Celebrating Slava was not generally encouraged in socialist Yugoslavia, although many people did still observe it. These days Slava seems to be celebrated as an occasion to get the family together and eat pork. I am very enthusiastic about both family get togethers and roast pig, so today I did sticky pork ribs with rum glaze (thanks Nigella) and homemade coleslaw, plus smashed potatoes (thanks Jill Dupleix) and rye bread – minus the family bit, seeing as we’re on the other side of the world. I have to admit, it was a bit off piste with the rum glaze – a whole pig on a spit would probably have been more authentic – but it was in keeping with the two Balkan mainstays of pork and cabbage. And, anyway, the other thing I’ve learnt about Balkan culture is that they really know how to have a good time and these ribs were really, really finger licking good.

A couple of weeks ago, I won a twitter competition held by Tim Elwin of posh wholesale delivery firm Urban Food Market (he’s @urbanfoodmarket). If the words “twitter competition” make you think of winning a lollipop or nice warm feeling, think again – I scored a $150 box of Bultarra saltbush lamb.

I’ve only had saltbush lamb once before, and was disappointed. I bought it from a person at the Farmer’s Markets in Canberra who was an agent, not the producer, and there was nothing about it to justify the extra cost. I’ve since found out from friend-of-a-friend Graham Strong who runs Arcadia Saltbush Lamb that many producers don’t graze their flocks on Old Man Saltbush for the extended period that’s necessary to really ramp up the flavour. As always, it pays to investigate your food, particularly if you’re buying a premium product.

Still, I was eager to try it because I’d read very high praise for Bultarra lamb from Neil of At My Table, whose blog has happily come back to life. It’s free range, naturally grazed, doesn’t have any nasty shit in it and the lambs aren’t mulesed. And, according to Neil, “the salt bush confers a concentrated lamb taste, not gamey in any way, just full on, robust, flavour; it was almost like eating lamb for the first time“.

When Tim announced he’d be giving some away, I sat glued to the computer. I whizzed in superfast with the answer to his question (about his site) and did a little happy dance when I found out I was in luck, because I am always greedy keen to try new artisanal Australian produce.

Urban Food Market is a Sydney-based business, but Tim arranged delivery to the in-laws when we were passing through town for family visits and packed it in an esky to bring home. As it lasts well refrigerated for a couple of weeks in its packaging we decided to not freeze any and have a lamb-fest instead.

The pack included a couple of rib racks. I’ve only encountered lamb ribs once before, and it wasn’t a happy experience. We’d bought a whole beast from my sister in law’s farm, Coolumbooka, in Southern NSW. It’d been butchered down there, and they’d bagged up the ribs in some vile sweet gunk that was no doubt purchased in an industrial drum.

With meat this good, I wanted to keep it fairly simple and focus on its inherent flavour. Serendipitously, the November Gourmet Traveller has a recipe for lamb ribs that looked perfect. You make a paste of lemon zest, dried oregano and mint, a tiny bit of chilli and EVOO. Fortunately oregano and mint are the only dried herbs I believe in, and it all was on hand to marinate overnight.

I copped the 34 degree heat today to bake them at 150 degrees. You need to use a rack in a baking dish to drain the fattiness, and cover the trays with foil to keep them moist. Then a rest until dinner time.

You finish the racks over a hot chargrill, which leaches out any last too-fatty bits, and crisps and colours them. I decided against the GT salad, but made one with watercress, cos and fennel from the garden. I had some fresh borlotti beans, and some broad beans from my friend Lyn’s garden, so used the GT’s thyme and mustard dressing on them. I also made a tiny bowl of cherry tomatoes with chilli and lemon juice and some fritters of corn and our own asparagus, adapting a recipe from Michael Ruhlman’s brilliant cookbook Ratio.

Owy started eating first (I was still pouring the wine) and he made some very odd noises. I asked him if it was OK, but he kept chewing and didn’t say anything. He finally answered in two words, the second of which was “Yeah!” and first one of which was rude. Very rude, in fact. Then he said “Spectacular”.

The meat had the depth of flavour and rich intensity that I was hoping for, but the real blowout was the incredible melting texture. I finally get why people rave about Saltbush lamb – and I’m very excited about the other cuts still waiting. A big fat thank you to Tim and Urban Food Market. Any suggestions or recommendations for particularly delicious ways of cooking the other cuts (a beautiful rack, shanks and an easy-carve leg roast) are welcome.

15 November – updated to add: we’ve just had the second meal of the lamb, this time a rack seared quickly and finished in the oven on top served with a saute of dutch cream potatoes, asparagus and broad bean and a rocket salad. It is now officially Best Lamb Eva.

I knew there was no huge rush to cook it, as the meat hadn’t been aged for long. It was firm, with barely any smell, so I bagged it up and set about investigating what to do with it. With meat so fresh, and a beast so young, you can really cook it like a Spring lamb, but I wanted something goatier. The kid was small, so I figured I could make one dish from the leg, and one from the shoulder.

Indian is an obvious choice as most Indian “mutton” recipes actually refer to goat meat (or so I read). However I ruled that out as we’d just finished the leftovers of a delicious Raan, an Indian spiced leg of lamb. The recipe, from the Foods of the World India book, involved briefly marinating the leg in a paste of ginger, garlic, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, cumin, turmeric, cayenne, salt and lemon juice rubbed into slashes in the leg. It then got a prolonged – two day – marinade in a puree of almonds, cashews (substituting for the original pistachios), raisins, honey and yoghurt. Then a saffron bath before a slow roast. It was, as you would hope after all that time and sixteen additional ingredients, utterly sumptuous, but I fancied something other than a curry.

I was shocked – shocked! – at my difficulty in turning up goat/kid recipes. I’ve recently written about my extensive cookbook problem collection, but it’s got some big gaps. Big goat-shaped gaps, as it turns out. Finding nothing in Stephanie Alexander’s Cook’s Companion was a sad portent of what was to come. I knew that many African cultures enjoy goat meat, but I have only two African cookbooks (by Dorinda Hafner and Tess Mallos), neither of which had any goat recipes. After pottering through a number of other books, and failing to find anything, I hit food blog search which trawls 3000+ food blogs, and twitter.

Jackie of Eating with Jack tweeted that she’d found a similar difficulty, and developed her own recipe for roasted goat shoulder, inspired by a meal in Spain. That was the shoulder sorted then, and I decided on a Birria do Chivo from a newly-discovered blog, Masa Assasin for the leg.

We ate the shoulder first. Jack’s recipe requires slowly cooking the browned shoulder on a bed of aromatic veggies with wine and stock then uncovering it and finishing the salted joint under high heat. She used suckling goat and the piece she used weighed 1.5 kilos; mine was barely a kilo, so obviously extremely young. I reduced the cooking time a little, and we ate it with a very creamy mash.

It was sensational. Incredibly tender, but any beast that age and size would be. The flavour was delicate but with the definite richness and slightly gamey flavour of goat meat. Thanks to Jackie for the recipe – we will definitely be having this again.

Sadly, the Birria was not so successful. It was tasty, but not exceptional. I think the first mistake I made was to use such young meat for a dish that has very long, moist cooking. We lost the texture that was so pleasurable in Jackie’s recipe and the meat didn’t have the intensity of flavour that an older beast lends to such a preparation.

Checking out the original recipe will make it obvious why I had been so excited. Mike, the author, has Mexican and Cuban heritage and lives in San Diego, just a whisker above Mexico. His expertise is obvious, and the site is fantastic, with descriptive unfussy photography and nice clear instructions. But I’ve never eaten a Birria of any kind, and had no palate memory of what I was doing. And I lacked some of the chillies used, which are quite hard to find here. If I had eaten the dish before, I would have known whether using the chillies I had already – a mixture of dried Ancho, chipotle and habanero – was a sensible one. The smell of them toasting:

was extraordinarily good. After that you reconstitute them and whizz them with vinegar, garlic, allspice, pepper and oregano, and tiny quantities thyme, cloves, cinnamon and cumin. The meat sits in a splash of vinegar overnight, is browned and then cooked in a big pot in a broth with onion, bay and the strained chilli paste. Not knowing any other use for the goat’s rib cage that I’d been provided with, I thought that its collagen and gelatin might go some way to making up for the goat’s head included in the original recipe.

You eat the Birria in a bowl, with corn tortillas and a range of traditional side dishes – oregano, chopped onion, limes, radishes, coriander and salsa:

It was tasty, but didn’t compare to the shoulder the night before. The wikipedia link to Birria up there says it’s known for it’s variety, as different cooks use different peppers, but my combo lacked some depth of flavour. I’d love to hear what any experienced Birria cooks or eaters out there use, or alternatively find a steady supply of fancy dried Mexican chillies.

* Sounds best if you put on your Barnsey voice.

Installments one , two, three, four and five.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I ran into Camel Man’s Wife and begged for a fillet of camel to play with in the kitchen but to date they have yet to deliver. The camp dogs have done better, with the Camel Man’s Boys dropping off enormous sections of back bone at various places around the community for them to chew on. We had one little dog drag a stinking piece of hump fat at least twice his weight into the arts centre last week in an effort to keep it for his own exclusive pleasure. He was most indignant when promptly chased back out.

I have nevertheless managed to get my paws on a little bit of dromedary on the sly. A friendly sparky called Richard had been staying with the Camel People while working on various jobs around the community, including fixing our hot water system (we had endured over two weeks of luke warm showers). Over coffee one morning before the sun had much of a chance to warm the day he offered me some freshly dried camel jerky. Marinated in sweet chilli sauce and coriander seeds, it was among the most tender, tasty jerky I’ve eaten – and having lived in Namibia for a couple of years where biltong from all kinds of bush meat is a fav snack, I’ve tasted quite a bit. Nice work, Camel Man. I almost forgive you for being so tight about providing meat for the rest of us.

Ever wondered what a camel’s oesophagus looks like?

Despite the lack of camel there have been some other unusual menu items to get excited about. Roo tails are a favourite camping meat out here and can be purchased frozen at both the community store or road house for $7 a pop. Surprisingly there is considerable variety in the quality of tails – I am reliably informed by a long time connoisseur that the black ones sold at the road house are a little tough.

Roo tails are prepared in the manner described in my last post, by first singeing off most of the fur in the flame of a hot fire then wrapping them in silver foil and buried in hot coals. If silver foil is unavailable, they are just buried directly in the ashes. Silver foil is, I have come to appreciate, the single most important cooking aid for camp cooking other than matches. Almost everything cooked on the fire is wrapped in foil: roo tails, emu, damper, lamb chops, potatoes and bananas (that last one is my idea). The only exceptions are traditional bush meats such as tirnka and marku (witchetty grubs), that go straight into the ashes. (Forgetting the foil is an almost unforgivable act of negligence and results in grumpiness all round when a great meat meal is ruined by the presence of grit on the cooked flesh. Forgetting the salt is also a sin, and forgetting both will get you permanently labeled incompetent.)

On this particular trip I forgot the foil, but as the provider of both the tails and the salt was promptly forgiven. Lucky someone in the other car had some foil tucked away under a tarp in the back of his troupie. I turned up late, so most of the women had already taken off looking for tirnka. I was left with one of the older ladies and her ten year old grand daughter and promptly instructed to cook all the meat I had with me despite the fact the other women wouldn’t be back for hours. I was given responsibility for fur removal and handling the shovel but was under close supervision lest I create an unevenly cooked tail charcoaled one side and raw and hairy on the other.

Breaking out the foil …

Getting bossed around (note the crow bar – a multi-purpose tool that no bush woman can do without – in fact it was one of the first modern tools taken up by Aboriginal women out here – a welcome if some what less personal improvement to wooden digging sticks of old).

The final product. Served with salt and eaten dexterously with a sharp knife. The meat is stringy but tasty, the flavour coming mainly from the lovely sticky fat between each of the tail bones (think ox tail stew, without the stew).

Given that few readers of this blog are likely to be able to find themselves a tail down at the local supermarket (unless, of course, you are in Alice Springs), I instead present below a recipe for roo and bean stir fry, courtesy of my mate Matt, the handsome tradie from earlier entry. Not only handy with a hammer, Matt has proved himself a bit of a gourmet in the kitchen and recently whipped up the following dish while out camping. Note the only implements he had with him at the time was a pocket knife, a fry pan and a (hopefully washed) lid from a can of dog food bent into the shape of a spoon.

Matt’s Roo and Bean Stir Fry

Stir fry a fillet of kangaroo, cut into fine strips, with chilli, garlic, salt and pepper to taste. Add some mushrooms, bacon and a tin of smoky barbeque baked beans.

Best eaten directly from the fry pan while sitting on your swag under a clear winter desert sky.

Pamela’s journey continues here.

Instalments one , two, three and four.

I’m in lovely Warakurna community at the moment, located at the base of the Rawlinson Ranges in Western Australia. The remote Giles weather station, located just up the road, was built in 1956 and was the first permanent colonial occupation of the area for hundreds of kilometres in any direction. Many older people living at Warakurna now were children at the time, their families living independent existences centred around the myriad of rock holes and hunting grounds scattered throughout the ranges.

By virtue of its tenure as a piece of Western Australian Aboriginal reserve excised by the Commonwealth government fifty years ago, the weather station is the only place in the entire Ngaanyatjarra Lands where alcohol can legally be consumed, and officially only by the station’s six employees. Have I considered dropping into the weather station to say hi and flashing my big blue eyes in the hope of a cold one? Not for a moment. My research permit is far too valuable. Luckily for us, Coopers make a convincing birell (brewed without alcohol) that tastes great straight out of the freezer. While barbecuing steaks over our fire pit on Saturday night, for a brief moment I almost forgot it wasn’t the real thing.

With some time on my hands over Easter, some of the ladies organised to go out hunting for tirnka (little goannas). Armed with crowbars as digging sticks and billy cans as shovels, 8 women and 2 dogs packed into a troopie and made our way to tirnka country.

Tirnka country

We wandered through the bush for a couple of hours, stopping to dig at holes where there was evidence of recent action. It was a very successful hunt in the end, with eleven (!) tirnka bagged. We made a fire, sat down with a cup of tea and proceeded to cook up the catch. The preparation process involves removing gut then burning off the skin in the open flame for a couple of minutes. The lizards are then buried in coals and left to cook for about twenty minutes. The cooked flesh is delicious – pale white, smooth and tasty –hints of chicken (!) and fish and just a little bit smoky. No salt required. We got back to town on dusk, the ladies subsequently missing the Easter Sunday prayer meeting and making me three hours late for a sausage sizzle being hosted by the neighbours. Not good manners, but at the end of the day I think we were all where we really wanted to be.

One of the ladies left this little fella on her handbag on the dashboard while she continued hunting:

The meals I’ve been cooking for myself and the occasional guest in the donger have been far less exotic but nevertheless delicious. I’m very excited to present my first blog recipe below: creamy corn fritters. The recipe comes courtesy of Ed, who prepared them on this occasion and who has spent a great deal of her four years living in Warakurna devising new ways to make tin foodstuffs interesting. She insists that the cream corn is the magic ingredient in this mix – without it, the fritters have trouble hanging together.

Creamy Corn Fritters

1 tin corn kernels
1 tin creamed corn
½ cup self-raising flour, but might need to add more depending on consistency of batter
2 eggs
a little bit of milk
1 onion, finely diced
Garlic, salt and pepper to taste.
A handful of fresh coriander (an option only available if you’ve been food shopping in Alice Springs recently)

Fold mixture together until dry ingredients are wet. Make sure batter is thick. Don’t over mix. Fry over medium heat until cooked through and golden brown. Serve hot and drizzled with kecap manis (sweet soy sauce) and a spoonful of home-made tomato relish on the side (in this instance made by Waikerie “Cobwebs” ladies). Best appreciated in the company of a handsome, hungry tradesman.

If you try to eat seasonally, particularly if you grow some of your own food, Autumn is the best time of year. I live in a cul-de-sac of eleven houses, four of which have veggie gardens, and it’s quite common to see someone or other ambling across the road with a handful (or a box) of excess produce. It was our turn last week, when our neighbour Kev dropped in with two lovely early butternut pumpkins from his patch. I’m hoping for some figs, as our tree is tiny. It’s one of three in this street and the next grown from a cutting from No. 8′s magnificent tree.

One of the best arrivals with the cooler weather is lemons. Meyer lemons seem to be the most commonly grown variety locally because they tolerate cold fairly well, but I spotted the first fresh thin-skinned Eurekas of the year at Choku Bai Jo last week. While they’re very common and often cold-stored to sell over the summer, freshness really brings out their appetising sharpness. I love their colour too which is more “lemony” than intensely yellow.

 

The other ingredient I had around and was keen to use plenty of is biodynamic garlic. We’ve been buying organic and/or byodynamic garlic for quite a while now, so the prices for a home delivery of a kilo of Patrice Newell’s Garlic wasn’t as frightening as it might be if you’re used to the (irradiated, Chinese) supermarket stuff. It’s excellent garlic, with a pungent, intense flavour that the imported crap can’t approach (that’s it in the picture in my last post).

I had no idea that all garlic harvested in Australia is harvested in November. The site suggests that from May it can start sprouting. I’ve always understood – although I can’t remember from where – that sprouting garlic was worthless. But I’ve also heard that you can cut out the sprouting germ, and I know you can plant some. Our garlic arrived at the end of January, and I’m a bit pissed off sad to see that some has started to sprout already, but perhaps my storage method – open in the box it came in, in a dry warm room – wasn’t quite so good as I thought. What’s left is now hanging in one of those orange mesh bags in the kitchen. If you haven’t snapped some up yet, there’ll be no more available until the next harvest, but you can register your details at their site.

Thinking lemony-garlicky brought me to braising, and chicken, and I ended up adapting this recipe a little. This is how good it looks before it’s even made it to the oven -

Ingredients

1 organic and free range chicken, jointed (or buy pieces if you fancy)
4 medium waxy yellow potatoes
3 merguez or other lovely spicy sausages (mine were from Meat Guru in Civic)
1 Eureka lemon, cut lengthways in eighths
1/2 a preserved lemon, flesh removed, skin julienned
half a dozen sprigs of lemon thyme (which we grow, but thyme is fine. Rosemary would work too, but use much less.)
a bunch of sorrel (*optional As is everything else, of course, this being the food blog of a suburban mother with no culinary enforcement squad.)
2 heads of garlic, cloves separated and peeled

Method

Heat the oven to about 180. I say “about” because my oven is crap, so do what your oven tells you.
Peel the potatoes and cut each crosswise into about three or four fat slices. Brown them in a little olive oil and remove from the pan, then add a smidgen more oil and brown the seasoned chicken pieces. Brown the sausages and cut into chunks of a similar size to the potatoes.

Put the potatoes, chicken and sausage chunks in a casserole with a cover. If you used something other than the casserole to brown everything, deglaze it with some vermouth and scrape all the yummies in. If you used the casserole itself, splash in some vermouth and/or white wine (not too much). Tuck the garlic cloves and lemon pieces in here and there and strew over the herbs and preserved lemon.

Cook covered for about an hour, then toss in a bunch of very finely chopped sorrel. You might need to add a splash more vermouth (or you could use stock). I won’t tell if you put a knob of butter in to enrich the sauce, although it’s not necessary. Cook it for another half an hour or so, but keep an eye on it, and remove the cover at the end if the juices need a little thickening up.

You won’t need any starchy base for this, as it already has potatoes, although I cooked some mograbieh in chicken stock for the carb-hungry kids. You will need a big green salad, preferably one with some bitterness and substance to the leaves. You could also try some wilted greens, such as the last of your rainbow chard. Which is a bit sad, but delicious.

Don’t skimp on the garlic, either – it becomes a vegetable here, sweet, mellow and warming not at all harsh and bitey. It might appear from the recipe to be a too-intensely lemony dish, but the flavours are complex and layered rather than a full-frontal single-note lemon assault. Not to forget that the highly flavoured sausages need something capable of standing up to their punch. It’s delicious, but doesn’t reheat as well as I’d hoped. This means you should have seconds if you feel like it.

I made this again recently, and while I was tempted to try it with chick peas (one can = 1/2 cup soaked and cooked) I bought some Dutch Cream potatoes at the Epic market on Saturday and wasn’t able to ignore them. I’d run out of vermouth, and had no dry white wine, so I used white wine vinegar to deglaze the pan, and that was fine. I considered caramelising the cut surfaces of the lemon wedges, but I decided that was stupid overkill.

I’d taken the lemon thyme out, in case you were wondering, because it looked brown and sad. And no need to mention the state of that casserole dish, thank you very much. I already know.

While I was in Melbourne I went to a bookshop I had only previously read about: Books for Cooks. Ever since I first read about this shop on Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, I have known that I could while away an entire day there, perhaps a week if I had nothing else to do. I didn’t spend quite that long there, but I did fulfill the other expectations I had for my behaviour: I ran from bookshelf to bookshelf, picking up one book, followed by another, and another, before finally having to sit down, wipe the drool from my chin, and have a deep think about the merits of the books I wanted relative to my budget.

I’ll talk about the whole heady experience in more depth when I finally get around to completing the promised Melbourne posts, but for now let me tell you what I’m cooking for dinner tonight. Seasoned Chopped Beef (Picadillo) is a recipe from one of the books I bought at Books for Cooks, The New Complete Book of Mexican Cooking by Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz. It’s the filling for Minced Beef Tacos (Taco de Picadillo) I’ll be eating.

Ortiz instructs you to use half of the following recipe for Picadillo:

Brown 900g of minced lean beef in a large frying pan. I used that other red meat, kangaroo, because I can’t really bring myself to buy beef at the supermarket anymore. I’ll eat beef when I’m out, but between what I have access to and what I can afford, kangaroo is a more ethical, environmental, and cost-effective choice for me. Add 2 finely chopped onions and 1 clove of garlic, also chopped. When these are cooked add the following: 2 green cooking apples, peeled, cored and chopped; 450g tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped–I made half the recipe and just added a drained tin of tomatoes here; 3 tinned or fresh jalapeno chillies, seeded and chopped–again I went for the tinned; 1/2 cup of seedless raisins; 12 pimiento-stuffed olives, halved–I only had jalapeno stuffed olives, but I figured they weren’t out of place in this recipe; 1/4 tsp each of ground cinnamon and cloves–I just threw in a whole clove that I accidentally crunched on later; and finally, salt and pepper to taste.

Simmer over a low heat for 20mins. When this is done you can sprinkle it with 1/4 cup of slivered almonds that you’ve fried in a bit of oil–I missed this touch since I didn’t have any slivered almonds and didn’t feel like the trouble of blanching, chopping and frying regular almonds. I’d bother if someone other than me was eating this.

So that’s the filling for the tacos.

The Tacos de Picadillo are just a matter of assembly. I used some small, soft tortillas and filled them with the Picadillo, added some Salsa Verde Mexicana Picante, and some shredded ice-berg lettuce that came in this week’s organic fruit and vege box. Ortiz recommends guacamole as well, but as I didn’t have any avocado, I substituted with some Greek yoghurt–I didn’t have any sour cream either.

I should mention that while the recipe book has recipes for both tortillas and the salsa verde I went for the pre-made and tinned varieties. I don’t think I’ll be too hard on myself for not making tortillas from scratch. As for the salsa verde, it’s a case of lack of availability of the key ingredient, tomatillo, the green tomatoes that seem to be used extensively in Mexican cooking. The closest I could find to this ingredient in my, admittedly, rather short search was an enormous tin of them, as big as those Golden Circle juice tins. On that shopping expedition, I went for the much smaller tin of ready made salsa. It seems to be quite simple, consisting of the tomatilloes, serrano chillies, onions, and coriander, to comprise a rather refreshing sauce.

Overall, I found this to be a really tasty meal. I hope I haven’t come across as too flaky in my lack of purity about all the substitutions. I used to be really up tight about such things, but ever since the woman at the Indian Grocers advised me that ‘you cook with what you have’, I’ve felt a whole lot freer about making substitutions. Maybe what’s worrying me is that I used tinned things instead of fresh, but again, needs must.

When I first flicked through the book in Books for Cooks, I thought that the ingredients would be a bit more accessible than they’ve proved to be so far. Much of my decision to get the book was based upon the use of pineapple and banana and other sub-tropical ingredients readily available in South East Queensland. I was intrigued by the use of fruit throughout–and perhaps it’s no surprise that I’ve since learnt that the used of fruit derives from the Spanish influence on Mexican cuisine via the Moorish influence on Spanish cuisine. Here I like to think that my use of kangaroo adds an Australian influence to Mexican cuisine.

Another reason I bought the book was because there’s a fellow post-graduate at uni who is Mexican, and on the subject of Mexican food in Brisbane, Australia even, she is dismissive. ‘Tex-Mex’ she sniffs when people ask her about Mexican food in restaurants. Her response has long piqued my curiosity because it made me aware that of course all I know of Mexican food is Tex-Mex, exemplified by the ‘Mexican’ section in the supermarket that consists entirely of Old El Paso products.

I guess at the moment I’m sort of stuck between wanting to know more about Mexican food and being faced with the trouble of getting the ingredients. I don’t think I’m ready to give up just yet, because clearly there’s a whole lot more to know–about all the varieties of chilli alone. First, I’ll be a bit more concerted in my efforts to find suppliers in Brisbane.

It reads:

Red Hill Butcher Shop

If you are after something special from your local butcher shop, make sure you visit Red Hill. The owners smoke their own hams on the premises, have Certified Angus Beef and moisture-infused pork and sell a variety of home-made meals and treats.

They even have a selection of wines from Mount Majura and Lerida Estate Wineries to perfectly complement that medium-rare steak.

Moisture infused pork, hey? In the olden days, when pigs were fat, they didn’t need any moisture infusions. And wasn’t there a moisture infused ham scandal a while ago? So I called the butcher to find out what they meant. For those outside Canberra, Red Hill is one of the oldest and fancy-pantsest suburbs in town, full of large homes on large blocks and lots of very long established money residents.

Tony the Butcher was at pains to point out that they were advertising the “moisture infusion” not just because they had to for legal reasons, but because they wanted to establish it as a defined product and that Australian Pork Limited, the industry body, was eager to see it marketed as such. He said that the meat had two additives, Potassium lactate (326, acidity regulator, humectant, bulking agent) and Sodium acetates ( 262, acidity regulator). (Those descriptions are from the Food Standards Australia New Zealand list of food additives and their properties.) I found him very helpful and happy to answer questions and volunteer information. Full points there.

He said that he’d been selling this pork for 12 months, and his pork sales had quadrupled in that time. He sells mainly cutlets and loin steaks, ie lean cuts that need fairly quick cooking.

Tony said that the meat is marketed as “Murray Valley Pork”, which a quick google shows is “the premium retail fresh brand of QAF Meat Industries, which is Australia’s leading producer of pork for the domestic and export markets.”

They’re certainly pushing the premium angle, appearing at the Sydney Good Food Affare (shame about that name) where they’re described like this:

Murray Valley Pork, Corowa, NSW
Succulent and absolutely delicious Murray Valley Pork from the Riverina and Murray Valley region is a premium range developed in 2005 exclusively for quality retail butchers. Moisture infusing ensures that Murray Valley Pork is always juicy and tender and its neutral flavoured brine has been specially developed to provide customers with a consistently high quality eating experience.

No mention of QAF Meat Industries and their rather unpremium business name there. But checking
QAF’s site will tell you they “now supply 20 per cent of pork to the domestic market and account for 30 to 40 per cent of all farmed pork exports from Australia. We employ more than 850 people at 10 sites across Australia, with our largest site and head office for the group located at Corowa in the Murray River basin.”

I only eat premium pork, because what I found out about industrial pig farming was so horrible I couldn’t face supermarket meat anymore. (A hat tip to Noodlebowl for sending me off on that journey – thank you.)

It must be very difficult for the real premium producers, like the wonderful Mountain Creek Farm that we buy our meat from, when industrial giants prey on the ignorance of consumers who don’t know how to cook a particular cut of meat, and are afraid of a bit of fat. You don’t have to eat the fat, you know, but it really helps your cooking. And a little bit is good for you.

I found Mountain Creek Farm by emailing the Free Range Pork Farmers’ Association and asking. If you want a moist pork, I suggest you do the same.

(PS – Michael Croft of Mountain Creek Farm keeps a terrific blog (unfortunately no RSS) where he describes the farming life, the principles behind the farm, his recent trip to the Terra Madre artisanal producers’ conference in Turin and how a man who was a vegetarian for seven years became a beef and pork producer. I have since met an ex-vegan couple who are now his enthusiastic customers – that’s how good the meat is. The farm will be featured in the 10 December issue of The Canberra Times’ Food & Wine section. Sales details are on the website. And I have no connection with them, beyond being a really happy customer.)