#123 – Celebrating Real Pork – History, Sourcing & A Mouth-Watering Recipe Book

Sausages, bacon, crackling – good pork can be heavenly food. But both of us know that, sometimes, in the ancestral food world, pork is viewed as the poorer cousin to grass-fed beef or pastured chicken. That needn’t be the case and this episode will put real pork where it deserves to be – at the centre of our plates. We’ll give you some fascinating history bites, we’ll talk about how the Industrial Revolution changed mainstream pigs, and we will lay out how buying real, pastured, pork is a positive, health-giving and delicious choice for you and those you love. Expect to be inspired by hearing us talk about the many ways we cook the products of the pig, from the nose to the tail.

This episode is accompanied by a fabulous pork cookbook which we’ve gifted, as a thank you, to all our current supporters. So if you’re a supporter do go check your email. The book, with over 25 pork recipes is also available to buy from the podcast’s shop, you purchasing a copy will be directly supporting Andrea and I to continue this work. Find it here:

Pastured Pork Cookbook

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One Earth Health make the grass-fed organ supplements we use and trust. Get 15% off your first order here and 5% off all subsequent orders here.

Resources:

• www.robertmichaelkay.com
• The new oat recipe download
• How to Render Lard in a Slow Cooker
• Pane con Ciccioli (lard crackling bread)
• 7 Ways to Use Lard (& a Lard Crackling Spread Recipe)
• How to Make Lardo (Italian Cured Pig Fat) at Home
• Slovakian Lard Crackling Biscuits from Naomi at almostbananas.net
• Eating to Extinction
• Episode 29 – True Historical Italian Food
• Episode 33 – The Fats We Love, The Fats We Leave
• Episode 38 – Fat Rendering, Traditional Food Gems & Eggs, Eggs, Eggs!
• Episode 49 – Traditional Slovakian Food
• Episode 23 – Traditional Slovakian Pig Butchery
• The roast pork crackling recipe Alison loves

 

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Transcript:

Andrea:
Hello, Alison. Good afternoon to you.

Alison:
Hello. Good morning to you. Is it light where you are yet or not?

Andrea:
Not even a little bit. No, okay.

Alison:
It is pitch black and low-dee for the site.

Andrea:
Yeah, we probably won’t see the light for a while, but that’s okay. So this episode is a little bit different. In fact, it’s quite different from all the other ones we’ve never, never, ever done before. Or this has something new and fun. And that is a song from Rob, which you have actually put throughout this entire episode. We’ll be hearing bits and pieces of it as we go. And Allison, I am pretty sure this is the first song of Rob’s I ever heard. Because way back when we were setting up the podcast, you sent me this song so that I could kind of get a feel for Rob’s style. And then I guess you were kind of auditioning him at me because then you said, what if Rob wrote and played the music for the podcast? And of course he did. So our theme is from and by Rob. And now this episode has a…

Andrea:
Hilarious but bittersweet and very poignant song as well he says he presents it in a funny way but it’s it’s really it’s serious a strong message so it’s going to be a good one for this episode and before we get going with the rest of it i also wanted to say we are recording this for the second time there was a major technical glitch which rob found much to his chagrin and your dismay and my consternation when he played the audio from my end so we are re-recording but when we recorded last time the foods that we ate beforehand I felt like were so good I actually I actually want us to bring them back and reprise them for this episode so don’t tell me what you last ate tell me what you ate the last time we recorded this episode I remember because it was.

Alison:
So perfectly lined up with this episode that we’re going to record the topic and I was just like I did not plan that but.

Andrea:
Yet it fits.

Alison:
In perfectly so Gabriel was at home that day, and we were recording on a Friday which is like the end of the week for us because we go to the market Saturday morning so it kind of just use up what’s in the fridge and so I left him with this is what’s in the fridge I’m going to come and make some pancakes in you know just before dinner do what you want to with the rest of it so he had onion and mushrooms and some kale.

Alison:
Um and i thought he was going to put them all in the one cast iron pan but when i went down there he had two cast iron pans on the go not quite sure why um why use one dish one you can use two exactly so we had the um onions and the mushrooms and the bacon in one of them sorry i didn’t say bacon did i i had bacon from our farmer um albert at market and then he had the kale in another saucepan in another cast iron pan and tomato on the kale and then we combined it all together so basically it was a big hash of onions mushrooms bacon kale and tomato sauce a kind of a chunky tomato sauce that still had bits of tomato and oh it did smell absolutely wonderful and he put some spices in it i think i think maybe he put my nigella because he’s a chip off the old block in the terms of nigella um fanatic um and then i went downstairs and the at breakfast i had put some emma flour i ground some emma flour in the mock meal and mixed it with water and some sourdough starter and i just left that on the side and that had been fermenting and then i oisted his bacon from one of the cast iron pans into the kale pan and put some more lard in that pan and then fried us up some emma pancakes and so we had the pancakes which were warm with the bacon tomato kale mushroom inside and folded it over it was absolutely delicious and used up everything in the fridge which is exactly what I needed basically what we did yesterday.

Andrea:
Not the meal but using up things in the fridge.

Alison:
And when you say.

Andrea:
Bacon do you mean what I call ham.

Alison:
No. Well, I don’t know. It was English back bacon, which as we established a few weeks ago is your Canadian bacon, isn’t it? So it’s got quite a lot of meat on it as well as a long strip of fat. But it’s not like your streaky bacon. It’s more meat on it than streaky and slightly thicker cut than your streaky, I think, from looking and remembering your streaky.

Andrea:
All right. Well, let me tell you what we ate as well.

Alison:
Yeah, please do.

Andrea:
And I actually, after we recorded last time, I thought, you know, I should just type this up and put it in the pork book. So that’s what I did. And this is just an old family recipe. My mom, when I was growing up, made this with like this boxed thing called rice-a-roni. And it’s just like rice and spices or something. But we don’t use that anymore, obviously. So this is kind of inspired by the dish that she made, which was one of our household favorites. And now my kids absolutely go bonkers when I make it. So you take and.

Andrea:
If you have like cased sausage, I just squeeze it out of the case or you put some bulk sausage in a pan and fry it up and then scoop out the sausage, but leave the grease. And then I like to throw in lots of garlic. You could do onions. I mean, whatever kind of floats your boat. But I’ll tell you the simple message. Oh, my gosh. Why can’t I talk today? I’ll tell you the simple method that we used. Words are hard for me, Allison. So I toast the garlic in the pork fat and then I also throw in the rice I’m going to use and I toast that as well. And I get it really toasty all over. And then I throw back in the sausage. I throw in, well, before the sausage, I guess, I throw in any other spices I want, although our sausage is usually spiced pretty well. So I don’t always have to add more. And then I pour in a combination of water and tomato sauce or crushed or diced tomatoes and put the lid on it. And I just let it cook it real low until the rice has simmered and absorbed all the liquid.

Alison:
Do you need to stir it during that time? Do you have to go back and or is it OK just leave it?

Andrea:
I might stir it like one or two times in the beginning, but I really want to kind of sit and become like a cake, basically.

Alison:
I see.

Andrea:
And then once that is done, I take the lid off and I pile on shredded or sliced cheese and I put the lid back on. It can be off at this point and then just let the cheese all melt. And then we have at it. It’s quite good.

Alison:
Wow.

Andrea:
I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t really know what like the official name of it is, but there we go.

Alison:
I’m sure we could come up with some kind of weird name. You have to put that in the pork book. You have to call it something really kind of fancy.

Andrea:
The weirdly named sausage dish.

Alison:
It’s always really nice to put rice. You know, I kind of, I forget about rice sometimes because I’m so into kind of the bread and the spelt and ancient grains. And I forget how versatile and delicious and easy rice is in a dish like that. You know, you throw it in, it soaks up all the lovely flavours of the stock, all the tomatoes, whatever you’re using. And it gives you textual interest when you’re eating as well and that carb so you don’t need to worry about it and when you’re making for a lot of people like you are you know you you’re cooking for more people than than I am here it’s just so useful to have it all in one pot and.

Andrea:
Enough of.

Alison:
It you know.

Andrea:
You know my mom actually does it in the oven she does all the things I described on the stovetop and then she takes and shoves her whole pan into the oven I just don’t want to run the oven because of the power so i do it on the stove top but it could go either way but yeah it is nice having the rice in there and as you know i’m eating gluten-free right now so i’ll also mention as you kind of hinted at a book do you want to say what the book is right now yeah.

Alison:
Go on then yeah go on okay.

Andrea:
So allison you put out the call for any of our supporters who wanted to contribute pork recipes or ideas to this episode. And when I say they delivered, they turned up. And so I was putting them into a little document, and the document got bigger and bigger until it turned into a book. So there is a full-size book now. And what I was going to say is that it is actually… Pretty much a gluten-free book.

Alison:
It was largely gluten-free.

Andrea:
Yeah a lot of the recipes don’t take a lot of grain and like the one i just described has rice in it but that would still be gluten-free which for me right now is actually really.

Alison:
Convenient yeah i think only one of my recipes possibly that i sent across for you to put in there is spelt but that you know it’s like a pastry so that could be made with a gluten-free pastry instead and the rest of them i don’t think have any gluten containing grains in them so yeah that’s an added bonus how.

Andrea:
Can you i know i’m jumping out of order here but since we’re talking about the book can we talk about how people can get the book.

Alison:
Yeah okay so for the supporters of the podcast um who are at the companionship level or above they already have that book in their inbox so if you’re listening and you’re a supporter to go check your inbox you will find the book there you can either have it on your device or you can download it and print it out it’s fine to just print it out at home or you can like you do with your copies of our books you take them to the local printer and you have them put some kind of spring binding on on it so it’s easy to turn the pages and a lovely cover on the front that protects it so you can do that with it as well that’s available for everyone if you are not currently a supporter but you would love to have a copy of all those delicious pork recipes some of them from us lots of them from the supporters and other information in there then the book is in our shop on our site which is ancestral kitchen podcast.com forward slash shop and there’s also a menu option there if you don’t remember that url you can just choose shop you will find the book in there along with the other two books we have meals at the ancestral hearth and the spelt sourdough every day.

Andrea:
Excellent. Brilliant. Well, thank you, Allison. So I also have a review to read. It’s a short and sweet one. And it’s from Kay Begale. And it says, loved this podcast for a while and find it continually inspiring and relevant.

Alison:
Wow thank you that’s okay and also.

Andrea:
I was going to tell you that ellen had made a mention the other day in a shared group that she and i are both in where she said allison’s tips on spelt transformed my ancient grain baking which.

Alison:
Is such a.

Andrea:
High compliment coming from someone who has been baking with ancient grains for a long time.

Alison:
Oh has she okay yeah that’s the comment on the the spelt sourdough everyday book that i just mentioned which is in our shop and what i like about that is that you know Ellen’s not the first person to mention that the recipes in there and the tips in there are applicable to grains other than spelt you know so if you’re using Emma or if you’re using einkorn other grains that are like spelt or heritage wheat perhaps, You can take the information that’s in that spelt book and use it on those grains as well. It will help guide you through those grains and through spelt.

Alison:
That’s really nice. I just want, before we get onto the pork stuff, which I can’t wait for, I just want to mention one other thing that’s come out of me the last few months, which is on my own website, which is ancestralkitchen.com. I now have the Heritage Oat Collection available to download for free. It’s a PDF, which you can download again and either just have on your computer or print out. And in it are three traditional British oat recipes, which are ones that I’ve investigated and researched as part of the work that I’m doing on my forthcoming book. And the ones that I just absolutely love. And people have given me feedback and said, you know, I’m now cooking them every week or I love to make these for my for my family. One of them is sweet and two of them are savoury. and each of the recipes has a little kind of history bite at the beginning telling you kind of why this was originally made how it was made how it fits into which part of the UK so it’s a it’s an interesting read and it also gives you something practical to go and do in your kitchen if you love oats you can get that from my website ancestralkitchen.com forward slash heritage oats or one word.

Andrea:
You know how to get me, Alison. Just set the trap with historical tidbits and good recipes.

Alison:
Exactly. Okay, so let’s dive into the content for this particular episode. We are talking, as we’ve said, about pork. Both of us absolutely love pork. And we thought it was about time that we did an episode dedicated to it. And as you said earlier, I sort of put this out to our supporters on our discord forum and in our email communications and mentioned that we’re going to be doing it and they were very happy and very encouraging that they would like to hear an episode about pork I have one comment in particular that I wanted to share before we start from Laura who is a supporter who said I’m looking forward to this episode because we love pork but it seems to not be as well accepted in the healthy eating world probably because of CAFOs or maybe because the focus is on grass-fed beef right now. We are lucky to have a pork sauce from a local regenerative farm.

Alison:
So that kind of speaks to something that I’ve heard from a lot of people who listen, that pork is kind of not really sure about it, you know, compared to beef. And so I wanted to, as well as talking about lots of other things, the products of the pork and the history of pork and that in this episode, we will be directly kind of addressing all the way through that kind of feeling of why are we not celebrating pork as much as we’re celebrating beef? As Andrea said, in the background, you’ll hear our special accompaniment, which is a song called Who You’re Calling Pigs. That’s from my husband and his music can be found at https://robertmichaelkay.com the links in the show notes for that and I’m hoping that it will just kind of come in and out in between what we’re talking about we’ve never done this sort of thing before so it’s a new step forward for us and hopefully it’ll be really entertaining and smooth on your ears we’ve got that and we’ve got the book that Andrea just talked about. So it feels like a bumper episode to start with, which I’m really excited to dive into, Andrea. Before we start, let’s quickly go to an ad break.

Alison:
Okay let’s start with some history the pig and its domestication and I just really wanted to start by saying pigs have been around for such a long time not necessarily in the form that we know them now but if you think for instance of wild boar they’ve been around for tens of centuries and we’ve been hunting and killing and eating them for tens of centuries and in a lot of places now that still happens you know I came back from living in Italy last year and regularly, as soon as the wild boar season started wherever we were living we would hear the hunting happening and we would eat the wild boar as well it was really really wonderful so it still happens regularly in Italy. Pigs themselves were domesticated about , years ago and when you think about how a pig works you can understand why because they eat waste and they make food from it and they produce manure and so for a farmer each of those three things in that chain of pigs is is really indispensable there have been so many different breeds of pigs and each area had it had.

Alison:
Is a particularly large area that’s got a strong history with pigs and when I read the book by Dan Saladino Eating to Extinction which is in our I think I linked it in our non on our non Amazon online bookstore links in the show notes for that he explained how deep the pig goes in Chinese culture through their language which I thought was absolutely fascinating and I wanted to share it with with you Andrea and everyone listening that the Chinese language symbol for home or house or family was made thousands of years ago by literally adding the symbol for the word roof on top of the symbol for the word pig so yeah what symbolizes home is a pig with a roof on top of it i love it um and in addition in chinese the word for meat, refers solely to pork all other animal flesh needs to be identified by its species so for example cow meat or sheep’s meat oh and i think this is so fascinating alison when when you just.

Andrea:
Think about the kind of the history and the the dna of a word what’s crammed into a word is so fascinating to me and it’s a good reminder why the words we use are so important and the symbol the fact that they wrote with symbols and encased their history in those symbols is just completely incredible.

Alison:
Yeah and i feel like there’s so much that we can learn from so many aspects of culture and if you just look at language you wouldn’t think that there was a whole story of culture and food embedded in the word for chinese home and yet it doesn’t take much digging to find that out and it’s just it’s part of the the embeddedness of everything within our culture and our history if you go back and pull threads you end up finding out all these other things that are absolutely fascinating I found this so.

Andrea:
Completely incredible the first time you told me this Alison because I.

Alison:
Did not.

Andrea:
Know this at all and I ended up going online and looking at pictures to find that symbol and I found a number of examples of it I actually put one in the pork book. So if people want to see what it looks like, they could kind of scroll down to that section. And I was looking for interesting pieces of art from history that incorporated the pig, and I wanted to put them all in. There was so many statues and paintings and things like that, but I just put in a sampling. But my goodness, the pig is throughout a lot of history, it turns up it’s very interesting.

Alison:
Yeah I feel like you know both wild and domesticated pigs are woven through our culture and and, Even now, as I said, in Italy, some of them are wild. Pigs have been wild or semi-wild for many centuries, you know, just left in forests to forage. In the UK, there were rights of what was called panage, which means you could take, for example, your pig into the local forest and just let it, you know, snuffle around and pick up the nuts off the floor. Um i think the most famous examples that we think of of ham you know that are the most gourmet types of ham are examples of pigs like this there’s the cinta sanese in italy or iberico the famous ham in spain.

Andrea:
So if we had all these different types of pigs and then all the wild types of pig, how have we gone from that to, you know where this is going, now we live in a world where there’s one dominant breed that is kind of taking over. What drove that?

Alison:
Yeah that it’s a long story and and it kind of fits with so many of the other stories of changes that we’ve seen in food and we’ve talked about on this podcast you know the changes in wheat and the changes in fats it’s it’s amazing so if i give you the example of britain britain has traditionally many many pig breeds when the industrial revolution happened this changed because at that point british pigs needed to be large scale they needed to be suitable for a large scale and they just weren’t so in britain we imported the chinese pig and we bred from that chinese pig by the s we had a pig which was called the large white or it also was called the yorkshire in some places that had been developed and then we took that pig which we developed to be you know available for large scale and capable of that we then exported that around the world interestingly denmark a country which in europe at least is is well known for its bacon they bought those large whites and they bred them and they were very good at it and british farmers couldn’t keep up and then imports were coming in of the bacon from denmark and so after the war.

Alison:
The British government got to addressing this and they said, and this is the most frustrating quote, the industry was being held back by diversity, which seems to be the thread of so much that happened after the Industrial Revolution. And now we’re trying to unpick that and we’re trying to say, no, you know, we need diversity. At that time, they said, yeah.

Andrea:
You’re telling me that diversity was still lingering at that point.

Alison:
Yes, it was. Obviously, how dare it?

Andrea:
The government actively said, we need to work against this because somebody ran a bunch of numbers.

Alison:
Yeah. And they thought, we can’t compete in this fast moving world unless we take these fewer amount of pigs that we have, you know, compared to years ago. But we need to focus on one pick type. They were like, we need one.

Andrea:
You know, Alison, that is very strongly reminding me of a quote from Joel Salatin. I’m not going to say it exactly, but he often refers to the fact that he says, when you are… We’re not talking GMO at this point, but you’re just using sexual selection, basically, to determine traits in a pig and then whittling down even the breed choice. And he says, when you exclusively breed for one thing, like size, he goes, you’re going to inevitably start losing the broader scope of the traits. So things like maybe being a good mother or having good teats or something like that, those will start to fall away as you just hyper-focus on this one thing. And then you do end up very much hamstringing yourself and you don’t have, you know, a very survivable animal. And I’m thinking of that here, where the government was looking at a piece of paper and said, what we need is more volume. So at the exclusion of all other possible factors of value, we’re going to just focus on volume and without realizing what they were losing in the process.

Alison:
It feels like a kind of a mirror to the green revolution that happened in that you know there was this pressure for more yield because of the problems the world seemed to be facing and yes it focused on yield but then that brought with it a lot of stuff that we are now struggling with you know that’s that’s why i’m baking with ancient grains and that’s what i’m teaching with that that we’ve lost this diversity and and the whole of dan saladino’s book is about that and all the you know many different types of foods that you just we’ve lost this diversity and yet we need that to be resilient and and how much of a miss um apprehension these people were under that they did not could not see beyond the thing that was in front of them at that time you know um it’s.

Alison:
Came out and we focused on one pig type we lost that diversity and then really since then the breeding of of that pig to provide us with pork has gone with the trends that have happened since then so for example in the s saturated fat became the devil and people didn’t want to eat it and we were told not to eat it and so that pig that the british were working on became a leaner pig you know it was made a leaner pig in order to not have so much saturated fat in it feels like we we’re like you said tampering with what is natural and what nature would choose by itself, and not understanding the consequences of it which is really sad luckily um, back when this was all happening there was a group of very wise farmers in the uk one particular man who started it who created um something called the rare breed survival trust and he got support and that organization and those farmers tried to save those old breeds that were being lost.

Alison:
Okay, so let’s, from the kind of history, let’s focus on now and talk a little bit about the pig industry. Now, we’ve gone from those wild pigs, you know, pigs in small farms and in the UK, at least, many years where literally every household, even in towns.

Alison:
Had a pig in their backyard. We’ve gone from that to the indescribable horrors of industrial pig units. And although it’s painful and uncomfortable to talk about them i do want to touch on that here because they really do highlight how inhumane and insane our food system has become.

Alison:
So i’m going to just talk through some um kind of statistics and figures and all of the references for these are in the show notes so if you want to go and look at any of them in particular go have a look at our show notes and you will find links there so the the scale of industrial pig farming now is is inconceivable um we have things called mega farms which in the uk at least are ones that house over animals and the number of those mega farms in the uk has increased since well if you search online you’ll find multiple example um articles where the inhumane conditions of those mega farms are exposed one example i found was a farm in warwickshire in the uk which has pigs in sheds and this farm has what we use in the uk on supermarket labels a red a tractor sticker on it, which…

Alison:
Apparently if you see that in a supermarket in the uk it’s supposed to indicate um saner conditions for the animals kind of healthy looking after the animals they’re in they’re in um healthier conditions and they’re being treated better but this particular farm that has red tractor status and people are looking at the packets of pork in supermarkets thinking oh red tractor that that’s got to have been a bit better pork this farm was exposed as having cannibalism and animal abuse which just feels absolutely insane.

Andrea:
You cannot put that many animals in a place in an enclosed space. I know somewhere in the back of my mind for years I thought, oh, these people must have systems that they can manage this many animals on. You cannot. It does not work. And animals also have natural herd and flock sizes. And when you exceed those natural sizes… Joel Salatin, again, I will quote, he compares it to like when a chicken is in a flock size larger than what her species is made for. He says, compare it to living in a football stadium filled with people. Something would feel off to you constantly. In a household of five to people, you can still feel pretty normal. So we understand that. But my goodness, you just there is no management system that can handle that. And when the conditions of these red tractor farms are so appalling that when I first read through these notes, not knowing what red tractor meant, I thought it was like a, I thought maybe some environmental group had this like flag of red tractor farms. These are bad. I didn’t understand that it was supposed to be a sign of a like better farm.

Alison:
Yeah, it just makes a mockery of the whole system. really i i just you cannot trust anything that’s on a label in my opinion in any kind of um supermarket or large-scale food distribution i’ll just.

Andrea:
Tell you right now they say what you want to hear.

Alison:
That might unfortunately yeah well sometimes it’s true.

Andrea:
And sometimes it’s not.

Alison:
Yeah it’s not just in the um the uk i mean both of those stats are from the uk some of the stats from the from the states the death rate for female sows nearly doubled on u.s farms with more than pigs in an article from um and what’s interesting is that this kind of um mega farm development the number of pig farms have decreased incredibly. So one quote I read said pig production has increased by more than % since the late s, even as the number of farms has decreased by approximately %.

Andrea:
Whoa.

Alison:
So pig production going up %. That’s almost the same number. But the farms got, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it?

Andrea:
You know, our largest pig pork producer here in the US is Smithfield. And i think that’s that name is probably based on your market right, and smithfield isn’t even owned by the u.s it’s owned by a chinese company oh gosh really so i guess they still love pigs but it’s huge and smithfield has tons of farms obviously, And I don’t think any of them are less than when I was reading online about it after we started talking about this pork buck. I don’t think any of them were smaller than ,, but some of them are, I mean, thousands beyond that. And like you said, when the death rate for female sows nearly doubled, when the size of the farm exceeded pigs, that’s a grim number.

Alison:
Yeah, I dread to think, well, that is on those farms that have that many more pigs in it.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
As you said, yeah, go on.

Andrea:
I was just going to say like another hidden cost that never turns up in any of these charts and articles that we read is the cost to the human workers who have to participate in this program because they end up themselves having to dehumanize in order to cope with the work. And it does lead to unhappiness for them in their life, which is really just devastating to think about.

Alison:
Yeah, that’s a side of it, that even if we do think about the horrors that happen in those farms, it’s easy to forget that. There are humans involved in each stage of that chain, and you can bet they aren’t being treated any better than those pigs. Because that’s not what the deal is. the deal is making money you know um you know as you said a few minutes ago you just there is no precedent for keeping animals that many animals in that confined space in the history of of humans you know we we haven’t done that, And when we do now put animals together like that, it doesn’t work sanitarily for the animals, for the environment, you know, the feed, the health issues that come up, the disease, the waste products. We’ve talked about that on our episode about chickens, you know, just trying to deal with that amount of manure coming from that many pigs in such a small place.

Alison:
There’s just an absolute you know wait a time bomb waiting to explode I just I find it incredible that we would do that I feel like for pigs particularly because there it was almost like you can and we’ll talk about this a bit later you can treat a pig in a different way to how you can treat a cow and for pigs it feels to me like this CAFO system is one of the worst sides of our industrial agricultural system seeing the pictures you see come up on online news sites i can really understand why anyone would turn vegan you know i can i cannot see how anyone could look at those pictures read those articles hear the stats that i’ve just said and then consciously put pork from a supermarket into their shopping trolley just that just feels like it can’t be done but what we’re trying to say in this episode is it’s not the keeping and the eating of pigs that’s the problem. We’ve been doing that for many, many centuries. It’s how we farm them and how we eat.

Alison:
Okay so um let’s talk about some surprising facts about pigs which i’m here for this, which some of these well most of these i would say came out um came to my attention when rob wrote the lyrics for the song that you can hear in the background of this episode because he went to a pig farm um in kent which is where we were living at the time it’s when gable was very young and he talked to a farmer who was raising pasture pigs and learned so much about pigs Rob is very thorough.

Andrea:
His research is quite thorough.

Alison:
You know I think it was it was far away from a train station I seem to remember he ran like miles or something.

Andrea:
Of course he did. Of course he did.

Alison:
So and and they’re just wonderful so I wanted to share some of them with you. So so pigs are more intelligent than dogs they can learn their names in two weeks and they can complete puzzles that are made for primates chimpanzees they also have social intelligence they build bonds and they play games in their communities i think i just want to share an experience i i had with pigs here you know because i’m not a farmer like you are i’ve not had pigs but um i do get to know my farmers wherever i’m living and my farmer in italy was called Flavio as long time listeners of the podcast will know and very often we went to his farm which was a few miles from where we were living and he usually did a barbecue with loads of amazing food and we took some bread and I would go and you know visit with the animals and and see what he had and he would show me around and on one occasion.

Alison:
We went to see the pigs and there were piglets there that they weren’t tiny, tiny, but they weren’t, you know, really, really big pigs. And I went into the kind of the space that they were in and I have never been so emotionally affected by being with a farm animal as I was at that moment.

Alison:
I think I probably was picking up on that social intelligence, you know, the part of the pig that can communicate in ways that you just don’t see when you look at them, you know, without kind of being with them. And I remember kind of staying with them and walking around and stroking them and watching them and talking to them. And I was maybe in there. Rob was outside and Gabriel was off playing with some of the other kids. Um you know he was outside the sort of area and I think I was in there more than half an hour and I I felt like I kind of didn’t want to leave my eyes were a little bit kind of teary and I just wanted to stay there with the pigs and and I’m not you know I’m not familiar with animals like that I’m not someone who easily goes up to a cow you know and strokes it it’s it’s unfamiliar to me and yet with those pigs together I just I felt such a closeness and a bond with them and I feel like that really tells something of the story of what of what these animals are you know um.

Alison:
Some of the other things that Rob passed on to me is that pigs sing. They have vocalisations.

Alison:
And people who study them have said that they have different vocalisations based on their emotional state. The mothers, like I said, sing to their babies. They can signal and they transfer emotional states, just like we do to our young, just like we do to our children. I just think it’s amazing. Now, Andrea, you have had pigs. I don’t know if you’ve got them now. Can you talk a little bit about how you experience the pigs that you’ve had at the farm?

Andrea:
Yeah, well, we’ve only had two and we absolutely loved them. And we’ve agreed that we definitely want more because the experience was very positive for us. And I for sure would agree with how intelligent and smart they are. These pigs were very quick to pick things up. You could walk them like you could walk a dog just by using a stick to kind of touch their side and they kind of go away from the stick a little bit. So you can imagine you can guide them. and we’ve all seen drawings and paintings of swine herds and things with their sticks you know yeah so you can picture how it looks and one of our pigs when gary was taking them to be we’re going to take them to this one specific butcher and he got one pig in the trailer and then the other pig saw and said yeah i’m not doing that and she just ran off into the woods so gary’s like i guess i’m just taking one and he took the one and then we figured we’d find some other solution for the other pig, but she ended up just living in our yard for a while. And I thought, oh no, she’s going to leave manure everywhere. It’s going to be a disaster. Not a bit of it. She trampled down a part of the fence to our little blueberry patch and she made that her litter box and she would go in there, do her business and get right out. She does not spend any time, you know, it’s like any human with a bathroom. It’s not like you’re hanging out in there. She just goes in, comes out.

Andrea:
Never left a pile anywhere. Cleaner than a dog, for sure. Cleaner than a cat. And our ground is extremely hard, hard packed because the topsoil has been stripped off from logging over the last hundred years. So it’s very hard packed, very gravelly, very rocky. And if you try to dig with it, even with a shovel, it’s quite difficult. And you look at a pig’s soft little snout I don’t know how she did it but she’d put her nose down and she’d tunnel straight through and churn up the dirt and Gary said man maybe we should have just put her in the yard because he really wants to break it up and put seed down and stuff and he’s like maybe we should have just put her out here and let her break it up for a while because she can do it all naturally wow yeah and she’s not really a digging breed so she didn’t do a lot of it but she did some but it was just amazing to me because I couldn’t see how her soft little snout could do that. But she’d come up to the car when we come home and she’d want to get scratched and pet. And of course, she’s, you know, pounds of wanting to get scratched and pet. So the kids were kind of like, ah, she’s leaning on me.

Andrea:
She was very friendly, and she doesn’t jump up on you like a dog might. So she just wants to lean her pounds on you. It was really fun and sweet. And I thought, man, I could have a pig for a pet. Like, this is pretty amazing. And I know people do. So I do take umbrage when people say pigs are smelly, because I think that they just mean the management of pigs that they have seen up to this point has been poor management and smelly management. Because if you give a pig a space, she will only do her business in that one little space and she’ll keep the rest of her spot clean. Of course, if you had , of them, now you’re going to run into big problems.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah. Just like if you imagine you had , people, you know, cholera and dysentery breaks out.

Alison:
Yes.

Andrea:
It’s not a good thing. So, anyways, it was just really fascinating and fun having them. And I think I told you that I learned that pigs can apparate because they can, I’m serious, they can get out of any pen, as we learned. And one time I walked up and put her back into the pen and I latched the pen and then I turned around and she was standing behind me.

Alison:
Huh? How about half of them?

Andrea:
To this day, I cannot, I do not know how she did it. I walked around the whole thing. I couldn’t find any spot where she could have got it. I still don’t know how she did it. So I think they can apparate.

Alison:
So obviously people who have been observing pigs have got yet more work to do to find out how that happens. You need to learn. There’s one more thing about pigs, which I wanted to share before we finish this fun little section, which is that they dream. So they like humans they have rem sleep which scientists have said suggests that they dream wow.

Andrea:
So, Alison, what is the pig? The pigs be dreaming. The CAFOs aren’t good. They’ve been around for a long time. We get all that. What is important to look at when you buy pork?

Alison:
Yeah, this is a very important question. I mean, I feel like the supermarket is just out of the equation. If you you know if I was going into a supermarket and I knew I had to buy some meat and I had no other choice I would not buy pork there I would buy a different type of meat um so find a farmer, that um raises pork and go to a farmer’s market talk to people you know search online and then talk to that farmer find out from them um what animals they have perhaps what breed they are what they’re feeding their pigs um is it a small farm how many animals have they got how are the animals kept and i know we’ve talked about this kind of questioning before andrea and that some people feel really self-conscious and awkward talking to a potential farmer about this kind of thing and i always think you have good advice around here so what what’s your kind of take i know that you’ve had your own pigs and so you’ve had your own pork but what would be your take on, how to sauce pork and and in particular how to speak to a potential farmer about it.

Andrea:
Well we were buying pork from other friends and for years before we raised our own and we’re we still have some of our own pork that we’re going through today and I’ve also bought some a little bit more again from.

Andrea:
My friend who I was buying pigs from before. And if you are looking for someone to buy pigs or pork from, I should say, you can always check eatwild.com and see if there’s a farm around you that’s raising them in a method that kind of jives with you. I mean, odds are if you get to a small farm, it’s going to be a thousand times better than one of these cafes. Maybe over time you can sort of find pastured but even if you just immediately want to make a switch and you can’t find fully pastured but you’ve got pigs that are maybe getting some of the feed that’s not your favorite it’s still a start it’s still a step in the right direction and you can talk to that farmer and start building you know farmers are selling what people are buying and a lot of people don’t care so if a farmer knows what’s important to you that does factor into decisions that are made year over year. And I would also say if every farmer you talk to is sold out, don’t be discouraged. Pigs are quite easy to throw another one in the herd and raise for the next year as opposed to, you know, like a cow or something larger. So if a farmer says, you know, we’re fully sold out for this year, you could say, can I reserve a pig for next year? You’re going to put a non-refundable deposit on it, I’m sure. But then he knows what to plan for.

Alison:
I wanted to add something just to that which is really interesting um amelia who’s a supporter here in the uk actually kind of adopted a pig which is kind of what you’re talking about that you know she said okay i’m going to pay for this pig and i’m you know she knew which pig it was and then as the pig was brought up by the farmer you know when the pig was ready she had all of that pig and so she was using all of the bits that we’ll talk about in a minute but it’s a kind of a similar thing to what you’ve just said You know, adopt a pig.

Andrea:
What the farmer needs to know is that you’re an invested buyer and… You know, there are people who will say, oh, I’m interested and then never turn up again. So they really need to know that you’re serious about this. And Amelia obviously exhibited that to her farmer, which is just amazing. And maybe she could talk to us about that experience on one of our next live calls, because that would be really fun to hear about. that.

Alison:
Would be yeah.

Andrea:
So you can also when asking farmers like we’ve said sometimes you want to be careful that you don’t come in sounding like the city slicker who’s like excuse me but do you think to these things at night or like what so you need to um you know have some respect for the farmer and what he’s doing when you ask him even if he’s using methods you disagree with just have some respect because they’re doing hard work and they are also learning and they have also been taught like you know things that we were all taught that maybe we now are finding is not so ideal so even if a farmer isn’t doing your exact thing just show some respect and there’s a book by jill salatin called holy cows and hog heaven the food buyer’s guide to farm friendly food and it isn’t pig specific, but it is talking to your farmer about their food specific. And it has great ideas. And at the end of every chapter, he has little things you could do, things you could ask, things you could read. And it is such a wonderful book. And it’s a little bit salty. And it has some funny little quips in it, as Joel’s books tend to do. So I highly recommend that book. And it will give you some specific ideas for questions for farmers.

Alison:
Okay, so let’s move on to the topic of health. And, you know, harking back to what Laura said at the beginning, you know, the quote that I read that pork always seems to be kind of we’re not, sure about it. It’s playing second fiddle to beef. And I think that’s quite an important point that grass fed beef and grass fed red meat is has been kind of the darling of the nutrient dense community. And a lot of the energy and a lot of the focus goes on that, which leaves pork somewhat in the shadows and because pigs will eat anything you know it’s easier to end up with a pig that has eaten something that you’re not sure about whereas you know the the beef that we buy you know we have that grass-fed label and it’s kind of clearer but both of us feel like pork bought from a reputable farmer fed well is a wonderful wonderful meat it’s a complete protein it’s high in vitamin b and it’s got many minerals in it zinc phosphorus selenium iron really it is it is a health food and it’s something that we can bring to our plates alongside you know the other types of food that we’re looking for that have been farmed well but just again back to that.

Alison:
Keep looking for a good sauce like laura had found a good regenerative farm for her pork and that’s the important thing to think about when you’re concerned about is pork good for my health um do you want to add anything there before i move on to a bit more about health andrea.

Andrea:
I’ll add in that pork is a red meat and it looks very red when you get these, pastured pigs and i’ve had people even call me and say look at this picture of the pork i bought i think something’s wrong with it and i’ll tell them no that’s what it’s supposed to look like we’re just so accustomed to this super super pale.

Alison:
Color of kind of a gray color.

Andrea:
Yeah why’d you have to say that the color of the gray color of the meat that comes from the store oftentimes so when you get your fresh pastured pork it will look closer to beef than to chicken.

Alison:
Yeah interestingly you know my my upbringing we had a roast every sunday and you know we were kind of tagged between chicken and beef and pork and i thought i didn’t like pork literally i would always avoid the pork because it’s just a gray thing with a layer of just funny fat around the outside and because i was fat phobic back then and it just tasted of nothing it just tasted of nothing at all yeah and yet you know last christmas, I was just, yes, let’s get some belly pork and let’s make this beautiful crackling. And it was some of the nicest pork, some of the nicest food I could ever imagine. And to think that those two foods are apparently the same thing, you know, one was gray.

Andrea:
Not even a little bit. They go by the same name, but they are not the same thing.

Alison:
But they’re not. Okay.

Andrea:
Good pork is transcendent.

Alison:
Yes, transcendent is the word I would use. I went back to Albert, the market, and I said, the pork that we bought for Christmas from you was just amazing because it was.

Andrea:
How rewarding for a farmer to hear that. You know, he was out in the mud every morning, every night and, you know, for a year. And then you enjoyed the piece of pork on Christmas and then you came and told him what the experience meant to you. And that is really, really positive for a farmer to hear.

Alison:
I feel it’s very important to share that back. You know, I love it.

Andrea:
Absolutely.

Alison:
When we hear stuff from podcast listeners saying how much the podcast is brought to them, you know how that makes us feel. It feels like I’m doing good. You know, this is actually changing things. And that is very, very important, really. OK, there are two health concerns I think that people have about pork. The first one is parasites, because there are two different parasites that can inhabit pork. The thing that you need to know here is you must cook the meat if you if you well cook that pork those parasites are destroyed so if you have a whole cut of pork make sure with an internal thermometer either a you know a laser thing that, puts a funny beam through it or a probe thermometer make sure that the inside of that pork is f or c for a whole cut if you’re using mince which is ground pork or offal it should be f c and once that’s reached that temperature whatever type of pork it is you should rest it for three minutes before you serve it then you just don’t need to worry about parasites because what’s the resting for i don’t know it’s a very good question usually it’s for flavor isn’t it you know you rest yeah that’s.

Andrea:
What i thought.

Alison:
Maybe it’s to stabilize the temperature throughout the tissues i would have thought maybe.

Andrea:
Yeah, I kind of, this would be a question for Abby Allen. She’s the one who would know. Why do you rest it? It’s probably got something to do with cutting the, Gary was even telling me when he was carving up the pig and then the beef, you know, when we’re packaging it to freeze, he said the direction you cut them is going to affect the flavor. I was like, what?

Alison:
I think he’s probably right. I’ve never seen that, but I can imagine that it makes a difference because, you know, the muscle fibers and how they react, how the proteins change under the heat sauce it must make a difference and.

Andrea:
You know he’s spent a lot of time with woodworking and and he’s always told me oh you do this with the grains or you cut.

Alison:
You use this.

Andrea:
Type of grain for that and so he’s familiar with you know following the channels and whatnot.

Alison:
Yeah he should come here and sort out our meat so parasites you don’t need to worry about them the other health concern people have with pork is the fat because you know whatever you feed that pig is going to go into its fat and so if you’re eating a part of the pork the pig that is particularly fatty or if you’re using the fat from the pork you’re going to be getting the consequence of whatever that pig has eaten so again here we go back to buy pastured pork try and find out what that pig has eaten because whatever it’s eaten is going to be reflected completely in its fats so cook your pork and sauce it really well then both of those health concerns really you don’t need to be worried about um do have a listen to our private podcast that will come out later this month if you’d like us to if you’d like to hear us go further into health concerns that have come up, Laura sent in another question and we’ve got a couple of other questions and I didn’t want to hijack this episode with those but we will go into those health questions in at a deeper level in the private podcast so go and check that out when we release it later this month.

Alison:
Okay on that i wanted to also say that private podcast feed that will have the extra pork information and there are now over a hundred episodes there in that feed and i’m every time i kind of go back to it to post another one i look at it and i think my gosh and i go i scroll back and i look at some episode that looks interesting i think i might listen to that one I don’t remember what we said.

Andrea:
Yeah, I think that podcast has outstripped the main feed in numbers of episodes at this point.

Alison:
Or how long we’ve talked for, because we’re unstoppable.

Andrea:
Well.

Alison:
So those are all available to supporters who are companionship or above. Okay, we’re going to move on to talk about products of the pig and how we cook them, the really tasty part, but let’s go to an ad break first. Okay so we were just talking about fat and i want to start by talking about the fat of the pig and the first thing i want to say is don’t buy lard which is the fat of the pig from a supermarket or a shop because it is horrible it’s probably been hydrogenated which is a word that most of us now think that’s not a good thing to do to fats we’ve learned that and most of the world has learned that now um i wanted to give you a really visceral example of this um that gable’s been eating um rendered pig fat in the form of lard since he was very very young because we’ve you know we’ve been rendering it since the beginning of our kind of ancestral food journey, and he’s got very used to it you know he he has it cooked you know vegetables and meat cooked in it he has pancakes fried in it he spreads it on his bread puts a bit of salt on the top um and he loves it and when we um came back to england and we were all kind of disorganized with no farmer and kind of you know suitcases everywhere um i wanted to make something with lard in and so i thought i’m just gonna buy some you know packet of this kind of old-fashioned in quotes lard it says on the label is.

Andrea:
That what it said.

Alison:
Just a load of rubbish and um so i i bought it to use in i think it was pastry I was making because I do like lard in my pastry um and Gable saw this lard in the fridge and thought oh it’s lard I’ll have some of that and he tried some he was like what on earth is this it’s horrible oh my god I was like it’s shop lard I hadn’t tried it at that point it’s like it doesn’t taste anything like lard it just tastes horrible and I mean Gable’s not, he’ll eat anything you know he’ll try anything and his reaction to that just tells the story of the difference between decent pig fat rendered at home and the pig fat that sold in blocks in a supermarket as large what do you do with it oh we threw it away we threw it away, it wasn’t very expensive you know because guess what it doesn’t you know it’s made in some horrible factory and it doesn’t cost much to make um but yeah just if you ever think about doing it don’t do it go without it find something else to use instead yeah um okay so after that kind of tangent a little bit let’s go back to um the bullet points that i have in front of me sending.

Andrea:
Him into the mind to see if the.

Alison:
Air is good yeah he did it without me even looking so i just turned around and he was like oh gosh i can.

Andrea:
Hear him saying it now.

Alison:
So um we have an episode way back in the annals number which you can scroll down and find called the facts we love the facts we leave and in that has the horror.

Andrea:
Story of lard in it.

Alison:
Yeah and crisco right we talk about um lard quite a lot um there are two types of fat that you will often see um offered to you from your butchers for making lard you can get back fat which is on the back of a pig or you can get leaf fat which is the fat that it surrounds the organs of the animal you can make lard from both of them leaf fat is supposed to have a more delicate flavor lard is yeah um.

Andrea:
I haven’t bought leaf fat so i’m wondering because we just have it from our own pigs.

Alison:
Yes and.

Andrea:
Or like when we get a pig we get the whole thing. So we take it out of there. So I’m wondering, does it cost more than the back fat? Because there’s so much less leaf lard.

Alison:
In my experience, it doesn’t. Because I don’t think really… For the farmers that I’ve been to, there hasn’t been a public understanding of the difference between back and leaf. And so they sell both of them at the same price.

Andrea:
I basically put it in my freezer with like a gold label on it. Do not use this for anything else because it is going in a pie. It’s going to be a crust.

Alison:
It’s very, very nice if you can get it. Lard is a wonderful sauce of vitamin D, which if you live in England is quite hard to get. If you live in Washington State, kind of hard to get to often. It has a great omega– balance. It’s % monounsaturated fat. People think lard is just this, you know, terrible saturated fat. But it’s % monounsaturated as well as saturated fat. And it has the wonderful brain food, which is cholesterol in it too.

Andrea:
Can’t have a brain without that.

Alison:
Exactly. Rendering, I was going to make some comment about society in general at that point, but I don’t think I will.

Andrea:
Put it in the after show.

Alison:
Yeah. So rendering lard is not difficult. People feel daunted by it. And it was interesting when we interviewed Holistic Hildor, or maybe it was when she interviewed me for the Wise Traditions podcast, we talked about lard briefly and she said, this rendering thing is just such a daunting word. It’s just melting let’s just call it yeah melting lard and then it doesn’t seem so scary does it, exactly i have an article on how to render or melt lard in the slow cooker which i will link in the show notes you can do it in the slow cooker you can do it in your oven you can also do it in the instant pot on the slow cooker setting or on the pressure cooker setting, i’ve done that a few times not as easy as the slow cooker setting so if you have the time do it in the slow cooker setting. We render large probably, I would say once every two months we do a big lot and then, you know, we decanting it into separate containers and some of them go in the fridge and some of them go in the freezer. If you can get your farmer to mince that fat that they give you, it will save you a lot of time. Because really the most time-consuming part of making large for us is chopping that fat into small pieces to get the optimum kind of, you know, juiciness out of it.

Andrea:
And it’s not that easy to chop fat, I’ll just say.

Alison:
Rob does that job and he struggles with it sometimes, I’ll tell you.

Andrea:
Yeah, well, your hand does pay a price. It is worth it. It is definitely worth it.

Alison:
And.

Andrea:
If I didn’t have the option to grind it for sure I’d still be doing it but.

Alison:
Yeah I do find it easier.

Andrea:
To grind it.

Alison:
Yeah um some people say there’s this wet rendering and there’s this dry rendering what’s the difference um very simply put wet rendering is using water to um facilitate the process and involves an extra step in that you then need to leave the rendered fat and the water which is the product to set and then obviously they separate and you can then get rid of that water and keep your fat the water tends to keep the resulting lard pure it gets rid of slightly more impurities so if you’re looking for a lard that you might use in a soap or in some cosmetic process it’s probably optimal to wet render it dry rendering means you’re not using any water at all and you know if you do it carefully and you don’t take the temperature up too high then the lard’s wonderful it doesn’t you know taste particularly piggy if you’ve got good fat so i i think i’ve wet rendered lard once um and i just did dry rendering.

Andrea:
Never wet rendered for the longest time i just was like and why and i’ve become very fond of it the last maybe year or so.

Alison:
Okay and.

Andrea:
Maybe it’s because i like having that giant cheesecake situation that i’m always posting.

Alison:
In the discord look at my massive cheesy over cut it into portions like some diagram pie shop.

Andrea:
But I have been enjoying that. And also it’s maybe because a lot of our pork that we get is, I mean, very, very rough. It’s not super duper clean like you would see maybe being sold. Like when Francine told me that she just used the suet, I was like, what? You just like put it in the cake? I couldn’t believe it. But I was used to like having to pick out, you know, all kinds of stuff. Yeah, I get it. So I think I’ve become more fond of the wet rendering in just having the rougher pieces of.

Alison:
Then you don’t need to worry about that at the beginning because you can deal with it in the fact that the wet rendering is taking those bits and putting it in the layer between the fan and the water.

Andrea:
And the LARB does, or TALO, because they do it for both. It comes out so pristine. And I know, I think people who’ve said they use TALO and things for face lotions, they’ll wet render it multiple times to really super purify it.

Alison:
To get it all out. I haven’t done that. More often, I wet render tallow because I do use it for like, you know, hand blocks, moisturizing hand blocks and things like that. We also have another episode, number , which we talked more about wet rendering in. That’s quite hard to say.

Andrea:
Wet rendering.

Alison:
Wet rendering. So if you want to know more about that, head back to episode . And once you have melted or rendered your large, you will have left very much smaller pieces of fat with most of the liquid out of them. Save those they’re called cracklings or that’s what i call them um save them i put them, in my bread or on my bread and in the show notes there’s a recipe for an Italian bread called pane con ciccioli which is basically bread with ciccioli which is cracklings in Tuscany.

Andrea:
Such a nice name.

Alison:
Ciccioli it’s lovely isn’t it? Yeah it is. There’s also a recipe for a lard crackling spread in the show notes and also I will link Naomi who’s at Almost Bananas who’s our ancestral cook in Slovakia who has done two wonderful episodes with us number and number she has them such amazing traditional lard crackling biscuits which I’m actually going to make next time I get lard I’ve got someone coming over who is Slovakian who’s never made them and we’re going to make them together which is really exciting so yes do use your cracklings you have.

Andrea:
Used cracklings to flame broil pizza too have you.

Alison:
Not yeah that was a bit of a disaster which which when gable turned around and said mama the oven’s on fire i was like that put too many cracklings on my pizza so less cracklings yeah more dough it is really good on.

Andrea:
Pizza though i.

Alison:
I did.

Andrea:
Take your advice on that and it is delicious.

Alison:
Oh it’s so lovely so when you’ve when you’ve rendered your lard, You can use it for so many things. You can spread it. Like I said, Gable spreads it on bread or on toast. Sprinkle some salt on the top. You can cook with it.

Andrea:
Shout out if someone is dairy free. It is very British, I have learned from you, to spread the lard on your toast. On your bread. Yeah, exactly. It’s a wonderful alternative. It’s a thought. That’s actually the picture. Our logo is a piece of bread with lard on it.

Alison:
Indeed. Indeed. You can cook with it, obviously, just like you would cook with tallow or perhaps olive oil. You can cook vegetables in it. you can put brown meat in it you can put it in your bread um to make it softer you can use it in pastries i mean traditionally it’s been used in english pastries um and in pastry for many many centuries you can fry bread in it and that is very good very very good just you know melt your lard slice your bread up put it in particularly if your bread’s a bit old or it went a bit wrong, just say oh that’s that’s going to be my treat my kind of lard bread we grease all our bread tins with lard before we you know sprinkle them with flour I put it in cakes there are two.

Alison:
Cakes in the spelt book that both have lard in them I seem to remember the top of my head and you can use it in creams like I said you know if you perhaps if you want to wet render you can use it in creams um we will um link an article in the show notes about ways you can use lard i think it’s ways to use lard an article that i wrote the other thing before we finish on fat um because there’s so much to say about fat um i wanted to talk about lardo which is italian cured pig fat when i first moved to italy i saw this in um you know kind of a local cooperative, along with all the meats. I was like, hmm, what’s this? And I learnt from the farmer, you know, you can slice it thin, you can wrap asparagus in it, you can put it on your pizza, you can put it in your veg, you can fry with it. It’s pig fat that’s been cured kind of like bacon has, you know, on the outside, it’s got a crust of kind of black pepper, rosemary, all the different things. And it’s absolutely delicious. My recipe for lardot is linked in the show notes. And if you want to print a copy of that out, it is also in this wonderful pork book that we’re talking about.

Andrea:
Well, now that our mouths are watering, let’s not forget to talk about sausage. We love sausage around here. And we did not have sausage in Lynx for a long time because it’s pretty expensive to buy. And because we were buying whole pigs, it was kind of hard to justify also then going and buying a bunch of cured meats, even though I would still buy them sometimes for special, you know, Christmas casserole or something like that. But we just had chunks of meat for a long time. And then we ended up getting a meat grinder, which has been wonderful. And then this past time, we also for the first time tried stuffing sausages, which was also really fun. We used sheep casings. And it’s a lot of lessons learned along the way. But it was so much fun and it’s so satisfying and so delicious to see all those sausages piling up in the big metal mixing bowls as you’re going.

Alison:
Making sausages is just naturally comic really, isn’t it? I mean, it just is.

Andrea:
It really is. It’s really soothing to sit there and twist them and like wrap them up and just watch the link getting longer and longer.

Alison:
You can do that, can you? You can do that thing where you kind of spin them and you end up with this beautiful kind of four things all hanging off and then another four things. Can you do that?

Andrea:
I don’t know exactly what kind of thing you’re picturing. Mine probably didn’t look very graceful. I did watch a ton of videos of people doing it. And all of them, I was like, what? How did you? What? What are you doing? It’s like watching somebody crochet. And they go really fast. And like, wait a minute, I missed everything you just did. But I figured something out eventually. At first, mine just kept unraveling. And then eventually, I started, I figured something out that was working. I don’t know if it’s exactly right, but whatever. We have a lot of fun flavoring them. I bring out tubs and tubs of all the different seasonings, and we read about different regional combinations and what people like, and we think about what we like. And you can grow herbs specifically for your sausage making if you know that you love thyme in it. Just grow a lot of thyme, like have a row in your garden exclusive to your sausages.

Andrea:
And fresh herbs and dried behave slightly different in your sausages. So as you go down that rabbit trail, you’ll learn more and more as I have. But also, I can just say that a fresh pastured pork, ground and salted and cooked on the stove, will exceed every store-bought sausage you’ve ever had. There is nothing to hide. We’re not masking any flavor here. We are only highlighting the transcendent flavor of the pork itself with the salt and it is an experience i mean it is almost a spiritual experience the first time gary and i ground ground the pork salted it put on the stove and we just stood there eating the pieces of meat like this is incredible i’ve.

Alison:
Got goosebumps thinking about that.

Andrea:
From there it only gets more fun because then you’re doing everything from mixing in maple sugar, if you like the maple sausages, to making chorizo type blends of which every little tiny village in Mexico has a different theme for their chorizos. And then there’s, we’ve mixed dried blueberries in or fresh blueberries in. You can, I mean, the sky is the limit. Pork is like a canvas palette and you can just paint all kinds of amazing pictures on it with your spices and, transport people somewhere you know you you pick this like italian blend and everybody just immediately knows it’s italian yeah or you pick this kind of you know very cumin heavy blend and everybody knows that you’re in mexico right now like it’s just amazing the fun things you could do with your sausage yeah i was surprised the first the first time.

Alison:
I heard you um sorry interrupt the first time i heard you talking about italian sausage i was like i’m in italy what what sausage she’s talking about here and then it took me a while to realize it’s a it’s a blend of herbs.

Andrea:
And that just transports you to italy i was like yeah just the not italian sausages you might italian sausage like that rosemary you know when you walk out down your road with that rosemary oh yeah that ran all that was yeah gorgeous yeah like i could just smell it looking at it you know when you you put all those rosemaries and the salt in and you know maybe some whatever it was you were eating at that time and you’re there in that moment it’s just wonderful so it’s tons of fun and yeah you don’t have to stuff them they can just be patties we did borrow a grinder our first year that we had ground sausage and we there was no stuffing of those and then it wasn’t until we got our own grinder and then we got like stuffer sort of attachments and casings and whatnot that we were able to try stuffing them but you know first we had years of no pork then we had years of just blocks of pork then we had some ground pork and then we had now we have the links again and it’s been a long journey but it definitely feels like it’s been worth the patient wait maybe.

Alison:
You could share some pictures of your.

Andrea:
Um sausage machine on discord when this episode.

Alison:
Comes out because i don’t remember particularly seeing it and i would be interested to kind of see you know which one you had and and how it works and and also then you.

Andrea:
Can show.

Alison:
Me your sausage twisting art as well at.

Andrea:
The same time i’ll show you the pictures we oh yeah that’ll be very fun to put in. Yeah, I’ll do that.

Alison:
Okay. Bacon. We need to talk about bacon. That should be the title.

Andrea:
Everybody’s waiting for this moment.

Alison:
Yes. So bacon is not daunting. It really isn’t. Again, it’s like another one of those things that you think, oh, it’s difficult. I have made bacon in my fridge drawer, literally just make room in one of the drawers of your fridge and you can make bacon. You don’t have to smoke it. It doesn’t take ages. It’s really user friendly. It’s just salt, sugar, and then whatever spices herbs flavorings you like put it all over the pork you’ve got to drain the water that comes out of it every now and again and it’s got to be in the dark ideally but literally you can just do it in your fridge drawer it’s not difficult we have a lot of supporters who make their own bacon the book which i think we might have to rename the transcendent pork book andrea, there’s a recipe in there from amelia the one who um adopted a pig who’s in wales um which um explains how she makes bacon andrew do you want to add anything to the baking conversation because there’s always more to say about bacon there’s.

Andrea:
Always more to say about bacon after we write the memoir me and what did you call it allison just me and the cable.

Alison:
Then we can write.

Andrea:
Our second memoir make room for bacon.

Alison:
Yeah because we need to make room for bacon i was gonna say.

Andrea:
When when we cut we cut pieces off the pig that and we kind of shape them about the size and weight so they’re all about the same so that they could be for bacon and.

Alison:
This doesn’t.

Andrea:
Just have to come from the belly as you indicated earlier there’s back bacon and you know you can kind of take any part of a pig and cure it and cut it to look like bacon. And, The belly is just where you get all that streaky fat that you were referring to when you called it streaky bacon. But I was also going to add, you don’t even have to cure it if you don’t want to. You can just take the bacon straight, you know, defrost it from the freezer and slice it and cook it on the stove and salt it. We do that all the time. And it is delicious and it’s really thick slabs the way I cut it usually. And the kids just love it.

Andrea:
And you can also like you said you can salt it down you can cover it in herbs and peppercorns and jalapeno slices and whatever kind of floats your boat and you can put it in a container with a lid on it or you could put it in a drawer like you said some people do it in a paper bag but it does get juicy so keep that in mind and then what you ideally would do is turn it over maybe every day and you would leave it in there for a couple days, roughly a week or so, while it’s just really absorbing all of the salt. Some people put sugar on it too. And if you’re familiar with the nitrates or nitrites conversation, which you can hear us discuss back in our interview with Meredith, who is a butcher in North Carolina, then you know that the nitrates and nitrites are for long-term storage and hanging at room temperature of this lactic acid ferment meat. So you do not need nitrates or nitrites when you’re curing at home in your fridge and you’re going to eat it unless you’re planning to hang it on hooks in a smokehouse somewhere and it’s going to stay there for a couple of months. There’s really, I.

Andrea:
I’m not saying that there’s a need for the nitrates and nitrites anyways. It’s a preservative kind of regulation in the U.S. To avoid selling any spoiled meat. And of course, when you’re making, you know, thousands and thousands of pounds from your thousands and thousands of pigs, you can’t be going in and inspecting each one. And so in the mass, in the quantity, we lose some of the quality. And so the nitrates and nitrites were introduced as as a regulation to ensure that you kind of forced the preservation of this meat to be safe. But when you’re curing at home, there’s no need whatsoever to put the nitrates and nitrites on it. That beef isn’t going to be, or that pork isn’t going to be hung up, probably, in a smokehouse for months. And if you are at the point where you’re doing that, first of all, send me pictures.

Andrea:
Secondly, you’ve done your reading and you’ve looked at other things and you know what you’re dealing with at this point. So you’re just carrying it in the fridge for a couple of days. You’re marinating it essentially, and then you’re going to cook it. So don’t feel like you need to preserve it with the pink salt, which is what is sold. And if you want to, of course, once you’ve done all of this marinating in the salt and the herbs, you can put it in your smoker and smoke it. And then it is cooked after that if you smoke it up to temp, but then you can still fry it on the stove and, oh, so delicious. Wonder if I can convince Gary to smoke a slab for Christmas now that I’m talking about this.

Alison:
Yum.

Andrea:
I’m sure it would be real hard to convince him.

Alison:
Okay, let’s talk about the offal now. We often talk about offal. We love talking about offal. And pork offal is no different. The liver, let’s start with that. The liver is not as strong as beef liver. I know that, you know, a lot of people have problems with liver. And beef liver, if you are not a liver lover, can be a challenging place to start sometimes. time just go.

Andrea:
Smaller and smaller animals if you.

Alison:
Have problems.

Andrea:
With liver just go smaller and smaller.

Alison:
Yeah the pig liver is not as strong as the beef but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it in any recipe where you see beef liver so whenever you know i don’t really look i don’t bother about what liver is in any recipe i just use whatever liver i have yeah um there is a recipe in the download for um pig liver um so go and have a look at that but really you can make any liver pate recipe with it the heart.

Alison:
Now, historically, apparently, that’s often been stuffed. I’ve never stuffed a pig heart myself. But I think there is a recipe in the Piper’s Farm cookbook you were talking about, Abby, from Piper’s Farm a moment ago. And when we used to live in Cornwall, we used to buy offal from our farmer there. And two ladies who were elderly ran the market. And when they saw me buying the heart, they was like, oh, yeah, my mum always used to stuff these hearts. They were absolutely delicious. and so probably i should try that at some point um yeah you can also use the blood so historically pig blood has been used um for lots and lots of puddings black pudding in this country in italy it was it’s called sanguinaccio sanguin sanguin meaning blood and i have a whole book in italian on the different sanguinacci that um all the different regions of italy um traditionally you have cooked um so if you have got your own pigs and you can get the blood and stabilize it when um you take the pig um to be slaughtered then you can use that blood in some really really tasty recipes the meat generally as well we haven’t we’ve talked about all the other things we haven’t actually even talked about the meat yet um.

Alison:
When I made some notes for this episode to share with Andrea, because I always kind of ping across to Andrea what I think I would like us to talk about and vice versa when Andrea is in charge. I put under this section for the meat, I put roast pork, yum, belly roast pork, yummer. And that’s really how I feel about roast pork. You know, I talked about the roast pork that we had last Christmas from our farmer and just it was absolutely amazing. The recipe that I did for that belly roast pork had the most amazing crackling. And I will find the recipe and put it in the show notes if you’re looking for a belly pork roast recipe. I think in the book, which you’ve put together, Andrea, there are four recipes for roast pork. One’s got sauerkraut, one’s got apples and two of them are for belly. Um and then we’ll put a link to my one that focuses on the crackling i mean roast pork there are so many flavors like you said in the sausages section andrea there are so many flavors that go with roast pork so any of those flavorings that you might consider putting in sausages, you can put in your um roast pork you can cook your shoulder of pork or your leg of pork with and i think pork can.

Andrea:
Really handle well i was gonna i was gonna say pork.

Alison:
Can really handle.

Andrea:
Of that sweetness so like you can put apples like you.

Alison:
Said yeah on.

Andrea:
It apples and onions with pork is a great pair.

Alison:
Yeah, absolutely wonderful.

Andrea:
Okay, that didn’t mean pear like the fruit, but I guess you could do pears too.

Alison:
It’s a great pear. I’ve never tried pork and pear together, but I think it would be very nice.

Andrea:
It sounds proper when you say it, you know.

Alison:
Exactly. And obviously ground pork and, you know, pork chops, all of the different cuts, they’re just, they’re absolutely delicious if you’re buying them from a farmer who’s really, you know, bought into the whole pig thing and is looking after their pigs well. Okay andrea do you want to add anything to the meat section or really anything that we’ve talked about in this delicious episode i.

Andrea:
Just want to eat some pork now.

Alison:
Yeah i’m so hungry.

Andrea:
Now that we sat here and talked about all these cracklings and herbs and oh now.

Alison:
I’m going shopping tomorrow and i will see i know what you’re buying to the market so you You know what I’m going to be relaying?

Andrea:
Like, is there anything pork related? I put, I should add on the subject of awful. I put in the book a list of the parts I ask the butcher for when we butcher a pig. Like, if you weren’t doing it yourself. So we ask for a specific list of organs. And I noted in there that a lot of times butchers are shocked that you want the organs. Sometimes they’re disgusted. They assume it’s for your dog. They’ll even say, oh, is this for your dog? And you’re like, no, this is for me. But you also often have to remind them multiple times because I’ve had some big, bigger butchers that I’ve worked with and I say, oh, I want these parts. And then I call them back and I’m like, I want this, this, and this. You have that on the list, right? And they’re like, wait, you do? What? So my favorite butcher is the one we have now. And I said, is it okay if I ask for this really long list? Because some butchers won’t. They’ll say, no, I’m not going to save that for you. But he said, I’m happy to give you anything you want off this. This is your pig. I’ll give you anything and everything you want. I’m happy to not have to throw it away. I’m happy that you’re using it so he’s very supportive of our love of organ meats which i think is just wonderful so i put that list in the book so that.

Alison:
You can kind.

Andrea:
Of have it in front of you if you want to if you want to be able to ask your butcher what you.

Alison:
Can get hearing you talking about asking the farmer for everything just made me think we haven’t even talked about trotters or bones have we because those are both things that both of us haven’t we you know making stock with trotters and then picking the meat off them and using that and also making um pork stock and i think again there a pastured pig makes all the difference you know if you get bones from pastured pig and you put them in the oven to roast them a little bit before you put them in the stock pot and then you cook them up in the stock pot for you know hours that pork stock, is just really, really wonderful.

Andrea:
It’s so good.

Alison:
And can be used for many.

Andrea:
Many things. Pork broth is so unique from all the other broths. It’s so delicate. I used to, you and I have talked about this before, but I used to think I hated pork broth because the… Bones smelled so bad and the broth stank and I couldn’t even make myself drink it and again you think oh do I just cover this up with flavorings but when I made the first time I had a pig that was fed no soy whatsoever and I cooked the I was like oh don’t waste these bones I’m gonna cook these bones and yeah oh my goodness I was drooling it smelled so good and it tasted so good so that’s where I realized in the most tangible way that what the pig was being fed and the way the pig was living and what it was walking around and was really affecting what I was getting in my final product.

Alison:
Exactly. So if you’re not hungry now, then I’m astounded. Go out and find yourself some really wonderful pork. And if you want to grab the download, anyone who’s a supporter already has it and you can go to our shop and have a look for it if you’re not if you’d like to be a supporter but you’re not yet you can go to ancestral kitchen podcast.com forward slash join.

Alison:
And if it’s okay with you andrea i will yeah lead us out by saying goodbye thank you to everyone who contributed to this episode we appreciate all our wonderful supporters and all the wonderful people who leave reviews for us and talk to us and tell us about um you know how they’re living and how wonderful their pork is we appreciate you all so thank you i want to um leave you with a full listen to my husband rob’s track who you’re calling pigs if you want to hear more of his music go to https://robertmichaelkay.com thank you very much andrea.