Beef
Le Crollé
Fancy butchers sell beef bred for the plate. Ours is grazed for the land.
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Crollé: Brussels French for curly.
The curly one. Galloway cattle that live outdoors all year in the Natuurpunt nature reserves, raised under the drache, the Belgian rain. The animal hangs for a month, whole, before the first cut. Even the minced beef has had its month.
Where it comes from
Galloway is a hardy Scottish breed from the same hills as the Aberdeen Angus most people know, but slower-growing and shaggier. It grazes the Natuurpunt reserves year-round, on grass in summer and on hay cut from those same reserves in winter. We're partial to the cattle from the Hageven, on the sandy Campine soil near where Bjorn grew up, where they fatten well. The animals are there to keep the ground open; the beef is what that work leaves behind. We occasionally have Aberdeen Angus too. No feedlot and no bought-in feed. No hormones or antibiotics either.
The whole animal
We buy whole carcasses. Not just rib-eye and tournedos, but stewing beef and soup bones, and the onglet and bavette. Each animal yields two fillets. When they're gone, they're gone. Nothing is thrown away.
What makes it special
The reserve raises the animal. The ageing is ours. Our cattle are six years old at least, sometimes twelve. People think old means tough; it doesn't, not when the animal has finished slowly and the beef hangs on the bone for weeks. It hangs a month, whole, the old way, in our own fridges at Abaco, the small abattoir where it's slaughtered, run by a young butcher called Baptiste. Small volumes, so we know every animal: which reserve it grazed and when it was born, right down to how it spent its winters.