The Menu: This free-range pork is meat of the first order

Meat treated right tastes all the better

I threw a couple of recently purchased sausages on the pan for a quick evening supper. It resulted in an extraordinary supper but it was not quick, for these sausages bore little or no relation to your regular supermarket bangers.

They were almost twice the size, densely packed with free-range pork mince, and easily weathered 25 minutes of slow cooking. The first bite triggered a rare moment of epicurean ecstasy, when all you can do is whimper with pleasure.

Deeply flavoursome meat, the only seasoning added to draw out a potent, almost gamey taste of ‘farm’. It is a flavour so pronounced in comparison to the callow blandness of industrially- reared pork that it often surprises novice tasters; for older generations, it harks back to when pork came with flavour forged first in the field, not through post-slaughter additions.

The following night, I gave them the culinary ceremony they deserved: A heavy pan, medium-low heat, knob of pork fat, sizzling and browning for 30 minutes, served up with braised Puy lentils and a fluffy, buttered mash of Tom Clancy’s Ballycotton Golden Wonders. Sublimely divine!

Glenbrook Farm free-range pork is meat of the first order. I’d happily order such a sausage as a main course in a fine dining restaurant from any chef smart enough to let produce quality do all the heavy lifting. This sausage also tells a story of what could and should be happening in a more equitable and sustainable food system, to the benefit of both primary producer and dining customer.

Cork City’s population is projected to double by 2040 but current development is beginning to fringe Glenbrook Farm with housing estates, so there is something magical and disorientating about driving from the centre of town through northside suburbs to the bucolic heart of a 70-acre farm in less than 15 minutes.

Back in 2018, we frolicked in glorious summer sun but that same heatwave caused a drought that ravaged grass growth, triggered fodder shortages, and eventually saw Irish farmers culling their herds.

Peter Twomey, then a third-generation dairy farmer, recalls walking across fields; the grass a bone-dry, yellowing stubble, crunched underfoot as if he were walking on Rice Krispies.

Every waking moment was consumed by stress — if you have no grass, how do you farm to a grass-based system? Visiting the couple of pigs he had always kept to feed the family became Peter’s ‘safe place’; he was with them when he had his porcine epiphany. In May 2021, he teamed up with Darren Allen of Ballymaloe, who brought his sows and boar to Glenbrook Farm to begin a free-range pig farming operation.

In 2023, Twomey shut down the dairy operation, reserving 14 acres for pig farming. The remainder, converted to organic, is leased to Cork Rooftop Farm whose owner/operator Brian McCarthy grows produce to supply Cork restaurants and his English Market retail outlet.

These days, Peter sells through their farm shop, open on Saturday mornings, with customers also able to walk up and visit the very happy and friendly pigs. Glenbrook do meat boxes, posted nationwide or hand delivered locally, and also sell through O’Mahony’s butchers, in the English Market, and Barry Fitzgerald butchers, in Fermoy. O’Mahony’s of Watergrasshill have had their meat on their restaurant menus since 2012. Last year, chef Brian Murray of The Glass Curtain cooked Glenbrook Farm pork for 400 diners at the Cork on a Fork long table dinner, where it was rapturously received.

Animal welfare in Irish livestock farming is generally decent; the exception is the high-intensity pig farming sector. I’ll skip specifics but suffice to say, Irish intensive pig farming falls below even EU standards and the idea of tightly confining indoors such intelligent, sociable creatures for the entirety of their existence is repugnant to me, and the taste is always inferior.

The current Irish pig farming model is all about high-intensity farming and low-cost selling, yet there are so many reasons to put true value back on a favourite Irish ingredient, properly rewarding good farmers for genuinely sustainable and compassionate farming.

TODAY’S SPECIAL

A good sausage loves a good egg and Adam’s Eggs are — ahem — ‘eggs-ceptionally’ good! Adam Dunne, from Ballybrack, Carrignavar, began selling eggs when he was in fourth class.

Years later, now graduated, his business continues going from strength to strength, delivering around Cork and the golden yoke and strong egg white testify to a very fine egg indeed, especially gorgeous poached and served on good sourdough toast.

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Syros awaits

It has been far too many years since I last visited impossibly beautiful Greece so perhaps it is time to start saving to join Irish food legends, Con McLoughlin and Karen Austin, of Lettercollum House in West Cork, for one of their annual culinary adventures, this trip (October 8-15) to the island of Syros. Staying in a renovated neoclassical mansion, by the main square in Ermopolis, with full board and meals provided, daily cooking classes still leave plenty of time to explore the island’s idyllic surroundings.

lettercollum.ie/holiday/