Our cooking ethos at The Shepherd’s Inn
Fresh, local and unfussy — the simple idea behind our kitchen.
We talk quite a lot about using local produce at the Shepherds. But “locally sourced” is one of those phrases that gets used so much these days that it can start to mean almost anything.
For us, it’s actually quite simple.
We make our food fresh, we keep the menu relatively short, and what goes on it depends to a large extent on what we can get our hands on from the people around us.
We don’t want a massive menu where we have to keep everything in stock just in case somebody orders it. We’d much rather do fewer things and do them properly.
And we’re definitely not pretending to be fancy food.
What we want to make is authentic food. Food that has a story behind it, food that comes from somewhere and, most importantly, food that tastes really good.
Where Our Food Comes From
Exactly where our “tradition” comes from is perhaps slightly complicated.
Az is Mexican. Raz is Danish but grew up in Northumberland. We then lived in Spain for 12 years, where we fell completely in love with traditional Spanish mountain food — the sort of simple, hearty cooking that relies on good ingredients rather than making a great fuss about them.
And now we’re in Cumbria, where there is a wonderful tradition of farmhouse cooking which, when it’s done properly, is exactly the sort of food we love.
So you’re probably going to see bits of all of that appearing at the Shepherds.
Fortunately, we also have Jez.
Jez is our head chef and has been cooking in Cumbrian country pubs for more than 20 years. He’s seen all sorts of food fashions come and go, but one of the reasons he joined us is that he likes the same basic idea we do: take good local produce and cook it well.
I think the moment it really clicked came when Kate walked into the kitchen with a load of produce from the Village Bakery Smallholding.
There was a slightly misshapen courgette. Some plums. And whatever else happened to be ready that day.
The courgette went into Jez’s aubergine stack. The plums went into the crumble.
Nothing had been ordered specifically for a dish. It was simply good produce that was available locally, and Jez worked out what to do with it.
And that, really, is how we want the kitchen at the Shepherds to work.
Local Produce at the Shepherds
When we can get them, Jez uses Renison’s grass-fed Aberdeen Angus beef for the Sunday roasts. Their eggs go into our deep yellow Yorkshire puddings.
Kate’s grass-fed cattle make their way into the kitchen too, along with the real ale we pull through the lines at the beginning of a shift, which Jez turns into an exceptionally rich steak and ale pie.
The pork from our own farm at Gill Bank goes into our sausage rolls and Scotch eggs.
And when they’re in season, Chilli Chris’s home-grown chillies turn up. Az uses them for chilli jam, pickled chilli garnishes for her Mexican dishes and, every now and then, they find their way into one of our speciality sausage rolls when we fancy giving it a bit more of a kick.
What Locally Sourced Means to Us
None of this means that every ingredient we use comes from within five miles of Melmerby.
It doesn’t, and we’re not going to pretend that it does.
It just means that when somebody nearby has something good, we want to use it.
And sometimes that means the menu changes.
Something might disappear because we can’t get the ingredient we want. Something else might suddenly appear because Kate has walked through the kitchen door carrying a box of vegetables. And occasionally we might only have enough of something to make ten portions.
We quite like that.
Because ultimately we don’t want the Shepherds to serve food designed by a spreadsheet.
We want to cook the sort of food we like eating ourselves: Mexican food that tastes like Mexican food, the Danish dishes Raz grew up with, things we discovered living in the Spanish mountains, and proper Cumbrian country pub and farmhouse cooking.
Freshly made, using good local produce whenever we can get it.
Nothing too fancy.
Just proper food, cooked properly.
Rasmus & Azareth