Farmers and Cooks Craft Meats
Photos by Adam DeTour
While growing up on Long Island, Dan Estridge had his choice of six good delis in his hometown. “Delicious food was ubiquitous,” he says. His father was a foodie, and the two of them bonded over food. So when Dan was raising his own son, Sam, in the Boston area, he took him on a pastrami pilgrimage to New York City to places like Katz Deli. At the time, “There was nothing like that available up here,” Dan says. Now Dan is chief flavor officer and Sam is VP of sales and marketing for Farmers and Cooks, a local brand of craft meats, providing simple roasted turkey and roast beef plus uncured ham and pastrami in the Boston area.
Though not trained in the culinary arts, Dan is an industrial engineer who began trying to recapture what he calls “noshtalgia”: the pastrami and corned beef of his youth. In 2007, he left his high-tech job to make and sell pastrami and corned beef to local chefs, eventually expanding his product line to include ham, roast beef and turkey.
By 2009, Dan was selling his craft meats to places like Savenor’s in Boston and Cambridge, Idylwilde Farm in Acton, Shubies in Marblehead and Butcher Boy in North Andover. Market Basket began carrying his meats in 2012, and now Concord Market in Concord does as well. Originally sold under the name NY Deli Patrol, the company has since rebranded to Farmers and Cooks.
“What distinguishes our products from other deli offerings is that they’re literally singular cuts of meat right off the bone, and they’re cooked whole rather than chopped and glued together and processed in the way that’s typical of deli,” Dan says.
R&D begins in Dan’s Westford home kitchen. “We don’t produce commercially there,” Dan says, but all the recipes are developed there. “That’s where it all starts because all of the products are essentially commercial renditions of foods that began as family recipes.”
Each meat is single cut, hand rubbed with fresh herbs and spices and small batch roasted. There are no antibiotics, added hormones, artificial ingredients, nitrates or nitrites. The company sources meat from cooperatives owned by a bunch of farmers, and Dan procures his own herbs and spices. “We’re putting it on a rack like you would at home and we’re roasting it for real, and it gets color the natural way,” Dan says about his Simple Angus Roast Beef.
Dan’s goal is to capture that taste experience of the home-roasted Thanksgiving turkey, creating a product that is simply made and roasted without chemicals. “We found a way to do an uncured pastrami and an uncured ham that does not rely upon nitrites from any source,” Dan says.
The brand’s name may have changed and the product list has grown since its inception, but the goal is still the same: to cook real meat with real ingredients to provide real food. Sam adds, “It’s real food the way real people cook it in their homes.”
