Calvey Family's Achill Mountain Lamb
It’s not an easy thing to make a good lamb burger. If it was, lamb burgers would be a staple of our culinary culture, and they’re not.
The problem is balancing the correct amount of lamb fat to make the burger juicy, whilst not allowing the fat to overwhelm the meat with its forthright taste
If you wanted to find a solution to this problem, you might reckon the only way to do it is to breed a type of sheep that has a small amount of sweetish fat.
Well, Lo and Behold! The Achill Blackface sheep that the Calvey family have bred and reared on the island for almost 60 years hits that target perfectly, which explains why Grainne Calvey’s lamb burgers are so darn good.
Happily, the burgers are only one small element of the story. Ms Calvey also make a killer lamb sausage: serve this with some lentils and you have the best sausage hot pot possible.
The lamb burgers and lamb sausages came as part of the Calvey family's lamb box, ordered from the butcher’s shop at Keel, on Achill Island. The lamb meat itself – the loin, the shoulders, the neck, the shanks – are, of course, peerless: Calvey's Achill lamb is one of the most distinctive and delicious artisan foods produced anywhere in Ireland, and there is no other lamb that tastes like this, with its perfect balance of sweetness and salinity.
Magic meat, no less.