Meat Innovation Award for Northern Ireland Pioneer
The prestigious UK Meat Innovation of the Year Award 2011 has been won by Northern Ireland's O'Doherty's Fine Meats for its original Old Fermanagh Corned Beef.
Pat O'Doherty, who runs the family meat business in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, turned back the clock six centuries to create an award-winning corned beef using ancient recipes.
O'Doherty's won the innovation category in the UK Butcher Shop of the Year Awards, which were announced at a gala event in London on 16thNovember.
Judges in the annual awards, organised by Meat Trades Journal (MTJ), said they were impressed with how "Pat O'Doherty took something more closely associated with a tin and South America and created a premium product, which has been flying off the shelves".
The innovative corned beef is based on an Irish recipe dating back 600 years and is already being enjoyed in Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland. O'Doherty, who created the award winning Fermanagh Black Bacon in 2000, developed the corned beef recipe from studying historic documents over a period of six years.
Old Fermanagh Corned Beef is salted and cured over a period of three months for sale either as a joint or pre-sliced. The beef, in common with the company's dry-cured Black Bacon, is sourced from local suppliers to ensure consistent high quality and provenance.
O'Doherty said: "Winning the UK Meat Innovation of the Year Award is a marvellous endorsement of the originality and quality of our corned beef, which is cured naturally like ham and is not processed. It's the award that I really wanted to win this year and will assist our international marketing drive for the corned beef.
"Old Fermanagh Corned Beef is a unique product cured by a technique that includes a very coarse rock salt and is completely natural using quality beef that's totally traceable from Aberdeen Angus cattle reared naturally on the shores of Lough Erne."
The company, which has seen top chefs lining up to add the product to their menus, aims to launch the innovative corned beef at the forthcoming big Gulfood international show in Dubai.
O'Doherty, a serial innovator, is also exploring other ancient curing techniques to bring other flavours to the corned beef.
"In the west of Ireland, for example, farmers burned seaweed and then wrapped the corned beef in it as a preservative. This process also gave the beef a very distinctive flavour," he added.
Ed Bedington, editor of MTJ, said: "The standards of entry into this competition are always high and this year was no exception. O'Doherty's corned beef was an exceptional product and a worthy winner of the innovation award. I'd like to congratulate all our finalists and winners."
The Butcher's Shop of the Year Awards are renowned as the premier event for the UK butchery sector. They recognise excellence in craft butchery and winners enter an exclusive group representing the crème de la crème of British butchery.
The competition covers butcher's shops around the country, with the winner in each region going head to head to see which one is declared the best butcher's shop in the UK. Other categories include the UK's best Farm Shop, Butcher's Plus, Innovation of the Year and Halal Butcher's Shop of the Year. The Northern Ireland Butcher of the Year award was won by K&G McAtamney of Ballymena, County Antrim.