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  #1   ^
Old Mon, Jan-26-04, 17:19
gotbeer's Avatar
gotbeer gotbeer is offline
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Default "'Pedigreed' pork makes comeback"

Jan. 18, 2004, 11:18AM

'Pedigreed' pork makes comeback

Atkins diet, mad cow scare make plumper version popular

Wall Street Journal


http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/health/2358919

After two decades in which pork chops got nearly as lean as chicken breasts, a new type of fattier, darker and tastier pork is starting to hit store shelves and restaurant menus. The pricier meat's biggest selling point: It tastes like pork used to taste -- before pig farmers bred their hogs to produce meat that's 30 percent leaner than it was 20 years ago.

The plumper variety often comes from "purebred" pigs, animals that have not been crossed with other varieties for many generations. These aristocratic swine are gaining favor partly because low-carb eating plans such as the Atkins diet have made lean meat seem passé. Another selling point: At a time when the public is concerned about mad-cow disease and other food-safety issues, pedigreed pork provides the ultimate in traceability. It comes from pigs whose "family trees" can be are in registries such as the National Swine Registry.

L'Etoile restaurant in Madison, Wis., offers "purebred Berkshire pork" glazed with apple cider. Boston's Chez Henri serves Black Pig pate, made with a rare type of hog raised by a local farm school. And last week the New York City restaurant Savoy hosted a dinner featuring descendants of swine brought to the New World by the conquistadors in the 16th century.

For diners, pedigreed pork holds several surprises, starting with a price tag up to three times greater than conventional pork. At Bradley Ogden, a restaurant in Las Vegas, the Berkshire Farms Pork Chop goes for $39, about the same as the restaurant's diver scallops and Hawaiian fish. Luxury-meat seller Lobel's of New York recently started selling Kurobuta pork for about $10 for just one chop. (Garden-variety pork chops typically cost $2 to $4 a pound.)

The pork -- also known as heritage, heirloom, rare breed or pedigreed -- also tends to be darker and redder than regular supermarket pork, and is mostly raised by small farmers who use "natural" farming methods, such as giving the animals fewer antibiotics and letting them roam freely. Then there's the taste: "The great ambrosial element in pork is the fat," says Josh Ozersky, a meat expert and author. Regular supermarket pork is "almost like tofu on four legs, because it's so lean."

Just like "heirloom" tomatoes and "heritage" turkeys, purebred pork is part of the movement among farmers and chefs to revive types of food earlier generations ate. While overall sales of pedigreed pork are tiny -- representing less than one-tenth of 1 percent of hogs slaughtered -- it's being embraced by influential restaurants and retailers. (Eden Farms, an Iowa company that sells high-end Berkshire pork, says it's selling about 90 pigs a week, up from 30 in 2001.)

The blue-blood porkers even got a recent nudge from the National Pork Board. In November, the main industry trade group rolled out a Web site telling consumers, among other things, how to find farms selling pork descended from Oliver Cromwell's pigs.

The difference between pedigreed pork and regular supermarket pork is the result of a deliberate strategy conceived in the 1980s by the industry to change pork's image from a high-calorie, down-home meal to a dining option just as healthy as chicken. Today, conventional pig farms are populated by a mutt race that has been bred to be lean and perform well in large-scale production.

An estimated half of all purebred piglet litters are registered with groups such as the American Berkshire Association, which require that both parent porkers be purebreds; the organization can trace an individual pig's lineage back for over a hundred years. The fancy hogs often are raised by small family farmers who know every pig by name. "They send me faxes that say `Bessie is eating chestnuts this week,' " says chef Bradford Thompson of Mary Elaine's, a restaurant in Scottsdale, Ariz. The pigs become so personalized that "it's kind of weird when they send them to the slaughterhouse," he says.

The most common purebred pork served in restaurants is Berkshire. Since the mid-1990s, nearly every Berkshire pig raised in the U.S. has been exported to Japan, where it is highly prized. Berkshires originally come from England, where, legend has it, Oliver Cromwell and his army ate them during the English civil war, but today Berkshire pork is so strongly associated with the Japanese market that it is now being sold in the U.S. by its Japanese name, "Kurobuta," meaning "black pig." The rocky Japanese economy has driven many farmers to look for a market for the product in the U.S.

Not everyone agrees that pork has to be purebred to be delicious. Bill Niman, who runs luxury meat company Niman Ranch, says that touting purebred pork is "a great marketing point" but says that he believes the most consistently tasty pork comes from Berkshires, Durocs and Hampshires that have been crossbred. Manhattan chef Dan Barber says that he once bought Duroc pork that tasted terrible and that he regularly serves nonpurebred Berkshire blends that are top notch. Taste, he believes, is a function of how the animals are raised and what they eat as much as what their lineage is.
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  #2   ^
Old Mon, Jan-26-04, 21:35
TBoneMitch TBoneMitch is offline
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That's great...it encourages small farmers, and more humane conditions for the animals...not to mention the fattier, tastier meat!! YUM! Hope we can get some in Quebec!
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