Here it is ... the Love Every Mouthful steak advert in which I appear for Tesco. PLUS short version of advert.

Readers will recall that I went down to London early July after winning a nationwide competition to be part of Tesco's new food campaign - Love Every Mouthful. I won on my passion for food and my love of being a Tesco butcher and sharing food advice on my meat counter and through this blog.

Without further ado... here is the advert. I am the butcher at the end.




PPS: If you are really interested in the process of my experience on the advert shoot. Click this link.

NEW!!!! The shorter version in which you can see my face. Just added 22nd August.

Roast shoulder of lamb with garlic and rosemary - butcher's version.

One of the things I learnt on the Gold Meat course in Wales recently was how to create cushions of lamb from a boned out shoulder of British lamb. So, this weekend I spent some time boning out a full shoulder of lamb (at work) and using the blade side as my 'cushion'  - so called because of the stringing method and resultant look.

The beautiful shoulder of lamb is by nature a joint with a larger element of fat than say, the leg. So the shoulder needs more trimming if you want to restrict the fat within the meat. Below is the full shoulder minus the neck muscle. This is how they arrive at my counter at Tesco once removed from the cryovac packaging.

First of all I removed the blade bone by trimming around the bone to release the meat and sinews. Then I place my two fingers around the top of the bone and pull towards myself. Amazingly, if you have trimmed well the whole thing comes clean away from the meat. The key is good trimming and fulcrum. Doing it this way means that you don't rip the shoulder skin by hacking at the thin join of bone and skin.

The next part is more labour-some. The two knuckle bones need to be tunnel boned which is done with careful pushing actions with the tip of the knife and a twisting motion as the bones come free of the meat. The outer knuckle bone is the more awkward to do because of its irregular shape. All the tougher bits of the joint now need to be removed so that when the meat is rolled and eventually eaten you aren't spitting out chewy bits of sinew. You then continue by removing any extraneous fat and the lymph node buried in a wedge of fat in the top right hand corner of the meat. It's all about working carefully with the tip of the boning knife and teasing away the unwanted element. Like any working in this way, a gradually learnt recognition of structure of the muscles and bones is key to a good clean job done.

Once all the fat and gristle has been trimmed you can then cut the shoulder in half in the same direction that the blade and knuckle end would naturally lay 'bone in' and pull the muscles into tight balls and string up across the meat creating a cross and then two more diagonal strings to create the cushion effect.

                                   Photo above shows the full shoulder in three cushions.

Now the exciting bit! The cooking of the shoulder. Shoulder needs a slower cooking to get the best result and the piece (top joint of the above photo) I cooked I did on gas mark 6 for two hours.

I decided to add rosemary and garlic to the lamb and trimmed some rosemary from a big bush in my cottage garden. I cut off little sprigs and sharpened the ends with a sharp knife. The garlic I cut into slithers and then cut slits in the meat to push the garlic/rosemary into.

As you can see I photographed each stage simply because I like to do this and get great pleasure in being able to share the images/text and ideas with you.

The meat went into a pre-heated oven for an hour covered with silver foil and then I took it out, removed the foil and basted the meat with the unctuous meat juices. The cooking oil was olive oil.

For the last half hour of cooking I chopped up some Tesco Cornish new potatoes and added fresh mint from my cottage garden. The house air was full of fantastic aromas of cooking lamb, garlic and rosemary.

These cooked on the oven top for about half an hour alongside some French beans I had in the freezer. Once cooked the lamb rested on the side for fifteen minutes even though it was very tempting to snaffle a slice or two. I removed the rosemary and added the cooked garlic to the gravy for added flavour.

                              I removed the strings once the cooked meat had rested on the side.

 

A lovely simple Sunday dinner, easily cooked with patience, love and respect for the meat.

On the front page of a national newspaper...

At the beginning of this month (August 2013) I was thrilled to pick up a copy of the Tesco internal newspaper – The One. This paper is distributed to all of the Tesco stores throughout the UK and to all its thousands of employees worldwide at every level. And, low and behold, I am on the front page this month as part of celebrating my achievements re: the Love Every Mouthful [steaks] advert and my passion for food. I also have a cookery advice section on page five where I explain a method of slow cooking brisket with whole spices such as cinnamon, star anise and cloves. My television advert is due to be shown from Monday 19^th August for two weeks on ITV and Channel Four and Youtube.

The front page article in The One talks about the knowledgeable Tesco employees being encouraged to share their passion for food with the customers and this is happening countrywide with special taster and demonstration events in stores. Exciting times.

Phil takes the brisket

To collect and relate my thoughts on my passions for food in this article I had a telephone interview with the newspaper and a male photographer came to the store in Beeston and took lots of pictures of me in and around my beautifully laid out butcher's counter. This was a slightly surreal but a very enjoyable experience especially fun when my colleagues all dived out of the way so they wouldn't be in shot. Hope you like the smile – I did it a lot.

I love the part of the article which says: “Ask Phil Lowe for advice on preparing the perfect mouth watering meal and you'll struggle to stop him talking. The Beeston Extra butcher apologies for gesticulating enthusiastically as he explains his favourite dishes … and it's only a phone interview!”

Chatterbox moi?

The rest of the article concentrates on my expertise, earned over many years as a traditional butcher and my growing love of cooking and interest in learning about food plus my time at Tesco. And probably most important of all, the sharing of those skills and passion directly with the customers and through this blog and other social media.

The Love Every Mouthful promotion seems to be a big hit with the Tesco staff and customers and we are proud to tell our meat counter customers that everything we sell is now British. On a personal level I get many customers – the regulars – coming up to me and asking when the advert is on and for cooking advice. There are already three TV adverts going the rounds (the general one, strawberries and lately the chicken advert). As far as I have been led to believe my steak advert starts Monday 19^th August. Am I looking forward to it? Of course. I am very proud to be involved in such a dynamic way.

There is also going to be an article about myself and the Love Every Mouthful promotion published in the Nottingham Post newspaper sometime next week – hopeful in the Saturday 17^th August edition.

I am off work for a week now so I will most likely adding some great blogposts over the next couple of days. Must go, I have a lamb shoulder to cook. That's if I can stop myself writing!

Incidentally I recently joined www.twitter.com and you find me at PhilLowe7. I was delighted to find myself tweeted about in a positive way by the production company Wieden and Kennedy that made the adverts for Tesco. See this here link.

A very special day, champagne and accolades.

Today I got given a special award for my efforts in the Tesco 'Love Every Mouthful' promotion. It is called a Values Award which thanked me for making a difference and it came with great praise from the store manager Tammy and her manager Paul Parsons. It made me feel very proud and that my passions for food were/are really recognised. I may be unusual in this but I do genuinely love my job and in particular helping the customers with their meat/fish choices and cooking advice. They also presented me with a wonderful bottle of Heidsieck and Co champagne which I have enjoyed drinking this Friday evening. Tea was a simple affair of a big wodge of penne pasta and drenched with a small bottle of pesto sauce and a little butter for some moisture. Easy to put together and very tasty. A great day with a simple finish.

Have a good evening all. x Phil x

The Making of Love Every Mouthful video and my contribution.

Well, I guess this is my readers first glimpse of seeing me in action during the 'Making of the Love Every Mouthful video' for Tesco and to hear about Tesco's tremendously inspiring notions about the food they supply and how it is enjoyed by the customers and vicariously promoted and embellished upon by the passionate staff UK wide. As I said in the previous 'enormously popular and over a thousand hits in two days' - blogpost; the day filming the advert was a fantastic experience. Sorry if that last statement sounded like blowing one's own trumpet overly loudly but I do check out the blogposts in terms of the stats and predictably perhaps, this one has exceeded well beyond my expectations. In the filming of my part of this video I actually spoke for a lot longer than the clips shown on the edited version above, but - in a nutshell- they have encapsulated my ramblings and made something coherent from it. Not that I talk a lot. Gosh no.

My belief is that there will be three or four Love Every Mouthful adverts and I will feature in one of them that concentrates on meat. In the last couple of days myself and three other folk involved in the advert from Tesco have appeared on the OurTesco website.

Personally, I am going to be profiled and featured in a Tesco in house magazine called The One and there is the potential for other promotions online and on video for the Love Every Mouthful campaign.

At work I am part of a poster for employees promoting the Love Every Mouthful campaign. I think this has come just at the right time because I genuinely do love sharing food ideas and passions with friends and customers and delight in the fact that they ask me for advice whether it be something I have practiced, have trained in over the years or just read with interest about and retained. I seem to constantly have my head in a book about food or watching  a telly programme live or on bbciplayer. Love it all! As my hero Raymond Blanc is very fond of saying - "Ooh la la! Food! Glorious food! So intense! Hmmm the flavours! The herbs and spices! The taste!"

Well, thank you for watching this short video and taking an interest in my foodie adventures. I'm off to Wales next week to do a Gold meat training course with Tesco - from the field to the table, apparently. So I will be getting down and dirty with the steers and heifers in mid Wales for a while. If the police come knocking Daisy the cow was the one that trampled me first! The rest just followed orders. Daisy will be the one with the mad look in her eyes and denial in her heart. I will be the one with the hoof print on my head!

The new 'Love Every Mouthful' Tesco television advert with myself as the Butcher.

Recently, I got chosen to play the butcher in the latest Tesco 'Love Every Mouthful' tv advert from a nationwide Tesco employee competition centred around Passion for Food and was very proud to do so.

A little while ago a poster went up on the staff canteen door asking for staff members to submit a photo of themselves with their favourite Tesco food and submit that along with an explanation why they would like to be involved with the forthcoming television advert.

This text below is what I sent along with a picture of me and some lush sirloin steaks taken by my work colleague, fishmonger Paul.

"Hi there, my name is Phil Lowe and I work on the counters at Nottingham's Beeston Extra store mainly as a butcher but I also enjoy working on the fish counter and occasionally on the Deli. To say I love my food is a vast understatement. I proudly passed my NVQ on Meat and Fish last year and I write a regular and very popular food blog (http://mugofstrongtea.blogspot.com) which often features and promotes the meat and fish I have bought at Tesco. Sharing my foodie knowledge is my greatest passion. I love to advise the customers directly, or through my blog, on all aspects of cooking meat and fish and love nothing more than a nice juicy sirloin steak (quite rare and bloody though) because I think it can be the tastiest steak and the fat element really does do wonders for the overall taste. Don't chop it off! Keep it in! Just add a teaspoon of Tesco horseradish sauce and it is heavenly! Salivating?

 

This passionate sharing of a love of cooking through life and work, to me, is really what Making Moments Matter is about. The customers go away with a positive confidence in the meal they are about to make because you have spent a few precious minutes simply and enthusiastically explaining the prep and cooking process. I love my job and I think that my passion definitely shows through as not only myself but the other experienced and keen to share members of our meat and fish department all enjoy demonstrating their various skills and knowledge. This practice brings customers back again and again and builds a trust in the products and staff. The same can be said across all our counters at Beeston.

 

In my working life, and as one of the more mature employees at our branch of Tesco, I have over twenty years experience as a former traditional master butcher. Plus I have a great passion and a degree in, and for, the performing arts having been involved in amateur and professional acting throughout my life as well as modelling in a similar promotion for Capital One the credit card company as their former employee. I also have experience in working in television as an extra therefore am used to that kind of creative/media working environment. I have a characterful personality and face and great sense of fun and so I sincerely hope that I can get involved in this promotion with Tesco."

Phil Lowe.

Well, over about a period of four weeks I had a series of phone calls about my application and a Skype interview with the production company. After all this I was very keen to know how I'd got on and I kept hearing that I was a 'very strong candidate'. Finally one night I returned home to find a message on my answer phone to tell me that I had been successful and had been chosen to be the butcher from hundreds of applications throughout Tesco in the UK. And the filming was three days away. Was I thrilled? Of course!

The advertising job took me down to London and specifically to a relatively new store in Woolwich and I stayed in a Mercure hotel in Greenwich overnight on the Sunday prior to the filming. I had to be up at 4am to start the filming at 5am. The hotel was lovely. Very smart with nice food in the restaurant (beef soup, grilled outdoor reared pork chop with apple puree and potatoes, and a crème brulee to finish). I had a clear view from my bedroom where I could see the London Eye as a small blue circle in the far distance and the red London Docklands trains arriving at the station to my left on a regular basis. There was a fabulous sunset. My only issue was that I couldn't work out how to turn the lights on. Apparently slipping one's card in the door slot did this. Ignorant of the simple task I took a shower in the dark and stumbled around my room trying to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything on the way out!

In the early morning myself and a young woman called Mercedes from a Braintree Tesco store were taken across south London to Woolwich to be ready for the day's filming. I was used first and poor Mercedes had quite a wait before she was used. I had my make up done - nails clipped square and my red nose powdered - and in my Tesco butcher's uniform I went down on to the shop floor to do my bit. Although lots of publicity photos were taken at the moment I don't have any to put on this blog post. The filming was of me (the butcher) putting my blue counters' hat on and then doing an isolated close up shot of me tying my red striped butcher's apron and then sharpening my steak knife with the steel. The last one was a full head and shoulders shot and we did a recording later on of the sound of the knife being sharpened. After that I did a filmed interview about my life as a Tesco butcher and my passion for food, my blog and my love of sharing ideas for the best usage and cooking of the meat products I sell. I got temporarily released back to the rest room and then did another interview with a lady called Katie from the Tesco magazine for real living - Tesco.com/living. I wasn't alone in this and I believe that the September/October issue will be featuring several Tesco folk who were part of the Love Every Mouthful advert experience.

I spoke to Katie about the influence of the rustic French - especially Mediterranean and Gascony - ways of cooking on myself and about other influences in my life that have shaped my love of food and cooking. Amusingly this conversation included my late Dad's hate of anything he deemed non British and repellently exotic nosh like Chinese and Indian curries. This would all come under the intolerant heading of 'foreign muck' and often be spoken about with huge distain coupled with a contorted and disgruntled face to make it abundantly clear he was having 'no truck' with this stinking evilness living in an aluminium tub. As far as he was concerned the local missing cat and dog population were hanging in a Chaddesden takeaway fridge to cook and sell on to the gullible public. And they used garlic!!! Unbeknownst to him my mum put a small amount of the abhorrent garlic in his stew one day and he wolfed it down. Ignorance can be bliss after all. Misty the cat went missing and was never found, however. We always called him Chairman Meow. Anyway I digress...

During the morning's filming I was called back down to film a product being handed over the counter (it was actually a very small camera that was the viewpoint of the product from butcher to basket) and a stayed around to talk to some of the film crew and the Woolwich store manager.

I also got a chance to chat with Tony the butcher at Woolwich Tesco Extra and share stories with him. He had also gone through some training with Dewhurst in his thirty year butchery experience and was experienced in the slaughtering aspect of the job and keen to tell me of his own passions for 'his' meat counter. Nice guy.

The crew had spent the time with various others in differing departments filming for the advert and we finally wrapped just before lunch. Having got changed those employees involved who needed cabs back to stations of hotels were invited to join the film crew for lunch on the catering bus. It reminded me of fondly remembered days when I used to film as an extra for Peak Practice and Crossroads and a few films and television dramas back in the 1990s and early 2000's.

A cab came for me and I got taken back to St Pancras Station. It seemed along way but I enjoyed the experience and after travelling adjacent to, and passing under the Thames, I saw the O2 arena, Billingsgate Market, the Gherkin, several old and bordered up Victorian pubs, some parks and the Number Fifteen restaurant owned by Jamie Oliver. I would have loved to have stopped the cab from time to time and hopped out to take photos of some of the quirky London buildings and shops.

I arrived at St Pancras in plenty of time to have a celebratory beer at the Betjeman Pub in the station building and then waited for the 13.30pm train back to Nottingham. I was back home by 4pm and reflected on a fantastic opportunity to share my passions for food. Thank you Tesco and thanks especially to my store manager Tammy Andrews and team leader Rebecca for all their encouragement throughout the process. This is just the beginning...

The first television adverts  for 'Love Every Mouthful' start on July 22nd 2013 at approx. 9.15pm on ITV and Channel Four. From a preview it seems that there are more than one style of ad so if you don't see me in the first advert do keep an eye on the others.

Shortly to come on this blog will be a video about the making of the advert and Tesco's food promises. I do certainly feature in this and speak about my passion for food. I'll put it up in a few days time. Phil.