Duroc Porterhouse Pork Chops

Good winemakers often make wine from the grapes grown in their own vineyards. Excellent olive oils are most often pressed from the olives of a single estate’s groves. Farmstead cheeses, made only with the milk of the cheesemaker’s own herd, are revered at most good cheese counters. Being involved in every step of the process creates tastier food because the makers can tweak any part of the system. The cheesemaker that doesn’t like the way the milk is tasting can change the field where the animals are grazing or adjust their supplemental feed. If recent heavy rains have been watering down the milk, they can adjust the recipe.

But there are next to no “farmstead” meats. There is almost nowhere in the US where the farm, the abattoir (slaughterhouse), and the curing room are all the same place.

Why is it so rare to have farmstead bacon?

The short answer is regulation. To run an abattoir, you have to have a USDA inspector on site whenever you’re processing animals. You also have to produce a mountain of paperwork to show that everything was done to keep the food safe. That regulation has its benefits—it (hopefully) stops us from ever living with another jungle like the one described by Upton Sinclair. But it is an immense burden for anyone trying to run a small operation. Little guys trying to do it all have been effectively squeezed out of the market. That is, nearly all the little guys.

Greg Gunthorp is one of very few farmstead meat makers in the country.

Two decades ago, Greg Gunthorp realized there was no way he could make a living raising pigs on pasture when he was forced to sell them for just five cents a pound—lower than the price during the depression. But Greg, a fourth-generation pig farmer who grew up knowing he wanted to raise pigs, wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. So he decided to build his own processing plant and sell pork instead of pigs. His meats are a treasure.

Greg does it all, and you can taste the difference.

Greg raises heritage breed Duroc pigs. They live their whole lives out on pasture. They get as much non-GMO grain as they want, plus their pick of whatever grows in their woods. They’re never given hormones, growth promotants, or antibiotics. When their time has come, they go to the abattoir on the same property where they’ve spent their whole lives. Greg and his team then break down the cuts. Many are sold fresh to local restaurants, butcher shops, and meat curers (including Smoking Goose, the folks behind our Zingerman’s exclusive pecan-smoked ham).

Greg makes his own bacon. He dry cures the pork bellies in a mix of salt and celery salt for 7 days. They’re smoked in the on-site smokehouse over a mix of applewood and hickory logs. The result is a fantastic, flavorful bacon that Greg oversees from farrow to fork. It’s as delicious as it is rare.

When you buy a bottle of wine what factors do you consider? I’ll bet one is what grapes it’s made from. We expect that a Cabernet Sauvignon will taste different from a Pinot Noir or a Chardonnay.

How about when you buy a pork chop? Do you consider the breed of the pig? No? You’re not alone. Over the last half a century, the meat industry has selectively bred more and more standardized animals, taking the breed completely out of the consumer’s mind. Pork is pork, right? Well, maybe. The vast majority of the pork that you buy at the grocery today is likely to be a breed developed over the last few decades, so it’s all going to be pretty similar.

The current trend is towards speed over quality.

While we used to breed animals to be disease resistant, or good tempered, or hardy, or delicious, the current trend is toward one very particular trait: the ability to convert feed into meat as quickly as possible.

First, it happened with chicken. In 1925 it took fifteen weeks to grow a chicken that weighed 2.2 pounds. By 1990 you could grow the same chicken in about four weeks. The biggest cost to raising a chicken is the feed so the quicker you can raise a chicken the less feed you have to give it and the less expensive it is to raise. With the new, faster growing chickens, the slow growing chickens that had pecked around farms were economically obsolete. Within a few decades, dozens of centuries-old heritage breed chickens were almost extinct. They were replaced by a few new breeds. Chicken meat became cheap and suddenly the dream of a chicken in every pot became a reality. Well, maybe a McNugget in every bucket.

But there were a lot of tradeoffs. These chickens lost their disease immunity. Wo they started getting daily antibiotics in their feed. They grew too big too quickly for their skeletons to keep up causing them to have trouble moving around without fracturing bones. So they were jam packed into tiny cages that barely allowed them to move. And while the meat was plentiful, it was bland.

After seeing the financial success they had with developing new chickens meat executives turned their attention to pork. Today, commercial pigs grow faster and bigger than ever. Also, like chickens, the vast majority of modern pigs bear little resemblance to the breeds that were rooting around on farms 75 years ago.

Back then, pigs were raised both for their meat and for their fat. Did you know lard was the number one cooking fat in America until World War II? Then, during the war, lard was so important as a grease used in making explosives that advertising campaigns implored housewives to switch to using “more healthful” vegetable fats like margarine so that the lard could all be used in the war effort. Long before the Mediterranean Diet craze put the nail in lard’s coffin it was on its way out. The idea that animal fats were bad caught on. Farmers started breeding pigs to be leaner. The meat industry noticed that lean muscle developed much more quickly than more flavorful fat and that sped the changes along. Within a few decades pork became so lean and that it ended up being advertised as a stand-in for chicken.

The good news is that there are a handful of farmers out there who are still raising heritage breed pigs.

These are the same breeds that could have been raised by their grandparents. Here are a few that you may find on the market today, including Zingerman’s. They do taste different!

Berkshire: one of the most common heritage pigs today, Berkshire pork is tender and incredibly flavorful—you might call it especially “porky.” It’s a popular choice with chefs.

Duroc: first developed in New England around 1800, Duroc pork is earthy, nutty, bold, yet clean and juicy.

Ibérico Pata Negra: these are the famous pigs that root in the forests of southern Spain and eat the acorns to become Ibérico de Bellota. The meat is usually cured. When fresh it’s unbelievably rich and savory, almost like a cross between beef and pork.

Red Wattle: originally from New Orleans, Red Wattle pork has incredibly complex, herbaceous, subtly sweet flavor. Its prized fat melts in your mouth.

Tamworth: first developed in Ireland, and known for being one of the best breeds for bacon. The pork has sweet, nutty notes.