Michael Mina in SF has our pork in course #2. Here's the menu.
Those two above are bacon made from the loin. Essentially, the loin is cured and smoked, just like sides (bellies) are smoked, to produce bacon. The one at top is from the top of the loin (near the shoulder blade). The bottom is from the sirloin area.. The rest of the loin got made into boneless chops.
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.
Rigwonedr (a flickr user) has nice picture of a Mangalitsa boar. It looks like some sort of crossbreed to me. He's very cute, but he's got very long rippers. Watch out.
How did it taste? Well, perhaps I can best describe it with a side-by-side comparison. I cooked a couple pieces of regular store-bought along with the jowl bacon and consumed each in turn. The store bacon was good; it's bacon, after all. But the first bite of jowl bacon knocked me back with an almost narcotic feeling. The fat came out clean and soft but intense, concentrated bacon flavor encased within a slight base of regular porkiness. It's incredible, like the abstract ideal of bacon come to life, bacon like exactly what you want bacon to be.Michael Barthel's and Bob del Grosso's recent statements about the awesomeness of Mangalitsa jowl make me feel a bit better about my previous statements about Michael Ruhlman's BLT challenge.
There's a magazine in "Inflight Magazine" about Mangalitsa. They've got a pretty picture of a Red Mangalitsa boar, foaming at the mouth.
We at Wooly Pigs are delighted that our Mangalitsa will be featured at the ninth annual Taste & Tribute benefit gala for the Tibetan Aid Project at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco tomorrow night (Friday, Nov. 20th). This amazing event features twenty-three of the best Bay Area chefs cooking tableside, and benefits the Tibetan Aid Project which helps Tibetans rebuild, preserve, and strengthen their cultural and spiritual heritage. Chef Mark Richardson of the Four Seasons will be showcasing his three-way Mangalitsa tasting at Table 5. Thanks Chef Mark!I've written about the Four Seasons and Mark Richardson serving our Mangalitsa. I think its great that when he's got a special event and wants something really nice, he knows we are the ones to call.
The guanciale I made from the hog jowl that I bought from Michael Clampffer (chef-swineherd of Mosefund Farm) is ready and it is on the dinner menu tonight!From his blog:
After deciding that it was worth checking to see if the jowl was mature enough to consider using to add lubricity and savoriness to my intended Spaghetti con caviofiore, I took the sucker down and tasted it. It is marvelous. It is salty, cream, firm, not a hint of bitterness. Like the best butter you ever had, but it is not butter, it's pork. Nice job Michael Clampffer and friends at Mosefund! And a tip of the hat to the fellow who brought the Mangalitsa to North America Mr. Heath Putnam of Wooly Pigs; damned fine job!
Mangalitsa pork shoulder served with watermelon radish, boudin, and collards.
Tao of Mangalitsa?
If you 'd rather not get out your knife, steel and rib-puller and break down your own pig, we've got boneless Mangalitsa chops for you. The picture at top shows how they look outside of the package. I'm guessing some chefs will figure out how to use these chops - and then they'll be ordering a lot of them.
Ok so it was very nice
We did a lot of lardo
I did to ham also
The rest we use it for a special right away
The meat is excellent, it has a great marbling
This was the highlight of the dinner, a lovely piece of woolly pig loin with spaetzle and roast veg in a red cabbage sauce. Mangalitsa is substantively different from typical pork. The flavor is much more pronounced, much more pork-y, and the flesh is marbled with fat. Mmmm... fat marbling
Hungarian Mangalitsa Pork and Apples
Crisp Belly, Roasted Loin, Braised Shoulder
"The obvious difference is how much fat they have. The fatback on this guy was about two and a half inches thick! Wooly pigs are famous for their high quality fat and I was perhaps a bit sceptical in the beginning but after working with and tasting the meat I a convert.
"Yesterday was spent smoking ham hocks and bones and making copious quantities of stock. I also proccessed the scrap into ground pork. This was the first real taste of the meat I have had. Highly impressive. Without question the best pork I've ever tasted. The flesh is such a beautiful red color and the texture reminded me of a sushi grade tuna. Just fabulous.
"Geddes Martin from The Inn At Ship Bay dry cured the bellies and jowls for bacon. The flavor is exceptional. The bacon is mostly fat but it's different than any bacon you'll see at the market. It goes translucent as soon as it heats the pan. The flavor is clean and the taste again, is out of this world."
Are pigs destructive?The answer:
Pigs can be destructive, but are not always destructive. It depends on the pig. If the pig is usually very calm and collected, it isn't very destructive. If it is usually hyper and angry, it is usually very destructive. It also depends on how tame the pigs are. There are a number of factors that play into this, but pigs can be destructive. Most of the time, they aren't.
With a title as alarming as "the most harmful invasive mammal in the world," it's no wonder that Oregon officials worry about the spread of feral pigs. They'll eat almost anything and root up the ground anywhere they gather. Weeds are the only species able to come back after that destruction.
The cocky-looking pig shown at top is presumably one of the two striped piglets pictured above, 8 months later. From the article, here's where those pigs are going:As described in the article, Schutte's Mangalitsas are finished on a special diet:"The first thing I said was 'I want one,'" says Pat Sheerin [Signature Room]. He told his brother Mike [Blackbird], who put himself down for two. Schutte also got commitments from Chris Pandel of the Bristol and chef Michael Higgins from Maldaner's in Springfield. Virant went in on a pig with chefs from the Boka restaurant group, which is planning to host two back-to-back dinners in December at which Virant, Perennial's Poli, Boka's Giuseppe Tentori, and Stephanie Izard of the forthcoming Drunken Goat will each prepare a course with Mangalista pork. The other chefs are also planning special dinners that month, with the exception of Mike Sheerin, who'll be offering a Mangalitsa tasting menu throughout January at Blackbird.
He feeds them a mix of his own organic grains, particularly barley, and in August they got apples—but in the fall, when Schutte added acorns purchased from a nut grower in southern Illinois to their diet, they began to turn their snouts up at everything else.Schutte's program for his six and our own much larger production remind me of Christoph Wiesner: most of his pigs get a low-PUFA diet similar to ours - because that's effective and affordable. The few special pigs (typically his own) are penned in the forest to eat acorns (and fed supplemental grain if necessary). I don't think Christoph sells any of his special pigs; there's never enough to spare.
The Mangalitsa is going to be the star of The Cadillac Of Pig Dinners. Chef Paul Virant of Vie, Chef Giuseppe Tentori of BOKA, Perennial's Chef Ryan Poli and Top Chef alumnus Stephanie Izard of the soon-to-be Drunken Goat are paying homage to the Hungarian Hog with a 4 course dinner. The host chef prepares the amuse and dessert, and the remaining three each prepare a course using a different cut of the meat.I called the restaurant and found out it won't be Mangalitsa from Wooly Pigs, distributed by Foods In Season, but rather, from Triple S Farms, one of our many feeder pig customers.
Donauschwaben with their pigs. Note the clothing.
Hungarians with fat Mangalitsa pigs. More fashionable clothing.
I have recently discovered Mangalitsa pork. As soon as I assumed my role at Brix 25, I made the call to Wooly Pigs for sample product. To say the least, I loved it. It reminded me of the pork I was able to get when I was cooking over seas. It is so much better than typical American pork. Currently we are using Mangalitsa in a stuffed pork raviolo at the restaurant.
... just butchered and cured 50KL of mangalitsa, cooling down the blood sausage, sleep and Vienna in the AM.Which is pretty cool. I'm pretty sure he'll kill a bunch more, before he comes home. By the time Bryce is done, I suspect he will be the American chef who is most expert at slaughtering, butchering and processing Mangalitsa pigs into food.
The pig is very cute.
Hungarians burn off the hair, Germans use scalding hot water.
When the pigs are de-haired, you can see how fat they are. There's no muscle definition, unlike typical pigs. Given the size of this pig, I think it might be different than the one shown above.
Its a fun time for everyone.
