All is well on the farm and with the cows, though the pasture is beginning to look a little tired as we come towards the end of the summer. Hopefully the grass will start gathering some momentum again and grow at a quicker rate in the autumn to allow us a couple more rotations grazing before the cows come inside at the end of the season. At least the scenery isn’t looking parched like recent summer’s gone by. ‘Dull’ isn’t usually a word associated with August, but with cool temperatures, no sun and no rain, it seems quite appropriate this time.
Last week was our organic inspection by the Soil Association – just for the processing side of the business (the farming inspection comes at a later date). The audit was mostly spent looking at ice cream production records, as they’re the only product where we’re using bought in ingredients. A lot of spreadsheets and receipts had to be cross referenced for tractability purposes to show evidence that what we are putting inside the ice cream is 100% approved organic produce.
The ice cream flavours we’ve made this month include Poppy Seed, Raspberry, Salted Honey and Vanilla. The raspberry ice cream is a new flavour we’ve developed this year made with organic raspberries from Sandy Lane Farm. As with our blackberry gelato, the whole fruit (fibre, seeds and all) go into the ice cream machine as we don’t concentrate or strain the pulp just to extract the flavour. We’ve had some comments in the past that the blackberry ice cream contains a few too many bits and seeds for some people and it can detract from the smooth mouthfeel of the ice cream (we love the bits personally!) But if the blackberry’s texture has put you off, rest assured there are far less bits inside the raspberry ice cream - the initial feedback has been very positive so far.
We’re excited to announce we have some beef booked in with the butchers next week and we hope the meat is available to purchase by the end of the month.
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