Twenty-one kilometres from the kitchen, on the plateau above Rouffignac, the Roussel family grows the sweet potatoes, pumpkins and carrots that go into every adult recipe. Marie-Claude and her son Antoine converted the farm to organic in 2012, four years before anyone in our kitchen had thought about dog food.
We buy about nine tonnes of vegetables a year from them, which makes us their third-largest customer after two school canteens. It also makes us the only customer who asks for the ugly ones: forked carrots and pumpkins with a soft spot cook down the same as pretty ones, and it keeps them out of the compost.
Why pumpkin
Pumpkin is one of the few vegetables that does two jobs at once in a dog’s diet: soluble fibre that steadies digestion, and a gentle source of slow carbohydrate that lets us leave grain out of the beef recipe without leaning on pea protein. Antoine grows the Musquée de Provence variety, which is denser and sweeter than the Halloween kind.
Harvest runs from late September to the end of October. We cook fresh through the autumn and store the rest cured, in the barn, which is why the pumpkin recipe is a little oranger this time of year.
