discuss the pork meat hegemony in Spanish cuisine it seems like a complicated task. Not in vain, the famous ‘from the pig, to the walk’ is a mantra that we are not opposed to and that we find more than satisfactory.
However, when along the way we meet mavericks like David Sueiro (Vila de Cruces, Pontevedra, 1975) and Patricia Lawrence (Toledo, 1980) it is impossible not to raise your ear, pay attention to your speech and verify that from the hen to the clocares.
chicken sausages (capable of entering the Inditex Christmas basket), organic eggs shared by chefs such as Martin Berasategui and that dazzled Amancio Ortega or a horizon, already underway, to take advantage of all of their hens.
In between, a TV crush that made them cross their paths and that now serves as a business —and personal— tandem that has turned Galo Celta into a benchmark of the vaunted —pun intended— circular economy.
From TV to the farm
Raising a chicken is not the same as making a company profitable. For the first, David Sueiro was amply capable. He just had to follow the example of how his family had raised poultry for generations.
Getting to monetize the idea, make it grow and not ‘autopose’ doors to the field is another story. In that song, the TV had a lot to do with it and it has managed to Although they don’t eat partridges, David Sueiro and Patricia Lorenzo are happy.
Farmer looking for a wife, a reality show of Four, was the television kick-off where Pontevedra and Toledo met and, since then, what could have been limited to a television set, mutated into romance and now they share avatars through Galo Celta.
Sueiro’s experience with chickens comes from afar, since he rode Galo Celta in 2010, but the incorporation of Patricia Lorenzo to the commercial and management part of the company was the definitive accolade.
A life beyond the egg
Although he came to the world of organic farming out of conviction, the reality is that David Sueiro also needed a impasse of luck. It was in 2015, despite taking several years raising their chickens organically in Vilar de Cruces.
Martin Berasategui crossed his path, though David’s persistence did the rest. “I met him at Madrid Fusión, I told him about my eggs and he asked me for a sample,” he explains. A week later, Berasategui made him the supplier of his three Michelin stars in Oria.
It’s not the only one. Their eggs can be enjoyed in other Michelin stars such as A Tafona, from Lucia Freitas (in A Coruña), or in House Marcellus (Santiago de Compostela), as well as in other restaurants without stars such as NaDo (A Coruña and Madrid), where even Iván Domínguez dares to cook David’s chickens.
However, between eggs and meat, there is another path that David explored and for which Inditex’s interpellation was necessary. “We understood that selling a rooster was very complicated, we had the restoration and we wanted to get to the food, but we couldn’t get there with the whole rooster”, summarizes David.
Inditex on the horizon
Like a Christmas story, Inditex came his way and during an agricultural fair, David opened his eyes. The way was not to try to sell their laying and mature hens like any other chicken, but to expand the horizons to the world of sausage.
I had already achieved enter the dining rooms of the Arteixo headquarters with their eggs of the group chaired by Amancio Ortega, being the only eggs that are consumed in this economic engine for the region.
“At that fair, a person in charge of Inditex told me ‘David, in five years, 70% of the products that are on the market now will not exist’ and I realized the possibilities of chicken sausages“, he comments.
For this conscious decision, there were tests and the conviction of the differential value of their product. “They are meat hens, they lay few eggs and are raised with great care, that’s why we did not want to make another product“, illustrates.
After the usual tests, in which there were also errors, as he states “we tried to add the fat from the rooster, but it became rancid, and we couldn’t go overboard with the spices either because they spoiled the flavor”.
“We made the recipe formula at home, we tried different paprika, we also tried different ways of stuffing it… It wasn’t just arriving and kissing the saint,” he recalls. They have now reached an equilibrium where they produce a fuet and a chicken chorizo, of about 120 grams each candle, and that are available in a 100% recyclable and plastic-free tin container.
In Amancio Ortega’s Christmas basket
“They have been cured for three months and we were also clear that we wanted to eliminate plastics. We believe that there was no good poultry sausage on the market and that, furthermore, nutritionally this sausage is a great product“, he comments.
Not in vain, the kings of the purchase of these cans, in addition to Club del Gourmet of El Corte Inglés, are the Inditex offices themselves, which use it inside their Christmas baskets. “It was an idea that was in the air because not everyone ate pork, either for taste or religious beliefs, so these sausages came in handy,” he adds.
Now, with a fine seasoning that does not mask the flavor of the chicken, this pair of sausages are made with a 80% of the hen itself and 20% of duck fat, “the right one to give texture and not disguise with the flavor”.
Sausage and fuet Galo Celta
All this obtained from pampered hens and roosters. “They are all meat animals, slow-growing and very long-lived breeds. In the end, we have hens with good infiltration, with well-shaped carcasses and with a quality meat that is difficult to spoil in the kitchen“, he adds. A speech that he reinforces with his actions and with the concern for animal and environmental welfare.
On the near horizon, some marinades with chicken meat and opening stalls, like the one it already has in the Plaza de Abastos Santiago de Compostela, where sell fresh produce of their hens such as breasts, drumsticks, whole hens, sausages and hamburgers.
Happy chickens in a happy environment
“We understood that to grow as a brand, one of our pillars had to be sustainability,” he explains, although he dismantles that it is only due to fashion. “We do it with conviction. In fact, we were among the first to have the environmental footprint calculated, that we have been putting up for six years, and we never use it as a sales argument”, he exemplifies.
A battle that also involves keeping the hens as happy as possible and, above all, in not devastate the place where they are. “The hens live as they want, that is evident, but it is not enough to treat them well: we must be aware of where we are,” he says.
“For this reason, our chicken coops are made of metal and when you have finished producing in a certain part of the mountain, you disassemble them and leave zero impact. If you set up a cement farm in the middle of the mountain, you are going to leave that residue there for 800 or 1,000 years,” he says.
“Our concept of production is to spend ten years on a farm and, after that time, go to another land to let him rest and that it regenerate to seek a zero impact”, he clarifies. In the same way, its traceability is once again key in understanding the future of Galo Celta.
“Being sustainable makes you competitive”
“In Toledo we produce the eggs that we serve in Madrid to be close to the point of consumption and to be as fresh as possible. In Galicia we produce the meat for sausages and the eggs for Inditex”, he explains.
With those wickers, the diet of the animal also matters, which they control to the millimeter. “They feed on cereals such as corn, wheat, barley and we give them protein through peas. Before we gave them soy and Inditex recommended we remove it,” he adds.
In that fight with food, they also pursue sustainability. “It’s about that proximity is also in what chickens eat. Therefore, everything they eat comes from a maximum radius of 250 kilometers,” he says in a fight with the industry.
“The feed formulas for cattle are standard. If you tell a manufacturer to make your own feed, they send you for a walk. We managed to get a Asturian company will develop our own feed and we get it by buying the raw material at source, so we buy the product very cheaply,” he says.
“We have the Spanish countryside abandoned and unproductive and we paid for the raw material at surreal prices. It was ridiculous that they raised the price of feed and that the land next to you was uncultivated,” he laments.
Under this reconversion umbrella, it alludes to the need to be sustainable. “At the same time, it leads you to be more competitive because it makes you more efficient. Think of returnable egg cups because the water consumption of cardboard is brutal, or what is spent with a feed that does not come in bulk,” he demonstrates.
Images | celtic gaul
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