Speciality butchers in New Zealand

"Aplaca’s are an ideal grazer in our dry Hawke’s Bay climate and they have a lesser environmental impact on the land than sheep and cattle. Being a grass eater the taste isn’t gamey, unlike a lot of exotic meats. It’s a juicy sweet-tasting meat and for the health conscious lean, very low in cholesteryl and high in iron and protein-rich. Mesa Meat Company do a range of cuts, sausages and pies and if you’re not game enough to buy and prepare it yourself … there are a few restaurants around in which to become initiated. Otherwise cook quickly on a high heat and serve rare to medium."

"Manurau free range game birds deliver to your door and sell from both Napier and Hastings Farmer’s Markets. The Wairoa-based farm offer a range of quality and unusual birds, including quail and quail eggs, duck, goose, squab, pigeon, bantam and guinea fowl. I love poking around at their display (okay maybe just looking) imagining how they’d taste and what I’d create with them. It’s a bit of a foodie’s heaven especially at Christmas, and mid-winter is coming up. I imagine my table dressed with a multi-bird roasted Turducken – a deboned chicken stuffed into a deboned turkey, which in turn is stuffed into a deboned goose."

"An increasing appetite for organic meat transformed what began as a fledgling local business on the ‘Ti Kouka’ farm 14 years ago. Now known as The Organic Farm it sells across the country and five certified farms supply The Organic Farm Butchery in Hastings. They stock everything from wild red deer venison, lamb, beef, pork and gourmet sausages, bones and lard. Everything is nitrate, preservative and gluten free and they boast their waste footprint is almost zero."

"The name Bostock is familiar to commercial apple production and is fast becoming recognisable for its free range certified organic poultry. Rest assured these very tasty chickens have ‘lived a life’, been well looked after and nurtured all the way from pasture to plate – fed on lush grass, locally-grown feed and apples with no chemicals, no antibiotics, no hormones and no genetic modification. Bostock’s Organic Free Range Chicken has only been around for a year and already has a name for being a superior and very delicious product."