Our craft

Everything we sell is butchered and cured by us, in our own rooms, and nothing leaves the estate half made.

It started in Andalucía

The craft behind Beal's Farm was learned in southern Spain, over the better part of a decade. Andalucía is a place where curing is not a speciality so much as a habit. Hams hang in the kitchen the way pans hang in other kitchens, and a household will happily talk through the merits of one leg over another for as long as you will let them.

That is where the technique came from. Not from a manual, but from watching people who had done it their whole lives, and from the long unglamorous business of getting it wrong and starting again. Reading a curing room by feel rather than by dial is not something you can be taught in a week. It takes years to settle into the hands.

Bringing it home to Sussex meant adapting to a different climate and a different pig, while keeping the principle exactly as it was. Good meat, enough salt, moving air and time that nobody is allowed to shorten.

Whole animal, or nothing

We butcher every animal ourselves and we use all of it. That is less a slogan than a constraint, and it shapes the entire range. One pig gives a pair of hams, a pair of coppa, two loins for lomo, two shoulders for spalla, a belly for pancetta, jowls for papada, back fat for lardo, and a good deal of meat that becomes salami and chorizo.

Working this way means we cannot simply make more of whatever sold best last month. It also means nothing is wasted, and every cut has to be worth eating on its own terms rather than disappearing into a bin of trim. The meat in a salami comes from the same animal as the ham, which is why the whole counter tastes of one place.

Salt, air and time

Curing is a slow conversation between salt, air and meat. Each piece is salted by hand and given the days it needs, no more and no fewer, then tied and hung. After that it is mostly patience and attention. The rooms are watched rather than automated, and a piece comes down when it is ready, not when a schedule says it should be.

A whole muscle sheds a great deal of its weight before it is finished, and that loss is the flavour concentrating. It is the entire point. Hurrying the process along would put stock on the shelf months earlier and it would taste exactly like a shortcut. We would rather wait, and let the salt and the fat and the air do what they have always done.