Where your full Irish really comes from

There is little clarity about the origin of so-called Irish pigmeat – labels such as ‘produced in Ireland’ and ‘traditional Irish sausage’ are no guarantee that the meat is Irish

It ’s a topic that can be as hot as politics or religion. What is an Irish breakfast? Does it involve beans or mushrooms? Are you an egg man or woman? Do you grill or fry?

For Kanturk butcher Tim McCarthy, it has to be black and white pudding, two rashers, two sausages and batch toast. One thing is clear: pieces of hot salty pig are at the heart of the whole enterprise.

Lately, however, the very Irishness of the Irish breakfast has been called into question. Since earlier this year, scientists have been looking closely at the heart of the Irish morning ritual, all those sausages and rashers. In Dublin’s Trinity Enterprise Centre a key question is being quietly answered by a specially designed computer: How Irish are they at all?

The IdentiGen computer in Trinity is running a regular DNA match on sausages and rashers that appear to the consumer to be “Irish”. So far they’ve found that not all of the pigmeat in apparently Irish sausages and bacon is Irish.

The Irish Farmers’ Association is sending roughly 100 samples a month to identify genuine Irish meat behind those Irish-sounding labels. It knows who has been using poetic licence with the word “Irish”, according IFA pig chairman Pat O’Flaherty. So far it is not accusing anyone of telling porkies; instead the association is attempting to work with food companies to try and get more Irish meat into Irish sausages and rashers.

It is not immediately obvious when you pick up a packet where a lot of pigmeat comes from. Phrases like “produced in Ireland” or “traditional Irish sausage” may not mean that the meat in the package is from an Irish pig. Parents lovingly wrapping well-known brands for emigrant children might not be so misty-eyed if they realised they were sending German bacon or a mixture of Dutch and Danish sausage.

Much of the bacon, ham and sausage meat sold in Ireland is a mystery to the consumer, yet food companies know exactly where they are sourcing it. The Government licenses the meat importation, but the consumer gets no information on the country of origin. A 2008 Safe Food report stated that a third of pigmeat consumed in Ireland is imported. As the number of Irish pig farmers falls, that proportion will only increase.

A question for Kerry GroupKerry Group owns the two best-known Irish breakfast brands, Denny and Galtee, so we asked them how much of their range was made with non-Irish meat. It’s too complex and commercially sensitive, says spokesman Frank Hayes. “The vast majority of our pigmeat products are sourced in Ireland.”

Only the products carrying the Bord Bia Origin-Ireland stamp are produced entirely from Irish meat, he adds.

Denny might say that it’s “the taste of home” but without the green, white and orange Bord Bia stamp alongside, that is simply a marketing slogan.

The global pigmeat market is head-spinningly complex, and involves parts of pigs passing each other at the ports in the import-export trade. Different countries like different parts of the pig, O’Flaherty explains. The back and legs of Irish pigs are sold in Ireland, where the pork loin (or the area at the top of the rib cage) becomes bacon and the legs become hams.

“The bellies go to Korea, the shoulders to Russia, offal to China and the ribs to the US – 50-60 per cent of what we produce is exported,” he says.

Kerry Group is the biggest buyer of meat from Ireland’s 350 pig farmers, Hayes adds, but there aren’t enough legs and loins being produced in Ireland to supply their output, both domestic and for export, in a competitive market, so the company sources Danish and Dutch bacon from “audited EU producers”. And the Irish farmers?

“We are working with them to increase the level of Irish-produced pigmeat within the system.”

European lawUnder European labelling law, country of origin is mandatory for beef, fish, olive oil, honey and fresh fruit and vegetables. Next month the EU will make it law to specify country of origin for the meat of pigs, chicken, sheep and goats, with a lead-in time of anywhere up to three years for food companies to comply.

The pork rule, however, will only apply to fresh pork and not to processed meat, so consumers still won’t get a country-of-origin label on rashers, sausages or ham. In the meantime, the Bord Bia Origin-Ireland stamp is a guarantee that your Irish breakfast ingredients are indeed Irish.

A spokeswoman for the Irish Food Safety Authority says the labelling legislation outlaws a producer selling something as Irish when it isn’t. However, words such as “local” and “artisan” can be used without any real meaning attached to them, as they are outside the legislation. The spokeswoman adds that, in light of the horsemeat scandal, theEuropean Commission is “in discussion” over extending country-of-origin regulations to processed meats.

It’s not just sausages and rashers that can fail the 100 per cent Irish test. Famous Clonakilty black pudding is currently being made with imported beef blood from the Netherlands, according to Clonakilty Blackpudding Company production manager John Gallagher. He says the Dutch blood makes up 5 per cent of a Clonakilty black pudding, with the remainder of the ingredients sourced in Ireland.

The company is working with an Irish supplier to try to source an Irish liquid blood supply for its product. As for eggs, the scrambled variety served in restaurants and hotels are typically made with pasteurised bottled eggs – one of the largest plants is in Lisnaskea in Northern Ireland.

Kanturk butcher Tim McCarthy’s supply chain is not complex or commercially sensitive. The meat in McCarthy’s shop comes from “100 per cent Irish and local” outdoor-reared pigs. He uses fresh pigs’ blood, local oatmeal and herbs for black pudding and less water in his sausages and bacon than larger processors.

Away from local butchers using local ingredients, supermarket shoppers face a complicated system of international pigmeat trading and marketing claims. Unless country-of-origin labelling becomes law, the unstamped meat remains a mystery to those of us eating it.

http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/food-and-drink/where-your-full-irish-really-comes-from-1.1587349?page=1

Albert Roux celebrates Irish food

Ireland is blessed ‘with a wonderful larder’

Michelin chef Albert Roux: “I used to come here for 10 solid years in the 1980s with the children and the dogs . . . I absolutely loved the Ring of Kerry.” Photograph: Alan Betson / THE IRISH TIMES

Alison Healy

• Topics:
• Life & Style
• Food & Drink
• Albert Roux
• Gordon Ramsay
• Marco Pierre White
• Pauline Bewick
• Queen Mother
• Robin Gogan

Fri, Nov 15, 2013, 01:00

First published:Fri, Nov 15, 2013, 01:00

   

Albert Roux is chef royalty. The restaurateur has trained household names such asGordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White. With his brother Michel he ran Le Gavroche – the Queen Mother’s favourite restaurant and the first UK restaurant to get threeMichelin stars.

Yesterday he came to Dublin for a celebration of Irish food, at the request of food service company Compass Group Ireland which provides catering in places such as the Aviva stadium.

In the eyes of this French man, though, do we have much food to celebrate?

“Oh yes,” says Roux (78). This is a country blessed by God with a wonderful larder. The sea, the grass, the rain – it’s got everything. You name it, it is here. I use lots of Irish butter.”

He picked the menu for last night’s celebration at the Aviva stadium.

It included Kilmore Quay diver scallop and fillet of beef from Robin Gogan in Ardcath Co Meath, accompanied by a Cashel Crozier blue, port and walnut butter sauce.

He is planning to open a series of restaurants on racecourses, starting with Cheltenham, and he is looking forward to getting some Irish custom.

“Gold Cup day without the Irish is nothing. It would be like a vicarage tea party.”

Roux has trained many Irish chefs, “hard-working people, good humoured and reliable,” but his most famous protégés are probably Ramsay and White.

Ramsay is “a nice young man . . . very gifted . . . hard-working, very successful”. He says the colourful chef doesn’t swear like that in real life. “It’s just for the camera. In my kitchen I never allowed swearing, pushing people.”

However his highest praise is reserved for Marco Pierre White, despite the fact that they no longer speak.

“I do not see him, I do not talk to him. He is without any shadow of a doubt the most brilliant person I have had the pleasure to have in my kitchen, a very natural chef, full of talent, but he has got a huge problem on his shoulder and I’m afraid he will never get the reward of his knowledge.”

It must be very satisfying to see his protégés become household names?

“The biggest satisfaction I’ve ever had in my life is to train somebody who becomes better than the master. And I’m not afraid to say that.”

He says the recent explosion of food programmes is “slightly overdone in my view . . . there are some programmes which make me switch off the television when I see them. I won’t name them.”

Roux and his family were familiar faces in Kerry in the 1980s but he hasn’t been here recently. “I used to come here for 10 solid years in the 1980s with the children and the dogs . . . I absolutely loved the Ring of Kerry.”

During one of those trips he discovered artist Pauline Bewick after seeing one of her works in Arbutus Lodge in Cork.

“I have a big collection now, I think she’s fantastic,” he says. Roux says he would like to return to Ireland, taking a horse and carriage and travelling slowly around Kerry for a week or two.

“It would be a sentimental journey. I’d like that.”http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/food-and-drink/albert-roux-celebrates-irish-food-1.1595197

The Fight Against Bland Airline Food

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303789604579195823006518910

British Airways IAG.MC -2.76% thinks it has the answer for flavorless airline food: umami.

Airline food can take a beating on its way to the plate. It's cooked many hours before a flight, then rapidly chilled, wrapped, trucked, stored and reheated. This often leaves it overcooked, dry and tough. In the air, passengers lose about 30% of their ability to taste as a result of extremely dry cabin conditions and high-altitude pressure inside airplanes. So even food that might be appetizing on the ground tastes bland at 35,000 feet.

For years airlines have added salt to give the food a semblance of flavor and ladled on sauces to combat dryness. Competition among carriers has intensified in business class and first class, and airlines now spend as much as $50 a person serving signature dishes from celebrity chefs. But for many travelers, it often still tastes like, well, airline food.

People typically buy tickets based on routes, pricing and loyalty programs, of course. There's little expectation for good food in coach, where airlines still serve hot meals on long international flights. But on board in first class and business class, the first thing passengers often think about is food, airlines say. "You could certainly lose a customer," said Adrian Jaski, British Airways' manager overseeing catering performance in London.

Enlarge Image

New British Airways offerings include pork belly and pork cheek with lime and lemon grass sauce and heritage carrot, pak choi and peach. Ian Macaulay/British Airways

Enter umami, the savory taste found in tomatoes, Parmesan cheese, mushrooms, Worcestershire sauce and other foods. British Airways had previously worked with Heston Blumenthal, a famous London chef, known as a practitioner of scientifically engineered dishes and creator of delicacies like snail porridge.

On a British television series, he first tried cooking food from scratch onboard a flight; it was chaos. He then prepared elaborate cold plates that took too long for flight attendants to serve. He even tried getting passengers to spray saline up their noses to moisten the palate. British Airways decided that wouldn't fly.

Then Mr. Blumenthal hit on umami as a breakthrough ingredient for high-altitude food. Umami is an intense flavor first identified by the Japanese and dubbed the fifth type of taste the tongue can detect, along with bitter, salty, sour and sweet. Mr. Blumenthal tweaked a shepherd's pie recipe to include umami-rich seaweed, for example. "You can't load more salt but you can definitely up the umami," he said on his show.

After that, British Airways began working with the London-based Leatherhead Food Research on more quantitative study. Thirty professional food tasters conducted a series of experiments on the ground and in the air and found the sense of bitterness in food was heightened at altitude.

Chef Heston Blumenthal consulted with British Airways. Getty Images

In addition to low humidity, they found that cabin lighting and temperature affect taste—cold temperatures and gray lighting have been shown to dull the experience of eating. Stress levels of travelers also affected taste.

And the researchers agreed with Mr. Blumenthal that umami didn't lose its punch at high altitude and could be added to recipes to bolster flavors. Even for items like steak—notoriously difficult to serve aboard planes without ending up tough and dry from double-cooking—a crust made of umani-rich ingredients bolsters flavor. "It's a salt substitute without the sodium," said Sinead Ferguson, BA's menu design manager.

Over the past year, British Airways has altered its recipes to load up on umami-rich foods. And it has pushed catering companies to overplay particular tastes in sauces so that tastes will come through for even the driest palate.

One example: The airline is serving a special tasting menu from the Langham, one of London's grand hotels, in the first-class cabin of its Airbus A380 super jumbo jets, and several recipes were reworked for high-altitude eating.

For a pork cheeks dish, "we had to pack more lime and lemon grass into the sauce," said Kevin Levett, executive chef for production at Gate Gourmet in London, which caters BA's flights.

Subtle wines don't cut it at 35,000 feet. The key at altitude is to minimize any bitterness in red wine tannins, since altitude makes them stand out more, and maximize fruit in white wine, because that gives it more taste in the sky, according to Keith Isaac, general manager of Castelnau Wine Agencies, the wine buyer for British Airways' business class service.

"Wine could be overly expressive and that is good in the air," said Mr. Isaac, who so far this year has tasted 850 wines for his airline client. "To me, above all, it's fruit. I spend all day on fruit."

Other airlines say they try to tailor food and wine for parched palates, but most haven't gone down the umami road. United, Delta, American and Singapore Airlines, a carrier heralded for its food, say they serve some foods containing umami, for example, but they don't make an effort to pump up use of it.

Enlarge Image

A dessert plate features a rose macaroon with a Union Jack Ian Macaulay/British Airways

One reason: Many customers have a difficult time noticing any difference. Skytrax, a London-based consultancy that polls travelers world-wide about airline service, says it has seen "no visible difference" in customer feedback on British Airways food.

Jamie Moore, a London technology executive and top-tier flier on British Airways, says that while food service has gone downhill on shorter flights, he thinks food on long trips across oceans has subtly improved. On a recent flight to New York, "the beef wasn't quite as destroyed as it used to be," he said, and the bread rolls were soft, warm and tasty. Business class food, he said, "tends to be quite good."

Others say it's still airline food. "My test of a restaurant is simply whether I was served a meal I'd want to go back for," said Howard Long, also a gold-level British Airways customer, "and I've never had a meal on an airline I wanted to go back for."

But British Airways is undeterred. Internal customer-satisfaction surveys score food higher, the airline says, and it is continuing what it calls its "Height Cuisine" effort.

Steam ovens have been installed in first class to supplement the convection ovens airlines typically use. The new ovens are a gentler way to heat bread and pastry without hardening them.

The airline challenged Twinings, its tea supplier, to develop a blend that would work better at altitude. Typically regular tea blends get brewed to taste either too strong or too bland, said Christopher Cole, BA's food and beverage and product change manager. Research took six months, testing with aircraft water and factoring in the lower boiling point of water aboard airplanes.

The airline settled earlier this year on a tea that's a mixture of Kenya, Assam and High Ceylon teas.

The next piece of this high-altitude puzzle? Coffee.

"We haven't yet come up with something that is noticeably different," he said. But one promising blend will be tested in-flight after Christmas. With coffee, bitterness really comes through in-flight.

"It's a difficult nut to crack," Mr. Cole said.

https://www.agriland.ie/news/the-american-dream-

The American market is set to open for Irish and European beef after being closed due to BSE since 1997, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has announced.

The US banned the importation of Irish and EU beef in 1997 following the BSE outbreak. In the intervening period, as a result of measures taken including the exclusion of specific-risk material and the feed ban, Ireland is now classified as ‘controlled risk’ under the internationally accepted standards of the World Organisation for Animal Health. However, the US policy has not recognised the international standard, thereby blocking market access.

Prior to the ban on beef imports to the US, Irish exports were approximately 110 tonne per annum mostly in frozen boneless cuts. According to the Department of Agriculture, market analysis by Bord Bia would now see Irish beef target a niche market.       

In April 2012, the US Department of Agriculture published a proposed rule to amend the regulations that govern the importation of animals and animal products. It published the final rule this week, which brings US BSE import regulations in line with international animal health standards. 

Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney welcomed the decision. In a statement he said it provides “an opportunity for Ireland in the US beef market”. He said the publication of the new regulation is a critical first step and the Agriculture Department is now working to complete specific veterinary requirements.

“My officials will continue to engage with the USDA and Irish producers to finalise the various technical requirements to ensure commencement of the trade at the earliest possible date.”

Noting the potential for the Irish beef sector, the minister said the US consumer, and particularly those of Irish heritage, would be a very interesting market for Ireland’s grass-fed beef. “I am confident that this market will grow strongly as US consumers realise the superior quality of Irish grass-fed beef andthe Irish meat industry and Bord Bia are well placed to develop this niche market to US consumers in the near future.”

The Department of Agriculture will continue discussions with the USDA Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) to seek approval as soon as possible of Irish meat plants interested in supplying the US market with beef.  A department representative will travel to Washington next week for bilateral discussions with the FSIS.

“The meeting will see submission by the department of a completed  self-reporting tool, which is a detailed USDA questionnaire on our food safety controls,” the department said. The minister is also expected to travel to America next week.

- See more at: https://www.agriland.ie/news/the-american-dream-us-market-opens-for-irish-beef/#sthash.pyF1LqvM.dpuf