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.

Forbes Claret Club visit

Thirty members of the Forbes Claret Club visited Toms Waterhole Winery for winetasting and endless ploughmans lunch. Resident winemaker Graham Kerr entertained guests with anecdotal wine tales and discussions on the production of fermented foods which include wine, bread, salami, cheese and olives.

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.

Canowindra Showcase dinner

Since the last newsletter the 9 course Canowindra Showcase degustation dinner has been held.  We were pleased to see a couple of our regular newsletter customers attend. Toms Waterhole did one of the mains, winemaker Graham created a special spiral of spicy homemade pork sausage baked in our woodfired oven, which we transported in there for the evening,  topped with Jan’s tomato relish. We  served it with our Waterhole blend Cabernet shiraz merlot and from all reports it was rated one of the top food and wine matches of the night. Record sales of the wine have followed. There were 20 food and wine journos from all over the country there so we are waiting to see what publicity follows. There will definately be another one next year so get in early when bookings open. We will keep you posted. In the meantime to see some photos of the food and wines have a look at

http://tastecanowindra.com.au/Text/1222849904872-3707/pC/1222640965669-4887/