These feral pigs cause billions of damage, but some chefs and meat purveyors are putting this pork on the map – and menus
A HISTORY OF THE WILD HOG, BY MARSHALL SEEDORFF
Austin, Texas restaurant Dai Due, wild boar often features prominently among the menu choices. Guests can order wild boar summer sausage to go with their brunch entree, and boar boudin fills a Czech-Texan pastry called a klosbasnek. For dinner, wild boar can come with a carrot puree and a savory chili bone broth; for lunch, it tops a luxe Italian sub along with Wagyu beef and nilgai antelope.
Notes at the bottom of the restaurant’s online sample menus assure diners that wild game is sourced in the nearby Hill Country and “almost everything comes from around here”.
Wild boar is both from Texas – and not. It’s hard to remember that swine are native to Europe – not the Americas – because they’ve been here so long. Christopher Columbus brought the first eight pigs, intended as food, to the western hemisphere with his voyage to Cuba in 1493. The wild descendants of those pigs and others, estimated to number 6 million in 35 states, have been wreaking havoc ever since; annually, they cause $2.5bn in damage to crops, forestry and livestock producers. They can spread disease to both humans and domestic animals. With upwards of 2 million of these beasts in Texas alone, the state has become the epicenter of a huge nationwide pig problem.
So some chefs, farmers and meat purveyors, many located in the Lone Star state and other southern wild boar hot spots, are bringing feral hogs themselves into the food chain. They’re transforming a nuisance species into a sustainable protein for human consumption.
Chef Jesse Griffiths, co-owner of Dai Due and author of James Beard-winning The Hog Book and Afield, is one of the hospitality industry’s biggest advocates for consuming wild hog. “I think it’s a real easy equation: they’re invasive, they need to be removed,” he said. “The argument for a lot of other game species we eat isn’t as strong, but it is pretty glaring when it comes to hogs.”
Casey Frank has seen the destruction. In June 2022, as extreme drought conditions gripped central Texas, Frank started to notice mud pits and churned-up crops around the sprinkler heads on Farmshare Austin’s 10-acre certified organic farm. A group of feral hogs – called a “sounder” – were seeking damp ground to root around for food and cool themselves during the hottest summer recorded in the state (until this year). What started as biweekly mud baths for the six full-grown hogs, which probably weighed more than 180lb apiece, soon turned into multiple wallow and pig-out sessions per week. The damage was devastating for the non-profit that cultivates new farmers and increases community food access in underserved areas of East Austin and Travis county.
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Austin Chef Jesse Griffiths’s ‘Hog Book’ Is a James Beard Book Award 2022 Winner
The Dai Due chef, Jesse Griffiths, won a medal in the best single-subject book category this year
The James Beard Media Awards 2022 were announced on June 11, and Austin chef Jesse Griffith took the main prize in the single subject category for his book The Hog Book: A Chef’s Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Pigs.
In Hog Book, Griffiths gives an in-depth breakdown of all things related to wild hogs, including their culinary importance and status as an invasive species, while also addressing misconceptions about wild game meats. He has long made use of wild boar meat at his restaurant Dai Due.
Griffiths self-published the book in August 2021. This marked the chef’s second book, as his first Afield: A Chef’s Guide to Preparing and Cooking Wild Game and Fish published in 2012.
The media awards ceremony — which focuses on books and journalism — was held over the weekend in Chicago. The chef- and restaurant-centered awards ceremony — the James Beard Awards — takes place tonight, June 13, in Chicago. Austin nominees are Iliana de la Vega, the chef and co-owner of Oaxacan and Mexican restaurant El Naranjo, who is nominated for best chef: Texas; and Edgar Rico of Nixta Taqueria, who is nominated in the emerging chef category.
Dai Due website: https://www.daidue.com/home
Jesse Griffiths is a hunter, fisherman, cook and co-owner of Dai Due Butcher Shop & Supper Club and New School of Traditional Cookery. He was fishing Central Texas’ lakes and creeks at an early age before traveling and cooking throughout Europe, Italy and Mexico. His love of hunting came later in life, credited to longtime friend and pork purveyor, Loncito Cartwright.
In 2006, he and business partner Tamara Mayfield turned their supper club and farmers market concept into Dai Due Butcher Shop & Supper Club, and eventually opened a brick-and-mortar in 2014. Described as “an ode to Texas,” the restaurant quickly gained critical acclaim, being named one of bon appétit’s “Top 10 Best New Restaurants” in its first year, featured on Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre Foods and was recognized as “One of the South’s Most Exciting New Restaurants” by Garden & Gun.
Dai Due founded New School of Traditional Cookery, a series of ethical hunting, fishing, cooking and butchery classes, led by Griffiths and praised by The New York Times, Texas Monthly, The Wall Street Journal and more. Griffiths shared his love of the hunt with his James Beard Award-finalist cookbook, Afield: A Chef’s Guide to Preparing and Cooking Wild Game and Fish alongside Austin-based photographer Jody Horton. In his latest book, Griffiths focuses on the invasive feral hog, offering a textbook of knowledge on its history, guides on butchering, stories from the field and recipes.
“To say [Jesse] is a skilled hunter and butcher is an understatement; the man has an overabundance of knowledge that he readily shares.”
– Eater
The Hog Book breaks down hogs into a simple set of categories based on size and sex. There are tips on locating hogs and hunting hogs, diagrams for building a simple hog trap, illustrations of shot placement, different methods of skinning and gutting hogs, and four highly-detailed butchery sequences based on these categories. Interspersed throughout are stories of actual hog hunts.
Recipes include an exhaustive exploration of methods to make the most of this resource- including brining, curing, smoking, grilling, sausage and stock making, charcuterie, offal cookery, and even how to cook the heads. There are recipes perfect for a quick weekday dinner, elaborate, celebratory deep dives, and even recipes for desserts and baked goods. Sauces, salsas, and complementary side dish recipes are found throughout.
In all, the book covers everything from the complex and fascinating history of the wild North American hog all the way down to a recipe for making a chocolate cake with hog lard.
Boar Parmesan
https://www.facebook.com/thehogbook/
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SHOGUN FARMS: PROVIDING THE FINEST QUALITY FLORIDA WILD BOAR
Website: https://shogunfarms.com/
ere on the farm, we believe in “Happy and Healthy Wild Boar”. Every aspect of our farm is carefully thought out: Why we raise Wild Boar, how we treat them and what they eat.
But most importantly, we believe that by treating these animals with respect and giving them the best life on the farm not only sets a higher standard for animal welfare but also produces a healthier, all-natural product for our customers.
Be on the lookout for the next Real Farms, Real Stories Video. Make sure you like and follow our page for more stories like this one! At Farm Credit of Central Florida, we provide financing for Farms, Homes, and Land. For more information on Farm Credit of Central Florida, call us at 863-682-4117.
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‘Perfect’ Feral Pigs Are Casually Destroying the Country. No One Can Stop Them.
- Programs to reduce feral hog populations haven’t made a dent in the destruction path brought by the animals.
- The hunt is on for a way to efficiently reduce the population of feral hogs.
- The rise of the feral hog has been a steady process with inbreeding of various breeds of swine.
Call them whatever you want: feral hogs, wild swine, or anything similar. The underlying meaning is the same—unencumbered destruction.
The persistent wild pig problem isn’t showing any signs of slowing. In fact, a recent report from WIRED highlights failing efforts to control the population and spells out a dire situation where no real solutions exist to the $2.5 billion per year damage issue. That price tag, by the way, doesn’t even take the disease-transmitting capabilities of these swine into account.
“If you wanted to create the perfect invasive species, one that could pretty much live anywhere, could eat anything, had a very high reproductive rate, was extremely destructive, and was also very difficult to control, you would have to look no further than the wild pig,” John “Jack” Mayer, a technical program manager at the federal Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina, and a noted authority on feral swine, tells Wired. “They can live just about anywhere, from the frozen Canadian prairie provinces down to the hot, humid deserts of the American Southwest and all parts in between. They are the ultimate survivor.”
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