Smoked Meats
Graham’s recipe for Rare Honey Glazed smoked beef. This is one of the specialty meats that we serve on our ploughman’s lunches at Toms Waterhole Wines.
Use a whole fresh silver-side of beef and cold smoke for eight hours at under 50 degrees Celsius using American oak chips that have been soaked in Toms Waterhole Shiraz for a minimum of twelve months. Baste the outside every hour with wild bush honey. Then raise the temperature of the oven to 100 degrees Celsius and cook until the internal meat temperature reaches 60 degrees for ten minutes. This will give you perfectly rare beef. I use a meat thermometer to gauge the “doneness”.
A bit about smoking meats at home. Search on google for “wood for smoking meats” and you will find numerous sites with lots of info but in Australia, hickory, the traditional smoking wood, is expensive as it is all imported. Of course oak chips are imported also but after the winery is finished with them you won’t pay nearly as much for them as when they are new and unused. The link below has a very detailed description of woods used for smoking around the world. Oak is strong but not overpowering and is a very good wood for beef or lamb. Oak is probably the most versatile of the hard woods.
You may even wish to try this recipe for a your own baked ham for Christmas.
If you would like to try out using our Shiraz soaked U.S. Oak chips order them from our on-line shopping cart.
Fermented Foods Fest
Toms Waterhole Wines will be hosting our first “Fermented Foods” festival at the winery on 17th/ 18th and 24th/25th October.
In conjunction with Orange Wine Week, we will have visiting French vignerons Phillipe and Aline from La Colline Wines in Orange to assist Graham and Jan in presenting a range of both cool climate and our warmer climate wines over a long ploughman’s lunch featuring local breads, cheeses, salamis, saurkraut, olives and olive oil. To find out more or make a booking for this event contact us.
Ploughmans Lunch
Today we served ploughmans lunches to six “blow in tourists” from Sydney. They started with a winetasting of our full range of Toms Waterhole Wines made in house. The lunch platter consisted of rare honey glazed smoked beef, hungarian salami, Milano salami, proscuito, ham. cheddar cheese, Brie, Blue cheese, swiss cheese, caperberries, sweet gherkins, tomato relish, cauliflower pickles, sundried tomatoes, marinaded mushrooms, artichoke hearts, kalamata olives, plus of course our own woodfired breads like pumpkin, wholemeal, french sour dough, and rye.
As if they weren’t full enough we “finished them off” with a genorous serve of home baked ricotta cheesecake made at home. A nice cup of short black espresso coffee topped off a lovely lunch.
They rewarded us by taking home four cases of our wine to put into their cellars.
