CHARCUTERIE

Search for a cure

The rst salami entrepreneurial pig farmer Jonny Cuddy ever tasted was one that he made himself. But within two years of launching Ispíní Charcuterie he had won a Great Taste Golden Fork, and now he is on a mission to revive his native Northern Ireland’s lost cured meat products

By Tom Dale

Janice & Jonny Cuddy

JONNY CUDDY HAD been looking for ways to diversify the family’s business for years – cycling through ideas from making bacon to selling the skins to budding tattooists to practise their art – before landing by chance on making charcuterie.

Now, a er just six years in business with multiple awards to his name, the Northern Irish charcutier is veering o the well-trodden British-twist-on-continental-classics path to revive some long-lost Northern Irish charcuterie recipes.

“What I’ve always wanted to do with Ispíní is make really good food, but I didn’t want to be just another person copying what the French, Spanish and Italians do brilliantly,” says Cuddy. “I wanted to reintroduce what we were doing here years ago.”

You may think that a man producing awardwinning charcuterie and opining at length about cures and cuts as Cuddy does with ease would have a long love a air with cured meats, but you’d be mistaken.

“The rst salami I ever tasted was the rst one I made,” he says. “I was a typical Northern Irish lad who thought you couldn’t eat meat that’s not cooked.”

His fateful journey into the blossoming British charcuterie scene started with a co ee-table book brought home by his wife Sarah one day in 2015: Pork: Preparing, curing & cooking all that’s possible from a pig. While icking through, his curiosity was piqued by the section on air-dried sausages; “I read the process of making a salami but didn’t think much more of it,” he says.

By chance, the next day, while Cuddy was representing the pig industry at a National Farmer’s Union event, a food technologist asked attendees if anyone had an idea for a food business. “I put up my hand and said I wanted to make salami,” he says.

Regional economic development agency Invest NI was in attendance and o ered the would-be charcutier a £5,000 slice of funding to develop the concept. Soon a er, Cuddy learned that the School of Artisan Food in Nottinghamshire had recently launched a week-long charcuterie course. He signed up and learned the fundamentals.

Then, a tiny butchery unit with equipment included became available to rent in Aughnacloy, near Cuddy’s home, giving him the perfect opportunity to develop his brand while keeping costs low. Cuddy coaxed his sister Janice back from Antipodean bar work to help produce charcuterie in the tiny unit, and Ispíní (Irish for sausage) was born.

“I suppose it’s a lot of chances that led us down this road,” says Cuddy. “All the cards just lined up.”

By the following year, the brand was already picking up awards, including the Great Taste Golden Fork for Best Charcuterie Product, and had developed an impressive inaugural range. The brand put forward three products in its rst foray into Great Taste – with the Pimenton de la Vera Chorizo and Rosemary & Thyme Bresaola picking up a 2-star and 3-star award in the process respectively, with the latter going on to Golden Fork success.

The pair remained in their tiny unit until 2019 when Cuddy renovated an old dairy parlour on the family farm, complete with hanging space for about three tonnes of meat.

Cuddy built up a solid base of retail and foodservice customers for his popular charcuterie products across the island of Ireland, and then COVID hit.

The loss of the restaurant trade – then accounting for 40% of the business – forced Cuddy to bring forward a long-held plan to open a retail operation to showcase Ispíní’s produce. “I had always wanted somewhere physical to sell our stu with cheese and everything that makes a nice board. Then, fortunately, just a er the pandemic started, a unit came up just up the road in Moira,” he says.

The charcutier had noticed that in retail environments which also sold cheese, sales of his products were far higher than in those which did not. “I wanted to have a shop focused on our charcuterie, which was also selling local cheeses and other provisions to showcase the area and

boost sales of our products. It all ties up,” he says. “I suppose I was one of the only people to open a shop during a lockdown, but we had no choice.”

The shop thrived as consumers looked to shop local, and independents grew in popularity, and now retail sales account for 80-90% of Ispíní’s business – including around 20% of that total ¬in the Ispíní shop – a model that Cuddy prefers.

Because charcuterie is such a slow product, planning for retail is relatively simple. “It makes the logistics of producing such a slow artisan product easier. If you run out of Chorizo for a couple of weeks it’s less of a problem, but it’s a huge issue for a chef.”

Opening the outlet in a small independent courtyard in Moira, shared with fellow Golden Fork-winner Hannan Meats, has helped reduce the monotony of producing the same few products every week, and introduce a new layer to his NPD. Having his customers come directly to his bricks-and-mortar store allows Cuddy to do some in-person taste testing.

“What I love most about the shop is getting to experiment again. Getting to give the customer a wee slice and seeing their reaction – it’s great,” he says. “Getting the satisfaction of a job well done, seeing someone enjoying what you’ve spent months and months creating.”

And it is this experimentation that has taken Cuddy back hundreds of years to uncover some long-lost Ulster charcuterie. Since Ispíní’s inception, he had used the internet to uncover di erent recipes, tweaking them and putting his own mark on classics, and it was this that led him to trawl through old newspapers for mentions and recipes of cured meats from the past.

“I think there’s a misconception about the olden days,” he says. “People think everyone was just eating salty bacon and potatoes, but when you delve into it we had some really nice cures.”

Ispíní’s Black Strap Mollases Lomo was one such cure. Based on a recipe from a 1783 Belfast News Letter for Belfast bacon, Cuddy thought that the same cure could, with some adaptation, apply to a lomo, and the product was born.

He has since uncovered a number of foods lost to history such as the Ulster roll – a pancettastyle rolled, air-dried and smoked ham, and the 150-year-old recipe for Belfast jerked beef which, says Cuddy, is almost identical to biltong – Cuddy has christened his product Beltong.

These products were enormously popular across the globe and the Ulster roll was one of the region’s major exports. Now, the charcutier has modernised the recipes and will be bringing the historic cures out as specials in the coming year.

“It’s a slow process, but I’ve learned a lot about Northern Irish food history,” says Cuddy.

“It’s quite nice bringing back a bit of nostalgia for what was done here years ago while trying to mix it up with what the Continent does best.”

And the nostalgic in uence on his operation doesn’t end there. A running theme when FFD speaks with Cuddy is his dismay at the ways in which agriculture has changed since he was a youngster. He laments the intensi cation of farming practices, and the focus on yield, not avour. “When I was a young cub, the animals had the run of the farm,” he says. “And I have this kind of nostalgic notion that by doing charcuterie, we can take things back to how they were. We’re farming for taste again.”

Cuddy sources his meat from a range of local smallholders who are rearing rare breeds as well as from the family farm. Having connections with other local farmers and the ability to control the pig-production process is allowing Cuddy to experiment with how di erent feeds and conditions can a ect the avour of the meat.

The pigs were previously fed a grain-based diet, but now there is some experimentation going on. One local smallholder has been feeding his pigs the waste whey from the production of Young Buck, made by Newtownards-based Mike’s Fancy Cheese. The meat from this has now gone into making a new salami, previously trialled as a beer stick, containing the Northern Irish blue – as well as Buckfast Tonic Wine – prosaically named Bucky Salami.

This circularity, says Cuddy, is a good story to tell his customers, but also a great way to use waste and create a better product.

While scouring the internet for historical cures, Cuddy came across a survey of Ireland, commissioned in 1820 by the Royal Dublin Society, which stated that the way to farm pigs was to pasture them for the summer and bring them in for winter, and that method produces the best hams and bacon.

“Those two sentences just summarise exactly what I want to do,” says Cuddy.

On the family farm, along with his brother who runs the operation, Cuddy is beginning to experiment with pasture-feeding the pigs. “It’s a hell of a lot of learning, though,” he says.

Where the elds were previously monocropped with perennial ryegrass, a more biodiverse mix with varying root depths is needed to prevent the pigs from destroying the pasture. “That’s the long-term plan. We’re totally rethinking how we do agriculture.”

For Cuddy, this process is about reconnecting with the land, something which he believes is equally important to consumers, “I can see that. You can tell the customers the whole story behind that piece of meat.”

“Somewhere in the last generation we lost that connection, but we’re getting reconnected.

“I nd it fascinating, but it’s a slow process.”

Ispíní is in a unique position, being able to control the entire process from the rearing of the pigs to turning it into charcuterie, but that isn’t without its logistical challenges.

“You’re looking at two-and-a-half years from when the pig is born to the nished product, so that’s how far you need to be ahead of yourself,” says Cuddy. “That’s one thing about charcuterie – you learn patience. There’s no other option, you have to wait.”

It’s quite nice bringing back a bit of nostalgia for what was done here years ago while trying to mix it up with what the Continent does best

Roll out the barrel

There’s more to Spanish beer than mass-produced lager and a new breed of independent cra breweries in Castile and León is creating cutting-edge brews with global appeal cra breweries in Castile and León is creating cutting-edge brews with global appeal

A COLD BEER in the sun is part of the Spanish way of life and big brand lager has long been the liquid refreshment of choice. But a new wave of cra breweries is now pushing the boundaries of cerveza in exciting new directions. Castile and León in northwestern Spain is at the vanguard of this cra beer movement, producing drinks that are shaking up the domestic bar scene and gaining fans overseas.

“It is a booming market,” says Juan José Villanueva, owner of Doce Setenta brewery in Villablino. “León is the largest producer of hops in Spain, which allows us to have the best and freshest hops. Despite the pandemic, cra beer is establishing itself strongly throughout our territory and we are proud of it. Five years ago, we could say that the cra market in Castile and León represented only 0.2% of the total. Now it has reached 2%. A low gure, but much higher than expected.”

Doce Setenta is a good example of the innovative, entrepreneurial cra breweries popping up in Castile and León. Set up in 2018 as a social project, the brewery is located in an old coal mine in the mountains, where Villanueva’s father and grandfather used to work. The site is used for production but also for tours and tastings, with more than 9,000 visitors having tasted beers such as Tostada Doppelbock - a strong German-style beer – and an imperial chocolate stout made in collaboration with a local chocolatier. Cerveza Mica in Burgos is also rooted in its local area. Set up by Juan Cereijo in Aranda de Duero in the Ribera del Duero region, which is best known for wine, the company makes beers with barley grown on Cereijo’s grandparents’ mountain farm. It also draws on the region’s wine traditions by using wine yeasts and maturing beer in wine barrels.

Mica Imperial Stout is macerated in Ribera del Duero barrels and is blended with a 48-month reserva wine, while Cereijo also teamed up with the Osborne sherry house to create Toro amber ale. This spends time in centuries old Oloroso barrels giving the beer toasted and caramel notes. “The quality of beer in Castile and León has grown

Villanueva, owner of Doce Setenta brewery in Villablino. “León is the largest producer of hops in Spain, which allows us to hops. Despite the pandemic, cra beer is establishing itself territory and we are proud of it. Five years ago, we could say that the cra market in Castile and León represented only 0.2% of the total. Now it has reached 2%. A low gure, but much higher than expected.”

Doce Setenta is a good example of the innovative, entrepreneurial cra breweries made in collaboration with a local chocolatier. Cerveza Mica in Burgos is also rooted in its local area. Set up by Juan Cereijo in Aranda de Duero in the Ribera del Duero region, which is best known for wine, the company makes beers with barley grown on Cereijo’s grandparents’ mountain farm. It also draws on the region’s wine traditions by using wine yeasts and maturing beer in wine barrels.

tremendously and it will surely become a benchmark area,” says Cereijo. “The market is being promoted by small breweries like us that do things di erently. We are building a beer culture through tastings, visits and articles.”

Bread is the secret ingredient at Raíz Cuadrada in El Barraco in Ávila. Owners and brothers Israel and Héctor García Sánchez come from a long line of bakers so when they decided to go into brewing it was only natural to combine the two.

“In our bakeries there has always been a surplus of bread,” says Israel García. “Usually it is le to harden and sold as breadcrumbs or for animal feed, or just thrown away. We have decided to give it a second life. The bread still has sugars that have not been fermented, so we chop it up and add it to the mash to extract them. It also helps with foam retention and silkiness in the mouth.”

Previously engineers by trade, the García brothers started their beer journey in 2008 as home brewers, before setting up their own premises in 2019. The company’s core range includes a blonde and British strong ale, plus a session IPA, all made with bread, but it also brews limited edition beers under the Alquimia Series, such as a strong bitter with honey and oatmeal milk stout with brioche.

“We want people to try di erent styles to create a beer culture,” he says. “There are more than 100 beer styles in the world and we want people to know and enjoy them.”

Raíz Cuadrada is not the only brewery with a home brewing history. The Coolumbus Beer Company in Salamanca originally started as a hobby, before it quickly took on a life of its own.

“We started at home and became the ‘o cial suppliers’ of beer at family gatherings and dinners with friends,” says commercial manager Arantxa

Nuin, who runs the business with brewer Raúl Martín. “A er many litres of beer brewed and many messages of encouragement for us to dare, we lost ourselves in taking the next step and embarking on making cra beer as a business project.”

The business, which launched in 2013 and joined forces with hotel and restaurant group Arco in 2018, specialises in un ltered, unpasteurised beers under the Coolumbus and Bizarra brands. “Castile and León is a very large region, and very traditional. Industrial beer has been the beer of choice for a long time,” she says. “But through hard work, cra beers have managed to conquer the market.”

The company’s beers, which include black IPAs, brown ale and pale ales, have been recognised with awards at Great Taste and the European Beer Challenge.

Cerveza Milana in Montemayor de Pililla, Valladolid, has also been recognised at the European Beer Challenge, picking up a silver for its Milana Yirga co ee stout and bronze for an amber lager called Milana Zorrilla.

The company, which was set up by brothers Ismael and Marcos Gómez de Pablo in 2011 with backing from friends and family has a core range of three beers, but also makes bespoke products for hotels and restaurants.

Creating a culture of good beer in their home town and working with like-minded creative souls is a big part of the brothers’ approach. The brewery acquires a painting by a local artist each year and uses it to launch a line of T-shirts and backs the local hockey team and lm festival.

It has also opened two Beer House bars in Montemayor de Pililla and Valladolid, and runs the hugely popular El Milanito cra beer festival each year with live music and family activities.

“We welcomed more than 15,000 people over the weekend at the last one,” says Ismael “It’s gotten out of hand!” For more information, contact: promocion.ice@jcyl.es WHERE TO BUY

uk.area-gourmet.com mundovinum.co.uk viandas.shop/gb spainiberico.eu

docesetenta.com cervezamica.es cervezaraizcuadrada.com cervezabizarra.com cervezamilana.com

FIVE AWARD-WINNING BEERS FROM CASTILE AND LEÓN

12.70 DOPPELBOCK

A 6.8% ABV dark lager made by Doce Setenta in Villablino that won bronze at the International Beer Challenge in 2021. It’s rich in body and malty with aromas of smoked oak and nuts.

MICA SIN

This non-alcoholic lager from Cerveza Mica was named best in the world in its class at the World Beer Awards in 2017. There’s a touch of sweetness from the locally harvested barley, plus a delicate hoppy bitterness.

BRITISH STRONG ALE WITH BREAD

A lightly carbonated homage to British beer made by Raíz Cuadrada, this 6.7% ABV ale is made with East Kent Golding hops and leftover bread from the family bakery. Roasted caramel and dark chocolate notes abound. Gold at Spain’s prestigious Campeonato Nacional de Cervezas.

BIZARRA TOSTADA

A strong (6.2% ABV) brown ale with a coppery colour and toffee and caramelised biscuit notes. Coolumbus Beer Company won a star at the Great Taste Awards for the beer in 2019.

MILANA YIRGA

This imperial coffee stout from Cerveza Milana is made with Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee and took silver at the Cathay Pacific Hong Kong International Wine and Spirits Competition in 2021. It’s smooth, citrussy and aromatic, which belies its strength (8.8% ABV).