the big winners
Respect for the b
As co-author of The Irish Beef Book, Tipperary butcher Pat Whelan has gone from champion of nose-to-tail
eating to Supreme Champion of Great Taste 2015. As we round-up all this year’s major trophy winners,
MICK WHITWORTH spoke to Whelan about making the most of Ireland’s ‘world-class’ beef.
W
hen James Whelan
Butchers of Clonmel, Co
Tipperary, picked up a
three-star Great Taste award for its
traditional beef dripping back in
2014, it turns out to have been a
happy accident.
“The only reason we entered
last year was that [community food
group] Tipperary Food Producers
wanted to take part in Great Taste
en masse,” says Pat Whelan, who
has run his family meat business
since 1999.
“The group wanted every
member to enter something. I was
their chairman, and said ‘good idea’.
Then I was in the sticky situation of
finding one of our products that I
could actually get to England. I only
sent the dripping because I knew it
could travel!”
A year later, entered into Great
Taste 2015, the humble block of
beef fat not only picked up its
second three-star award but took
a place in this year’s Top 50 Foods.
And then, at the annual ’Golden
Forks’ awards night in London on
September 7, Harrods food chief
Bruce Langlands took to the podium
to name Whelan’s beef dripping
Great Taste Supreme Champion
2015, swept to the top on a wave of
foodie nostalgia.
It’s the third Supreme Champion
title in five years for an Irish meat
product, after Northern Irish butcher
George McCartney’s corned beef in
2011 and his near neighbour Peter
Hannan’s guanciale (cured pig’s
cheek) in 2012.
Made from a carefully balanced
blend of back fat and body fat from
grass-fed Angus and Hereford beef,
rendered and clarified, the Whelan
dripping’s complex sweet-andsavoury taste was said by one of the
final judges to distil all the flavours
of roast beef, roast potatoes,
Yorkshire pudding and gravy in one
neat package.
James Golding, chef director
of The Pig hotel group, said the
product took him straight back
to his childhood, while restaurant
critic and MasterChef judge Charles
Campion described it as “an old
friend”. “It touched the hearts of
all the judges,” said the Great Taste
judging regular, adding: “I’ve never
seen such an outrageous reaction to
a simple product.”
“It’s an extraordinary thing,”
12
October 2015 · Vol.16 Issue 9
HARRODS TROPHY
SUPREME CHAMPION
2015
Beef dripping
James Whelan Butchers
L-R Guild of Fine Food MD John Farrand, Harrods’ director of food
Bruce Langlands, winner Pat Whelan and BBC Radio 2’s Nigel Barden
Sponsored by:
says Pat Whelan, when we meet
in Dublin at the Speciality & Fine
Food Fair Ireland, a week after his
Great Taste triumph, “but what I’ve
learned about dripping is that it’s
quite an emotive product – certainly
for anyone over the age of 30. If
you’re under 30 you’ve probably
never tasted it!”
He continues: “People think
dripping is just rendered fat, but
it’s the blend that’s important. Fat
is flavour, and it’s one of the most
misunderstood ingredients on the
planet.”
It’s one of those great
contradictions in British food culture
that, just as healthy eating is again
moving up the media agenda,
interest in fat from well-reared
animals has been rising among
chefs and food columnists. But Pat
Whelan won’t take any credi t for
spotting a commercial opportunity.
“People say to me, ‘You obviously
really understand the trends’. But it
was in no way contrived.”
In fact, like that first foray into
Great Taste, the development of
Whelan’s beef dripping came about
has world-class beef, and I need
❛toIreland
make the most of it out of respect for
my trade and for nature, which has given
us this wonderful animal. To discard any
piece of it is a sin.
Pat Whelan
❜
through a mix of chance and the
company’s progressive attitude to
business improvement – in this case,
the Irish government’s Origin Green
programme.
“Origin Green is an initiative
that’s all about making us a
sustainable, carbon-neutral nation,”
Whelan says. “In that context, I was
already looking at what we were
doing with fat and bone and other
by-products of what we produce.
“And then I got a phone call
from the guy who had been paying
me a nominal amount for taking
them away, saying ‘From now on,
you’ll have to pay me.’”
So Whelan did what any good
Irish son should do: he consulted
his mother, asking what she and his
father James used to do with their
waste fat when they started James
Whelan Butchers back in 1960. To
which the answer was: “We made
dripping.”
“We go back five generations
as butchers on my mother’s side,”
says Pat Whelan. “So she gave me
my grounding in making dripping,
and then we have a good team who
were able to develop it from there.”
Since then, the product has
also benefited from a continuous
improvement process at James
Whelan Butchers that its boss calls
Good to Great, focusing on the
firm’s added-value products. “Every
six to eight months we identify
three or four products that we think
are good and have the potential
to be better, and we try to make it
great. And the dripping was one of
those.”
Both of Whelan’s parents
were farmers’ children, and with
his mother also from a butchery
family he says there was never any
real doubt what he would do for
a living. He absorbed the business
simply by sitting down round the
dining table each day, listening to
the conversation and eating produce
from the family farm, which is still
“at the core” of the operation.
The company had a single shop
when he took over in 1999, and
Pat Whelan effectively opened its
second a few years later when he
established a website and then a
full e-commerce site. It sold initially
to what Whelan calls the “Clonmel
diaspora” – people who loved their
local butcher but have moved to
other parts of the country. They in