Pork Found In ‘Halal’ Meat Served To Muslim Prisoners

Muslim inmates have been unwittingly eating pork in the latest scandal to hit Britain’s tainted food industry.

Prison pasties and pies labelled as Halal - where meat is slaughtered by hand and blessed by the person doing the killing - contained traces of pig DNA, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) confirmed.

Both the FSA and Ministry of Justice initially refused to name the UK supplier, but it has now emerged it was 3663 - a leading wholesale food distributor to 60,000 British restaurants, hotels and catering firms.

Under Islamic law, Muslims are strictly forbidden to eat pork, and Justice minister Jeremy Wright said the incident was "absolutely unacceptable" and prison bosses were investigating "as a matter of urgency".

A spokesman for 3663 said the company was "shocked" to find five of its Halal beef pastry products contained pork and they had been immediately withdrawn from sale.

He said they had been supplied to prisons and nowhere else, and had come from McColgan Quality Foods Limited, a Northern Ireland-based company accredited by the Halal Food Authority.

"This is a wholly unacceptable situation and one that we deeply regret," the spokesman added.

He said 3663 - the numbers corresponding to the letters “FOOD” on a telephone number pad - carried out the tests after initially fearing the five products may have contained horsemeat. Instead they contained pork.

It comes after beef burgers sold by Burger King and some supermarket chains were found to contain horsemeat. An extra value burger flogged by Tesco contained nearly a third horsemeat, leading the retail giant to give full-page apologies in national newspapers.

The Ministry of Justice said the results of the tests became known on Thursday. It has not been disclosed how long inmates have been eating the pork-tainted products for.

A spokesman said: "All prisons have been informed about this very regrettable incident and we reported this issue to the Food Standards Agency immediately."

The FSA is now investigating whether the contaminated meat pies - which were labelled and served as Halal - were distributed more widely across the UK.

Editor of the Muslim News, Ahmed Versi, said the development was disturbing.

"This is very serious because no Muslim would ever eat pork meat - anything to do with pork - and it must be very distressing for those in prison who have been given this meat to realise they may have been eating food which was contaminated with pig," he told the BBC.

COMMENT: People have a right to know what food they are eating, and retailers and suppliers have a duty to describe their products correctly, and should not be allowed to cut corners by secretly padding out food with cheaper meats to boost profits.

There is little doubt the latest lapse will have offended and distressed high numbers of Muslim prisoners and their families, and will be another serious blow to the British food industry, which already has the stench of Soylent Green surrounding it. 

:: Horse Meat Found In Tesco Burgers - Every Little Pony Helps
:: What's Really In Your Lamb Doner Kebab?

Venison Shank With Dumplings & Venison Empanadas

Guest post by Dom Bailey

There are farm shops and there are farm shops. My closest sells ice cream. Nice ice cream, from the milk of the cows that fertilise the field at the end of my road that serves as a short cut to the pub.

Now ice cream and chutneys might have a certain appeal on the odd lazy Sunday afternoon, but they don't help with the general business of food shopping and feeding the family.

The second closest never seems to be open, and is less like a farm shop and more like a big shed near a motorway junction. They do have goats though. But there is a third and favourite farm shop tucked away near a pub and a children's petting farm.

There are cows in sheds, rickety collies, muddy ducks - everything you'd expect down to the Polish workers. There is fresh chicken, duck, geese and, sometimes, quails’ eggs (10p each!) and the meat of their older brothers and sisters in the fridges. And a whole lot more.

I think I've mentioned the special "never know what you're going to get" element in previous entries. And that is why it is my favourite. You can stock up on the Saturday bacon, the Sunday roast, the kids' sausages and sandwich ham, then grab half a pig's face or veal liver for your culinary experiments.

If you're game, they might just have it. If you actually are game, then you're probably wrapped in cellophane in the fridge. This week's extras were a green-tinged venison shank for £2.96, and some venison mince for £3.60. So what to make?

THE DAYS are getting shorter, the nights are drawing in, and the wood burner is starting to wink at me as jeans replace shorts. The kale and root vegetables are doing nicely in the garden. Damsons are picked, elderflower champagne has been drunk, and the elderberry cordial needs drinking as I keep getting a little disk of mould on the top (any suggestions?)

So it's comfort food time - and shanks fit the bill nicely. As they are a slow cooker, and there's oven space and heat going spare, why not try a little reminder of the summer with a few pasties as well? Well, not actually recreate the noble Cornish pasty, but completely bastardise it for your own amusement.

I'd never make it on to Masterchef. "So what are you cooking for us today?" "Well, that depends what you've got in the cupboards...Oh..." Slow ominous music, a raised eyebrow, the glint of pate, tears etc etc.

I'm more of a Ready Steady Cook man. Tip the bag out, what we gonna cook? Recipes are great and I love cookbooks, but unless it’s a really special occasion, I will go shopping, see what takes my fancy, and then if necessary look up how someone has cooked it and realise I have variants instead of ingredients.

I’ve cooked venison many ways before, but I love the fall-apart unctuousness of a rich venison stew. You can use red wine, port, stout, the imported strong Guinness is a good one. I wanted an autumnal fruitiness too, so here goes...

Marinade the shank:

Half a chopped onion, some garlic, a few juniper berries, a bay leaf, thyme, a couple of cardamom pods, a splash of balsamic vinegar, and a good few glugs of elderberry cordial. But blackcurrant cordial could work. Or plum juice. Or a spoon of quince, medlar, or crab apple jelly. The sweetness and fruitiness is to balance the Guinness that's added later.

Put the meat in a sealable bag with the marinade and into the fridge. If your shank is farm shop bought, there may be shards of bone which pierce the bag, causing the marinade to drip into the hummus and onto a poorly covered blackberry and apple pie on the shelf below. So check first.

After the meat's had a soak, put some chopped celery, onion and carrots with a knob of butter in a casserole dish to soften. Take the shank out, dry it, and brown it in a separate pan before adding it to the veg. Pour the marinade into the casserole then add three-quarters of a can of Guinness. Use the rest to deglaze the browning pan and tip the juices into the dish.

A few mushrooms and a handful of stoned damsons then go in. Put in the oven to slow cook. Check occasionally - tasting the sauce and sweetening with cordial if it is too bitter for your liking. And that's it for a few hours.

So on to the pasties. First brown the mince, surely? Half an onion and some cubed butternut squash. And while that's browning, find a pastry recipe.

It's got to be short crust. There are abominations being sold not far from the Atlantic Highway calling themselves pasties but they are made with puff pastry. I say again, puff pastry. And that's just wrong.

Chuck that down to a hungry miner, and it will have flaked into a tickertape parade down the mineshaft before you can say Oggy Oggy Oggy. I've been caught out a few times. I'm not a pasty fundamentalist. I do quite like the non-traditional fillings - steak and stilton, bacon and leek (Ok, they're the traditional, non-traditional ones) but if you stray further than that - like smoked haddock - then things start to get flaky.

I did have the nerve to mention it once in Padstow - where I had fallen foul of pasty crimes in the past - and got an icy: "We only serve short crust here."

So, short crust pastry. Flour, equal amounts of butter and lard (I used veg fat - no lard to be found in a one-mile radius despite four corner shops), bicarb, salt, egg yolk. Then in cling film and in the fridge.

The internet can be a cruel mistress (don't for heaven's sake Google 'cruel mistress'), I just mean that scrolling around I'm hit with pasty recipe after pasty recipe...and what's the difference between a pasty and an empanada..?

Good question now you mention it internet. Not so good if you're aiming for a pasty and have the meat browning on the hob. Apparently you never cook the ingredients before you put it in the pastry. If you do, it gets all Latin and becomes an empanada.

So these are venison and black kale empanadas...

While the mince is cooking through, having added a spoon of mango chutney, I put some butter and a splash of water and an anchovy in a pan, let things dissolve, and then add the black kale for a few minutes and turn off the heat.

Roll the pastry out to about 5mm thick - or however thick you like your crust. Use an upturned bowl to cut a circle then place some of the mince and kale in the middle.

Pasty making, sorry empanada making, is as individual as it is global. You can fold over and crimp. Pull the sides up to the middle and crimp. Do little folds or plaits down the side, or just replace the pastry with pizza dough and get a calzone. But however you do it, brush egg yolk wash round the edge to help seal the pastry, then stick the two sides together. Then on to a greased and floured baking tray and egg wash for a nice shine.

Then into the over for about half an hour - less than it would have been for a pasty as the middle is already cooked. About half an hour before you want to get the shank out of the oven, you can whip up a few dumplings.

Dumplings sometimes provoke the same reaction as the mention of semolina - memories of suetty, semi-cooked doughy balls from the school canteen lurking amidst a fatty mutton stew.

A nicer version – by His Essexness, Sir Jamie of Oliver – is 250g self-raising flour, 125g butter, seasoning and water. Mix the flour and butter to crumbs (I added some mixed spice, salt and pepper, and a bit of rosemary) before adding a splash of water to bring it to a dough.

Roll into balls, then drop them into the casserole - they will soak up some of the liquid but not be like anything you remember from school. Back in the oven for about half an hour.

The dumplings have puffed up a bit, the venison is dark, rich and falling off the bone, and in a silky, fruity sauce that says autumn.

You may as well taste your other wares while you’re at it - and the pasties, sorry empanadas, have a nice crispy crust and meaty middle with a "Oooh, what's this?" extra of black kale, or cavolo nero as it's called in Padstein. Might go nicely with some chutney and ice cream. And that would mean a stroll to the pub...

:: Dom Bailey is a writer and singer-songwriter. His songs are here at domssongs.blogspot.com.

Why Didn’t You Do The Cornish Pasties?

It was all going well. I’d have an early night, get up at 5am; shower, shave, and drive up to Rick Stein’s industrial unit for a day learning about Cornish pasties and successful side-crimping.

Then the phone rang. It was Colin, a pap I knew from the paper. He’d rung the day before and said he was doing a piece on the ‘snob yobs’ that pillage the village of Rock – that favourite summertime haunt of Princes William and Harry. He was in a pub at the harbour and had already got me a drink in. I promised myself it would only be one or two and walked back down the hill.

Colin was fishing cockles from a jar, listening to a folk band. He leapt up when he saw me and crushed my hand. He had cockle juice in his beard and looked like he’d been there some time. He wanted to hear all about my day at Stein’s, and kept running off to the bar to refill our glasses.

“What are you worrying about?” he kept saying. “Chefs don’t sleep! If they did, they wouldn’t have a social life!”

A posh old lunatic with his trousers tucked into his socks walked in, and made horn sounds with his fist clenched to his mouth. He danced around the pub, shouting: “Do you like hunting? I do!”

He had an altercation with the band, and then sat next to us.

“These folk lot are so bloody serious aren’t they!” He scrunched up his face and impersonated a constipated cat. “No fun at all! One of them – that woman making that hideous sound with the violin – was bending down, showing her thong to the pub...and all I said was ‘I can see your shitty bootlace!’ No sense of humour...”

“Sure it wasn’t her G-string?” I asked.

The mad bastard wasn’t listening. He was one of those barstool boors whose lives are one long, befuddled monologue.

“That’s the trouble with these folk lot - I know how it should be sung. They’re too nasal – they should sing like this…” He burst into a powerful bass-tenor. “Bella was young and Bella was fair with bright blue eyes and golden hair. Not…” He sang the lyrics again in a flat, nasal voice, his teeth protruding like a demented vole.

“What are you doing in here listening to this shit anyway,” he yelled. “You young people should be out binge-drinking and fighting.”

He introduced himself as Roger and claimed he owned 1,000 acres up the coast. He said he used to be addicted to amphetamines, and spent his twenties drinking and fighting. He could barely remember his thirties.

“Do you know Simon Cursley?” he said suddenly. We shook our heads. “You would if you knew him – I bit his nose off!”

He got louder and drunker, and insulted everyone who walked past. “I bet she was quite pretty once,” he shouted at one woman. And when a plump barmaid arrived to collect glasses, he yelled: “My word that woman has a body on her!”

I slouched lower in my seat, but Colin was loving it. A nearby drinker tried to intervene, but our drinking companion would not be silenced. “Have you ever been burdened by the ravages of intelligence?” Roger screamed at him.

Later, a small, tattooed man sat next to us, and clinked glasses. I asked him how he knew Roger. “I met him in a toilet – think it was in a prison,” he laughed. He said they used to make a living dynamiting salmon in rivers.

“But you had to know when they were going past. I’d be in a wet-suit dynamiting them, and he’d be on the bank fishing them out! We used to flog them to restaurants in the West End...”

At some point, I crawled up the hill to my room. I was too drunk to remember my alarm, and woke at nine with a stinking headache. I don’t know what happened, but bleary-headed, and embarrassed by the thought of going in late, I found myself agreeing to go on a fishing trip with Colin. I was braving my first cigarette of the day on the quayside when Raymond phoned. He sounded confused, and slightly hurt.

“I just wanted to know you were alright,” he explained, almost apologetically.

My head was still thumping, and I babbled about my friend coming down and how I’d promised him a fishing trip. A few minutes past, then Jimmy phoned. He was Stein’s executive chef, and far more direct.

“Why dinnae you dae the fuckin pasties this mornin?”


:: This blog eventually became a bestselling book, called Down And Out In Padstow And London by Alex Watts, about my disastrous attempt to train as a chef, including stints at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck and Rick Stein's kitchens in Padstow.

You might like it if you're a foodie or have ever entertained the ridiculous idea of entering the padded asylum of professional cooking. It's here on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle book if you want a read...