Walk The Pork - The Chef

In 2014 we were privileged to be nominated for The Field to Fork Norfolk Food & Drink Award. One of our fellow nominees was Scott Taylor – Head  Chef at The Elveden Estate and a customer of Scotts Field Pork .The Elveden Estate is not only the largest in house farm in the country but it is also the gateway into The Brecks. We were delighted when Scott agreed to talk at Walk The Pork about his role on the estate as well as the estate’s policy for sourcing food in it’s restaurant.

‘ The Elveden Estate is 22,500 acres of Breckland of which only about 10,000 acres is used for arable farming, most of the rest is managed as part of various conservation projects. This means that The Elveden Estate Restaurant is part of a a very large scale operation. One in six Ryvitas comes from this farm in The Brecks  as well as 6% of the UK’s onions.

 When I first arrived at Elveden I found it quite difficult to use estate produce in our restaurant. This is because our farmers usually deal with a minimum order of 16 tonnes of onions for example, so finding a 10 kilo bag for me was a real pain. To their credit they have bent over backwards to try and accommodate me and this is because Lord Iveagh’s passion to use the produce that is around us here in The Brecklands is shared by everyone who works on the  estate. If it is not supplied directly by the estate it comes from small scale producers nearby, so we buy Red Poll beef from a gentleman that is a tenant on the farm and we use Jacob lambs from another.

We buy our honey from someone on the estate that has his own hives – last year we bought 600lbs of Elveden Honey to be used in The Estate Restaurant as well as The Elveden Inn. It is also the reason we like to support Scotts Field Pork which  is a brilliant product as the pork has a fantastic flavour. We could use commercial pork but that is not what we are about – it is important to us that we support small farms in The Brecks.

One of the things that we make from Scotts Field Pork is The Brecks Salami which is made from beef fat from the red polls mixed with the pork to make a fantastic product that is then sold to our customers.  The idea of the Elveden farm shop & restaurant is to be part of The Brecks food web. As a relatively large organisation we are able to buy quite a lot from the small producers that surround us enabling them to increase their business and employ more staff. We in turn provide employment locally and so the hopefully a large proportion of the money that is made in The Brecks by visitors spending at the estate shops stays in the area.

This philosophy has been developed further by the estate helping local small holders to increase their businesses by for example purchasing a flock of sheep which the small holder then buys back with a loan arrangement.

Here inThe Brecks we have  a unique landscape. You can see this as you drive past  the fields,the honeycombing of sand, the soil, chalk and flint. The productivity here is a credit to everyone that works on the land which is not the easiest on which to grow. When you go up Lincolnshire way and see that lovely dark peat soil it amazing to consider that we get anything out of ‘The Broken Land’. It is however our unique heathland that gives rise to a habitat for plants which are not found anywhere else on this planet  and this must give our animals which graze it a unique flavouring that wont be found elsewhere.

It is our relationship with our producers that creates interest with our customers. Like Vanessa I am on first name terms with them all and it is this that gives us a unique understanding of how the food has arrived in our kitchens.

In short we are an example of a large farm working with lots of small farms and I think this is the way the future lies to ensure the continued success of us all.'