Sandridge Farm pigs eat grain. yoghurt and beer yeast

ROGER Keen's family have been farming in Wiltshire for generations. But in the last 20 years he has carved out a reputation as one of the best producers of traditional cured bacon.

His 350 acres at Sandridge Farm in Bromham are where he produces his famous Wiltshire Cure bacon and speciality hams.

The Wiltshire Cure was developed by the Harris family from Calne in the 1840s, but when the last factory producing their bacon closed Mr Keen decided to continue the tradition.

He said: "The Wiltshire Cure is much milder than that which the population was used to in the 1840s, because it's cured in brine.

"My father came here in the 1920s and always produced pigs, but we only really started curing 21 years ago when the Royal Wiltshire Bacon Factory in Chippenham closed.

"British bacon had made a bad name for itself because more and more water was being added to it.

"We realised there was a call for better quality bacon, but we were only thinking of supplying a few towns like Chippenham, Devizes and Trowbridge."

He hired the staff from the old factory and got them to start producing bacon with a Wiltshire Cure like they used to.

He rears the pigs himself, mainly a mixture of Large Whites and Landraces, feeding them on a mixture of grain grown on the farm, yoghurt and beer and cider yeast.

They go off to slaughter and come back, are trimmed into sides and the meat is then placed in brine for four days.

When it comes out it is only partially cured, so it is then stacked and left to mature in a cool cellar for another week before it is ready.

It is then smoked over oak and beech sawdust, lit with straw, and left in the smoke house for two days until it is a rich golden colour.

Mr Keen said: "When we were interviewing staff from the old factory, they said they used to smoke the bacon for exhibitions - I couldn't understand why they only did it for exhibitions so I thought why not sell it to the public?"

He has also adapted local and family recipes to create speciality hams with different names after the local towns and villages.

He said: "We had an old map in the house and decided to name them after the way the towns were spelled back then - Brumham, Devyses, Trubridge and Chipnam.

"Each of the hams has something to do with the town it's named after - so the Devyses is called that because hot spiced Wadworths 6X is poured over the cured hams."

The company now supplies butchers in all the local towns as well as in Somerset, Gloucestershire, Oxford and Hampshire.

Mr Keen said: "The supermarkets can do all they like to copy our cures with their premium brands, but as my daughter says, the missing ingredient in their products is time."

For more information call the farm on (01380) 850304.

1:03pm Thursday 28th February 2008

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