Gregory Llewellyn Joins Haverick Meats

“One of the struggles I had with Hartsyard was that I always had more ideas than places to put them,” says Gregory Llewellyn, the newest member of the Haverick Meats family.

Most already know and love Gregory for his work at Inner West hatted-restaurant, Hartsyard, and sister venue, Wish Bone. He’s a well-respected chef and restaurateur in the wider hospitality community of Sydney, and we’re proud to have him on board spearheading the innovation of our pre-cooked and value-added range, Cook & Sons.

For Gregory, the move was strategic in that the time had come to hang his hat on the always-on lifestyle of restaurant ownership and make time for his three young kids, but it also offered him the opportunity he was looking for to take those creative ideas and utilise them in developing amazing new products.

“I thought I could use my skillset in a different way,” he says when asked why he chose to come work for Haverick, “whilst also being challenged tremendously with a factory size and staff number I’d previously never tackled.”

A few weeks into the job now, he’s already tackled these challenges head on, working carefully to develop and test new recipes for what will be the first product launch in the new range: smoked meats.

“With a 250kg smoker, it’ll be hard to stop me [from experimenting] now!”

First off the rank are four fat mortadella sausages, each a special recipe Gregory has been waiting six weeks to taste test.

Utilising a few techniques, two variations are first oven-roasted before being cold smoked and the others are hot smoked, each is balanced with a different proportion of fat to lean pork, in the quest to find the perfect balance. As he slices into one of the hot smoked sausages, a beautifully marbled blend of meats, fats and spices such as white peppercorns, coriander and nutmeg, is revealed.

This is just one of the amazing products that Gregory and the rest of the Haverick Meats team are working hard behind the scenes to create. The entire arm of the business was developed a few years ago as a high-quality, value-added cooking facility and product range for busy chefs, and now, with new technology in place, we’re able to deliver even more great products.

“We want to connect with the top end of the market,” explains Peter Andrews, “we want to talk to great restaurants in Australia and see what Cook & Sons can do for them.”

Many restaurants, as Gregory can attest, simply don’t have the infrastructure to produce these types of products, and we want to enable them not only to be able to purchase these for their menus but to input into what’s being created as well. We’ve always worked closely with our customers to ensure that the products they purchase from us are customised to the needs of their restaurants, and our pre-cooked range is no different.

In addition to the mortadella, Gregory is in the process of developing new recipes for smoked and regular chorizo, smoked cheese kransky (filled with American burger cheese), smoked hot dogs and a really special smoked 2GR Full-Blood Wagyu brisket that literally melts in your mouth. The brisket is brine-injected with a mix of salt, brown sugar and spices, and left to marinate for five to seven days before being dried and crusted with a mix of coriander seeds, black pepper, kibbled onion, brown sugar, chilli, garlic and mustard seeds. It’s then cold smoked and finally slow-cooked for 12 hours. This is a must-try for your menu!

This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what we have in-store for Cook & Sons, it’s going to be an exciting second half of the year here at the Haverick Meats factory.