All of our smoked gammons and hams are prepared in a traditional kiln smoke oven using proper wood chips including Applewood, Beech, Oak and Cherry.
We hang all of our hams and gammons by hand, light a fire and leave them in our smoker for up to 8 hours. Years of experience tell us when the meat is ready, when the colour looks right the taste will be just right as well.
Each evening the wood chips are prepared to our special and secret recipes ready for the next day’s smoking. We smoke bacon, gammons, hams, loins and chops and deliver them to your door full of our unique flavour.
Curing is where pork becomes gammon or ham. Our cures are well over 100 years old, in fact we have been curing pork since 1907.
We introduce a selection of ingredients for flavour and preservation. The flavour remains true to the original although we have tweaked the cures over the decades to suit modern machinery and ever evolving food safety standards.
We use modern wet curing techniques using some of the most sophisticated technology in the world as well as more traditional curing techniques that involves nothing more than a pair of hands, experience, salt and a bag.
No matter what the technique we use, we always manage to pack flavour into the product whilst being sympathetic to salt levels and standards such as Red Tractor, BMPA, RSPCA and BRC.
Our butchers have been working at our East London facility for over 30 years. Using traditional butchery techniques on old fashioned butchers blocks, they produce our famous gammons and hams from bone in pork legs.
We don’t use production pace lines and we don’t rely on lots of people taking small parts of a leg. All of our butchers manually select the right pork legs from our leg chiller, and transform them from an entire Pork leg into either a gammon or ham which is then lovingly finished into our award winning products.
Each evening, the butchers hand sharpen their knives, using proper wet and dry stones, ready for the next morning so that they can cleanly cut and trim pork legs into gammons and hams.
All of our hams are manually graded by our butchers at delivery so that they are all the same size for cooking. We don’t like dry, tough hams which is why we are the only producers to make so much effort to get them the same size to maintain even cooking times.
Each ham is manually formed into a traditional butchers net and made ready for cooking. Our hams are slowly steam cooked for up to 12 hours using a technique that keeps them juicy and succulent. The smell is amazing and our neighbours are often queuing up outside our factory to buy one.
We don’t cut corners and even our roasting is done the old fashioned way. We don’t use liquids or tunnels and we don’t use colours or additives to make our roast hams look great. Our roast ham look great because we use proper honey in a proper roast oven.
Our twin rack rotary roast oven is like a rotisserie but instead of chicken we roast our hams. It’s not a scientific process but rather we watch the hams during roasting and when we are satisfied with the colour we pull them out and put them into our purpose built roast ham chiller ready for packing, and eating, the next day.
