Brays Cottage Pork Pies

Or. Don’t give your money to The Man – if you are in Norwich City centre why would you go to Starbucks or Costa? Why? Why?

Steven, Joe and cakes

I had a pie meeting yesterday with the guys at Union Yard, I wasn’t sure where it was or what it was but I’m totally entranced and I want you to go there and be entranced too. Daily if you work anywhere near St Stephens. I want it to be your regular coffee shop of choice and habit.

Union Yard is indie and run by a lovely pair of guys. Joe, who I met first, is a lovely, lanky chap and previously worked at the famous Tregothnan tea estate in Cornwall, which is well known as the only place in the UK that grows tea.

Tea plants

Real live coffee

Dotted around the walls are pots of yer actual tea and coffee plants growing. They seem perfectly happy in Norwich, so it could be that St Stephens has the making of a plantation. Strange but possible. Joe sat down to talk to me armed with a small pot of green tea and a chaser shot of esspresso, which seemed interestingly individual.

For sniffing

They also have jars of tea on the counter that you can sniff to decide which you’d like.

The other lovely chap is Steven, who will be well known and

Steven and the pie party

possibly revered by Norwich foodies as the man who set up Dozen, often thought of as the best artisan bakery in Norwich. He’s been a baker all his working life (he is only 30), in the UK and abroad, including Australia.

The spare black and white design of Union Yard’s branding might make you think that it is more corporate than it is, but it’s truly indie and serving the best names of  Norfolk and Suffolk food, so deserves much attention for it. And I’m going to make it my mission to drum up lots of support.

I think the black and white fascia also makes it a bit hard to spot, but it’s right at the bottom of Surrey Street, where it joins St Stephens Street, cosying up to smartly suited and booted neighbour Jonathan Trumbull.

Plump and cheery cakes

The cakes and breads are, unsurprisingly, well selected and have that happy, plump and hard to resist look of real food – and now (from Monday afternoon) they sell our pies too. So what else could a person want?

I’m angling to get one or both of the guys along to the next Forum farmer’s market (14th April) to put in a stint as a pop-up-pie-assistant (an honourable tradition) so that more of you can meet them and become so flipping loyal to them that you never go to Starbucks again.

Now, remind me. Why would you go to Starbucks and give money to the man when you can be mates with Joe and Steven and eat my pies instead?

“A carefully edited shop that truly respects their customers’ right to have the best.” – Rose Prince – The Telegraph Feb 2012

I’m double delighted that our pork pies are going to be sold in Caracoli’s food stores from Saturday. Not only are they a growing family business with shops in Winchester, Guildford and Alresford but the Alresford shop won Best Small Food Shop in The Telegraph‘s recent retail awards. All three shops are going to be pie-sampling this weekend so if you are in Surrey or Hampshire get along, have a cup of excellent coffee and buy a pie!

But I’m so pleased the pies are going to be in Alresford for more personal reasons. Back when the world was young and I’d left home for Norfolk, my parents retired to Hampshire, where my mum had spent her childhood and where she met my dad when he was studying to be a teacher at King Alfred’s College in Winchester. They settled in Alresford, a very beautiful small Georgian town on the famous trout-rich, chalk River Itchen where the fields, fed by streams, famously grow the best watercress in the UK. My brother already farmed in the nearby village of Ropley and my grandparents and uncle lived in Winchester so it has always been a family place for me. Alresford and my nearest town in Norfolk, Holt, are very similar in lots of ways. I’d urge you to visit if you are in Hampshire.

Home from home…

Just spotted a lovely post (click here to see it) in Gourmet Magazine introducing America to the concept of a pork pie wedding cake. Americans generally think of a pie as a sweet dish so it may be a doubly new idea to absorb. We’ll see if it leads to calls from Hollywood…

The full four tiers

We’ve used since 2008 a very simple but good UK software for our accounting called KashFlow and are strangely fond of it and consider the people who make it as part of the BrayCo team. It’s run by a chap called Duane Jackson and we’ve always had a great relationship with him, so I talk them up on Twitter as much as is decent and generally have lots of laughs with them, feed back ideas and send them pies.

Yesterday the marketing team came up to video us for their website and one of the (many) things I often say and repeatedly said, from different angles, yesterday is that our pork pies aren’t furtively eaten by blokes on garage forecourts like so many other pork pies – they are for sharing and being proud to eat as good food.

After we had filmed till we couldn’t film any more we packed them off back to London with a picnic of pies with a fond wave farewell.

Today the Kashflow boys sent me a photo of them, as blokes, furtively eating the pies on a garage forecourt.

Men furtively eating pies on a garage forecourt. Photo by Katie Poole from Kashflow

Yare Valley Oils on camera

Last December a group of Norfolk producers (including Breckland Orchard, Yare Valley Oil & The English Whisky Co) went over to Denver Windmill, near Downham Market for an evening farmers market which was being organised as the last part of the filming of The Fixer with (ex Hotel Inspector) Alex Polizzi. The programme is all about small family businesses such as Denver and Alex helping them improve their business. Our pie stall may or may not be on the TV tonight (8pm BBC2), fleetingly – depending on whether the bits to camera I did ended up on the cutting room floor.

I love being on TV and radio talking about the pies but I’ve always been very wary of most reality TV. I have no idea whether the editing is going to be kind to Denver or not, but before the programme goes out I wanted to say what a brilliant place Denver is and what a special, and unique, asset it is to Norfolk food.

Me at freezing but smiling at Denver (Credit Ian Anderson)

When I was researching for a month of eating solely (glorious) Norfolk food a couple of years ago (which lead to the formation of The Norfolk Diet) I found real Norfolk flour, especially white and strong, to be one of the more problematical things to source. We have several working mills around Norfolk (including one very close to me) but what people tend not to realise is that most mills largely buy in flour from large commercial millers and re-bag it under their own label except for, often, a couple of lines such as, typically, spelt and wholemeal that they grind on site. So visitors go into the mill shop and see shelves of rustic brown paper sacks of many types of flour, branded to that mill, and have to search the label quite hard to see that

Denver bread

it has been “produced for” and not “produced at” that particular mill.

Denver bread

Denver isn’t like that. When the Abels took over the mill they made the decision not to rebag at all – and they produce brilliant flours and excellent bread on site from their own flours.  I am full of admiration for them for that decision.

I do hope The Fixer programme tonight is kind to Denver and that their business goes from strength to strength.

Bray’s Cottage wedding pies have been featured today on lovefood.com – the big foodie newsie website. We were already expecting a bumper season for wedding pies and this might increase the action! We’ve got lots of orders already for 21012 as word gets around and couples look for something pretty and super-tasty but a move away from a formal centrepiece.

What more could you ask for at a perfect summer wedding?

Pies at HQ being wrapped for delivery

Every February we cook a small mountain of big pies as part of the lunch for the annual Norfolk Farming Conference, being held this year at the John Innes Centre and attended by the president of the NFU.  We love the idea of the whole county’s worth of hungry farmers tucking into the pies.

It’s been a busy week at BrayCo HQ in deepest North Norfolk, with the usual round of making and baking – and we welcomed a new pie elf, Frances, into the fold. But on Wednesday I broke free, leapt on a train and went down to London. The mission was to visit one of our new customers and then head to the party held for the nominees for this year’s top 100 social brands.

Note the wall paper - that's their logo.

The customer was The Craft Beer Co in Leather Lane in Clerkenwell. We send two big deliveries of pies a week down to them, so I wanted to see the pub in action. Craft Beer Co has been named as the 4th best bar in the world so I expected to be impressed. It’s smart, but subtle in its smartness, comfortable to be in and very much focussed on excellent beer, with a long bar of taps and pumps. They choose to have a few excellent options for food, food that goes well with a beer, which is where our pies come in. I met the bar staff and management and discussed how the various flavours of pies fitted in with their customers tastes and the beers. It’s the building of  working friendships that is easy with local pie stockists but takes a bit more effort with customers outside Norfolk, but is so worth doing to form a good team with the people who are actually selling the pies and to help give them what they need. And it’s particularly fun, when you get to sit in a great pub working.

Many, many beers

After a bit of shopping and a tour of foodie hot spots, with my friend Linda who runs Bright Blue Skies, we headed to an underground bar and a room full of social media enthusiasts. Last year, to my bewilderment, Bray’s Cottage was named one of the top 100 social brands along with household names such as Dell, Innocent, Marmite etc. You can relive that bewilderment here.   And we’ve been nominated again – which we’re truly chuffed about.

We met up with co-nominees and the team from Headstream who organise the SB100 and listened to Dell’s  Stuart Handley (Director of Comms EMEA ). Dell were the top ranked  in last year’s SB100. Listening to Stuart was fascinating – their experience as a massive organisation using Twitter and Facebook is an eye opener for a small business, just imagining the logistics and management of that scale of communication with customers makes your head spin. Dell have 103 thousand employees all with access to Facebook and encourage employees to be active on social media. They know that 22-25,000 conversations happen online about Dell every day and they monitor, actively listening, and intervene to improve customers experience of the brand and products. As founder Michael Dell, an early social media enthusiast, said “It gives us big ears”.

I very much liked the fact that Dell’s use of social media is instinctive rather than fearful, which is the impression you get from a lot of larger organisations. All the best users are wise but brave.

His top tip for the growth area in social media was business to business. I’ve had a few conversations with local firms of accountants and lawyers, helping them try to work out how they can use social media, so it’s going to be fascinating to watch that emerge.

Gratifyingly to us small fry, Stuart said “As a big brand we keep an eye on the innovation that small businesses bring to social”. So we’re watching Dell watching us.

You might have read some of our posts before over on our wordpress.com blog.

We decided it would be much more fun to have a blog right here on our website. So here we are. The posts from wordpress.com will be added when we get chance but at the moment we are raring to go with some new posts for you.

We hope you enjoy the pie talk (it won’t exclusively be about pies, of course) and do join in with your thoughts and comments.

Sarah and the Brays Cottage Team