One early morning last month, a dozen Chicago chefs crowded into Stan Schutte’s kitchen, listening to the stocky, buzz-cut farmer talk about the owls, hawks, and coyotes that harass his animals. “Coyotes I’m not so friendly to,” he said. “I will kill a coyote. They’re not so bad this time of year, but once it gets cold they’ll start coming in closer and closer, and that’s when they start to get a little bit greedy.”
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That would be a very expensive loss. Mangalitsas are an old Austro-Hungarian breed that had no presence in the United States until about three years ago, when a Washington State financial analyst and programmer named Heath Putnam imported a herd of 25 from Austria at enormous expense. Like other old breeds, Mangalitsas are lard-type pigs, fattening well—if slowly—and producing juicy marbled meat. Putnam dubbed the swine Wooly Pigs and put their meat in the hands of chefs at the Napa Valley’s French Laundry, Seattle’s Herbfarm, and New York’s Spotted Pig, and they were duly featured in the pages of Saveur, the New York Times, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Like Schutte, most of the chefs in the room had read the April Times article, in which their colleagues on the coasts swooned over the creamy fat of the woolly pig and compared its marbled meat to Wagyu beef. Kendall College dean Chris Koetke and Slow Food Chicago’s Joel Smith read it too. A year earlier they’d purchased four heritage pigs—two Durocs and two Red Wattles—and contracted a farmer to raise them naturally with the intention of eventually selling the meat. Though the experiment wasn’t an economic success—one of the pigs died—they did sell one off to Osteria di Tramonto. The rest they distributed among themselves and friends.
He brought the two-and-a-half-month-old pigs back to Illinois and turned them loose on a narrow half-acre piece of pasture with a border that includes a few oak trees. He doesn’t yet have the acreage to put his regular hogs out to pasture full-time, though he hopes to get there eventually.
None of them has ever worked with Mangalitsa pork before, and until the chefs get their hands on the meat, their plans are speculative. “I think it depends on when we cut into them and see,” said Sears. “If they have a huge fat cap, we’ll put some up for lardo,” said Pat Sheerin. “If we could get the blood that would be fantastic for blood sausage.”
