I think the nose-to-tail movement opens a pathway
for people to cook responsibly and sustainably.
[lively music]
We opened Manteca in Shoreditch in London.
As the chef and co-founder,
I work with the senior team in more of a support role
and help drive the restaurant more creatively.
The plan was to always use whole animals.
It gives us better control over sourcing.
It gives us the best quality
and price that we can then pass back onto the customer.
We make everything from our creme fraiche to our pasta,
our whole animal, butchery and all of the salumi.
If we’re talking about 100 years ago,
nose-to-tail was the only way of eating.
[lively music]
Hi, I’m Chris Leach, the chef and co-founder of Manteca.
We’re here in Shoreditch and we’ve got busy day ahead of us.
So we’re gonna get started.
[lively music]
It’s about 8 AM now.
We’re gonna catch up with Jake
and just go through today’s menu.
How are we looking?
Quite a few big tables in.
Tonight is looking as it always is.
Nice. But nice, looking good.
[lively music]
We’ve got a whole pig that came today.
We’re gonna break that down now.
[lively music]
We’ve got this pig in this morning.
Will last us a couple of days.
We’ll go for about two and a half whole pigs a week.
For ease of delivery for the drivers,
we get this cut into six parts.
We’re gonna go and break down this pig upstairs.
We’ll start this for the rest of the day.
[lively music]
This is our whole [indistinct] Saddleback Cross.
We buy direct from farms or butchers
we have very close relationships with.
We know everything we need to know about the animal.
I’m gonna break down the shoulder
and the butchery team are gonna break down
the rest of the animal now.
We will take the coppa muscle,
which is a collection of muscles
that will lead into the loin, which we’ll cure downstairs.
We’ll salt that for three weeks.
So we just saw straight through here.
Then cut down, also cut off the pot.
That will go to be braised with the head.
We will begin by removing the pork skin.
So when I’m taking off the skin,
I’m trying to just take it off in one big piece
without cutting into the flesh.
And then some of it we will dry out in a dehydrator
that we will serve with a ragu,
which we’ll make from the rest of the cooked pig skin.
When you buy whole animals,
it’s very easy to serve chops and pork bellies
and nice easy cuts like that.
What you also are left with is a lot of skin, a lot of fat,
and a lot of other connective tissues
that aren’t as easy to make use out of.
Landing on the pig skin ragu
as a dish to use up the skin was something
that I think it really defined what we do as a restaurant,
which is using every part that we can.
Now, when I’m gonna separate the shoulder blade
and the coppa muscle, finding the natural seams,
you can do most of it with your fingers
and then using the knife just to break away
any connective tissue.
You’re staying as close to the bone as you can.
And the way we cure our coppa muscle
is to leave a nice big chunk of fat on,
which is just at the end here.
The fat cures very nicely
and it gives the particular cut
a really nice mix of textures.
When it comes to salumi you want a good mix of fat and lean,
but you do always have to be a little bit careful
when having too much fat
because you can get higher levels of rancidity.
The coppa muscle, it cures very evenly. It’s off the bone.
We stuff it inside a [indistinct],
which is part of a the cow’s intestine.
It protects it as it’s curing.
Generally about three months
it takes for it to be on the menu.
And then once it’s off the bone,
we will salt it to around 2.7% of salt
to the weight of muscle.
So in this case it’s 3,507 grams.
That’s our target weight.
And then I’m gonna weigh out each of these 96 grams
of pure sea salt.
The more accurate we’re with our spicing,
the more consistent the recipe is.
So this is ground nutmeg.
They work really well with the pork.
Same amount of ground bay leaf,
freshly ground black pepper to this as well.
I’m just gonna put the cure all over.
We’re gonna rub it all in
and then we’re gonna vacuum seal it in the cure.
When you’re buying a whole pig,
you would really wanna be looking
for a good amount of fat coverage.
The more fat the better for curing.
So now we’re gonna take this down and vacuum seal it
so it can go to be cured for the next few weeks.
[mellow music]
So it’s 9:30 now, we’re gonna do a team briefing,
go through the menu for the day,
deciding what pastas are gonna be on,
looking at stock counts from the day before,
making sure everybody knows
what they’re gonna be prepping for the day.
Because we work with whole animals,
we make a lot of different slow cooks and ragus,
which will ultimately change day by day.
Briefing, please. Okay, let’s do this.
So we’ve got a hundred booked in for lunch
and we’ve got 300 tonight.
So we’ll be looking at probably 320, 330 as per usual.
Two lunch parties and two evening ones,
which we’ll get into afterwards.
Then at 1:30, we’re doing all three meats for 18 people.
We’re gonna do a potato mix today for a new dish,
scarpinocc, which we’re gonna serve with possibly a ragu.
So we’ll try that today.
Thanks so much. Thank you.
So with the menu locked in,
we’re gonna go and check on the salumi
in the salumiere downstairs.
[mellow music]
So this is our salumiere.
We call it salumiere because salumi is the Italian term
for what’s known as charcuterie.
The general process of salumi-making in Italy
and the way the butcher is done,
is all about elongating the muscles.
Okay, so I’ve got this coppa
that’s gonna be on the menu today.
This has been curing for four months.
There is a system to how things move around.
For example, here are all of the coppas
that stay around here and they kind of move around,
and by the time they’re at this stage, they are ready.
Everything that comes in is given a code
so we know the weight it is when it goes in.
We monitor the pH before it goes in.
So we want our acidity levels to be right on each product.
We will monitor it until the weight drops
by about 30 to 35%.
The fat won’t lose any weight,
but the lean muscle mass will.
With the coppa muscle we’ve just cured,
but those three weeks in salt will draw out
a lot of moisture from the coppa, from the muscle.
Our setup in here is to essentially replicate the caves
and curing cellars in Italy.
We have a humidifier and a dehumidifier
so that the relative humidity in here
is at around 70, 72, 73%,
and the temperature hovers at around 10 degrees.
Those conditions allow the meat to very gently dry out.
If the temperature was too high, it would take too long
for the cure to reach the middle.
We would not end up with a very desirable product.
So just to compare two pieces.
This has been in here for a week,
so that’s very, very fresh.
This has got a long way to go.
This has been in here for three months
and you can see there’s much less give on it.
We could probably take that out and slice it.
When they are ready
and they’ve lost the desired amount of weight,
we’ll take off all of the protective layers,
cut off all the string, then we’ll vacuum seal it
so that the cure is allowed
to fully equalize all the way through.
So we’re gonna go upstairs
and check on the next stages of the pig skin ragu.
[mellow music]
So we’ve got our sofrito of onion, carrot, celery, fennel,
and garlic that’s been cooking down for a couple of hours.
We cook the sofrito for a long time, nice and slowly,
really cook out the vegetables
and bring out all of the natural oils in them.
Then we will add white wine, reduce that.
We’ve added to this a spice mix of cayenne pepper,
black pepper, fennel seed, star anise and chili flakes.
There’s a of fat and richness to this,
and the acidity from the wine and tomatoes helps cut through
and balance this really, really nicely.
So we’re gonna add now some crushed whole tomatoes.
Then we’re gonna cook this down just a little bit
and add all of the cooked pig skin.
The skins were cooked two nights ago.
They were scraped and prepared yesterday,
minced this morning, and now all of this will come together
to complete the dish today.
So the next step of this process
is adding the cooked pig skin to the base here.
We’ll put it back on the stove.
We’ll cook that now for probably a couple of hours.
All those flavors and all that fat
and skin will start to make friends,
and that is the main protein in this.
It’s very rich and sticky.
It’s probably the dish that defines
what we do at the restaurant the most,
using up slightly more gnarly bits
that don’t necessarily have a place all over the menu.
So now we’re gonna fry some pig skins
to serve with the dish.
So now we’ve got these dried pig skins.
We’ve dried them out fully since they’ve been cooked
and we’re essentially gonna rehydrate them in the fryer.
So this’ll nearly double in size.
[mellow music]
So essentially this is a chicharron.
We use this as a vehicle for basically eating the ragu with.
Nice and big.
Just gonna season it with a little bit of salt.
The chili, fennel and spice mix,
we just give it a little dust
and we’ll serve this on top of the pig skin.
There’ll be some fresh Parmesan on it.
They’ll snap it, break it, eat it.
So now the pig skin regu is ready.
We’re gonna go and work on a couple
of new dishes with some pasta.
[mellow music]
This is a section where we roll
and make all of our pastas for the day.
These are some of the ones that we’ve got here.
We’ve got lumache, which means snails.
This is the strozzapreti that we sometimes serve
with our brown crab cacio e pepe.
This is campanelle.
And we serve this with a duck ragu [indistinct],
which we serve with a pork and fennel ragu.
So the reason we’ll choose different shapes
for different ragus is how they work.
This has got lots of little ridges in.
It catches the sauce really well
so we’ll serve this with a pork and fennel ragu.
I’m working on a new dish at the moment,
which is gonna be a filled pasta.
And so this is like a classic pasta dough.
Essentially one egg for every a hundred grams of pasta.
When you see these air pockets here,
that’s what you wanna see.
The dough is made yesterday,
has it had a really nice rest.
The protein allows it to be worked quite well
and works with the gluten, which is in the dough as well.
So I’m gonna roll this out now.
[mellow music]
We use a machine rather than by hand
because it is a lot more effective for us
to do 400 covers in a day.
So it goes through these steel rollers
and starts to get quite thin.
Dust it along the way.
We’re gonna fold and we’ll be trapping lots of air
in between each pasta.
This is called laminating,
and this will give us a really nice mouthfeel
and texture when we come to eat the pasta.
If it’s too thick, it will be undercooked in parts
and that’s not what we want.
We’re gonna fill it with a potato filling
and we’ll serve it with a meat ragu.
This is our potato filling.
I’m gonna put little dots of this here.
And then we’re gonna fold the pasta over,
bring them together to create a nice little shape,
which is called scarpinocc,
and that’s from the north of Italy.
And I’m just pushing any excess air out as I keep the shape,
and then I’m gonna use a cutter,
which is a little brass fluted cutter
and I’m gonna make these cuts.
Got these, we’re gonna just squeeze out the air,
put a little dimple in them.
What I love about making pasta is the craft.
I’ve always loved making things with my hands.
So we have tried this filling before with a duck ragu,
but with a more classic ravioli shape.
But I think this, it’s gonna present a little bit better.
It’s hopefully gonna eat a bit better.
And I think with the beef ragu, it’s gonna be delicious.
So let’s go and try these.
[mellow music]
I’m gonna try this with a beef shin ragu
with a little bit of butter, and then I will cook these.
And when you’re on this section,
you’re cooking hundreds of portions of pasta
and you kind of have a sixth sense
for it after a little while.
Oh, we use the pasta water.
It’s pretty essential ingredient in all of our pastas.
It’s got a nice amount of starch in it.
It just helps the sauces loosen up a little bit.
We couldn’t cook the amount of pasta we do
if we didn’t have a setup like this.
It’s really, really important to taste as you go.
So the ragu has been finished, it’s perfect,
but we’ll just give it a little kiss of sherry vinegar
so it just needs a little extra bit of acidity
just to help lift and elevate the whole dish.
We’re kind of thinking about a lot of things,
how this will work for us in a busy service,
how we can manage the prep for 300 covers in an evening.
We need to think about how it looks, how it tastes,
and how we can plate it.
Ultimately, the test of this will be
how it all eats together.
Jake, let’s try this.
[Man] Looks great.
This is pretty good. I think it’s lovely.
Jake keeps me in check
and won’t let me do stupid things
like put really difficult things on the menu.
So I definitely need Jake. Jake steers the ship.
I rock it sometimes.
So it’s noon, we need to get set for service,
so I’m gonna see you in a bit.
[mellow music]
So now I’m doing the pass.
That’s just calling tickets and managing the tables
for out service.
Checks come in, I’ll let the team know what’s on order,
and then we’ll just send them as they come through.
[bell rings]
So when I ring the bell, that is for service
and somebody will come and take these dishes to the table.
Away Table 14, pork blade and a cabbage salad.
It can be quite a hectic pass to manage.
There is a lot going on,
so we have to be very organized on here.
We try and get all starters out within 20 minutes.
And then similar thing with pasta,
which allows us a bit more time
for longer cooked proteins like steaks
and large protein cuts.
Away.
You’re coming up on that now, yeah?
Yeah, sure.
So when a check’s called away, we’ll keep it on the pass
so we know what’s on order.
We’ll move it into an away section
so the team know exactly what’s going on
and where they’re at with the orders.
Send this to 1-4. 1-4.
Cacio e pepe, and then this [indistinct] collar to 6-2.
When we’ve completed the check, we will spike it here.
So we keep all of the check from the last like hour
so we know what’s going on.
We’ll put a note on it here
so we know it comes from our section.
Check on for catch up muscles, follow rib eye,
potatoes, [indistinct] salads.
There’s a lot of shouting during service.
It could be quite loud in the evenings as well.
Lunch service is three hours.
We finish at three-ish and then we reopen at 5:30,
and then that will be a big five-hour service.
[mellow music]
Okay, last table’s in.
We’re about to get ready for a busy dinner service.
Hope you’ve got a sense of what it’s like
to be a chef at Manteca, but you’ve gotta go now.
So thank you. Bye-bye.
[mellow music]