We recently caught up with Sam and Peter from Tamar Artisan Small Goods who are sponsoring the Pork category at the inaugural Bay of Fires Winter Arts Festival's Beer, Blues & BBQ competition on June 10th. I was fortunate enough to sample all 4 flavours of their artisanal Bacon and even managed to get a cheeky sample of the new English treacle Bacon, and all 5 were supremely tasty! Fair to say they know what they're doing. Where is Tamar Artisan Smallgoods based? Beauty Point Tasmania How long have you been running for? We started playing around with Bacon recipes roughly 5 years ago and eventually our friends and family started saying “Damn that Bacon is pretty good you should sell that!” So, 2 years ago I quit my job and spent 6 months setting the business up then we went full time. What did you do before you made Bacon? I was a safety manager in the Construction Industry and before that pretty much exclusively in the Commercial Fishing Industry. Where do you source your Pork from? We buy all our Pork from Scottsdale Pork as they are extremely ecofriendly. Their pigs are paddock reared the Sows spend their days in the paddock, while the weaners are free to run around up until about 6-10 weeks before they are processed. Then they are moved to straw floored eco-barn. Explain the process of how you make your Bacon. All our Bacon is dry cured naturally for 14 to 18 days depending on the size of the cut, then we rinse the cure off and let the bacon sit for between two and seven days, if I have the time I like to let it sit for the whole 7 days, there are no numbered ingredients or preservatives in our cure. After this the bacon is hot smoked for around about 2 hours. We’ve played with shorter and longer smoking times but we think 2 hours is best. After its smoked we like to let it sit for a further 7 days. Its approximately 20 -30 days from pork belly to bacon. What are your core products? 4 flavours of Bacon. The Classic which is just your classic flavour is salty and bacony. The Maple Bacon is a very different product it has a unique quality which is hard to explain unless you’ve tried it, the salt and the sweetness of the maple balance perfectly which gives you a beautiful robust flavour. Chilli Bacon, it does what it says, we use fresh Tasmanian chillies when available and dried when not as we want the Chilli Bacon to appeal to a Chilli lover not necessarily just the broader audience, to do that we are working on boosting the spiciness a bit more. The Garlic Bacon was a wild idea that we thought we’d try and funnily enough it really works! Up until recently we were using our own home grown purple garlic that is until we ran out and we are now sourcing Tasmanian Garlic through a local supplier. It’s a simple process as we don’t do anything to it all we do is tear the core out of the garlic slice it up and add it to the cure. Our latest Bacon that we are working on is English Black Treacle Bacon which was an experiment that seems to have turned out really well and it’s something we will probably go on with….. SIDE NOTE – I managed to get a sample of this Bacon and it was absolutely amazing!!! Very well rounded with deep sweet notes – I really liked it…. We noticed after it was smoked it had a deep brown colour to it but it was something about the way that the treacle interacted with the smoke that gave it a unique flavour. What products are available from your market stalls? We sell 100 gram packets of all 4 flavours of Bacon. We also sell take away Bacon and Egg rolls and maple bacon doughnuts at Evandale markets (but not at Harvest) – all we do is warm up the doughnuts on the BBQ and add a few slices of the Bacon topped with maple syrup. We will be selling packets of Bacon and takeaway food at the St Helens Artisans market. What type of smoker do you use? It’s a custom built standard flow smoker that was built for me by a friend. It’s a 200-litre hot water cylinder with an lpg gas tank off a car set about 2 feet lower than the base of it then it’s just piped up to about a foot from the bottom with a gas burner inside then there’s a series of wires where we hang the bacon to be smoked which allows me to do about 20 kilograms at a time. What kind of wood do you use? Pretty much exclusively apple and cherry from the local growers around the Tamar. But just recently I was lucky enough to get some 100-year-old pear wood from Lees orchards. When we process our smoking wood we like to let it sit in the yard for about a year just in case there are any nasties left over on the bark. Where can people find you? We at the Launceston Harvest Market every fortnight and at the Evandale Sunday market weekly, weather permitting. We only sell packets at Harvest but at Evandale we do bacon and egg rolls, featuring Trevallyn Gourmet Bakery rolls and Mt Rowland Free Range Eggs. We also do a hot bacon donut topped with maple syrup that is very popular. We’re really excited to be bringing our Bacon to market so we’re keen to get to as many markets as possible which is why we’re super excited to be attending the Bay of Fires Winter Arts Festival Artisans market in conjunction with the BBQ competition as we feel it’s the perfect fit for our products. Have a look at their Facebook page and give them a like :) https://www.facebook.com/TamarArtisan or have a look a their web site... http://www.tasg.com.au |