Young Bay butcher returns to roots
Georgina (Georgie) Moleta has chosen an occupation not that common amongst 26-year-old females. Processing people’s homekill is this qualified butcher’s game, and now she’s dedicating herself to learning the finer art of charcuterie – the processing of cured meats into everything from bacon, hams, salami and sausages to pate and confit. Soon, she’ll be fine-tuning her skills at a course at the Calabria Culinary Institute in Italy.
It’s a value-added thing, and the future direction of her Georgie’s Homekill business. And she’s the first to admit that she’s just not built to break down larger quantities of animals in a day, like some butchers.
‘‘It’s not about cutting animals into big chunks any more anyway. It’s more an art of being able to use all of the cuts correctly,’’ Georgie says.
‘‘The idea is to use every part, like they still do in the older parts of Europe – traditional, continental cuts.’’
Encouraging her all the way have been her parents, Leon and Chrissy Moleta of Rock Glen farm, which runs up Dry River from Packard Rd to the tops of the Pikikaruna Range adjoining Abel Tasman National Park.
Largely regenerating now, they still keep it stocked with sheep. It was here with her dad that Georgie shot her first wild pig at 16 – the stuffed big tusker on the family wall is hers, too. It goes without saying, given her trade, that Georgie keeps her firearms licence current.
It’s easy to see Chrissy’s ardent homesteader influence, too, always turning out chutneys, pate, jams and conserves using the amazing produce from their farm, a veritable microclimate of productive land. Now there are sausages, bacon, ham, saveloys, terrine and pate galore.
For Georgie, it all started by doing a few sausages for friends and family, and she hasn’t looked back.
There’s no shortage of determination or work ethic either. Last year, she worked out roughly 14 tonnes of carcass meat (not including sausages) through her processing shed and big chiller complex built into an old farm cowshed at Rock Glen.
The cost of converting the shed into a double chiller complex, along with purchasing big new mincers, sausage fillers and vacuum packers, is a big investment that she’s now paying off.
Georgie’s Homekill works in conjunction with the Thorpe family’s Ellis Creek Farm in Bird Rd above nearby Clifton. MPI restrictions mean that all the Ellis Creek Farm stock has to go to Harris Meats in Cheviot to be killed before it is returned, while Georgie’s dual butchery allows her to process homekill on people’s farms and then, if required, process that homekill into sausages, hams and bacons at her facility.
Sausage lines include herb and garlic, chorizo and gluten-free, while the pepperoni-based salamis have garlic added. People bring in their wild pork and venison for her to process, too.
Like Georgie, Ellis Creek Farm is aiming for the high end of the market, advertising its meat as coming from from ‘‘local spray-free, regenerative pasture’’ which has been in the family for 80 years.
Georgie says much of her early inspiration to get into charcuterie came from working for Philippe Gauthier of the former Philippe Butchery and Deli in central Nelson.
‘‘It was a privilege to work with this fifth-generation family butcher, who came here from the south of France. He saw the niche for a specialist butcher here in Nelson. I learnt so much from him.’’
Later, she worked at the butchery at Raeward Fresh in Richmond, then moved home to work with the team at Fresh Choice in Takaka, where she had started her work experience.
Other jobs she mixed and matched between times included working at PGG Wrightson and the Telegraph Hotel, and more recently as an operator at Fonterra’s Takaka plant, running the separator and evaporator – the same job her father Leon did for 18 years.
In many ways, Georgie is going back to her family roots, which can be traced to the volcanic island of Stromboli off Sicily. Her greatgrandfather, Antonino Moleta, emigrated to Waitai on northern D’Urville Island in 1898, and forged a sheep farm out of the bush. This is a family of farmers, but with Italian roots.
Interesting, the trade of charcuterie can be traced back to at least the time of classical Rome, when sausages could be bought, not to mention the famous hams of Gaul. In a large town, slaughterhouses, butchers and cooked meat shops were well organised to safeguard public health, a system followed right up to medieval Paris.
‘‘It will be interesting to see what ideas I will learn and bring back,’’ Georgie says of her impending trip to the Calabria institute.
It’s appropriate, given the family input into the business, that Georgie’s parents and two siblings have decided to accompany her. A highlight of the two-month trip will be a visit to the ancestral family home on Stromboli.
Until then, she will continue getting through her orders and building up stock for the time she’s away. It’s not unusual for her to work into the small hours to keep up with it all.
Georgie Moleta is surely a sign of things to come. Specialist butchers have been largely replaced by supermarkets, but the trend is now reversing.
I suspect that in 10 years, the selling of meat will be quite a different trade from what it is today, thanks to a motivated younger generation of butchers like Georgie.