Wednesday, June 30, 2010

The Secrets of Slow Food - Mangalitsa Roulade

There's a video from Deutsche Welle showing a fancy chef making a Mangalitsa roulade. It has wonderful footage of the farmer's Mangalitsa pigs. They've got a giant pen, which they've turned into a moonscape:



As the chef explains, the pork tastes more nutty than regular pork, but that the flavor isn't as strong as wild boar.

Although the food may be cooked to "Slow Food criteria", he used olive oil to make the mashed potatoes, when he could have made them a lot more traditional by using Mangalitsa lard.

Sadly, he did not use the Heath Putnam Farms Austrian Pig Neck cut for this roulade.

Final remark: if they really wanted to use local and traditional ingredients and be politically correct, the pig would have been of a German breed. But as in America, the traditonal German lard-type breeds - the ones that taste the best - are gone. Non-Hungarian chefs who want the best-tasting pigs have to choose "foreign" breeds like the Mangalitsa.

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