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History of the Mangalitsa

September 19, 2017 / Bruce Steele / History
 The name “Mangalica” means “roll-shaped,” it could be from the Serbo-croatischem “mangala svinija – pig that is well fed“, “Mangulica” or “Mangulac – easy fat becoming” or by the Romanian “mancare – eat” may be derived.


Many names are used for the Mangalitsa, his races and crossbreds: Mangalitsa, wool haired pig, curly-haired pig, Baris and Ordas (crossbred) or Bogauner (Bakony ancestor of Mangalitsa). In different countries are different spellings for Mangaltiza:

 Mangalica (Hungarian), Mangulica (Serbian), Mangalita (rum), Mangalitsa (AmE), Mangulac, Mangaliza, Mangalicza. The races of the Mangalitsa pigs (Hungarian Blonde Mangalitsa) in Hungarian Szöke, Fecskehasu (Hungarian Mangalitsa swallowbellied) and Voros called (Hungarian Red Mangalitsa).

The primary breeding in Kisjeno has pioneered this development. A document from 1833 shows involved the transportation of twelve Schumadinka (Sumadija, Sumadia) fat pigs (2/10) as bred in Topscider, Belgrade, the Serbian Prince Milos Obrenovic, the Palatine of Hungary, Joseph Anton Johann of Austria in its Dömäne Kisjeno. This “Milos–pigs” were paired with Szalontai and Bakony–pigs. Their descendants became the basis for subsequent fat pig breeding. The “blood–Kisjeno” spread all over the numerous breeding flocks in Hungary.

Mangalitza as the leading lard type breed, the products of this pig fueled mainly the population of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The reason of his popularity was the fat.  After a long time runner, the pigs were fattened up to 250 to 300 kg,. 20 to 25cm backfat not uncommon.

Before the introduction of the Danube Steam Navigation and construction of rail shipments of pig farms they had to bring the pigs to the Vienna slaughterhouses in weeklong walks by feed.  1871, 38.330 fat pigs from Gyor and Sopron were driven to the Vienna market.

In the 1890s in Budpest a pig market system and the pig slaughter house was built. Hungarian livestock census in 1895 showed a population of 6,447,143 pigs (MATLEKOVITS 1900; Tormay 1896). 94% of them belonged to the lard type pig.

Hungary with 407 pigs per 1000 inhabitants, the country with the most pigs in Europe. 1894 73% to Central and Western Europe were exported.

This first golden age of Hungarian fat pig breeding ended in 1895 introduced from America, swine plague, export restrictions and rival, foreign pig meat breeds. The stock recovered only in 1911, but was again decimated in the war years.

 In 1927, the Hungarian National Association of Fat Pig Breeders (Mangalicatenyésztok Országos Egyesülete, MOE) established and recognized the Mangalitsa pig officially as a separate breed. The Mangalitsa experienced after the Second World War, a new boom. The number of registered breeding pigs increased by 1943 to 30.000 pieces.

From the 50s of the 20th Century, the demand for pork products changed radically and pig breeds with lean meat quality supplanted the Mangalitsa pig. During the late seventies industrial pig established with imported pig meat breeds and standardized health conditions in warehouses, the Mangalitsa pig was maintained only in zoos or occasionally by small farmers for their own use.

In 1973, the Mangalitsa in Hungary was placed under protection and introduced a subsidized gene reserve breed. Until 1980 within 10 farms it was possible to rebuilt a breeding line of the three race options: Blonde, Red and swallowbellied

Only an export agreement with Spain for the production of Serrano ham (Jamón Serrano) from 1990 caused an economic boom of Mangalitzas.


Originally posted: https://www.mangalitzainternational.org/

Mangalica, Mangulac, Mangulica

Mangalitsa Pork: Where to Buy and Try the Prized Meat

August 20, 2017 / Bruce Steele / History, Mangalitsa Pigs

Known as Mangalica, Mangalitsa or Mangalitza, this is the pig prized for its high fat marbled meat that has been hailed as the Kobe beef of pork and attracted critical acclaim from chefs around the world.

As delicious as it is, tracking down this curly haired rare breed hog is still somewhat of a challenge, despite its growing popularity.

In response to the huge Facebook interest we had from our initial article introducing the delights of the succulent meat, we’ve decided to put together a list of some of the farms, shops and restaurants where you can get your hands on this tasty find.

From a rural farm in Wales to a three Michelin-starred restaurant in New York find out where you can try this tasty delicacy and you’ll be hooked.

Meanwhile, those wanting to go the whole hog should mark the annual Mangalica Festival Budapest in their diary for three days of celebrations from 10 to 12 February 2017 (TBC) and anything and everything related to Mangalitsa.

Watch the video from the Mangalica Festival 2012 


Originally published: https://www.finedininglovers.com/blog/culinary-stops/mangalista-pork/

Budapest, Mangalica Festival

Inside the Secret World of Super-Premium Spanish Jamon Iberico

April 2, 2017 / Bruce Steele / History, Mangalitsa Pigs

Preface — Mangalitsa pigs (like the rare Hungarian breed raised at Winfield Farm) are the only other pigs besides Iberico that can officially be labeled “pata negra”.    In fact, Spanish charcutiers rediscovered Mangalitsas in Hungary in the early 1990s while looking for new sources of premium quality lard hogs and found Mangalitsa, and their interest saved the breed from extinction.   Mangalitsas also are descended from European boar lines.

[Photographs: Max Falkowitz]

It’s a misty Wednesday afternoon and the pigs are hard at work. So is their porquero Juan Carlo, who’s busy guiding them across this 1,700 acre farm to the land’s choicest acorns. At sunrise, Juan Carlo rouses about 340 pigs from their farmhouse and sets them to work. At sundown he corrals them back to the ranch. This year marks his 25th on the job.

In a few weeks the pigs’ work will be done: they’ll be sufficiently fattened up from their grazing to be slaughtered, butchered, and turned into some of the most expensive ham in the world—at my local source, $220 for a hand-sliced pound. Why so much? Because it’ll be jamon Iberico puro de bellota, acorn-fed pure breed Iberico ham, and sold under the Cinco Jotas (5J) brand, one of the oldest and most well-respected in Spain.

It’s a misty Wednesday afternoon and the pigs are hard at work. So is their porquero Juan Carlo, who’s busy guiding them across this 1,700 acre farm to the land’s choicest acorns. At sunrise, Juan Carlo rouses about 340 pigs from their farmhouse and sets them to work. At sundown he corrals them back to the ranch. This year marks his 25th on the job.

In a few weeks the pigs’ work will be done: they’ll be sufficiently fattened up from their grazing to be slaughtered, butchered, and turned into some of the most expensive ham in the world—at my local source, $220 for a hand-sliced pound. Why so much? Because it’ll be jamon Iberico puro de bellota, acorn-fed pure breed Iberico ham, and sold under the Cinco Jotas (5J) brand, one of the oldest and most well-respected in Spain.

Acorn-fed jamon Iberico is intensely sweet. It’s floral, earthy, and nutty like good Parmesan, with fat so soft it melts right in your mouth. For many ham lovers it’s as good as good gets, and it never comes cheap.

This storybook-green plot of land, dotted with knobby trees and cooled by the breezy Iberian climate, is one of many across Spain and Portugal that raises pigs for Sanchez Romero Carvajal, the company that produces 5J ham. But all those pigs eventually make their way to a small town called Jabugo where hams cure in a 130-year-old cellar designed for the task. From start to finish, the ham-making process is simple: grant good pigs the freedom to be good pigs, let them feast on the land, then cure their flesh with little more than salt and air.

For most eaters, that’s where the story begins and ends. But there’s more to it—a process that blends unwavering tradition and modern technology to produce this sought-after ham. To share what work that involves, Carvajal invited me to tour their farms and ham curing facility. Though the visit wasn’t all-access—there wasn’t time to see the pigs’ nurseries or the actual slaughter facilities, for instance—no questions were off-limits. Here’s how it all happens.

Behind the Label

In the world of Spanish ham, there are two premium classifications: Iberico pigs and acorn-fed pigs. Unlike white pig breeds like Serrano, black-skinned Iberico pigs are descendants of the Mediterranean wild boar, and are colloquially called pata negra (“black foot”) for the hoof that accompanies each ham. They’re athletic animals, runners and rooters, and thanks to the structure of their intramuscular fat, their meat is more flavorful, juicy, and distinctive.

Iberico pigs are expensive. They have smaller litters, yield less meat per head, and take time to mature, which is why many ham producers around Spain cross-bred them with other varieties. Up until recently, ham made from pigs that were as little as half-Iberico could be sold as jamon Iberico, but new legislation now requires Iberico ham to be labeled according to the percentage of the pigs’ Iberian ancestry. 5J is one of the few brands to exclusively use pure Iberico pigs.

Then there’s the acorns, the bellota, which fall from oak and cork trees from early October to early March on the farms where the pigs are raised. They’re high in fat, a large percentage of which is unsaturated oleic fatty acid, and eating them is what makes the pigs’ fat so soft and creamy, on the verge of melting at room temperature. Acorns also contribute to the ham’s nutty flavor and aroma, as essential to the product as the meat itself. Of all commercially raised Iberico pigs, only 5% are both pure breed and acorn-fed.

From Piglets to Porkers

Spanish ham culture has a vocabulary all its own. There are porqueros, not shepherds; pigs are “sacrificed,” not slaughtered; and the farms where they’re raised are called dehesas.

The dehesas are a national treasure: each one to two thousand acres of forest partially converted to pasture, often hundreds of years old, with rolling grassy hills amidst crops of acorn-producing oak and cork trees. Just as acorns are an essential ingredient to the ham, so too are the dehesas. These pigs need to run around all day, over the hills and through the woods, for their muscles to develop and for the ham to taste the way it does.

Over 18 to 24 months, the pigs will root around the dehesa, grazing on grass, mushrooms, bugs, herbs, whatever they can find. Come October all through March, the montanara, or acorn-dropping season begins, and the pigs march into action. Fatty acorns are the pigs’ favorite food, and with a mandated five acres of dehesa per pig, there’s plenty of room to look for them. By the pigs’ second montanara, they’ll have feasted enough to reach their kill weight, about 360 pounds.

Managing the pigs isn’t just left to nature. Carvajal inspectors pay anonymous visits every two to three weeks to check on their treatment and diet. They also sample the pigs’ fat to analyze its oleic acid content—too little and the pigs won’t meet quality standards, too much and they’ll be impossible to cure into ham.

You may have heard that pigs are as smart or even smarter than dogs. On the dehesa they behave more like sheep dogs than sheep. Curious about newcomers, they’d inch closer and closer to me, some even posing nicely for the camera, before bolting away. Unlike livestock domesticated into complicity, these wild boar descendants stay smart.

The Long Cure

The curing facility in Jabugo is over 100 years old: part modern office space, part ancient farm house. In one courtyard you can still see hundreds of hooks on the ceiling from when ham was cured out in the open. These days they rest in a sprawling brick-walled cellar.

Before they get there, the pigs must be slaughtered. They’re knocked out with CO2, and once a pig is deemed unconscious by a vet, a worker slits the artery along its throat until it bleeds out. Legs, loins, and shoulders go toward making Carvajal products, and the remaining fresh meat is sold to Spanish restaurants. The ham-bound legs are then skinned, salted, rinsed, dried, and sent to the curing cellar, where they’ll remain for about a year and a half.

See those hanging bits at the top? All ham.

Carvajal’s 130-year-old cellar is an underground city of ham; step downstairs and you’re slapped with an aroma that’s something like rising bread, aged cheese, and your deli’s cured meat display—multiplied by the 40,000-odd hams inside. With little signage it’s a marvel anyone knows their way around. “Don’t worry,” an employee tells me, “I get lost in here all the time.”

Thick brick walls, a breezy, hilly climate, and a stable population of ham-friendly microorganisms are most of what the meat needs to finish its journey into ham. Skilled specialists monitor the cellars at all times, noting fluctuations in temperature and humidity, but their adjustments are amusingly low-tech. Need to change the temperature? Open or close a window. Air too dry? Spill some water on the floor.

It’s more complicated than that, of course—hams too close to a window may get moved if they dry out too quickly, and the legs are regularly rubbed down with oil to prevent insects from taking up residence—but the most vital and final measurement Carvajal takes is very much a human one.

Before any ham leaves the cellar, it gets a sniff test. A trained nose can purportedly detect 100 aromas from a premium ham, some sweet, some meaty, some nutty. Different regions of Spain have their own hammy terroir, and even different cuts of the same leg bear unique aromas.

A mere eight noses are charged with inspecting all the hams. The job is so specialized that one ham sniffer, a third generation Carvajal employee, isn’t qualified to sniff cured loin (another 5J product) because the aromas are too different. (That’s his father’s job.)

With a short, stubby needle called a cala, the ham sniffer pokes down to the bone, quickly takes a whiff, and covers the breach with a smear of fat. There’s just a second or two to detect the balance of sweet, earthy, fermented, and floral aromas that signal a well-cured ham, and only a ham that passes the sniff test in four inspection sites makes its way out the door. If anything goes wrong, the nose knows.

Even for ham-loving Spaniards, 5J ham is a luxury good, which is why Carvajal also sells a more affordable ham under a Spanish-only brand called, eponymously, Sanchez Romero Carvajal. It’s made from the same pigs and cured in the same cellar, just not held to quite as stringent conditions. Only at the cellar do quality control experts decide which hams get the 5J label and which ones don’t.

To Market, to Market

From there the ham moves on to a grateful world, though in truth many whole hams have already been spoken for by bars, restaurants, and large-scale clients that reserve them while they’re still aging. Jamon Iberico shouldn’t be sliced by machine—the soft fat would sheer out and the lean, bony legs make horizontal slicing difficult—so when Carvajal sells whole hams to a new restaurant or store client, they also provide training in how to slice the ham by hand. (You can see a good introductory video here.)

The company also employs 60-odd expert carvers who fabricate all of its pre-sliced packaged ham. Like cutting fish for sushi in Japan, carving Spanish ham is an artisan job of its own. The perfect slice is nearly see-through, small enough to eat in one bite, and carved at a level angle to get the most consistent and efficient slices from the ham as possible.

Remember how expert ham sniffers can detect four different aromas from the same ham? You may not be able to pick up on all the nuances, but it’s easy to see that different cuts of ham look and feel different, from the maza’s clean striations of fat to the ribeye-like marbling of punta—or the hard-to-reach “butcher’s cut” of the ham, the chewy, flavor-packed cana near the hoof. A skilled carver knows how to make the most of them all, mixing up a plate of ham with multiple cuts for contrast.

Which brings us back to where we started: why does good jamon Iberico cost so much? It’s more than the expensive pigs, spacious farmland, or acorn-rich diet. It’s more than the time and investment needed to prepare and cure hams properly, or the laboratory science and quality control behind the scenes.

Carvajal also sells cured loin and shoulder products.

At the end of the day the question comes down to scale—how much can you produce when every step along the way is so labor-intensive? What substitute is there for highly trained specialists who in some cases are born into the job?

Good pigs, living and dead, need time. And as with plenty of other luxury goods, there’s a choice to do something fast or to do it right. Fortunately for us (and the pigs), there are still some people more interested in the latter.


 

Cinco Jotas, Iberico ham, Juan Carlo

The pig in Hungarian History — By Wilhelm W. Kohl

December 21, 2016 / Bruce Steele / History, Mangalitsa Pigs

An exciting story of the survival of a nation & the glory days of the Mangalitsa

The current pig industry in Hungary was probably started by the Transylvanian Saxons, German settlers encouraged by King Geza II, of Hungary (1141-1162) to colonize and defend the southeastern frontier of the Kingdom of Hungary. From the 12th century onward until the end of the 13th century this migration of Germans…

(click here to download/read the rest of the story)

The taming of the pig took some wild turns

September 6, 2015 / Bruce Steele / History

wildpig

The next time you slice into a juicy pork chop or chow down on some sausage, see whether you can pick up the taste of wild boar. Farmers may have domesticated pigs 9000 years ago, but genome studies now show that in those early centuries, trysts with wild animals were quite common, particularly in Europe. In fact, they were so common that genes from the founding stock have all but disappeared. The new work not only sheds light on where pigs come from, but it also speaks to how complex the process of domestication is compared with what we thought it was.

The results “challenge the assumptions of 100 years of research,” says Fiona Marshall, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis in Missouri, who was not involved with the work.

In the 19th century, evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin pointed out that breeding led to striking differences between farm animals and plants and their wild counterparts, an observation that helped lay the foundation for his theory of evolution. Based on that thinking, researchers imagined that about 9000 years ago, humans corralled a few wild boars and—by separating them from their fellows and breeding them for favorable traits like tameness, size, and meatiness—they developed the domesticated oinkers that we see all over the world today.

But the story is not quite that simple. For one, archaeological evidence now indicates that pigs were domesticated at least twice, once in China’s Mekong valley and once in Anatolia, the region in modern-day Turkey between the Black, Mediterranean, and Aegean seas. For another, a 2007 study of genetic material from 323 modern and 221 ancient pigs from western Eurasia suggests that pigs first came to Europe from the Near East, but that Europeans subsequently domesticated local wild boar, which seemed to replace those original pigs.

Eager to get the record straight, Laurent Frantz, now a bioinformaticist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, carried out sophisticated computer analyses of 103 whole genomes sequenced from wild boars and domesticated pig breeds from all over Europe and Asia. His adviser at the time, animal genomicist Martien Groenen of Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands, had sequenced these genomes and had gathered additional, albeit less complete, genetic data from 600 other wild and domesticated pigs as part of another study.

Domesticated animals have a large number of wild ancestors, Frantz, Groenen, and their colleagues report online today in Nature Genetics. Their data support the idea that pigs originated in two places. But Europe’s modern pigs are mongrel mixes derived from multiple wild boar populations. Some of their genetic material does not match any wild boar DNA collected by the researchers, so they think that at least some ancestors came from either an extinct group or from another group in central Eurasia. This anomaly suggests that pigs were herded from place to place, where they mated with this “ghost” population. Moreover, at one point—most likely in the 1800s, when Europeans imported Chinese pigs to improve their commercial breeds—a little Asian pig blood entered the mix.

The effort is quite impressive, says Carles Vila, an evolutionary biologist at the Spanish National Research Council’s Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain. “[It] uses this large amount of data to evaluate competing hypotheses and obtains very clear results.”

Those results are “part of the emerging story about long-term gene flow between domesticated and wild animals,” explains Greger Larson, a co-author and evolutionary biologist at Oxford. “We see this massive mosaic, with gene flow between east and west and between wild and domesticated.”

There have been hints before at this kind of interbreeding in dogs and in horses. But this work really drives home that, contrary to what researchers had long assumed, domesticated animals often mated with wild counterparts. And what happened in pigs—and possibly dogs and horses—may have happened in other animals, Vila says. Recent work in barley indicates that some crops have a similar history. “The separation between domestic and wild lineages is not always clear,” Vila notes.

Researchers have assumed that so much interbreeding should have caused boars and pigs to look more alike than they do. But apparently by always selecting animals that looked like pigs and not boars, these early farmers were able to enhance and maintain piglike behavior and traits. This selection likely created “islands of domestication,” sets of genes that were passed on in the pigs despite interbreeding, the researchers suggest. There are even a few islands—those that contain genes involved in behavior and size, key traits for domesticated animals—that are in the genomes of both European and Asian pigs, Larson reports. The idea of “islands” provides a “basal genetic model for understanding domestication that could be tested in other species,” says Ludovic Antoine Alexandre Orlando, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, who was not involved with the work.

Similar islands are thought to enable new species to form. “We need to be looking at these special islands and how they are established and maintained,” says Alan Cooper, a molecular evolutionist at the University of Adelaide in Australia who was not part of the study. And Larson and his colleagues are doing just that by sequencing genomes of ancient pigs and boars to better pick out the islands and figure out when they first appeared.

Marshall looks forward to these and other efforts. “We have to completely rethink domestication processes,” she points out. “Genomics provides very exciting tools with which to do this.”


Read the original post: news.sciencemag.org

domesticated, wild boar

This Spanish Pig-Slaughtering Tradition Is Rooted In Sustainability

March 20, 2015 / Bruce Steele / History, Mangalitsa Pigs, What Chefs Say

Armando

Pig farmer Armando Escaño stands with his Iberian pigs on his farm on western Spain’s dehesa. Escaño raises pigs for jamón ibérico, Spain’s most prized ham. | Lauren Frayer for NPR

 

In Spain, an age-old way of surviving the winter is getting some new attention from foodies worldwide. It’s called la matanza — literally, the killing of a pig. It’s an ancient ritual in danger of dying out, amid an influx of commercial abattoirs and modern supermarkets. But Spain’s matanza is now getting renewed interest from farm-to-table food enthusiasts.

Armando Escaño calls out to his fat black pigs as they chomp on acorns under cork trees. Escaño comes from a centuries-long line of pig farmers on western Spain’s dehesa, a UNESCO-protected landscape where this country’s most prized ham — jamón ibérico — is produced.

“You can see the future in the past. It’s lasted thousands of years and is therefore sustainable.”

– Chef Dan Barber

Lured by that delicacy, tourists are now making these empty green hills a new foodie destination. They’re coming to see how Armando’s pigs live — and how they die.

“Matar means ‘to kill’ in Spanish — but the word ‘matanza’ actually refers to the whole process that takes two to three days, which starts with the actual slaughtering, but involves the seasonings of the meats and charcuteries,” says Miguel Ullibarri, a tour guide and jamón expert who organizes culinary tours of the dehesa region. “There’s lots of cooking involved — quite a lot of drinking as well!”

Ullibarri’s company, A Taste of Spain, brings visitors to learn about the farm-to-table, free-range, organic eating that’s been the norm here for centuries. Tourists typically spend a few days in Spain’s dehesa, a landscape of rolling hills dotted with cork oaks and fat black pigs. They learn about the relationship between wildlife and landscape conservation: Each Iberian pig requires nearly 5 acres of grazing land, on average. They also learn about the pigs’ relationship to cork — some 80 percent of global cork exports come from this border region of Spain and Portugal.

“These age-old practices carry with them a very complicated ecological understanding, and an intimate engagement with the environment, because technology has not penetrated the agricultural landscape like it has in America,” says Dan Barber, the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, who has toured western Spain with Ullibarri. “You can see the future in the past. It’s lasted thousands of years and is therefore sustainable.”

Barber writes about his discovery of Spanish food traditions in his latest book, The Third Plate.

Like Barber, Ullibarri’s guests tour jamón-curing facilities, and they sometimes attend a matanza — the pig slaughter.

 

“It’s important to know where your food comes from — even if the experience is unpleasant.”

– Juan Miguel Ramos, mayor of Linares, Spain

 

“They simply pick the animal up, and lay him on a table — all the while, they’re all stroking him and trying to keep him calm,” recalls Bob Hancock, a Kentucky native who went on one of Ullibarri’s tours a few years ago. “They simply just cut the artery, and the pig is bled out. They don’t do what they do here in the States, [where] they either stun or shoot the animal to knock the animal out. The pig was simply calm until his life was gone.”

The pig is massaged to calm him, and to prevent the flow of adrenaline into his muscles — which can change the flavor of the meat.

Hancock was so impressed with what he witnessed in the matanza that he decided to raise pigs at home in Kentucky. “It was a completely different experience! You could really feel the respect they gave to the animals,” he says.

Iberian black pigs can weigh 500 pounds, having doubled their weight in the two-month acorn season, right before the slaughter. Outside the acorn, or bellota, season, the pigs eat grass, other plants, corn feed — even insects. The matanza has always been an intimate community affair. Tour operators must get to know local officials personally and persuade them to allow foreigners to attend in small groups.

“The matanza is such a core part of the culture, in the sense that it’s how people fought to stay alive — it provided the food for the year. So for them, it’s not a hobby that’s taken lightly — it’s not roasting your ribs on the weekend,” says Ryan Opaz, a Minnesota native who now lives in Portugal and runs a food and wine tour company, Catavino.

Opaz has received increasing numbers of requests for tours that include the matanza and hopes to add them to his company’s itineraries next year — but he says it must be done carefully.

“It’s not a pretty sight for some people. So there’s a bit of voyeurism here. What the tourists are looking for is that full visceral experience,” says Opaz, a former butcher himself. “If it’s done respectfully, it’s truly like stepping back a century — which is great.”

Ullibarri says his company was reluctant at first to include the matanza in its tours. Guides spend days explaining the historical and cultural context of the matanza before guests watch the killing. They want to be careful to respect the wishes of local officials, who don’t want their age-old practices to appear backward to foreigners.

 

matanza-2-99e1e3d977a68484735418563abafad583b5fcc1-s400-c85

Women wash pig’s intestines in the local river near the village of Linares, Spain. After the matanza, or pig slaughter, every part of the animal is used, nose to tail. The intestines — cleaned with water, lemon and vinegar — will be used as sausage casings.

Lauren Frayer for NPR

NPR was invited to attend a matanza in the Spanish mountain village of Linares, population 300.

“It’s a rural tradition we want to preserve,” says Linares’ mayor, Juan Miguel Ramos. “It’s important to know where your food comes from — even if the experience is unpleasant.”

In Linares, the matanza is done in a farmyard not far from the town square. Villagers drag the pig onto a wooden table that looks like an altar — they use the Spanish word sacrificar, to sacrifice, rather than to kill. Grown men coo and pet the pig, to keep it calm. A man wields a sharp knife, and women rush forward with buckets for the blood.

“¡Está muerto! ¡Sangre! — It’s dead! Blood!” a man screams. The whole process takes less than 15 seconds.

“The rest is women’s work,” says Carmen Ramos, chuckling, her arm elbow-deep in a bucket of hot blood, which she stirs vigorously to keep from coagulating. The blood will be mixed with rice, oats and spices to make morcilla, a type of Spanish blood sausage.

The pig’s heavy carcass is carefully lifted onto a wooden cart and hauled into the town square for butchering. And a festival begins. Flamenco music blasts from speakers affixed to the town hall; children dance on cobblestones.

The women take the pig’s intestines down to the river, where they wash them in a cold stream with lemon and vinegar. The intestines will be used as sausage casings. Every part of the pig is used — nose to tail, and down to the hooves, which are boiled for gelatin.

“We came out to the countryside to show our little girls the old tradition,” says Isabel Romero, a Spanish tourist from the city of Malaga, who brought her daughters, ages 11 and 6. “It’s the first time they’ve seen that pork doesn’t always come from the supermarket.”

After his matanza tour, Bob Hancock went home to Kentucky and installed a Spanish wood oven in the bakery he owns — and started raising pigs himself.

“There’s a huge wave of people getting into a nose-to-tail style of eating. They’re not just going to the three-star Michelin restaurants. They’re doing exactly what I did,” he says. “And slowly but surely, the way we are looking at our food here is changing — for the better.”

matanza-3_custom-2779d1967888378b0110776fd1522a492dba4ba8-s400-c85

Village women chop herbs for use in sausage at a matanza festival in the village of Linares, population 300, in the Sierra Aracena, in southwestern Spain. | Lauren Frayer for NPR


March 18, 2015 | by Lauren Frayer | NPR | Read original post: http://www.npr.org/

Iberian pigs, la matanza, Linares, Spain

Mangalitsa pigs inspire Operetta

January 14, 2015 / Bruce Steele / History

The Mangalitsa even inspired its own Operetta. In 1885 Johann Strauss II wrote “The Gypsy Baron,” wherein a wealthy pig farmer (Kálmán Zsupán) declares:

Ja, das Schreiben und das Lesen
Ist nie mein Fach gewesen,
Denn schon von Kindesbeinen
Befasst ich mich mit Schweinen,
Auch war ich nie ein Dichter
Potz Donnerwetter Parapluie!
Nur immer Scheinezüchter
Poetisch war ich nie!
Translated:
I’ve no time for learning writing,
breeding pigs is too exciting
and I’ve got no time for reading,
for the pigs will keep on breeding
So I’ve never been a reader,
for reading I don’t care two figs,
I’m just a humble breeder,
who keeps on breeding pigs

“When a man chooses pigs over literacy you know you’ve got some powerful lard!” — Wilhelm Kohl

Excerpt from The Cookbook “The Mangalitsa Pig – Royalty is coming to America” — By Mate Dobesch, Wilhelm W. Kohl, Peter Toth, Beata Bencsics, Eszter Szalai

 

Johann-Strauss

Johann Strauss II, Kálmán Zsupán, Pig Farmer, The Gypsy Baron

Mangalitsa pork has retaken the foodie world by storm

January 13, 2015 / Bruce Steele / History

In recent years Mangalitsa  (pronounced MAHN-ga-leet-za)  pork has retaken the foodie world by storm.

With their abundant fat, the curly-haired Mangalitsa pigs of Hungary were all the rage a century ago – favored by nobility in the Austro-Hungarian empire. Mangalitsas were bred for their silky white-as-snow lard on the Hungarian farms of Archduke Joseph in the 1830s. Herds shrank with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I and declined further with the introduction of fast-growing white pigs and cheaper vegetable oils after World War II.

With the fashion trend to lean meat, Hungarian wooly pigs, a heritage breed lard hog, nearly went extinct.

Mangalitsas were saved from extinction on a farm at the edge of Hungary’s Great Plain, in efforts to preserve Hungarian heritage.  Now that succulent, flavorful pork is back in style, along with increasingly popular charcuterie, Mangalitsa pigs are making a comeback.

Mangalitsas are reknown for charcuterie, cured meats such as prosciutto and sausage.  Mangalitsa is the only other heritage “black footed” hog besides Spanish Iberican that can be marketed as “pata negra”, premium prosciutto.

The Mangalitsa pig is genetically very similar to the Iberian pigs of Western Spain that produce the famous Jamon Iberico. And like their cousins, the Mangalitsa pig is renowned for the quality of the fat that it produces, which is low in saturates and high in oleic acid. This comes from the feed given to the animals, which primarily consists of wheat and acorns.

wooly-pig

Charcuterie, History, Hungarian wooly pig, Iberian pig, Mangalitsa, Mangalitsa pigs

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