Feedback, Farm Visitors

I just got some feedback about my Berkshire pork from a restaurant with 3 Michelin stars:

I'm very impressed with the pork. The fat has a very low melting
point similar to wagyu. The pork tasted like..........well..............
pork! Sometimes it seems as though modern pork is a four
legged turkey, this was a refreshing departure from the norm. As
I've stated before, we're all excited by this.

I feel relieved now. Someone else can see that our finishing program produced fat with the desired qualities. If he hadn't noticed the huge difference between our stuff and other pork, we'd have been really worried.

Besides the feedback, we had some farm visitors this weekend.

Today Sara Dickerman, a freelance food writer, visited the farm. Given her nice article that mentioned how Chez Panisse used bacon, I thought we should give her some samples of our various bacons, produced from the 400 lb, year-old, barley-finished Berkshire hog that we had Curt (of CNJ Custom Meats of Clayton, WA) slaughter on the farm:

That hog, slaughtered without stress on the farm, and ripened 10 days in Curt's cooler should, according to theory, produce great cured products. If we were in Austria, we'd ask the butcher to make Speck, a product that ripens months. The butcher could turn nearly the entire hog into wet-cured, cold-smoked meat. But American processors typically make faster products like bacon.

So I asked Curt, the butcher, to turn half of the pig into bacon. That is, he used the same wet-cure-and-smoke process used to make bacon with the different cuts from the same hog. From the top clockwise there is Kansas City bacon (cured shoulder), Canadian bacon (cured loin), ham (cured leg), bacon (cured belly), smoked fatback and jowl bacon (cured jowl).

There are a lot of neat things about turning the hog into these products: the taste is more intense, they take up less space and there's a spectrum of bacons, from lean ones (Canadian bacon) to fatty ones (jowl and fatback).

When they were cut into sample sized pieces and cooked (and with some ground pork thrown in), they looked like this:


That's (from the top, clockwise) Kansas City bacon, Canadian bacon, bacon, fatback, jowl and sausage. The fatback really shrunk - the fat rendered out of it. It seems Sara's favorites were the jowl and the Kansas City bacon. I suspect I scorched that stuff a little too much. It still tasted very good.


After serving our bacons, we let Sara eat some roasted pork from a Mangalitsa piglet:


She's got some loin, ribs there and other meaty parts. That yellow looking thing in the lower left of the plate is the roasted fat attached to the meat underneath. Mangalitsa fat, even from a piglet, is very tasty. Older pigs have even higher quality fat. I just put the meat into the oven at 350 F for about 45 minutes, then warmed it up again for Sara the next day. That allowed her to taste the Mangalitsa without interfering flavors.

The day before Sara showed up, another freelance writer, Heidi Broadhead, visited and we likewise gave her pork to eat. We didn't have the camera though, so we lost those historic moments. Heidi (and Gary Angell, the herdsman), were the first Americans to eat Mangalitsa slaughtered in America. They both said that Mangalitsa was very, very different from normal pork.

It will be very interesting to see what The French Laundry says about the Mangalitsa piglet once they try it.

Finally, here's a video of some piglets running around on the farm:

First-time Custom Slaughter And Other Questions

I will attempt to answer the concerns of a few commenters at once:

www.stlbites.com: so how does one go about requesting custom slaughter with a breeder?

I see three solutions to finding someone who will raise an animal for you so you can do custom slaughter:

1. You can ask the "custom butchers" in the phone book which farmers they work with. But watch out - they may just try to sell you some cheap USDA meat from a commodity farm. Or they may try to sell their own animals to you, which may or may not meet your standards. You have to be very careful about what meat that guy starts with.
   
2. You can ask farmers (perhaps those selling at the farmers market) if they'll raise an animal for you.
   
3. You buy an animal from me, and I'll get CNJ Custom Meats in Clayton to do the processing. I know Curt does a very good job - I just got half of a heavy Berkshire turned entirely into bacon (jowl, belly, back, shoulder, fatback, etc) - it is very good!
   

ellen: Though I don't understand the Austrian process, either. What can an inspector tell just by looking at the carcass? Finally - what planet do you live on where freezers are cheap to buy and run? Obviously, electricity is a lot cheaper where you live than it is in the DC area.

When the inspector examines the carcass, he's looking for signs of disease. E.g. tubercules, abscesses and worms. I admit, if the inspector doesn't see the animal before he dies, you could have someone sell a sick or dead animal, and it could pass inspection. We probably avoid that with our USDA system, but at a huge cost in meat quality.

Second, freezers are cheap to buy. E.g. a freezer to hold the meat from a 400 lb hog costs under $300 and about $24 to run (according to the label on the freezer) per year. Being able to buy a whole pig or half a cow saves you a lot of money over retail, to say nothing of your ability to get the highest quality.

molly: A lot of interesting information. It's hard to trust a custom slaughter sometimes. My uncle had a situation where they seemed to have traded some of his good meat out for some other meat after it went to the shop for wrapping and freezing (?). Is that common of the "make a buck" custom slaughters?

You really have to shop around for the right butcher. As with contractors, plumbers, mechanics, etc. Find a good one and stick with him. There are definitely sleazy or sloppy custom butchers. You should ask around. The good ones should have lots of regular customers.

One general problem is that some custom butchers serve low-income folks who just want the cheapest meat they can possibly buy. If you care about quality, you probably shouldn't hire that butcher.

This guy is an Austrian custom butcher - and he's one of the best. Although you'll probably never need his services, you might enjoy his site.

molly: How would one best pick a local farm or custom slaughterer BEFORE committing to purchase the meat or services?

There are a number of things you can look for though: does the butcher hang his meat? Can he tell you what feed leads to good meat quality (for your particular animal)? Does the farmer know what to feed the animal? Does the farmer produce his own feed (e.g. grind and mix the feed), or does he just feed the animals whatever Purina sells him?

In general, if you stick to buying local, you'll only have a few choices - so you gather your information and go from there. Farm visits are a good idea.

There's one problem I have with the "buy local" approach: if you live somewhere were people don't have much skill at making what you want to buy, it may not be worth buying. E.g. if I try to buy local cheese, I'm disappointed - because people around here don't seem to know how to make really great cheese.

Stress and Meat Quality

Stress and meat quality is a very important topic. Although it has been studied in depth, e.g. here is an in-depth treatment of the topic, many Americans don't understand the importance of stress on meat quality.

Essentially, stress results in chemical changes that prevent meat from "ripening" properly as it otherwise would. There's two recognized problems - meat from an that's been so exhausted that the meat doesn't have enough glycogen to ripen properly. That meat is called DFD - dark, firm, dry. The other problem is meat from a stressed animal, whose meat's pH drops too quickly, damaging the meat. The meat loses fluid, texture and water, so it is called PSE (pale, soft, exudative).


Please note that stress immediately before slaughter has the biggest impact. There's all sorts of stress that could conceivably ruin meat (e.g. transport stress, weaning stress or the mental trauma of an unhappy piglethood) - but stress just before slaughter seems to be most important.

One technique Austrians recommend is to feed animals sugar water 12 hours before slaughter. The purpose is to increase the glycogen in the muscle, so that it will ripen better. Some runners do similar things, in an attempt to fill their muscles with glycogen before a race.

Regardless of the actual mechanism or science, it is interesting to see how companies or individuals behave when they pay the price of stress:

• Austrian Mangalitsa breeders, like Mr. Gasser keep pigs, raise their young, slaughter them, then make and sell products from their meat. He is an integrated pork processor, in miniature. People like him are particularly careful to eliminate slaughter stress - they'll tell you that stress ruins months of work.
  

• Large meat packing companies spend millions of dollars to reduce preslaughter stress. Employees who stress animals, resulting in losses for the company, lose their jobs.

It is clear: those who have the incentive to produce good meat attempt to mitigate preslaughter stress.

Finally, small slaughter plants are often bad at controlling preslaughter stress. This does not fit the typical paradigm that local, small and family-owned is necessarily good.

The small USDA plants - the kind that a small farmer uses - can't afford to spend the money that big companies do controlling stress, and they have little incentive to do anything better: small plants are paid by the head, not according to the quality of the slaughter. Most of their customers don't care; they are just happy to get USDA slaughter so that they can sell their meat to people.

I talked with a guy who works as a custom butcher, but who used to work in small, family-owned slaughter plants. He confirmed that the small USDA plants are the worst. E.g. there are employees working there who delight in making hogs squeal. Who do you think works in these plants, anyway? It gets pretty irritating to handle big, squealing, stressed pigs all day long.



Also, it isn't possible to pay the smaller plant more money in return for better service - that's like expecting to walk into McDonald's, pay a bit more, and get a waiter and table service.

E.g. I took in a few animals for slaughter. The big pigs (pictured at the very top) were put in their own area, but my Mangalitsa piglets were put into a feces and urine-filled pen with a bunch of bigger pink piglets that started to pick on them.

The root of the problem was that our slaughterhouse doesn't have enough pens for small pigs. There was no place to stick them but with the other small pigs (from another farm). If they hadn't been stuck in that pen, they might have escaped and ran down the road. Taking them home was not an option - they might bring home a disease. I needed to get my pigs slaughtered, and I wasn't going to stand outside the stalls for four hours, watching to see if they were trying to squeeze out - so my piglets had to go in with someone else's pink piglets.

The slaughterhouse folks had told us to bring the animals in at 8AM and we figured they'd be slaughtered soon after - but after we arrived we found out they'd be slaughtered in the afternoon. It was all a real letdown. Everything we did to try to mitigate slaughter stress was probably overshadowed by what happened to the pigs after they went into the pen at the slaughterhouse. I'd wanted to see them get slaughtered, but we weren't able to witness it. I'm just hoping they got those hogs slaughtered with a minimum of stress and coercion.

Please don't get too upset by the photo: when pigs live outside and it rains, they sometimes wind up in muck. And big piglets always seem to pick on smaller piglets and take the better spots. A pig's life is not an easy one.

Mangalitsa piglets are very stress resistant; they still taste good even after stress. E.g. I ate one that jumped out of a trailer and mortally wounded itself. It was in pain for quite a while, until they decided to butcher it and keep the meat. When roasted, it tasted absolutely fantastic. So I'm hoping my three sorry looking piglets will very good. Hopefully their lives weren't wasted.

I was actually glad to get these hogs done USDA. I need to get them done that way to sell them. Hence, raising a big stink about the piglets wouldn't have helped anything; I need to get my restaurant hogs done there, and I need to get along with the staff. Their place is probably the best USDA plant in our area. My big hogs looked like they were set up just fine. One could even argue it was my fault for bringing in such small piglets.


Also, I understand the economic constraints of that slaughterhouse: they don't have enough secure pens, and $50 per slaughtered animal doesn't give them a lot of money to spend on improvements. Nor would their existing customers want to pay a penny more for marginally better slaughter - because they aren't as focused as Wooly Pigs on low-stress slaughter. As I might be the only customer who cares about this; I can't expect it to go my way.

As I mentioned previously, custom meat is the way to go for the highest quality and animal welfare. I find it interesting that supporting small farmers may mean supporting small slaughterhouses, whose animal welfare policies might shock people if they knew more about them.

If you want to buy custom pork from me, I will sell you a good hog and arrange for humane on-farm butchering.

Thoughts on Slaughter

Wooly Pigs is about to send our first pigs to market. Some of the first pigs are going to some famous American restaurants, including The French Laundry. This is a huge deal for everyone involved, and a bit stressful.

Restaurants can only serve USDA-inspected meat. Farmers trying to deliver high-quality meat have to work hard to control stress before slaughter. USDA slaughter typically involves things that naturally stress the pigs, so the farmer has to really work hard to keep things calm. As it is possible to ruin an entire animal's meat with stress, the farmer is looking at potentially throwing away entire animals.

The farmer can easily control breed, feed and how he raises the animal (important determinants of meat quality). But the law forbids the farmer from managing slaughter, except when someone buys a pig or half a pig, and has it slaughtered on farm. When the farmer slaughters on farm, he's in a position to deliver the highest quality meat.

Slaughter

Many people don't think much about slaughter, despite it being an integral part of eating meat. Few know that typical American slaughter really hurts meat quality. Almost nobody knows about alternatives to typical slaughter.

Slaughter is quite simple: the pig is stunned, typically by being hit on the head. While the pig is senseless, the butcher cuts an artery so that it quickly bleeds to death, without recovering consciousness. Here is a guide to the process.

Stress before slaughter is bad for the animal and the meat eventually made from it. Stress reduces meat quality.

Ideally the pig is going about his business when he falls unconscious, perhaps due to a blow to the head. He's dead soon after, without ever waking up. What we see may look messy, violent and bloody - but from the pig's point of view, he lost consciousness and that was it; he never felt anything bad. Imagine dying in one's sleep.

This no-stress method of slaughter is only possible with on-farm slaughter, as slaughtering a pig any other way only involves more stressors. Loading pigs used to living outside into a truck, and then taking them to a slaughterhouse, stresses them. If the pigs have to be herded somewhere, even into a mobile slaughter unit that visits their farm, there's typically some stress. Just smelling strange stuff can stress pigs.

A farmer who slaughters himself can waste fewer pigs by not killing the stressed ones. If a pig is stressed, he lives another day. Eventually he'll get slaughtered. Such careful selection isn't usually possible if animals go to a plant: all of them get slaughtered, relaxed or not, and the farmer has to sort it out later. That leads to a lot of waste: a producer determined to only sell the best meat has to discard the low-quality carcasses.


Comparison With Austria

Austria has a meat inspection law, but it is different enough to allow small farmers to consistently give their customers better meat.

In Austria, a farm can have a slaughterhouse. It gets inspected, and then the farm may slaughter on site. There's no inspector on the farm. The farmer is supposed to get the pigs into the slaughter room and do everything there. After he prepares the halves, the farmer takes the carcass to an off-site state inspector, who examines it. If it is OK, he gives it the necessary stamps, and the meat may be sold.

The interesting thing is that unlike in the USA, slaughter does not necessarily happen in view of the inspector. The farmer can bend the rules.

This leads to small farmers like Christoph Wiesner doing the following: they kill the pig in its pen, as with custom slaughter in America. They then drag the pig into their slaughter room and prepare the carcass (scald and evisceration) for inspection.

When the inspector gets the halves, he can't tell that the pig was slaughtered in a pen. He just sees the meat. If the meat is wholesome, it gets the stamps, at which point the meat is legal. It might even get sold in a very fancy restaurant like this one. In America, that would be a huge scandal.

Of course, the farmer is supposed to kill the pig on the kill floor - but getting the pigs to go into the room is tricky, and might alarm them. It is easier and more humane to slaughter them in their pens. The farmers who do this argue that the meat is just as safe: whether the animal dies in its pen or in a clean room, it is the same.


Foodies

Individual consumers are strongly advised to do custom
slaughter. There are numerous reasons:

• More humane for animals, better meat quality
• Buying a half or whole is cheaper per pound. Just buy a freezer to hold the meat, or share with friends and family.
  
• Custom butchers are motivated to process your meat how you want it. They are usually good at what they do.

Advice for the Savvy Customer

• Visit the farm before you buy. Make sure they are finishing the hogs on good stuff, like acorns or barley. Continental Europeans have a system they use to produce good meat. If you follow the system, you get the desired results.
  
• Freezers are cheap to buy and run. You can buy a lot of meat and eat it over several months.
  
• If you buy between January and July, you might get a discount - it is slow then.
  
• If you can stomach it, go watch them slaughter your pig. If they screw it up, tell them you want one killed properly. You are going to eat it - you might as well watch.
• If you are there when they kill the pigs, take the one that has the carcass you want. E.g. take the leaner or fatter pig. Most people don't care, so if they are killing a few, you get the one you want. If you want the heads or organs of the other pigs, you can probably get those too, for free.
  
• If you buy an older pig, make sure it hangs in the cooler long enough. E.g. 5-7 days for a year-old pig. Your custom butcher will probably be OK with this. But your local USDA plant may be too busy to allow your meat to rest; they'll want the meat in and out. Yet another reason to do custom slaughter.