Tag: kitchen

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Autumn in the kitchen

Autumn in the kitchen

The first Musquée pumpkins came down from the Roussel farm on Tuesday, which means two things in the kitchen: the beef recipe goes back to fresh pumpkin after a summer on cured, and the turkey recipe gets its cranberries.

Free-Range Turkey & Cranberry is our puppy food, and it is the one recipe whose ingredients all arrive in the same six weeks. Turkeys from Manou in Sarlat are ready from mid-September; the cranberries come frozen from the cooperative in the Landes in early October. We cook the year’s turkey batches through October and November and freeze nothing else, which is why the drying room runs seven days a week until Christmas.

What else is happening

  • The waiting list for pre-orders has passed four hundred names. The founders’ discount still applies to the first hundred orders.
  • Inès has finished the new sweet potato chews: thicker slices, dried a little longer, for the dogs that finished the old ones in ten seconds.
  • Kitchen tours resume on the first Saturday of October at 11:00. Bring the dog.
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Why we cook low and slow

Why we cook low and slow

Most dry dog food is extruded: a dough of meals and starches is forced through a die at high pressure and around 130 °C, puffed, dried, and then sprayed with fat and a “palatant” so that dogs will eat it. It is efficient. It is also why so much kibble looks and smells the same whatever the bag says.

We do something closer to what Tomas did in restaurant kitchens for fifteen years. Fresh meat and vegetables go into a steam kettle at 85 °C for an hour and a half. That is hot enough to make the food safe and digestible, and cool enough that the amino acids in the meat stay intact and the vegetables keep their colour.

Then we wait

The cooked mix is pressed into small pieces and moved to the drying room, where it spends eighteen hours at 55 °C. Slow drying is what lets us skip preservatives: at 10 % moisture the food keeps for nine months with nothing added but mixed tocopherols from sunflower.

It also explains the price. A 40 kg batch occupies the kettle for a morning and the drying room for a day. An extruder makes that much in about four minutes.

What you notice

Open a bag of Grass-Fed Beef & Pumpkin and it smells of beef and pumpkin. The pieces are not uniform. Some dogs, used to sprayed-on flavour, take a day or two to decide it is food. Then, in our experience and in the words of the customers who write to us, they decide rather firmly that it is.