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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. . .
Rooting around with wild boars cont.
First and foremost, the boars themselves are due respect. The times in my career when whole animals were brought into the kitchen, a sense of reverence settled into the truest of cooks and chefs. Albeit we tend to be a bit more calloused in our humor, we feel a duty to respect and utilize everything we are given to make great food to be shared by many. Along the way, I have learned that to appreciate the “fruit” of the foods we eat, learning about its roots in the cultures and cuisines from around the world leads to true understanding.
Alright, let’s go deeper into the roots and way back when. Wild boar were loaded onto ships and brought to this side of the pond through the early shipping routes taken by the Europeans soon after Columbus. The boars served their purpose on the ships well. Brought aboard early in weight and size, they would eat the remnants, leftovers and any spoilage of the crews “culinary delights.” Their continued growth led to some tasty meat by the time they entered the Caribbean and the shores of Mexico and ultimately changed the diet of the land they soon roamed wild. The usage of boar meat in cooking spans all borders of the world. With a texture very similar to pork and a flavor similar to lean dark meat, it crosses all culinary boundaries and is simply interchanged with pork. Enough with the history lesson, let’s get to the boar that arrived at the back door of Niche.
