DIY Butchery!

Impress your friends at your next dinner or BBQ by doing your own Butchery! The question is: Chicken or Lamb?

Local Master Butcher Steve Rossiter, who runs Birmingham’s first organic butchers – Rossiters – in Bournville, leads our Butchery courses here at Loaf Cookery School (we also buy all of our meat for the Bakery/Shop lunches from him too!)

In the Perfect Poultry course, Steve will teach you how to joint, spatchcock, and butterfly your own chicken and poussin.

As well as learning the simple secrets to the perfect chicken stock, we’ll be making chorizo-stuffed chicken breast wrapped in streaky bacon, spatchcocked poussin with lemon and garlic (wild garlic when in season), Raz al Hanout tagine chicken, and chicken liver salad.

We sit down to feast on the fruits of our labour towards the end of the evening, so save plenty of room!

In the Nose to Tail: Lamb course, he’ll take you on a guided tour around a whole organic lamb carcass, explaining the provenance of the animal, the classic butchers cuts, the quality of the meat, and typical dishes cooked from each joint.

Steve will then demonstrate how to respectfully take apart a whole side of lamb, before handing over his saws and cleavers to us to take apart the other side, under his expert guidance.

You’ll learn how to bone out, roll and stuff various joints, ready for the oven. Always finishing with a sit down dinner of delicious slow-cooked lamb – usually chump chops with butter beans and salsa verde, plus lamb curry with rice and raita.

At the end of the course you’ll also take home your oven-ready boned and rolled roasting joint to cook at home!

*These are the last two courses available until Autumn, so don’t delay! Book today!*

Christmas Meat

I was chatting to Steve Rossiter (who runs Birmingham’s only registered organic butchery) last night at our joint poultry butchery workshop, and amidst general chit chat, he quietly mentioned that he’s throwing a charity hog roast outside his shop for Christmas. Brilliant!! If you’ve ever been to Rossiters for meat in the week running up to Christmas, you’ll know there’s always a queue going out the door, with Paul Leverton from the deli opposite often running across the road with hot teas and coffees for the crowds. Steve says the 23rd December is normally the busiest day for order pick-ups (you really must pre-order if you want any joints of meat or turkeys/geese that week!), so this year he’s asked one of his farmers, Adrian to come up from his farm in Stroud with a pig and a hog roasting oven, and feed the hungry hordes outside the shop. Steve’s throwing in the pig, and Adrian’s coming out of his own good will, all to raise a bit of cash for Acorns Children’s Hospice. So if you’re ordering meat from Rossiters this Christmas, come and pick up on the 23rd December, have a hot pork roll, and give generously to Acorns!

You can pre-order your meat by popping into the shop at 247 Mary Vale Road, Bournville, or by calling 0121 458 1598. I’ve ordered a rib roast this year and will definitely be picking up on the 23rd!

Eat Local short film

Back in the spring I had a crew of BCU media students come and do some filming with me – they were making a film about Birmingham’s local food scene and wanted to film me doing some baking, some local food shopping, and chatting about my views on local food. You can see the results in the 10 minute youtube film below. It also features my Friends Steve Rossiter, Paul Leverton and Audrey Miller. Thanks to Toby Nutter, Tobias Evans, Charlotte Percival and Hannah Quainton for putting it together:

A Butchers Apprentice

I just spent an enjoyable hour with Steve Rossiter at his butchers shop in Bournville. Steve showed me around his meat hanging cold rooms, we chatted about the business a bit, and then he proceeded to demonstrate how to take apart a side of lamb. It’s fascinating to watch a craftsman at work, and even though he slowed down for me, he still did it bloomin’ quick! I’m getting really excited about our next collaboration, a Lamb Butchery workshop on the 20th October. I really like working with Steve, and love having the opportunity to put on courses like this for people, mainly because I just want to learn it all myself too! I’ll be writing the course description for the workshop up in the next few days, so stay peeled to the cookery school pages for that. In the meantime, here’s a pic of Steve at work with his meat cleaver splitting a lamb in half: