White Park Beef

White Park beef is lean, tasty and well marbled and it cooks beautifully. When properly hung for 3 weeks or so, joints will shrink very little on cooking and the natural juices produced will be full of flavour White Park is best cooked at a slightly lower temperature, over a longer period of time than modern beef breeds. The meat is much sought after and sold by name in top restaurants and butchers. AA Gill said in the Sunday Times:

“The white park, a breed I've never eaten before and had always assumed was purely ornamental, was really excellent: softly chewy, with that strong, distinctive, almost corrupt flavour of proper beef ... it was the best steak I've had this year”

Breeding and Management

White Park cattle reach full size at about five years of age, bulls averaging about 955kg in weight and cows 635kg. Heifers are typically put to the bull at 27 months to calve at 3 years old, but this depends on the system of management and climatic conditions. The cattle are very hardy and successfully outwinter in low temperatures and wet weather. They are capable of converting coarse herbage into high quality meat, while also capable of gaining weight at over 1 kg per day in good conditions.

Conservation Grazing

The breed is ideally suited to both organic farming and conservation grazing. White Park Cattle have been successfully used to protect and enhance SSSI environments as diverse as chalk downland, coastal marshes and ancient forest.

The White Park Cattle Society is responsible for maintaining the herd book and protecting and overseeing the development of the breed. Pedigree White Park Cattle must be registered in the herd book, and meat sold as ‘White Park Beef’ must be from the offspring of pedigree parents

For further information about this breed of cattle please visit The White Park Cattle Society Ltd and The Rare Breeds Survival Trust.