"Qualitätshandbuch für Fleisch und Fleischerzeugnisse aus bäuerlicher Produktion"

The Austrian government publishes guides for farmers who want to make and market products made from their livestock. One such guide is "Qualitätshandbuch für Fleisch und Fleischerzeugnisse aus bäuerlicher Produktion".

The books are amazingly detailed, covering things like breed, feed, transport, slaughter, breaking down the carcass, curing, aging, etc. As I've mentioned before, a lot of this information isn't available in English.

Kapitel 1: Qualität
Kapitel 2: Rechtliche Rahmenbedingungen
Kapitel 3: Fütterung und Rasse
Kapitel 4: Transport, Schlachtung, Zerlegung, Kühlung
Kapitel 5: Frischfleisch
Kapitel 6: Fleischerzeugnisse
Kapitel 7: Pökeln
Kapitel 8: Wursten
Kapitel 9: Reifen von Dauerwaren
Kapitel 10: Räuchern
Kapitel 11: Sensorik
Kapitel 12: Reinigung und Desinfektion
Kapitel 13: Herstellungsabläufe
Kapitel 14: Rechtsgrundlagen für die Fleischvermarktung

A Second American Makes the Mangalitsa Pilgrimage

An American is visiting Austria right now, hanging out with Mangalitsa breeders who fatten and process their hogs. He's also spending time with Chef Stockner, one of Austria's best chefs and Mangalitsa experts. You can see those guys on YouTube.

His trip should get written up by the food media, so I won't provide more details now.

If you are someone interested in fattening Mangalitsa and processing them, I recommend you consider making a similar trip. Although there are other countries where people process hogs, they normally work with leaner ones. E.g. you could go to Italy and make pancetta. But when your Mangalitsa pancetta winds up looking like pure fat, you'll be in uncharted territory.

Here's photos of typical Austrian products made from Mangalitsa. Many Americans are shocked at how fatty that stuff looks.

I am a firm believer in learning from people who already know what they are doing. In that vein, if you know about making and marketing salami - and would be willing to talk to me about it - please contact me.

What is Good Meat?

Mangalitsa Ham from a Hungarian Producer

When asked the question, "What exactly is the definition of 'good meat'?", Bill Niman (founder of and now ousted from Niman Ranch replied:

This is not my phrase, it’s the Times’s. But here’s the way I see it. It takes a lot to make “good meat” but it isn’t rocket science – it’s more about common sense. “Good meat” is meat from animals who were always treated well, who were given a chance to live in a way that allows them to express their basic natural behaviors, move freely, breathe fresh air, and feel sunshine on their backs and faces. It also comes from animals who were never given growth hormones, fed antibiotics or other drugs or fed meat-by products or other unnatural feeds. Finally, good meat can only come from animals who were provided a swift and painless death.

When I read Niman's answer, it is clear he's completely focused on the method of production, not on organoleptic (taste) properties.

I find it interesting that some people producing meat generally considered to taste the best don't farm anything close to the way Mr. Niman suggests.

• Japanese-raised Wagyu cattle: no free movement, fresh air or sunshine - but they taste the best and cost the most. They definitely don't meet Mr. Niman's "good meat" requirements.
  

• Spanish producers of Iberico increasingly raise them in confinement, even if some get finished outdoors for a few months of their long lives. The Spanish freely use antibiotics and other chemicals. E.g. people feed hogs specially-crafted diets designed to produce the best fat. Whether alpha-tocopherol or copper sulphate are "natural" simply doesn't matter to the Spanish producers.
  

• Hungarian producers of mangalitsa farrow in modern facilities. Their product is fantastic. They export it to Japan, a country of notoriously quality-sensitive consumers.
  

As I've mentioned before, even wild salmon aren't all produced naturally. That's certainly not true of oysters either - in both cases, humans optimize the reproduction, even if the animals finish in a more natural environment.

A lot of people would like to think that what's "natural", "organic", "local" or whatever is naturally going to taste the best. It not only isn't the case - but one can find examples like confined Wagyu cows versus free-range cows that force people to choose between good-and-unpalatable versus bad-and-world-class.

People have already been forced to choose between what's good and what tastes better - and it even involved Niman Ranch. E.g. a chef chose pork from Cargill (a producer not meeting the "good meat" requirements), because it was better than Niman Ranch's pork.

Another interesting issue involves what the animals themselves want, and whether or not that fits with Mr. Niman's "good meat" criteria. E.g. animals, like humans, like being inside, where it is warm and shielded from the wind. They also like to eat things like ice cream and Cocoa Puffs. When the Spanish producers turn the hogs out on the Montanera to eat acorns and whatever else they can scrounge up, that's probably perceived by the hogs as a reduction in their quality of life. Until that time, they've been in a warm barn, eating concentrates. Just as most people would rather sit inside and eat a bowl of cereal than be outside foraging for raw vegetables and carrion, the hogs probably prefer the easy life.

Wild Boars, Breed Preservation

Wild boar are a huge problem in Germany, as in America. Recently a hunter got killed by one. The article mentions that with the increased planting of corn (due to its high price), there's more fodder for wild boar, so they are undergoing a population explosion.

In America, a guy is on trial for being the "Johnny Appleseed" of feral hogs in Minnesota - although farmers there probably think of him as a biological terrorist. He's already blamed for the appearance of wild boar in tens of counties (with the associated crop destruction) and two pseudorabies outbreaks in domestic swine herds. Pseudorabies is absolutely awful for the owners of those herds; if the government finds out that you've got pseudorabies in your herd, they put them all down.

That brings up another interesting issue: a lot of people who keep rare breeds of pigs raise them outdoors, where they can catch diseases from wild hogs, badgers and other wild animals. In some cases, this has been disastrous. E.g. you've got a GOS producer who lost his herd due to bovine TB, which they caught from being outdoors. On a bigger scale, Spanish farmers have had to kill large numbers of Iberico due to diseases like Classical Swine Fever. Now that they raise them indoors more and more, that's less of a problem.

One argument says that if your goal is to preserve rare breeds, you should be wiling to do use technology to do it. E.g. raise them indoors away from wild animals, and use modern techniques like hormones and embryo transfer to increase their numbers - and even use techniques like cloning or gene modification. I don't think that most people who say they are in favor of breed preservation are aware of what breed preservation really entails.

Making The Laundry List

There's an article about companies that sell food to the French Laundry in the Washington Post. I'm quoted in the article, and it mentions Mangalitsa.

The article makes it sound like it is incredibly hard to sell a product to the French laundry, because they check to make sure that you've got the best product. It isn't really so bad: if you are the one with the best, they want to work with you. It might be hard to convince them that your olive oil is so much better than the others out there, but if you are selling something as world-class as Mangalitsa, it is easy for them to make a decision.

The difficult thing is that if you decide you'll produce the best, you have to find customers other than the French Laundry. Some potential customers, even those with Michelin stars, won't make a decision based on quality and price. E.g. they'll want you to be "local", organic or something other than what you are: the producer with the best-tasting product.

Fixed the Broken Links

In my previous post on Austrian products, I had a bunch of broken links to an Austrian food website.

Blogger could't handle the German alphabet used in the links. I've fixed the links, so if you click on them, you'll get taken to www.schätzeausösterreich.at.

Austrian Mangalitsa Products

There's a nice article in Spanish about Mr. Olmos and Mr. Toth forming their Mangalitsa business - "Una empresa de jamones recupera una raza de porcino al borde de la extinción"(here is a google translation).

The Spanish know what to do with the pigs - they'll treat them like their own Iberico. They won't bother to turn the Hungarian pigs into Hungarian products (e.g. szalami) and sell that in Spain (although Pick and Herc do export all over Europe).

Similarly, the Austrians have started processing Mangalitsa pigs, into their own Austrian products.

Their products are different from the Spanish products. A few key differences: they smoke their products, they bone out the legs and they use wet or mixed curing methods. Here's a summary of Austrian methods, translated into English.

Here are some photos of traditional Austrian products made from Mangalitsa. Click on the captions for more info:

Bauchspeck

Paprikaspeck

More Rueckenpeck

Rohschinken aka ham

More ham

Kareespeck- aka "loin bacon"

And so on. Click here for all their Mangalitsa products. There's a lot of pates, lard products and a bunch of specialty products that don't immediately spring to mind when you think Mangalitsa.

One funny thing about the Austrian products is the huge amount of fat in the products. Indeed, some of the products, like the Paprikaspeck, are entirely fat. That product - which many think of as a Hungarian specialty - is one of the most addicting. The versions I've had were parboiled, which gives the fat a wonderful bite.

Normally people need to try these products in order to be convinced of how great they are. If you haven't eaten them, they probably just look too fatty - perhaps even repulsive. One bite is normally enough to turn people around.

Thanks to Our Customers - Again

Little Miss Naughty Holds a Mangalitsa Side

After months of being out of Mangalitsa, I finally sold some at a farmers market. Response was astounding.

Notorious C.U.T.

I asked the slaughterhouse to prepare Notorious C.U.T.s - as these are a favorite cut - but they didn't. Instead, they gave me a bunch of sides, like the one pictured at the top. It isn't normal for retail customers to buy sides - that's just too much. A side weighs about nine pounds, a Notorious C.U.T. about 1.5 pounds.

When informed of the mistake, our customers are purchasing sides. They love Mangalitsa so much that they'll buy a 9-lb side. I never would have guessed that I'd see someone come up and buy a side of a Mangalitsa - and see that same person leaving, looking very happy, like he'd just scored. A bit like a rat dragging a big treat back to his nest.

Mangalitsa-Berkshire Belly

I tried my first Mangalitsa-Berkshire (50/50) belly today. As previously mentioned, Wooly Pigs runs a breeding program, the goal of which is to allow us to produce especially tasty hogs using our Mangalitsas. Purebred Mangalitsa is too extreme for most consumers anyway - it defines one extreme of the pork continuum.

Part of the breeding program is mating Mangalitsa boars to Berkshire sows, to produce F1 hybrids. The males are all castrated and marketed. The females are either marketed or used to produce 3/4 Mangalitsa market hogs.

This is how it starts:

The sow in the background wonders what's going on.

Here's somewhere in the middle (about 4 months into the process):



And this is how the pigs end up - seared and braised (14 months into it) :

Seared and then simmered in a pot.

When I cooked it, I thought I was cooking Mangalitsa. When I ate it, it tasted enough like Mangalitsa that I think you could fool someone into thinking it was Mangalitsa. Except for yet lardier hogs, I have never had such good pork. It was definitely better than Berkshire pork produced similarly. I ate just a little scrap (the missing 5th piece) and felt satiated and excited for about an hour.

I can imagine that if someone just wanted really great-tasting pork (in a market increasingly flooded with Berkshire pork), a Mangalitsa-Berkshire cross would give one a real edge over everybody using meat-type breeds. Mangalitsa is so incredible that just 50% Mangalitsa is still noticeably better than the Berkshire, which is the best-tasting common American breed.