Many have prophesied our love of smoke comes from a primal yearning. The theory goes that we gravitate towards smoke and fire because smoking was a way of curing food to stop it going off. Is it ingrained in us that smoked food is good food?

Most of the flavour of smoke is actually smell – a trigger some believe awakens our inner cave man. But if all this sounds a bit airy-fairy and you’re not a believer in ancestral memories – maybe the reason we love smokey food isn’t even important.

Our pantries are full of smoked salt, olive oil, brown sugar, paprika and all sorts of goodies. More and more we’re hearing about the art of smoking meat – low and slow, American style. This has been a wonderful trend that has made a hero of lesser cuts like briskets and ribs.

If you’re not ready to splash out on a backyard smoker, we’d suggest taking baby steps with a hooded charcoal grill like a good old trusty Weber. There’s some tips on getting started here or checkout our friends at Misty Gully – we stock some of their wood chips at our Rosanna butcher shop.

An easier option is the tried and tested backyard spit – you can easily add a smoker tray to your gas burner.

It doesn’t need to be over complicated, just have a go – it’s a fantastic thing to do with your family on the weekend and a great way to develop a love of cooking in young people. Check out this simple but effective method our managing director Steven Castle and his family enjoyed on the weekend.

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Ingredients

2 kilograms of marrow bones cut into roughly 50mm pieces

3 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar

1.5 kilograms of meaty chuck, brisket or rib bones

3 onions

3 carrots

3 celery stalks

2 leeks (white part)

3 thyme sprigs

1 teaspoon of crushed black peppercorns

1 whole garlic bulb, cut in half across the cloves

2 handfuls of parsley stalks

Method

Place the marrow bones in a stockpot or very large saucepan, add the vinegar and about 4 litres of cold water – or enough to cover the bones. Let it stand for one hour. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celsius.

While the marrow bones are soaking, place the meaty bones in a roasting pan and roast for half an hour, or until well browned. Then add the roasted bones and the vegetables, roughly chopped, to the stockpot or saucepan containing the marrow bones.

Transfer the fat from the roasting pan into a saucepan and add one litre of water. Place it over a high heat and bring to a simmer, stirring to make sure that no lumps coagulate. Then add this liquid to the bones and vegetables and add more water if required to cover the bones.

Bring the stock to the boil, skimming off the layer that rises to the top. Reduce the heat to low and add the thyme, peppercorns and garlic.

Simmer the stock for at least 8 hours. The longer you cook the stock the richer and better it will be. Just before the end of this period, add the parsley and simmer for another 10 minutes.

Strain the stock into a large container. Cover and cool in the fridge. Remove and discard the congealed fat that rises to the top. Transfer the stock to smaller, airtight containers and place in the fridge, or for longer-term storage, the freezer.

The stocks will keep for 2-4 days in the fridge and three months in the freezer.

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If this sounds all too familiar, meal planning can prevent it. Meal planning plays an important role in ensuring you and your family enjoy a healthy balanced diet. It also alleviates the daily stress of deciding what’s for dinner, puts a stop to the constant trips to the shops and saves you money.

We’ve developed a few tips to help you and your family (the kids will love to get involved) plan your meals and enjoy fresh, natural and healthy produce.

1) Sit down and work out what you would like your weekly plan to include in general terms. For example, each week would you like to have one stirfry meal, a pasta meal, a slow cooker/soup meal, a salad, steak or mince beef meal etc. This template will vary depending on how much meat you like to eat, your budget, household and likes/dislikes.

2) Think about maximising some cheaper cuts of meat, as well as treating yourself to some premium cuts. The slow cooker is a great way to turn things like lamb shoulder, gravy beef, osso bucco, chuck and ribs into family favourites.

3) Decide on a handful of dinners that your family will enjoy regularly. These can form the foundation of your meal plan and rotate onto your dinner table every week or two. You might decide on 10 dinners, for example, that you use once every two weeks. This would leave two dinners a week to add variety to your meal plan and try new recipes and flavours.

4) Once you’ve decided on the look and feel of your meal plan, considered how you might use different cuts to stretch your protein dollars and developed your core dinner recipes, it’s time to buy what you need. With our online ordering and free home delivery service, we would encourage you to order on Wednesday nights for Friday/Saturday delivery. This allows you to pick up your fresh fruit and vegetables on Saturday morning and kick off your first dinner for the week that night.

Nutrition Australia has some useful meal plan templates and recipes that might help you further here.

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Traditionally, we’ve grown mostly Shorthorn Hereford Cross cattle at the farm, but in the past year we’ve begun crossing our Hereford Cross cows with Charolais bulls. Pictured are the first lot these 10 month-old Charolais Hereford Cross cattle ready for processing today.

Our Simply Free Range moto is ‘meat the way nature intended’ and we mean every word of it. These beef cattle were bred naturally in their paddock, with their mothers covered by a bull. The mothers carried them in our paddocks at a ratio of one cow and one calf to three acres. In addition to pasture, the cattle receive hay and silage harvested from our properties.

When calving time approaches, our cows are checked at 5.30am, midday, at 5pm and again at 10pm.  If we need to render assistance with a calving we do, but in the vast majority of cases the calves are born naturally in their paddocks.

The first 24 hours are very important for a calf, which needs a good feed of its mother’s colostrum. Colostrum contains important antibodies which protect the calf from disease. While some farmers intervene in this process, we leave it to nature and the success rate is excellent.

After about three weeks the calves will begin to eat grass from the paddocks and hay and silage when they want to. They remain with their mother and drink from her right through to processing. The cattle pictured here, for processing today, fed from their mothers until yesterday.

Sometimes seasonal conditions can make it very difficult to grow beef cattle to the standard our customers deserve.

If necessary, we can now supplement their feed with a specially designed pellet that meets pasture-fed certification guidelines. These animals didn’t require it and reached our target 420kg weight on their mother’s milk, pasture and fodder alone.

These cattle were separated from their mothers late yesterday and travelled less than 2km to our on-farm boutique abattoir at Koallah Farm. They spent last night together in a large soft floor pen. Cattle that spend nights on concrete can become stressed and get quite sore hooves and legs which can impact meat tenderness.

They were handled respectfully and processed by our own staff in our accredited facility at 6am this morning. The carcasses will be aged for about 10 days before being butchered for online orders and our shops in Mt Waverley and Rosanna.

Incidentally, their mothers are already about seven months pregnant with their next calf. They now dry off naturally and have two months to put all their energy into the health of their new calf before it is born and the process starts again.

So that’s what we mean when we talk about pasture fed, free range beef. To us it means no antibiotics, no added hormones and plenty of wide open space where nature can take its course.

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Rather than venting how many producers fall well short of meeting customers’ expectations, we thought we’d just let you know what the term means to us at our farm.

The team at Koallah Farm is now growing our own meat birds on our property near Camperdown in south-west Victoria.

All our poultry live in our paddocks – protected from predators by Saydi our trusted Maremma (pictured below). The chickens can do whatever they want, all the time. We don’t even lock them up at night time.

This means our chickens are genuine ‘pasture-raised’ chickens as they can eat grass and roots and forage for bugs, worms, larvae and more. They also benefit from lots of natural sunlight.

Although we still provide a feed pellet for additional nutrition, the natural proteins and minerals from our rich volcanic paddocks are essential in growing healthy, fully-feathered chickens with thicker skins and darker, stronger-flavoured meat.

It takes us a full 12 weeks to grow our chickens and it’s worth the wait. As you can see, they develop quite differently with much more muscle in the legs from roaming around.

There’s no doubting you can taste the difference. Pastured chicken is much less watery, not quite as soft and has a distinctly earthier and more gamey flavour.

If you cook it a bit slower you’ll release all the natural flavour and we think you’ll love it.

Keep an eye on the website for more Koallah Farm-listed chicken products. At the moment, we’ve started with whole birds, but very soon we’ll be able to provide all your favourite cuts as well.

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