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The Scott Rea Project started as just that, a project, a personal passion I have for butchery and food that I wanted to share, before the skills and traditions I learnt over a lifetime died away.
But it has evolved and become a movement, a mobilisation of like minded people who feed off my videos - they imitate, replicate, modify and experiment!
We are dragging game, offal and traditional artisan butchery and recipes into the 21st century for a new generation to discover and enjoy.
No longer are these products and methods frowned upon, this new audience are getting back to the basics of field to fork, nose to tail eating.
I want young and old to understand and appreciate good food and to know where their food comes from – to move away from sanitised, processed unrecognisable packets of meat on a supermarket shelf that children cannot relate to a specific animal, to having some respect for ourselves and the meat we consume.
We produce some magnificent food in the UK and have some wonderful traditional recipes that would equal any French or Italian ones and with contributors from all over the world our movement is infusing these traditional British recipes with other variations and the results are magnificent and shared among our community for the cycle to continue.
I still love to cook all kinds of meat on the bbq, but i'm really interested in bringing game to the grill. Now game is notoriously hard to cook, especially on the BBQ due to the very low fat content, so i'm working on a pheasant roulade, which is pheasant stuffed with sausage meat and wrapped in bacon, sounds simple enough, but it involves a bit of witch craft.
I have been experimenting with Transglutaminase (meat glue), the creative possibilities are endless. It's basically a protein glue which alows you to stick meat to meat or protein to protein with no visual seam or connection, like I said its which craft.
So I bat out a pheasant breast, glue in the sausage meat, roll it up, then glue bacon to the outside, it sounds wrong, against nature but it works, and works well.
It's then chilled for 4 hours to set, then cooked sous vide at 60°c for an hour, it's then ready to throw on the grill to crisp it up and add that all important smokey flavour. The pheasant is juicy and tender then you get the fantastic char-grilled bacon, cut into rings it's mind blowing.its just begging to be put on the bbq or smoker.
Meat the Butcher
Scott Rea