Post by Sprouts on Jun 1, 2013 9:47:18 GMT -5
altoonaherald.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120916/LIFE/309160009/Iowa-farmer-Carl-Blake-reinventing-pig
Written by
Jennifer Miller
Rustik Rooster Farm
WHERE: Rural Frederika, Ia., northeast of Waterloo
INFO: Go to www.swabianhall.com. Or email Carl Blake at carl@swabianhall.com
WHERE YOU CAN EAT THESE PIGS: Centro and Django in Des Moines plan to incorporate Iowa Swabian Hall meat into menus in the next few weeks, and received six pigs last week. Other Iowa restaurants that use Blake’s pigs include the Lincoln Cafe in Mount Vernon and Newton’s Paradise Cafe in Waterloo.
Pretty much everything about Carl Blake is unconventional. Larger than life. To say he’s a pig farmer is to only scratch the surface.
Blake grew up on a farm near New Hartford and fits into his unglamorous, workaday landscape. He’s a WWE-wrestler of a guy, a tree trunk in overalls with one buckle hitched down low and work-worn hands that could palm a prize-winning watermelon.
He’s also a college graduate with years of computer consulting and tech startup businesses under his expansive belt. And a guy who describes himself as a voracious reader, who turned Macintosh computers into aquariums, and builds Indian motorcycles from scratch.
Blake does tend toward enthusiastic hyperbole and is what might be called a big thinker, whose ideas seem to straddle the line between genius and what conventional folks might think of as “crazy.” He’s the guy who might have dreamed up a “flying machine” a couple of centuries ago.
Right now, though, it’s all about the pigs. “The best-tasting pig in the world,” Blake claims.
Since 2007, the 48-year-old Blake has been working on crafting the most delicious pig in the country. Research, tracking down actual pigs to work with and breeding them has consumed the intervening years. Now, he says, he’s found his porcine paradise in a rejiggered version of a prized German pig, the Swabian Hall. His Iowa-grown formula breeds the very fatty Chinese Meishan pig with the more muscular Ossabaw pig, a wild breed from Ossabaw Island, off the coast of Georgia in the United States.
The rare heritage breed is beloved by chefs for its richly flavored red meat marbled with plenty of fat, and Blake’s Iowa Swabian Halls have racked up culinary contest wins and drawn the interest of the Food Channel’s Andrew Zimmern.
The original Swabian Hall (Schwabisch-Hallisches Schwein) was the brainchild of King Wilhelm I of Wurttemberg, Germany, who in 1920 imported Chinese pigs to mate with wild pigs hoping to produce meat with an ideal fat-to-muscle ratio.
“Obviously,” Blake says, “my pigs aren’t going to be exactly the same — there’s almost a century of breeding that went into them.”
But his goal was to get close. “Pork isn’t meant to be a ‘white meat,’” he says of the modern, lean meat most consumers are familiar with.
Eventually, Blake’s quest for a tastier pig led him to Dan Fox, formerly the executive chef at the Madison Club in Madison, Wis., who was also raising heritage pigs.
“He called me,” Fox says, “and offered to send me an (Iowa Swabian Hall) to get an opinion on it.”
“It’s fantastic,” he says without reserve. “It’s some of the best pork there is.” Fox has since bought quite a few of Blake’s pigs.
Blake’s 15-acre homestead, Rustik Rooster Farm, certainly strays from the highly organized, straight-lines-of-shiny-metal-roofs confinement model. For starters, the only detectable smells are pleasant ones — grass and trees and general outside-ness. There is no “pig farm” stink.
Rustik Rooster is an 1881 farm near Frederika, north of Waterloo.
Bremer County Sheriff Duane Hildebrandt said there have been some complaints about the condition of Blake’s farm, as well as the condition of his animals. The young Swabians tend to look thin. Blake says it’s a case of not understanding what the unusual breed is supposed to look like and that it’s precisely because the youngsters have so much fat that they look thin.
The fat gathers in the belly and hangs low, leaving the back looking bony. Hildebrandt says Blake has produced a statement from a veterinarian to that effect and that a recent investigation determined no wrongdoing. Chef Fox says the pigs tend to be late bloomers that don’t fatten as quickly as modern commercial hogs.
All in all, about 400 pigs call the farm home, including a cadre of breeder pigs, all named after gods and goddesses. Blake is particularly proud of the impressively rotund and stunningly lazy Aphrodite and Ossabaw stud boar Hercules — who declined to be introduced and tends toward orneriness.
“I can put 10 gals in there with him and he’ll have them all pregnant before I get the gate shut,” says Blake.
In another of his off-the-beaten-track ventures, Blake feeds the pigs not standard commercial feed but mostly hydroponically grown barley, living grains and canary grass. The pigs are not confined, so are free to graze and root in the dirt, where they gather nutrients and immunities.
Though this type of feeding system has its detractors, something seems to be working, and Madison’s Chef Fox is not the only fan of the rich, unfashionably fat Iowa Swabian meat that Blake is producing. Among foodies, meat experts and chefs, there is a growing push-back against the lean meat of what Blake calls “pink pigs.”
Chef-owner Staffan Terje of Perbacco and Barbacco in San Francisco landed a Blake pig for the Bay Area’s 2010 Cochon555 (a pig-cooking contest that travels from city to city matching chefs with heritage pigs, the brainchild of Iowan Brady Lowe) and came out the winner with his 13 “nose-to-tail” Swabian Hall dishes. Blake’s pigs also won a 2011 Cochon555 event in Denver and one in Chicago this year.
Terje said it was the first time he had ever heard of, let alone worked with, this particular breed of pig. “These heritage pigs get back to what pigs were originally used for — for grease and lighting as well as food. It’s a nice thing to see farmers getting back into it.”
Centro’s executive chef Derek Eidson echoes Terje’s sentiments. “The Swabian Hall fat is amazing,” he enthuses. “It’s not greasy and when it melts, it’s like olive oil. It’s perfect for charcuterie. We made a pancetta with the pork and — keep in mind here that we are not the world’s best pancetta makers — it was by far the best pancetta any of us had ever had.”
Madison’s Fox says that many chefs are not familiar with using pork with the Swabian Hall’s type and amount of fat.
“But as the charcuterie industry grows in America — and it will — these kind of pigs will become more and more popular,” Fox predicts. “We did a taste test with a Mangalitsa (another fatty heritage breed) prosciutto, a Swabian Hall prosciutto and some (top-notch) imported hams, and the Swabian Hall was everyone’s favorite.”
Mike Fogel, owner of Buffalo Gal, a Minnesota-based meat company and ranch that sells bison and elk meat, as well as pork, has recently sold out of his first batch of Swabian Hall meat and the second go-round is almost ready to market.
“We have a waiting list for the next batch we butcher,” Fogel says.
Rustik Rooster Farm is a one-man operation, but Blake’s vision for the enterprise — like him and like all his plans — is outsized. He wants to be able to grow 6 to 9 tons of fodder a day (he currently produces about 2), quadruple in size, have a USDA processing plant on site, make his own brand of charcuterie and have the whole system completely automated.
For now, Blake is doggedly spreading the word about his pigs and their extraordinary flavor. And a big dose of national attention for Blake and his Swabians is forthcoming.
The pigs will be featured in a December episode of the Food Channel’s “Bizarre Foods” with Andrew Zimmern, who spent a day with Blake this summer during a swing through Iowa and was treated to a Swabian Hall pig roast.
“He called the pig ‘magic,’” Blake says.
Written by
Jennifer Miller
Rustik Rooster Farm
WHERE: Rural Frederika, Ia., northeast of Waterloo
INFO: Go to www.swabianhall.com. Or email Carl Blake at carl@swabianhall.com
WHERE YOU CAN EAT THESE PIGS: Centro and Django in Des Moines plan to incorporate Iowa Swabian Hall meat into menus in the next few weeks, and received six pigs last week. Other Iowa restaurants that use Blake’s pigs include the Lincoln Cafe in Mount Vernon and Newton’s Paradise Cafe in Waterloo.
Pretty much everything about Carl Blake is unconventional. Larger than life. To say he’s a pig farmer is to only scratch the surface.
Blake grew up on a farm near New Hartford and fits into his unglamorous, workaday landscape. He’s a WWE-wrestler of a guy, a tree trunk in overalls with one buckle hitched down low and work-worn hands that could palm a prize-winning watermelon.
He’s also a college graduate with years of computer consulting and tech startup businesses under his expansive belt. And a guy who describes himself as a voracious reader, who turned Macintosh computers into aquariums, and builds Indian motorcycles from scratch.
Blake does tend toward enthusiastic hyperbole and is what might be called a big thinker, whose ideas seem to straddle the line between genius and what conventional folks might think of as “crazy.” He’s the guy who might have dreamed up a “flying machine” a couple of centuries ago.
Right now, though, it’s all about the pigs. “The best-tasting pig in the world,” Blake claims.
Since 2007, the 48-year-old Blake has been working on crafting the most delicious pig in the country. Research, tracking down actual pigs to work with and breeding them has consumed the intervening years. Now, he says, he’s found his porcine paradise in a rejiggered version of a prized German pig, the Swabian Hall. His Iowa-grown formula breeds the very fatty Chinese Meishan pig with the more muscular Ossabaw pig, a wild breed from Ossabaw Island, off the coast of Georgia in the United States.
The rare heritage breed is beloved by chefs for its richly flavored red meat marbled with plenty of fat, and Blake’s Iowa Swabian Halls have racked up culinary contest wins and drawn the interest of the Food Channel’s Andrew Zimmern.
The original Swabian Hall (Schwabisch-Hallisches Schwein) was the brainchild of King Wilhelm I of Wurttemberg, Germany, who in 1920 imported Chinese pigs to mate with wild pigs hoping to produce meat with an ideal fat-to-muscle ratio.
“Obviously,” Blake says, “my pigs aren’t going to be exactly the same — there’s almost a century of breeding that went into them.”
But his goal was to get close. “Pork isn’t meant to be a ‘white meat,’” he says of the modern, lean meat most consumers are familiar with.
Eventually, Blake’s quest for a tastier pig led him to Dan Fox, formerly the executive chef at the Madison Club in Madison, Wis., who was also raising heritage pigs.
“He called me,” Fox says, “and offered to send me an (Iowa Swabian Hall) to get an opinion on it.”
“It’s fantastic,” he says without reserve. “It’s some of the best pork there is.” Fox has since bought quite a few of Blake’s pigs.
Blake’s 15-acre homestead, Rustik Rooster Farm, certainly strays from the highly organized, straight-lines-of-shiny-metal-roofs confinement model. For starters, the only detectable smells are pleasant ones — grass and trees and general outside-ness. There is no “pig farm” stink.
Rustik Rooster is an 1881 farm near Frederika, north of Waterloo.
Bremer County Sheriff Duane Hildebrandt said there have been some complaints about the condition of Blake’s farm, as well as the condition of his animals. The young Swabians tend to look thin. Blake says it’s a case of not understanding what the unusual breed is supposed to look like and that it’s precisely because the youngsters have so much fat that they look thin.
The fat gathers in the belly and hangs low, leaving the back looking bony. Hildebrandt says Blake has produced a statement from a veterinarian to that effect and that a recent investigation determined no wrongdoing. Chef Fox says the pigs tend to be late bloomers that don’t fatten as quickly as modern commercial hogs.
All in all, about 400 pigs call the farm home, including a cadre of breeder pigs, all named after gods and goddesses. Blake is particularly proud of the impressively rotund and stunningly lazy Aphrodite and Ossabaw stud boar Hercules — who declined to be introduced and tends toward orneriness.
“I can put 10 gals in there with him and he’ll have them all pregnant before I get the gate shut,” says Blake.
In another of his off-the-beaten-track ventures, Blake feeds the pigs not standard commercial feed but mostly hydroponically grown barley, living grains and canary grass. The pigs are not confined, so are free to graze and root in the dirt, where they gather nutrients and immunities.
Though this type of feeding system has its detractors, something seems to be working, and Madison’s Chef Fox is not the only fan of the rich, unfashionably fat Iowa Swabian meat that Blake is producing. Among foodies, meat experts and chefs, there is a growing push-back against the lean meat of what Blake calls “pink pigs.”
Chef-owner Staffan Terje of Perbacco and Barbacco in San Francisco landed a Blake pig for the Bay Area’s 2010 Cochon555 (a pig-cooking contest that travels from city to city matching chefs with heritage pigs, the brainchild of Iowan Brady Lowe) and came out the winner with his 13 “nose-to-tail” Swabian Hall dishes. Blake’s pigs also won a 2011 Cochon555 event in Denver and one in Chicago this year.
Terje said it was the first time he had ever heard of, let alone worked with, this particular breed of pig. “These heritage pigs get back to what pigs were originally used for — for grease and lighting as well as food. It’s a nice thing to see farmers getting back into it.”
Centro’s executive chef Derek Eidson echoes Terje’s sentiments. “The Swabian Hall fat is amazing,” he enthuses. “It’s not greasy and when it melts, it’s like olive oil. It’s perfect for charcuterie. We made a pancetta with the pork and — keep in mind here that we are not the world’s best pancetta makers — it was by far the best pancetta any of us had ever had.”
Madison’s Fox says that many chefs are not familiar with using pork with the Swabian Hall’s type and amount of fat.
“But as the charcuterie industry grows in America — and it will — these kind of pigs will become more and more popular,” Fox predicts. “We did a taste test with a Mangalitsa (another fatty heritage breed) prosciutto, a Swabian Hall prosciutto and some (top-notch) imported hams, and the Swabian Hall was everyone’s favorite.”
Mike Fogel, owner of Buffalo Gal, a Minnesota-based meat company and ranch that sells bison and elk meat, as well as pork, has recently sold out of his first batch of Swabian Hall meat and the second go-round is almost ready to market.
“We have a waiting list for the next batch we butcher,” Fogel says.
Rustik Rooster Farm is a one-man operation, but Blake’s vision for the enterprise — like him and like all his plans — is outsized. He wants to be able to grow 6 to 9 tons of fodder a day (he currently produces about 2), quadruple in size, have a USDA processing plant on site, make his own brand of charcuterie and have the whole system completely automated.
For now, Blake is doggedly spreading the word about his pigs and their extraordinary flavor. And a big dose of national attention for Blake and his Swabians is forthcoming.
The pigs will be featured in a December episode of the Food Channel’s “Bizarre Foods” with Andrew Zimmern, who spent a day with Blake this summer during a swing through Iowa and was treated to a Swabian Hall pig roast.
“He called the pig ‘magic,’” Blake says.