Sunday, November 22, 2009

Micah vs The Mangalitsa Jowl


Wooly Pigs, with its Mangalitsa pork, continues to attract the attention of a certain sort of early adopters - the truly intimidating home cook.

The most recent is Micah Shotel, who has a gallery on flickr showing his work, "Micah vs the Mangalitsa Jowl (with the help of the Ad Hoc cookbook)".

Micah joins Bruce, Kavin and a bunch of others (please forgive me if I don't name you) in cooking/curing/processing Mangalitsa pork at home. I've noticed such customers generally share a few traits:

1) They are almost always men.

2) They really like jowls.

3) They are willing to spend a lot of time/money to make their creations.

Whether its sous vide at home, multi-day preparations or curing stuff at home, it takes a lot of effort and/or money. If a busy guy wants to unwind by cooking or curing meat, he'll want to use the best ingredients he can get, because otherwise he's wasting his time.

Wooly Pigs is very lucky to have such customers. I'm reminded of something I read from Paul Graham:
PB [Paul Buchheit] made a point in a talk once that I now mention to every startup we fund: that it's better, initially, to make a small number of users really love you than a large number kind of like you. If I could tell startups only ten sentences, this would be one of them.

As Wooly Pigs expands its production and distribution broadens, I'm looking forward to satisfying more customers like Micah.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Heath,

Thanks for the shout out. But I'm not a "home cook." I've been a professional cook, professor of gastronomy and food science since 1981. Sure I cook at home. In fact I cook all the time. But cooking is not only a hobby for me or a familial obligation.

Heath Putnam said...

Bob -- I'm sorry for the error. The post started differently than it wound up, at which point you didn't belong in the list.