2012 off to a flying start

It was a busy weekend at the Farm School. Marc had a full house for his Curing and Smoking Course, the first course of the year. This is one of our most popular courses and it had been fully booked for some time. Another lovely group of people.  We had the pleasure of the company of Giancarlo and Katie Caldesi who run the well known La Cucina Caldesi in London, as well as Monique Borst. Monique is running her Food Business Start-up Boot Camp at the Farm School in March. 

Monique is London-based and came down  by train. She was unlucky that the trains were diverted around Woking, so the journey was 2.5 hrs and not the usual 2 hrs. She  was busy with her camera and some of her photos of the day can be seen here.

Marc covered a range of cured products, including gravadlax, bacon, ham,  pancetta, duck ham, and biltong. We had both the hot and cold smokers in action and there were plenty of cured and smoked foods to taste at lunch. This time we had a play with our new smoker, a ProQ Excel with the cold smoke generator which we will use as a cold smoker. We tried smoked sea salt and garlic. Despite only having 4 hours of smoke, both picked up a smoky flavour.  Thanks for Alison at Hot Smoked for giving us a good deal on the ProQ! She also sent up a few samples of speciality woods which will be interesting to try out on future courses.


It was Dan's turn on Sunday with Pork Butchery and Sausage-making. This time we had had people attend from as far afield as Lincolnshire. They combined their course with an overnight stay in Salisbury to make a super weekend away. 

The morning was spent covering all aspects of pork butchery while the afternoon was devoted to making sausages. As usual everybody had a chance to make up their own recipe of sausage, so this time we had herby sausages, spicy sausages and some made with apple and cider. This group proved to have really good  hand-to-eye co-ordination and linked their sausages in record time! There was enough time during the afternoon for Dan to prepare a  coppa ham for air-drying,  and cure another piece of rib eye muscle for the next course. 

The next Curing and Smoking Course takes place on 24 March but if you are interested don't delay as we only have a few places left. 


If you are interested in sausage-making, Marc is running an Advanced class on 28 February when he will be covering sausages such as  chorizo, boudin blanc, mortedella, and salami.