To take some of the strain off last year’s Christmas shopping, my brother and I both decided that we’d buy each other an evening butchery class at the Ginger Pig in Marylebone as our Christmas presents. I’d been looking forward to it since we made the booking in November, and Last Friday was the day of reckoning. They do four different classes at the shop, pork, lamb, sausage making, and our class of choice, beef.

On arriving at the shop we were cheerily welcomed by Borut and Perry who were to be our guides on planet beef for the evening. After they’d kitted us all out in butchers whites, our hosts started off by explaining about the type of cattle that they rear on their farm in North Yorkshire (Longhorns), the difference between free range and organic, and how they actually go about preparing the beef for consumption once it’s slaughtered.

It was good to learn a bit more about the ageing process, and the rather underhand tactics that supermarkets employ when talking about their aged beef. The Ginger Pig, and most other quality butchers, dry age their beef. This means hanging the carcasses in cool ventilated rooms so that blood and moisture can leave the meat, thereby intensifying the flavour (the meat can be hung for up to 100 days, but the guys at the shop reckoned around the 35-40 day mark was perfect).

The only problem with ageing is that it leads to some wastage, as the extremities of the meat tend to go off and have to be removed and discarded. But what the supermarkets do is vacuum pack the meat before they ‘age’ it. Vac packing the meat means that none of the moisture can escape from the meat, so the flavour doesn’t develop, but importantly for them there is no wastage. So supermarkets can legitimately claim that their beef is aged and offer it at a cheaper price, but they are supplying a greatly inferior product. I guess t wasn’t a great surprise to find out yet another way in which consumers are being screwed by the big chains, but it never fails to amaze me the lengths that they will go to make money.

We then moved over to the chopping blocks to get a bit more hands on with the Longhorns. We were talked through all the different cuts and joints that the animals are broken down into, mainly focusing on the middle section of the carcass where the rump, sirloin, fillet, porterhouse, T-bone, wing rib and fore rib are all found. It was all a bit baffling at first, but it wasn’t long before we started to be able to identify our wellington from our cote de boeuf and our skirt from our strip.

It’s not really a course for the squeamish, as an important part of the action is getting up close and personal with the carcass and handling the meat. Not only feeling the different textures, density and marbling, but also cutting it up. We each had a go at sawing and jointing up a different section of the middle, aside from one of the group who was a vegetarian who came along with her partner – all rather odd.

The final practical part of the course was to prepare our own cote de boeuf joint to take home. This involved removing a section of the back bone (the joint had already been chined for us ), taking off the cap (the layer of tougher meat that sits over the rib eye meat), trimming it, French trimming the ends of the rib bones for presentation, before tying the cap back on with the most bloody complicated butchers knot known to man. Despite having all been total novices a few hours earlier, there were no real disasters, and to our untrained eyes our joints all looked pretty professional.

After all that graft, it was time for a few glasses of red wine and dinner. Whilst we’d been ‘working away’, Borut had been in the kitchen preparing an awesome roast fore rib for us. He showed us how to carve the joint properly, separating out the ribs, cap and the rib eye section of the joint. I’ve got to say, it was cooked to perfection. The rib eye was pink and moist, the cap a bit tougher but richer in flavour, and the meat around the ribs sticky and sweet. They served it with amazing dauphinoise potatoes, roast potatoes cooked in beef fat, and some green stuff. The meal was rounded off with a few more glasses of wine and a bread and butter pudding made with brioche.

I think we were all a bit high on meat when we left the shop at around 11.30, but we all agreed that it had been a really good fun and interesting evening. I came away with a fair bit more knowledge than I had before, and the confidence to know what I want to buy from now on. My local butcher is going to hate me.

The course costs £125 per person, and you can find out more about them here, and see some more photos from the evening here.