour before you'd like to start cooking them.

2. Melt the butter for the glaze in a small saucepan, over a low heat, add the sugar and vinegar and stir until dissolved. Mix in the remaining ingredients and stir until smooth.

3. If cooking on a BBQ, the ribs will need a good 1.5 hours over a lowish heat, with fairly constant turning. If cooking in the oven, preheat to 170C / Gas Mark 3, place on a lightly oiled baking tray and cook for 1.5 hours, until cooked through. Both methods of cooking require the ribs to be frequently basted with the glaze - use a brush to paint it on evenly, delivering a wonderful, sticky finish.

Our first pop-up; #winnerwinnerchickendinner

We spent last week 'popping-up' in our Askew Road shop, turning our butchers shop into a restaurant by filling it with tables, chairs, guests, glasses, crockery, cake stands and more. Guests enjoyed a six-course surprise menu, which celebrated the arrival in the shops of our 100-day chickens. Here's a flavour of what went on.

Rillettes, scratchings, 'bread and butter' pickle

Broth with watercress, peas and parsley

Ravioli, with asparagus and a butter sauce

Coq au vin, boulagere potatoes

Cheese, crispbreads made near the farm

There was a beautiful dessert too, made by Sarah on our Yorkshire Farm, but it was so popular we're serving it again at our two pop-up events in Hackney this week, and don't want to spoil the surprise.

Think you might fancy coming to a future dinner-in-a-butchers-shop? Email enquiries@thegingerpig.co.uk with the subject field 'mailing list' and we'll be sure to let you know about future events and new meaty things in general...but definitely, definitely no spam.

@GingerPigLtd really enjoyed last night's six course chicken dins with @lagebaston and especially great to meet @ruduss and @barmbakery

@GingerPigLtd thanks for delicious food at#winnerwinnerchickendinner last night - ate so much choock I might just start sprouting feathers!

still stuffed after #winnerwinnerchickendinner courtesy of @GingerPigLtd. Great night though - when's#winnerwinnerbeefdinner??

@GingerPigLtd huge compliments to the chef as well please!

Thanks @GingerPigLtd for a great #winnerwinnerchickendinner last night - can't wait to roast my 100 day pullet this weekend

thanks to @GingerPigLtd for last night's#winnerwinnerchickendinner - I am still full! Found a bit of cheese in my coat on way to work...

Many thanks to @GingerPigLtd who put on a cracking night last night :) twitpic.com/9wkm9l

Ate some amazing food last night at @GingerPigLtd's supper club. Lovely people and lovely chicken. Especially the ravioli.

Coq au vin #winnerwinnerchickendinner, thank you @GingerPigLtd. I'm in food heaven! pic.twitter.com/ybQH3dW6

#winnerwinnerchickendinner

With our stunningly succulent, eye-bogglingly tasty 100-day chickens hitting the shops today, we've got some celebrating to do. The Ginger Pig chicken has been a labour of love - not to mention blood, sweat and feathers - and is on par with the best birds from France (we'd say nosing ahead but that's a bold, bold claim...).

These chickens will be popping up - in the form of dinner, a six course mystery tasting menu - in our Shepherds Bush and Hackney shops over the next few weeks. The menu will showcase the best of both cockerels and pullets (hens), as well as the talents of our exceptional butchers and chefs. We'll be cooking dinner for four nights on the dates and in the lshops stated below, starting at 7:30pm each night:


Shepherd's Bush: June 13th and 14th
Hackney: June 20th and 21st


To attend one of our #winnerwinnerchickendinners simply email enquiries@thegingerpig.co.uk with the subject #winnerwinnerchickendinner and state your preferred and secondary date and how many people you'd like to book for (up to six).


Dinner will be £45 for six courses, and is BYO booze. A chicken will peck names from a hat, and we'll confirm reservations by Friday 8th June; come join us, good luck, cluck cluck!

The Queen of Coronation Chicken

Our Coronation Chicken has a little more freshness and light about it than the original, using a yoghurt base rather than buckets of heavy mayonnaise, and a garnish of fresh herbs, lemon wedges and a little salad. We left out the dried fruit (which appears terribly divisive), though a tablespoon of good mango chutney would be a fine addition to this recipe. This stray from tradition may get the most patriotic of eaters tutting their disagreement, but trust us - it’s bloody lovely.

For this recipe we poached a Ginger Pig 100-day cockerel, using the breast meat to make enough Coronation Chicken to serve four as a starter or light lunch, leaving the legs and a divine stock for the next day. If you're cooking for a crowd, just double the 'coronation' ingredients and use the juicy leg meat too.

The 100-day cockerels and pullets hit the shops on Thursday 31st May giving you plenty of time to 'coronate' one in time for Her Madge's big do.

Ginger Pig's Coronation Chicken

For poaching

4 bay leaves

4 cardamom pods

1 cinnamon stick

1 star anise

Handful parsley stalks (you can use the leaves in your chicken broth the next day)

1tsp whole black peppercorns

1tsp salt

1 white onions, peeled and quartered

2 garlic cloves, smashed

1 cockerel (a Ginger Pig 100-day pullet or a large free-range chicken would also work well), un-trussed

Water, to cover the chicken

  

To coronate

1tbsp tomato puree

½ tsp ground coriander

A large pinch cinnamon

1tsp cumin

½ garlic clove, very finely minced

2cm cube fresh ginger, very finely minced

250ml full fat natural or Greek yoghurt

1tbsp mayonnaise

1tbsp good mango chutney (optional)

Squeeze of lemon juice

Salt to taste

To garnish

Fresh coriander leaves, picked and any huge ones torn in half

Fresh mint leaves, finely shredded

Fine slivers of red onion

A little cracked black pepper

Cherry tomatoes

Finely sliced cucumber

Lemon wedges

Sourdough or rye bread lightly toasted or super-fresh, soft white bread rolls

Method

1. Put all of the poaching ingredients in a large pot, ensuring the water just covers the bird.

2. Bring to a very gentle simmer and cook for two hours.

3. Remove the chicken from the pot and allow to rest for 15 minutes, before carving off the breasts in thick slices. Set the meat to one side to cool down, and don’t forget to refrigerate your chicken stock and legs once cool.

4. Mix together the sauce ingredients, combining everything except the yoghurt until smooth and then adding the yoghurt. Add salt to taste, and extra lemon juice if you like it tangy.

5. Roughly tear the breast meat into the sauce, and then either refrigerate until use (eat within two days) or pile everything straight onto your fanciest serving dish. Garnish with the fresh herbs, sliced onion and cracked pepper and place the cherry tomatoes, cucumber slices, lemon wedges and bread around the plate for proper retro-tastic presentation.

Grab the Pimm’s or a glass of English fizz, sing the national anthem and dig in.

Thai pot-roasted cockerel

We've been busy rearing some stunning 100-day chickens. We have put together a few recipes to make the very most of them and here's the first - enjoy.

Our cockerels should be cooked slowly at a low temperature to produce a silky, succulent texture to match their unbeatable flavour. We’ve put together a light-yet-satisfying Thai dish, but these birds can be used in any casserole, pot-roast or poaching recipe, for cock-a-leekie soup or traditional coq au vin, or a Heston-esque, 5-hours-at-90C-style roast. The large, meaty legs also make for excellent confit and rillettes.

The end result isn’t the prettiest bird you'll ever present to the table - no crispy skin - but he has flavour in spades; boy is he tasty. The meat pulls away from the bone with gentlest persuasion, and the reduced broth turns this meal into a laksa-type dish; comforting yet fresh, suitable both for chilly nights and warmer days. If you don't have a large pot – and this recipe does need a big one – joint the cockerel (or ask one of our butchers to) before cooking and reduce the cooking time by 45 minutes. A 3kg cockerel will easily serve six.

Ingredients

For the pot roasting

A 3kg cockerel

4 sticks lemongrass, bashed with a rolling pin

5 kaffir lime leaves (dried are fine, and the zest of a lime will also do)

5 cloves garlic, peeled and bashed

A large-ish (around 6cm) piece ginger, peeled and finely sliced

10 black peppercorns

4 star anise

1 large bunch coriander, stalks and leaves separated (retain both)

1tsp chilli flakes

Sea salt

1 tin of coconut milk (full fat is best)

1l chicken stock

A very large pot!

To serve

Thai fish sauce

Lime segments

The reserved coriander leaves

2 spring onions, finely chopped

Cooked rice or noodles

Method

1. Heat the oven to 160C.

2. Un-truss the cockerel to allow for even cooking and sprinkle a little salt inside the cavity of the bird. Put the cockerel upside down into your large pot along with all of the remaining pot roast ingredients, leaving out the coriander leaves, and sprinkling a little more salt into the pot. Put a lid on the pot and bake in the oven for 3 hours, baste every 45 minutes or so and carefully turn the bird over half way through.

3. Once the cooking time is up, allow the dish to stand for ten minutes before very, very carefully removing the cockerel from the pot using a fish slice and a carving fork. The tender wings may fall off at this point, and make an excellent snack for the cook. Wrap the bird in foil and rest it until serving.

4. Reduce the cooking liquid by around a quarter, until it loosely coats the back of a spoon, then strain and discard the aromatics and spices. Add fish sauce to taste - a good tablespoon should do it - and serve bowls of cooked rice or noodles with plenty of sauce, -think half rice dish, half soup - pieces of succulent chicken, spring onions, coriander leaves, a squeeze of lime and a dollop of chilli sauce for hot heads.

The Ginger Pig 100-day chicken and pop-up suppers to celebrate!

For six months we’ve been driving each week to Rungis market, on the outskirts of Paris, to buy stunning French poultry. With poulet de Bresse, poulet noir and corn fed Landes chickens flying off the blocks of our five London shops, we know that they're popular - quite rightly! - with customers as well as butchers and chefs.

Pourquoi?

Because these chickens are simply outstanding; quite different to poultry produced in Britain, in part due to nature – slow growing, leg-meat heavy breeds not commonly reared in the UK – and in part due to nurture. The birds are grown up to a month longer than their British counterparts, from 93-110 days as opposed to just 65 for a commercially grown free range British chicken.  They’re leggy, they’re succulent and they’re richly flavoursome.

We believe that we produce pork, beef and lamb that is among the best in the world, and so in collaboration with the Botterills of Lings Farm on the Belvoir Estate, we’ve turned our trotters to chicken and started rearing our own incredible poultry.

The Ginger Pig 100-day chicken

The Ginger Pig chickens, braving the outside world on a drizzly day in the estate

A cross between a Cornish Game cockerel and a Sussex or Dorking hen, our chickens are bigger than your average bird and have been reared outdoors, free-ranging over grass and herbage in the heart of the Belvoir Estate on the border of Lincolnshire and Leicestershire. They’re dry-plucked, hung for a week and labelled as cockerels or pullets (hens) to ensure you can cook them the right way for the tastiest, most succulent meat. Both birds should be cooked low and slow to give great texture, with the cockerels particularly suited to pot-roasting and casseroles, and the pullets producing a fantastic roast.

We have - quite literally - spent years getting this right and are delighted to announce that these wonderful birds will be hitting our shops in time for the weekend. Chick chick hooray!!! We've got recipes up our sleeves too, which we'll be sharing on the Hog Blog all week starting this afternoon.

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner: The Ginger Pig pops up

Chickens this delicious – as well as the people who’ve worked hard to rear them – deserve a bit of a party, so we’ll be hosting dinners in our Shepherd's Bush and Hackney shops to celebrate the new addition to our marble slabs. Diners will eat their way around these birds through five courses, prepared by our butchers and chefs. 

Shepherd's Bush: June 13^th and 14^th                                                               Hackney: June 20^th and 21^st

We'll announce details of how to grab a spot at Winner Winner Chicken Dinner at 10am on Thursday this week. Places are extremely limited so watch this space...


CLUCK CLUCK!

Little picnic pies

At the beginning of April our Yorkshire chutney queens Julie and Hestor turned their able hands to a new project, and developed some dinky little versions of our beloved pies intended to be grab and go picnics. From nearly twenty varieties we - through rigorous testing (very technical) - whittled it down to a handful of favourites, intended to go into our shops as "pick and mix" picnic pies. 

And then it rained and it rained and it rained and it rained. The fields became muddy and our calves were getting stuck in the quagmire (we pulled them out, don't worry). Kevin, the stockman who looks after the pigs, had to put bales and bales of straw down to stop us losing little piglets to the mud. Just as we were about to gather our animals up two by two and load them into a big boat, the sun came out (yesterday), so out little pies are hitting the shops for the weekend, hooray!

Here's the menu:

Black pudding and sausage pinwheels

Chicken, bacon, prune and spring onion pie

Bacon, pork, sage and applepie

Stilton and caramelised onion quiche

Steak, stilton and caramelised onion pie

We'll be trialling them in Askew Road and Moxon Street to start, with the intention of having them in all of our shops if they're a success. Let us know if you try them, we've got everything crossed for a sunny picnic-or-BBQ weekend...