Rooting around with wild boars continues with their back door arrival

…Just days earlier, the boar that arrived at Niche were foraging wild in the hill country near Ingram, Texas. Without time on the feed lot, their diet mainly consists of nuts, berries, grasses and tubers as they roam in groups called sounders. Always on the move, their meat is lean and leads to dark meat throughout most of the cuts. The population of wild boar in Texas hovers around 2 million and is regularly thinned out to control populations by licensed trappers. North of San Antonio in the central part of the state, Broken Arrow Ranch prides itself in high quality meats handled and butchered by professionals. A bit to my dismay, due to strict state regulations, I wasn’t allowed many of the parts of the animal that are enjoyed as delicacies by many.

When the usual delivery truck arrived last Friday morning, I carefully lifted the wild boar out of their shipper and watched my regular delivery guys’ eyebrows raise either in sheer curiosity or utter shock. No matter how much research or experience comes flushing back, chefs tend to be most creative when they are able to look at and feel a product much like any other artist and their mediums. Its light rose-colored meat lightly laced in cotton-white fat along with other more graphic in nature yet bright colors showing its freshness, spurned ideas of how we would carefully prepare it. Within moments, ideas of flavors and textures began to run rampant and riddle my brain, but more of that to come later. . .