The Dirty Chef

by Matthew Evans

  Anyway, commercial suicide meant Wessex Saddlebacks were perfect for me. Slower growth and a strong foraging instinct mean more flavour. Stronger muscles from free-ranging also suggest better taste and texture. It’s inherently more elegant and sweet-tasting pork, as I said earlier, because of the breed. Saddlebacks are able to put down more marbling in the meat, and the increased fat levels overall means the pork remains moist and flavoursome and can be more versatile than modern, lean breeds.

  Fat is a strange enemy. For a few decades it’s been considered the devil’s work. But to me, good strong-flavoured fat is the point. You can’t eat a lot of lard compared to flavourless vegetable oil. Your body tells you you’re doing the wrong thing. And fat equals flavour. Any decent home cook or chef can tell you that. It’s not the only flavour, but it’s a very, very good carrier of flavour, and if you want yummy food, as chefs have known for eons, some fat goes a long way to providing it. With great-tasting fat, you only need a tiny bit. That, of course, means you get more taste for less fat—contrary to your expectations, really.

  I wanted to slow-grow and free-range my pigs for a reason. Pork consumption in Australia consistently dropped over several decades, despite marketing campaigns such as ‘New Fashioned Pork’ (an unabashedly anti-fat way of butchering). As piggeries became more intensive, as breeders focused more on faster-growing, leaner breeds that could handle high stocking rates, pork quality—let’s be clear what I’m talking about here, its eating quality—declined.

  Consumers, duped into rejecting fat, found that this new fast-growing pork was dry and mealy and unappetising. The industrial farmer’s response to this (after humanity had spent 5000 years domesticating and selectively breeding pigs to produce delicious meat) was not to look at breeds. Their response didn’t consider the feed. Or the intensive housing.

  No, when consumers found pork dry and tasteless, the industry just started injecting it with salty water. ‘Moisture enhanced’ or ‘moisture infused’ pork appeared on the market. Intensively reared pig meat with water added.

  Now, if you can find some slow-grown, free-ranged, old-breed pork, and cook it next to the conventional product, you’ll be gobsmacked at the difference. Moisture-infused pork is probably only about 90 per cent pork. The rest is water sold at the price of pork. Goodbye flavour, hello profit.

  So when other farms aim at the bottom line (and I mean bottom), my background as a chef and food writer means I’m driven to aim at the top shelf. Yes, as a middle-class hobby farmer, it is an indulgence, but one I would like my family and me to afford. And it’s based on a belief system that I had always wanted to test. Does breed, and the management system, actually make a difference to flavour?

  So I really had to fatten my own pigs, at home. They were the first large animals that I’d brought to the farm. What’s more, pigs are mammals, which gives us a closer emotional link to them, I think. With that closer feeling comes all the incumbent responsibility you’d expect of caring for an animal not dissimilar to a dog in its intelligence and sociability.

  Docile girls, Prosciutto and Cassoulet had about an acre in which to free-range during their time on Puggle Farm. They ate strawberries on occasions, and drank leftover milk. We gathered windfall pears from ancient trees around the valley for the girls and fed them all our vegetable scraps.

  I’d used ring-lock fencing, the kind you’d use for sheep, to keep them in. It did its job, but the constant nibbling next to fence posts, the daily rub against the gate, the pigs’ ability to push on the wire did cause some damage, ageing the new fence prematurely. I’d heard about electric fencing but Jen, who sold me the pigs, had found all her wire coiled up in Peter Pan’s bed one morning after he discovered there was a short in the line (meaning it was no longer electrified) and he’d decided to dismantle it. Pigs are pretty clever, I have to say. In hindsight I wish I’d installed temporary electric fencing first while I worked out how I’d use the farm. But like most things, I did little research and simply launched in and put in a new, expensive and permanent fence.

  I have often launched into projects without doing enough reading or asking those in the know. By the good grace of nature, and some very helpful friends, most of the time I pulled it off.

  Anyway, I can strongly recommend pigs for the smallholder. Or the orchardist with fruit they can’t use. Pigs are terrifically companionable, and endlessly fascinating. They can turn old potatoes, the outside of cabbages, the rinds of cheese and any amount of cherries into high-quality protein and fat. They can fill the freezer with fresh meat, the larder with cured meat, and the pantry with great-tasting fat that can be used instead of butter or oil most of the time. And while my initial pig rearing was a relatively naive, high-cost indulgence, many families near us, some probably on a fairly low income, continue to enjoy the glory that is home-raised free-range pork, as people on the land have done for thousands of years.

  I enjoyed the sociability and curiosity of the pigs. I’d often stand near their paddock at dusk, beer in hand, watching their antics as they raced around the paddock, sending dust clouds up into the fading orange light.

  And one day, about nine months after they arrived, the reality of why they were on the farm hit home. The girls were loaded onto a trailer. It was time to take them to the cutting shop, thankfully only a ten-minute drive up the road rather than the traumatic journey of several hundred kilometres from some remote farms I know of.

  An abattoir is a grim place. It’s not, almost by definition, going to be in a nice area, or smell great, or be housed in a pretty building. Ours certainly isn’t. But the reality is that to have meat from an animal that you can sell, you have to use the services of an abattoir. They do the mean deed on our behalf, and we just hope they do it cleanly, quickly and with as little trauma as possible.

  The next time I saw my pigs, they were hanging at the butcher’s shop, weighing in at about 70 kilograms each. The black outer skin and hair rubs off to produce nude pink flesh with the occasional five o’clock shadow. Pigs have become pork. It’s curious how we often use words to remove ourselves from the reality of what we’re eating. You don’t see venison sneaking in and eating crops on farms in the Tassie Highlands, you see deer. You don’t see beef grazing lazily and chewing their cuds in the paddock, you see cows. You don’t see pork digging up your paddocks with their snouts, you see pigs.

  And at the end, I saw pork.

  I’ve chosen to eat meat. I like to think of myself as a conscious omnivore. I have made a clear and conscious decision to eat the flesh of other animals. I don’t believe that being vegan will mean no animal will die for my dinner. Yet I do believe we eat too much meat, and certainly too much poor quality meat. And if we all magically became vegan overnight, apart from having to learn to cook all over again (being vegan and properly nourished isn’t quite as simple as being a meat-eater, sadly), I do think the world, at least some aspects of it, would be a better place. But I also see domesticated animals’ role in agriculture—without them we would need to rely more on petrochemical fertilisers and inputs. There are parts of our farm where it would be impossible to grow fruit, nuts or vegetables on any commercial scale, but we can graze cattle. There is food that would otherwise be wasted—we can use up to 1000 litres of waste milk a week to help feed our pigs— which can be turned into high-quality protein and fat through the use of porkers. And meat is a luscious indulgence that we should never take for granted. But, according to British author Simon Fairlie, for every acre of Amazon rainforest turned over to beef production, 2 acres is turned over to soybeans. How sustainable is your vegan burger looking now?

  The great news for those of you who want to eat this quality of pork, without the need to run a small-holding or have two porkers, is that rare-breed free-range pigs are making a comeback. Check out most farmers’ markets and you’ll find small producers of pork are nudging their way in. Just be sure to quiz your supplier and possibly ask for photos of their farming system. And be very wary of butchers who call
their meat free-range when most of it is fattened in sheds and gets re-branded along the way.

  Chicken

  My first chooks, the ones I had when I was a boy, stopped laying after a few years. And Dad dispatched one when I was away so as not to offend me, only to find it scrawny and impossibly chewy. Not that I ever got to eat it. The others went to a new home. Somewhere. To this day I don’t know where. And I have to believe Dad when he said they were ‘re-homed’.

  I now know a laying bird, at the end of its laying life, will be skinny and tough. I know that because we kill our own birds these days for the pot. And once they start to crow, or reach about sixteen weeks of age, generally it’s time to get out the killing cone and heat the water ready to pluck them.

  The first time we did it, which was documented on Gourmet Farmer, the transition from feathered bird to nude plucked meat was confronting. It still is.

  Death is grim, be it natural, assisted, human or animal (though I harbour no qualms about killing slugs). The taking of a life of a warm-blooded animal, in particular, harbours no joy for me. I didn’t like it the first time, and I don’t like it now. But I am also conscious of what I eat and how I farm, so I know a death must happen for me to eat meat. I’ve also come to learn that death will happen if I don’t eat meat, but of different things, at different times. I’ve made the decision to have meat as part of my diet, and to use animals as part of my integrated farming system, so at my hand, or at my behest, an animal will die.

  Death, and all it entails, is the ugly reality of farming. It doesn’t matter whether you eat chickpeas or apples or quinoa, for you to eat, animals must die. In fact, I kill more living things growing vegetables for the table than I do putting beef on my family’s plate for a year. They may be slugs, snails, caterpillars, mice, rats and the like, but they compete with us for food, and so they often end up dead.

  Rearing animals on Puggle Farm, however, has given us plenty of drama. There’s an old saying in the country: if you have livestock, you have dead stock. Brutal as it is, there’s truth in it. Birth, and all that’s associated with it, is a risky thing. Illness, injury, accidents and all that goes with caring for your domesticated animals, including reproduction, can involve death. Crop protection and other kinds of farming can also comprise killing living things. Crop farmers hunt wallabies, they trap possums, they shoot birds and poison rats and spray all manner of chemicals to eradicate pests. Even things like Dipel, which are approved for organic vegetable growers, kill things. They’re only bugs, yes, but kill them it does.

  When I found it, Puggle Farm’s timber cottage had nothing needing attention inside. I wanted a place where I could work on outdoor projects and leave the house as it was built. Despite this, the empty stone fireplace in the kitchen looked like it was just waiting for a woodfired cooker to be installed. Wood cooking, that old technology, was historically used almost exclusively in the Huon, where timber was plentiful and cheap, and owning a razor-sharp axe was the norm. Even small children have plastic chainsaws in their toy boxes these days. If you didn’t cook on wood, you certainly heated your house with it. We still do. It’s all about being sensible with what you have, and how best to use it. It’s the logical way of living off the land.

  I discovered this about the Huon very early on—the historic connection to the soil. Tasmania has the least urban population of all the states in Australia. And the Huon Valley, where Puggle Farm lies nestled, is the most densely populated rural council area in Tasmania. That means relatively more people live in the country in my area than in the rest of rural Australia. We live on, and in, the landscape.

  The Huon Valley is dotted with small farms, where only a generation ago it certainly wasn’t unusual to milk a cow, or keep pigs, or kill sheep at home. And it’s still not unusual today. Far from it, even if it isn’t as common as it was 50 years ago. People are used to growing their own food. They’re used to bartering. They expect to pick food off the trees, and they expect to have to chop their own firewood. Local wood heaps are always very neat, and quite vast. A lesson for those of us who arrived later.

  The use of wood for cooking was another dream of mine that had lain dormant. But here I was, in a house that needed nothing except a cooker to make it ideal, and in a region that made wood-burning not just possible, but socially acceptable. I looked around and scouted online for a secondhand cooker, but nothing practical or fixable came up. So I ordered a brand spanking new Rayburn, an expensive but efficient wood-burner from the makers of the famed oil- and coal-burning oven, the Aga. Made in the UK, they take a long time to get to Tassie.

  A few days after ordering it, and paying what felt like a deposit on a house, I was putting in a fence for the pigs I fattened at the farm. I was working with a local contractor named Col. Underneath his wide-brimmed hat and bushy beard lay a hard man with biceps as big as the posts we dug in by hand. Thing is, under that same hat lay a computer programmer who’d rather do the hard (and believe me, it is hard) graft of fencing than suffocate in an office and work in IT.

  We’ve laboured together a few times, Col and I. Dragging 60 kilos of fencing wire up muddy slopes in the sleet. Attempting to wallaby-proof the steep terrain of my bush block as the rain sloped in under our hats and through our raincoats. Fastening a possum-proof orchard net over my vegie garden after losing my whole first winter crop.

  On this first job, however, we were still sussing each other out. I asked Col if he’d ever used a wood-fired cooker (you never call a wood-burning stove a stove, apparently).

  ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘Just pulled one out last week.’

  Ah, I thought, I can ask an expert for some tips.

  ‘Bastard of a thing,’ he muttered, with a few expletives swallowed by his substantial beard. ‘So heavy.’ I could imagine how hard they would be to move, so fair enough that he was a bit disparaging. But he went on.

  ‘Cooking on it was like having a second wife,’ he exclaimed. ‘You become married to the thing.’

  The commitment to a cooker is pretty large. First up, they weigh around 250–300 kilograms so the house has to be solid underneath them. You have to find the wood, and for a Rayburn you have to cut it shorter and split it thinner; which turns out to be about eight times the work of cutting normal firewood. Our cooker wood doesn’t stack very neatly or easily, either, taking up more room and making the stack messier. It’s also harder to cart.

  Then you have to keep an eye on the oven and fire as you cook, keeping the flames going, but also dampening them down as need be, using the flue and inlet valve as your only tools. The thermometer on the oven itself is not an indication of the actual temperature at the top or the bottom of the oven, so you use your hand and common sense as a more reliable guide.

  Cooking on wood is a beautiful dance; cook and cooker, food and flame, fire and heat. It’s part science, part art; it’s intellectual and soulful. As someone who loves to cook, let me tell you it is the most joyous of ways to do it. This dance changes every day, depending on the type, dryness and shape of your wood, on the way you use the wood, and on the cooker itself and what you’re doing with it. Working with one becomes instinctive, all based on the reactions of the cook to the Rayburn itself. It’s nuanced cooking of the finest order, and it takes a lot of consciousness and some degree of skill. You do, in some sense, become married to it.

  But from the swearing, and the fact he’d just taken one out of his house, it didn’t sound like Col’s relationship with his cooker had gone all that well.

  ‘What did you do with your Rayburn?’ I asked, sensing I’d missed out on a bargain.

  ‘I pulled it out and threw it in The Channel,’ Col said, talking as if it was as light as a kettle and as disposable as an apple core. ‘I’m using it as a mooring for a boat.’

  A few months later, at the same time as my future mooring was being installed as a temporary food-heating machine, my chickens were starting to crow. And when a chicken crows, you kinda suspect it won’t be very good at layin
g eggs. When it starts to crow, however, it is also at its best for the pot. So my roosters were heading for the cooker.

  The only problem was that a live, clucking, scratching bird is quite different from a roast, and I was a long way off wanting to kill my chickens myself. So I rang Jen Owens, who’d sold me my pigs, because she’d told me how once upon a time she’d been vegetarian. Seems odd, calling a former vegetarian about killing chickens, no? But now, for ethical reasons that are very similar to why she became a vegetarian, and with a small farm where she had the option, she wanted to feed her family meat. Homegrown meat. And every month or two she’d get together with a friend to chat and slit throats, provide support and pluck, gossip and gut all their roosters. Both Jen and her friend Colette only did it so their families could eat meat. It was through that spirit of community and of support that they could, both former vegetarians, bring themselves to end the lives of the animals they had helped rear.

  Now let’s get this straight: for every chicken that’s trapped in some dank, sulphurous shed, laying the eggs you buy in a shop, a rooster has died, usually at day one, because they are of no use to the farm. Every fluffy male chick born in the industrial system is a problem that is solved by snapping its neck and throwing it into the bin. It may seem brutal and harsh to kill our roosters at home, but at least it’s a better use of the boys than compost or fish food (or, as in the US, fodder for cattle, ugh).

  The first chicken I beheaded was one I’d raised at home from the time it was one day old. The technique we used included a killing cone, which holds the bird upside down so it is fairly relaxed, its head extending down so you have access to the neck. The idea is to cut off the head with a razor-sharp knife, leaving the body in the cone. The cone itself holds the bird once it is dead, so it can’t flap or flee: the involuntary muscle movements that occur postmortem are held in check by the metal funnel.