Made in Britain winner: Trealy Farm Characuterie

Country Living magazine features local food producers every month - the Made in Britain Awards were launched by the magazine, together with Waitrose and Farmers Guardian, to reward those who are creating the best-quality and most innnovative foods, while keeping traditional skills alive. Five food producers of the year each received £5000 from Waitrose to develop their business. The overall Made in Britain Food Champion (selected from these five) received an additional £5000. Seven finalists were given the chance to have their product stocked in local branches of Waitrose. The Farmers Guardian Best Farm Entrepreneur will also receive £5000 from Waitrose.

Trealy salami is a perfect example of how first-class ingredients, age-old techniques and 21st-century innovation can combine to produce incomparably good food. Coarse textured and subtly seasoned, and dappled with melt-in-the mouth discs of creamy fat, its flavour resounds with the richness of slowly matured rare-breed pork. This fine British charcuterie holds its own against anything the Continent can offer - quite an achievement given that it's made by an ex-civil servant and a dispute management arbitrator.

James Swift and Graham Waddington met in 2004 at the Abergavenny Food Festival: two years later they launched Trealy Farm Charcuterie from James' Monmouthshire farm. Today, in partnership with butcher John Standerwick, they make around 50 cured, smoked, air-dried and fresh meat products, including sausages, pancetta, black pudding, air-dried lomo (pork loin), coppa (pork collar) and nine different salamis and chorizos. "All the recipes are our own - we haven't set out to copy other traditions," James says. "But we've travelled around Europe meeting small scale butchers, farmers and charcuterie-makers and taking inspiration from them."

The key to Trealy Farm's success is the quality of the pork, boar, beef, venison and lamb that it sources from farmers within a 40-mile radius. Trealy salami, for example, is made from the shoulder meat and back fat of Saddleback, Welsh and Gloucester Old Spot pigs. "As they are traditional breeds reared for at least 10 months, their meat is beautifully marbled with fat," James explains. "This is essential, because if meat is air-dried it loses a lot of water and the succulence comes from the fat. You can't make good salami out of a lean, fastgrowing modern pig - there's not enough fat and too much water."

As a hobby pig farmer himself, James is thrilled that his company's "The animals are properly free range: that's important for the taste, but it's ethical, too. We like pigs." success is providing a market for the rare-breed producers whose animals he admires. "Some people won't buy traditional-breed pork as it's too fatty, but it's ideal for us. We use every bit of the animal, from its nose to its tail, so we can give farmers a good price. The animals are properly free range, with a varied diet of roots, worms, earth, grass and cereals, free of drugs and routine injections. That's important for the taste, but it's ethical, too. We like pigs."

After being hung for at least seven days, the pork is minced and mixed with herbs and spices and a live culture before being stuffed into natural casings and left to ferment. Producing a fermented, air-dried meat that's safe to eat, despite containing minimal preservatives, requires attention to detail. During the roughly monthlong fermentation and drying process, the salami moves through a series of rooms in which humidity, temperature and air flow are controlled. "Although Britain has a long history of curing and airdrying meats, producers didn't have the climate or techniques to ferment them safely. Today we have the technology to create a new tradition," James explains.

The next stage in the trio's quest to produce the definitive British charcuterie is to take control over the way their pigs are reared. "We are in talks with a local farmer about getting a herd raised to our exact specifications," he adds. "Once we've got the formula right we'd like to build up relationships with other farmers to enable us to create foods with real provenance."

Trealy Farm Charcuterie (01600 740705; www.trealyfarm.com)

Find all of this year's Made in Britain Awards winners here 

You might also like...

Country Living's online recipes

8 bread recipes from bestselling UK magazines