The Village Butcher, Ipstones

It seems to me that there are two distinct strands of food culture in Britain today.

The first is a desire for cheaper food at all costs, whether those costs are reduced animal welfare, mind-boggling food miles, a degraded environment or tougher times for producers. Although many people have little choice but to find the cheapest food, I’m talking about those who see ever-cheaper food as some sort of public good. The result of this is today’s obscene amount of food waste alongside ultra-processed junk for the poorest.

Happily, there’s another strand: a growth in the number of people who are concerned about the issues underlying cheap food, who understand that cheap food is not necessarily the same thing as good value food, and who want to purchase the best they can afford and from suppliers they trust. It was in search of such producers and suppliers that led me to the door of The Village Butcher Ipstones, I guess a year or so ago now.

A FAMILY FARM

Will Pearson’s family have been farming in the Staffordshire Moorlands since 1973 and it was in November 2015 that Will opened his butcher’s shop in the small village of Ipstones to help support the farm. Specialising in locally sourced, native breed meat, produce at the shop includes grass-fed beef from the family’s Dunwood Farm in Longsdon. Here they raise small herds of Aberdeen Angus, Hereford and Longhorn cattle, at times other native breeds such as Belted Galloway and Red Poll.

In a relatively short time, the shop has become an important part of the community and is to be welcomed when so many rural areas are losing their local stores. Besides serving the village and an impressive, growing list of pubs and restaurants (including the excellent Three Horseshoes Country Inn), discerning shoppers who really care about the provenance of their food have discovered The Village Butcher Ipstones and keep coming back. As Will explained when I dropped in one afternoon, he has a customer who will drive all the way from Stafford (around 20 miles away) just to buy two of his home-produced rib eye steaks.

TOP QUALITY, NATIVE BREED BEEF

I can certainly understand that customer’s loyalty as we’ve eaten lots of beef from The Village Butcher Ipstones, including rib eye, and the care and patience taken to dry age the beef for a minimum of 28 days certainly produces a fabulous-tasting meat that cooks well. On my last visit we picked up a rib of beef which I quickly browned in a pan before roasting for 30 minutes then resting for 30 minutes. This was a sensational piece of meat: the flavour intense and properly beefy, the texture perfectly tender.

This simple way of cooking, with just salt and pepper added, is a pretty accurate test of just how good a piece of beef really is with no fancy sauces or gravies to hide behind – the product has to speak for itself. Will’s rib of beef certainly passed the test: we ate it, still pink and juicy, thinly sliced with creamy dauphinoise potatoes and sauteed sweetheart cabbage, a little of the incredibly tasty beef fat stirred though the cabbage.

We’ve also had great brisket of beef from Will and, although it’s less popular these days I think it’s a wonderful cut of meat. From a quality producer like Dunwood Farm, brisket is full of flavour and, cooked properly, it’s deliciously tender. Many people will think of brisket as being just for a meat-and-two-veg type meal, but I think it’s versatile enough to use in loads of different recipes. With a top-notch piece that’s been traditionally aged like Will’s beef, the intense flavour means that brisket can be stretched even further with the addition of lots of vegetables.

This was borne out when I recently cooked one of The Village Butcher Ipstones briskets that had great beefy flavour and which I used to create three different meals.

CLICK HERE TO READ MY RECIPE FOR BRISKET OF BEEF FROM THE VILLAGE BUTCHER IPSTONES & HOW I USED IT TO CREATE 3 DIFFERENT MEALS

FREE RANGE PORK

Besides Dunwood Farm’s own beef, Will offers his customers products from carefully selected suppliers such as Packington Free Range, a renowned Staffordshire producer. As well as selling their free-range chicken, all of The Village Butcher Ipstones’ fresh pork (like the belly of pork pictured) is from Packington, and that includes the pork in their range of homemade sausages. Along with a traditional and simple pork sausage, we particularly like the Ipstones Sausage which is subtly flavoured with apricot, marjoram and chives. We found the thin ones good on a weekend breakfast sausage sandwich and enjoyed the thicker sausages with a pile of creamy, buttery mash flavoured with spring onion and served with plenty of onion gravy – I’m afraid I couldn’t resist sticking the sausages into the mash, Beano comic style.

Meat for bacon comes from free range pigs such as Anna’s Happy Trotters and, apart from the smoked bacon (Will doesn’t have a smoker), all of it is home cured. Lamb is sourced in Staffordshire, mainly from Foxt which is just a couple of miles from the shop.

MEAL IDEAS

Besides selling top-class meat to people like me who love thinking up different ways of cooking it, The Village Butcher Ipstones also caters for those looking for meal ideas where most of the preparation has already been done, offering items like meatballs, seasoned steaks, marinated pork and veg ready to stir fry, stuffed chicken breasts, beef burger melts (beef with caramelised onion and garlic with a pepper sauce that melts once cooked) and beef truffles (seasoned beef with garlic marinade topped with red onion and cheddar).

DELI COUNTER

If you fancy a pie for dinner but don’t want to go to the trouble of making it, you can pick one up here as, in a neat collaboration with another local producer, Will supplies Hartington Farm Shop & Café with meat which they make into pies. These are then sold in both the butcher’s and in the farm shop. Why eat one of those anonymous supermarket pies with the contents coming from who knows where when you can have one with local, traceable, high welfare meat?

Other pastry goods such as pork pies and sausage rolls, all of which contain free range pork, are homemade at The Village Butcher Ipstones. We particularly enjoyed an intensely flavoured Stilton and ham pastry which we took home to eat warm; lovely with some salad on the side for lunch.

Further proof of a keen eye for spotting other suppliers of excellent quality products, was a magnificent black pudding from Maynard’s of Shropshire which was one of the best examples I can remember in a good while; plenty of soft, delicious fat and an almost sweet flavour, making another great weekend breakfast sandwich.

A GREAT LOCAL PRODUCER & SUPPLIER

It’s clear that Will is very knowledgeable and passionate about what he does. This includes refusing to compromise on the welfare of the animals on his family’s own farm and those which provide the meat he sources elsewhere. He’s committed to using native and traditional breeds, believing that these provide the very best meat. For beef, that also means taking the time to dry age it in the traditional way: on the bone and for a minimum of four weeks. For items not from the family farm, suppliers are carefully selected as their products must also be of great quality

If you go to the shop’s Facebook page, besides the rave reviews – every single one 5-star at the time of writing – you’ll see from the comments left that the locals really appreciate having an exceptional butcher on their doorstep. In a culture where supermarket domination has distanced us from the realities of how food gets to our plates (some supermarket meat is even marketed under the name of non-existent farms), it’s genuinely heart-warming to see that in an ordinary Staffordshire village there are people who still know great, local produce when they see it and are eager to buy it, joined by foodies from further afield.

It’s still relatively early days for The Village Butcher Ipstones but from what I’ve seen, and tasted, the commitment to producing and supplying the very best will mean even more shoppers, pubs and restaurants will be coming through Will’s door.

Highly recommended.

Images of The Village Butcher Ipstones © Ian Dakin Photography

All other images © Moorlands Eater