A meaty boast - chef Keith Baker benefits from farm connection

Carpenters Arms head chef Keith Baker is in his element at the Oxfordshire pub that's run hand in hand with the local farm.

The manager of the pub in Fulbrook, Colin Dawes, also owns Foxbury Farm, just up the road in Brize Norton. This means the Carpenters Arms kitchen has the ultimate in traceability, with three-week hung beef, lamb, Gloucester Old Spot pigs, free-range poultry and fowl all butchered on the farm and delivered daily to the pub.

"Being able to get meat direct from the farm is great," says Baker. "I order it the night before and by the next morning it's sitting on the doorstep. It's really fresh,"

He joined the Carpenters Arms in January with more than 40 years' experience at some of the top UK hotels, such as the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park and Claridges. He says he has turned the Carpenters Arms' food from cheap and cheerful to quality classic.

"I have a policy that if you can buy it, you can make it," says Baker. "So we make almost everything here from scratch, including mayonnaise, tartar sauce, onion marmalade and bread. Foxbury Farm and its shop provide the raw ingredients and we do the rest."

Baker worries about the future of this type of cooking as he says creativity and imagination are lacking in today's young chefs. He feels that many new chefs, fresh out of

college, simply don't have a clue.

"They have two years or so of training and then they're thrown into the kitchen and expected to get on with it - it's absolute rubbish," says Baker. "The quality of chefs coming out of this kind of system is not good. If I run out of ingredients, for example, I'll make something new - I'll be creative - but many new chefs just wouldn't know what to do."

Although it's hard work to run a farm and a pub, Dawes is convinced of the benefits. "We cut out the supermarket and can therefore supply meat direct. It has a positive knock-on effect on the area. We breed the animal in the area and then it's eaten in the same area - all the money comes back to us in the local economy," he says.

High quality commands premium

"A lot of people in the pub trade are scared to use quality ingredients as they feel they won't make enough money on them, so they buy cheap and sell the dishes at a middle range. But here we use high-quality ingredients and sell the dishes at a premium. We have 100% control over the food from beginning to end. People are prepared to pay for that."

The superior sourcing at the pub is reflected in the menu, which boasts fillet of Foxbury beef with dill and orange dressing and wild mushrooms, award-winning home-made Old Spot sausages and Cotswold free-range chicken. Vegetables and honey are also sourced locally. The pub does 70 covers per day and has a 30:70 wet:dry split, with an average

customer spend of £15.

Baker is not afraid to reinvent the old classics too, such as lamb cutlet reform, which uses lamb cutlets in a piquant sauce made of beef stock, tomato purée, redcurrant jelly,

egg white and ham.

"It was once a really popular dish but these days the name puts people off. But now we've explained to customers what's in it, it's one of the most popular dishes on the menu."

Perhaps the pub's most famous creations are the meat pies, which are made from scratch. The Foxbury steak and ale pie, made with beef bones and ingredients sourced solely from Oxfordshire, was awarded

runner-up prize in the English Beef & Lamb Executive's National Steak Pie Competition 2006 this summer.

"It's a wonderful pie, but it was the puff

pastry that robbed us of the gold at the competition," says Dawes. "It was one of the hottest days of the year and the puff just wouldn't keep its puff."

Despite the disappointment of missing out on the top gong, Baker's pies remain one of the most popular dishes on the menu. In fact, comedian Norman Wisdom was once heard to describe them as the best he'd ever tasted.

"I know how to cook," says Baker. "We offer proper home-cooked food and try to offer value for money."

Business Ideas

Taste not waste

Keith Baker is always looking for ways to save money in the kitchen and for the business as a whole.

"We live in a wasteful society," says Baker. "The other day my trainee chefs found a box of tomatoes that looked a bit rough. They were just about to tip them all in the bin when I caught them. They seemed astonished that I wanted to use them."

But once he had explained that chucking out the tomatoes was tantamount to throwing money down the drain, he showed them how to be less wasteful.

"I simply popped the tomatoes in a big pot of water on the hob, with some torn basil leaves, a little salt and some freshly-ground black pepper. Then I boiled and simmered it for a time and made a tomato purée."

Another great business trick, says Baker, is to get the staff to try out the dishes. "All my recipes are tried and tested here and the

bar staff love it when I'm doing a taste-testing day.

"Sometimes it takes three or four goes to get a dish just right but their input is invaluable and it also gives them an opportunity to learn about the dishes - what's in them and how they taste - and this means they're better at selling them."