One of the best places to source your ‘beef bits’ is Lakes Speciality Foods in Staveley, who offer a fantastic range of locally sourced meats.  They are currently sending out 8-ounce beef daubes, square cut ox cheek, and oxtail. If you’re not sure about a cut, ask – these boys really know their stuff.

The directors of Lakes Speciality Foods are Paul Hevey, a time-served butcher, and Dan Weston – once a chartered surveyor in the West Country.

Paul and Dan are both passionate educators who get around to spread the word about seasonal and regional food. Dan says: ‘We don’t want to be a faceless company – Paul and I often help in the van. Even when our chefs are happy, we like to get out and talk to them.’

Chatting with chefs

Paul and Dan invite chefs to visit the Staveley factory and see the cuts and products hanging in their raw state, so that the unfamiliar becomes familiar. They have recently employed two former head chefs as butchers so that they can cut to the standard that chefs want to see, rather than what butchers want to cut.

They’ll chat with chefs about menus and margins. Dan says: ‘Often the cheaper cuts can give the best demand and the best gross profit – it doesn’t have to be best fillet steak every time.’

Paul and Dan send out a monthly flyer to keep chefs in touch with the seasons. ‘We might get a chef saying ‘my venison saddle’s a little smaller this week than it was last week’ and we can explain that venison shot in August will only be stag – hinds are not shot until the beginning of November. We love to pass on our knowledge.’

Lakes Speciality Foods only supply British lamb, beef and pork.  But what a range, especially for local lamb. Dan says: ‘Imagine Cumbria from sea level to the top of Helvellyn. There is a year-round breeding programme and then an early, mid- and late lambing programme which gives a calendar of different lamb throughout the whole year – lowland, salt marsh, Barley Bridge, Kendal Rough Fell and Swaledales. We can really push on seasonality.’

This summer, young chefs and front of house staff came up from Tate Britain, and Dan took them out to farms, abattoirs and cutting plants, focusing on the whole production chain.

Paul – a 2007 national sausage champion – gives cutting demos to students at Kendal College, and uses the opportunity to tell them all about different cuts and yields of pork – then they’ll make sausages to their own recipes.

Recently Dan talked to the pharmaceutical company Pfizer on animal health. He explained to them that growth needs to be consistent through the life of the animal. ‘It’s like tree rings,’ he says. ‘In 1976 when there was a drought, trees were stressed and the rings were tight – it’s the same with animals.’ So anything that affects the consistency of an animal’s growth – for example, pneumonia – will affect the texture, taste and appearance of the meat.

As well as building up a fan base with young chefs, Paul and Dan are establishing brand loyalty outside the area. Last year a chef left the Lake District to go down to London and took six of his chefs with him down to London.

Dan says: ‘He told us that the quality of meat in London is really poor now, and I have seen it for myself. I’ve been to Smithfield and it is sad to see such a great institution go downhill. About 90% of the meat was foreign. So the team now have orders despatched twice a week from Staveley by overnight courier.’

www.lakesspecialityfoods.co.uk/