When pondering about the rest of one’s life, one doesn’t need to think for very long to realize that good health is a necessary pillar to sustaining a good life. The foundation of a healthy diet comes from traditional home cooking. Long standing diets of cultures that have lasted centuries and have a proven track record of promoting health all have a few things in common. They eat meat cooked on the bone (or include bone broth), they include the organ meats and eat most if not nearly all of the animal, and eat fresh and fermented plant foods.

Prior to industrialization, the family pig would supply cooking bacon, hams and fats through springtime and even longer. Or in some cases, backyard ducks would take this place with rendered duck fat, pates, stocks, confit, and cured duck breast. However industrial meat production lowered the quality of those products, and campaigns against saturated fat caused people to replace with industrial food alternatives. The resulting lack of flavor (and I would argue, nutrition) in food left a hole that corporations were happy to fill with their latest new toys: natural and artificial flavoring, vegetable oils.

I’ve found that options for healthy, responsibly made, fruits and vegetables to be plentiful. However I’ve found it difficult to find animal products produced in a way that is both healthy and humane for the animal, as well as produces a product of the highest culinary quality. For these reasons, we’ve developed the following mission at Suggs Custom.

We at Suggs Custom strive to keep you excited for home cooking by providing the highest quality meats, produced in the most beautiful ways, to serve as centerpiece ingredients for your meals.

There is something magical about bringing a whole duck into your kitchen as an ingredient. You cannot possibly use it all in one meal. The obvious way to try would be to invite family over and roast the whole duck. But when roasting that duck you will be rendering its fat, boiling it down and reducing the leftover carcass for duck fat and stock to add weeks of wonderful flavor into your kitchen. You might decide to break down the duck, and cut off the breasts to enjoy as steaks, confit the legs in fat you saved from your roast, and make soup with the back meat and remainder carcass of the duck. Even simple cooking becomes a culinary delight when you include such home made ingredients in your cooking.