The Milestone Cookery School

The Milestone, for those who don't know, is one of Sheffield's greatest restaurants, serving high end food made from locally sourced seasonal produce, with a sincere passion (verging towards reverence) shown towards the ingredients. They run a variety of regular masterclasses, from day courses in pastry or pasta, to "A Pig in a Day", and half day courses in bread, Indian street food and the course I went on, all about sausage, bacon and black pudding. The cookery school experiences can be given as gifts in the form of vouchers bought from the restaurant or online here and this is how I found myself counting down the days to the visit.

When the day finally dawned, I arrived a little nervously clutching my golden ticket, to be greeted with a coffee and some pastries in the dining room downstairs, which is cosy and inviting for all occasions. After the full group of seven arrived, we made our way upstairs to what is usually another space for eating, which had been converted for the occasion into an makeshift cooking space with a single gas stove ring and a big knife each.


The Cooking

We started the proceedings by preparing the black pudding. This began its life as a tray of powdered blood and half a bottle of cider, to which we added lightly fried onions and some nutmeg, before passing it to Richard (our host for the day) to put in the kitchen's oven.

We moved on to the delectable bacon cure: a simple blend of equal parts sea salt and brown sugar, with the aromatic mixture of nutmeg and thyme to add a varied sweetness and a herby meatiness. Richard prepared the full pork belly joint for us, demonstrating an array of butchery techniques, leaving the short rib behind to provide us each with a tender fatty portion of meat ready to be cured.

As we placed the bacon to one side, word came from the kitchen that the black puddings were done, and they were brought forth, still in the steaming bain marie. As we were presented with the warm blood pudding, the next event was prepped. An exercise in plating up food, using the Milestone's very own burnt onion sauce, horseradish crackling and divine miniature apple jellies. I can't quite believe I managed to produce such a pretty plate of food!

The final activity was sausage making, an awkward skill for the clumsy set of hands I came with, but in the end a very worthwhile technique to know. We started by mixing to ground pork, a small amount of lightly fried onion with a great selection of fresh herbs, such as thyme and parsley as well as an ingredient that I had only heard in hushed whispers around whisky tastings... Smoke powder. This definitely lived up to my dreams - a seemingly magical white powder that filled the whole room with a smell of open fire. Once all the ingredients had been mixed and squeezed to the bottom of a piping bag we were ready for rolling.

The skin of these sausage was to be crepinette (known less exotically as caul fat). Rather than using the lower intestine, this French method of wrapping meat in bladder lining quickly became obvious as an easier method, than the filling of traditional sausage. Once piped as a strip onto the crepinette, all that was needed was a tight roll once and the outer would stick to itself. Once we had our sausages portioned, we cooked a few up and were presented with a hearty dollop of the restaurant's mash and their frankly delicious gravy.

Being able to leave with a bacon on the cure, a still warm black pudding and a fistful of sausages just meant I was hankering to cook it all.


The Eating 

What better way to eat a smashing homemade sausage than with Yorkshire puddings, roasted sweet potatoes, and lashings of tarragon gravy. The perfect Sunday tea.









Chicken, bacon and black pudding empanadas, and black pudding huevos rancheros.

The traditional English breakfast, remastered with a healthy dose of homemade bacon, some free range eggs and a pinch of chilli.


I'll definitely be making the bacon again, and would feel confident with the sausages and black pudding too once I'd paid a visit to a good butcher to acquire the right ingredients. All in all, the experience was a great day which taught me an array of new skills. Highly recommended.

Cheers,

Jim