Killing It

by Camas Davis

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  WORKING AT EVOE also meant I came into regular contact with many of Portland’s farmers, who delivered carrots and squash and exotic greens—but also ducks, chickens, pork shoulder, and lamb—to our front door. And so Evoe became, for me, the perfect portal to the players of the Portland farm scene.

  Some of the meat producers who came in were seasoned marketers, like John Neumeister of Cattail Creek, who had been selling lamb along the West Coast for decades. He had a loyal following and little trouble selling out of his product, but he’d worked hard for a long time to educate his customers, mostly restaurants and retail meat counters by this point. I began buying whole lambs from him for our lamb butchery classes, classes he’d often show up for, to introduce himself to our students and answer their questions. Occasionally I’d call him with a question like “So how is it that lambs can be grass-fed year-round if in the summer months the grasses dry up?” To which he’d answer, “The answer is long. Let’s meet for coffee.” Eight years later, I still buy lamb from him for our classes, and I am still learning from him.

  Most of the meat farmers and ranchers, however, were newer to the game, eager to make an impression on Kevin and me. Many of these new farmers had spent most of their adult lives making good money in corporate jobs and then, quite recently, decided they were going to make a nostalgic go of the agricultural life, using their retirement money to buy land and raise grass-fed Angus cattle or pastured Berkshire pigs, free-range Red Ranger chickens or Muscovy ducks. So far as I could gather, they had figured out how to farm through trial and error and were convinced that they produced quality meat—in truth, the quality varied greatly—in a humane and sustainable manner, but few of them had counted on it being so hard to sell the meat they raised and cover their costs at the same time, let alone turn a profit. They’d conjured in their heads a fantasy customer base, one willing to pay higher prices for better meat, one that understood how much work and financial input went into their meat—a base like the one that bought our saucisson and boudin noir in France. But they’d quickly realized that even consumers who wanted to eat better meat seemed to believe that a pig was made up of only bacon and pork chops, that the breasts of truly free-range chickens would be as big as those of the factory-farmed variety, and that somehow, miraculously, higher quality would not translate to higher prices. Their customers were Americans who ate 265 pounds of meat a year and had grown used to paying very little money for that 265 pounds, thanks to the low and hidden costs of factory farming and the subsidization of grain.

  Their customer base was also not, for the most part, composed of adventurous eaters. They were largely afraid of fat, flavor, and texture. They complained of the “gamy” flavors of grass-fed beef and scoffed at the “toughness” of pasture-raised chickens. And they favored cuts whose flavors and textures they deemed familiar—sausage, steak, burgers, chops, bacon, ham—leaving the farmers to contend with the fifth quarter, as Kate called it: the trotters and hocks, skin and liver. To recoup the cost of producing these parts they couldn’t sell, the farmers had to increase their prices on the cuts that did sell, and the customers complained.

  Their customers were also typically not creative cooks, or even adequate cooks. Often, the customers would cook stew meat from the shoulder, which required a longer cooking time with low heat, as if it were a loin chop, and then complain to the farmer that the meat had been tough. They had little understanding of how different muscles had to be treated differently in the kitchen.

  Even more of a surprise to me was that the farmers themselves were often not creative cooks, either. They, too, admitted to not knowing what to do with a pig head or a trotter or a hock, so they were rather ineffective salespeople when it came to making every part of the animal sound appealing to customers.

  Education seemed the only way to help these farmers, but the farmers told me they didn’t have the time to do that sort of education themselves. They needed to sell their ham hocks today. If the Portland Meat Collective, however, could teach eaters to get excited about grass-fed beef fat and the flavor of liver, and chefs to get excited about making their own charcuterie and stock and sausage out of a whole animal, maybe someday we’d have that longed-for customer base. Maybe someday these farmers wouldn’t be looking at me so desperately for an answer. It was, however, a long game.

  And so, over the counter at Evoe, as I assembled fennel salads and toasted crusty bread, I watched the farmers hustling as best they could, and I wondered what they were going to do with all the pig heads they’d stored up in their freezers at the end of the month because no one wanted them. This, of course, was what inspired me to eventually begin holding pig-head butchery and charcuterie classes, but one class wasn’t going to relieve the number of farmers I knew with freezers full of pig heads.

  I thought about the Chapolards’ vertically integrated business strategy, their cooperative ownership of equipment and slaughterhouse, the creative ways in which the family had figured out how to market and sell every part of their animals. I wondered what these farmers in Oregon, along with their customer base, might gain if I could bring Kate and the Chapolards to America to share their particular way of work and life. I imagined Dominique standing in front of a roomful of people in his beret, with his very French mustache, admonishing the audience that if you work alone, you die, and then telling them to stand up straight, breathe, and smile before demonstrating how to make a good head cheese.

  I called Kate.

  “Kate, it’s Camas. How much money would it take to make a trip to Oregon with Dominique worth your time?”

  THIRTY-TWO

  As it happened, Kate was already planning a trip to Portland to attend a gathering of international culinary professionals in April 2010, and so we decided to pull together a workshop for the conference. We pictured it as a cross-cultural comparison of whole-animal utilization and butchery. Adam agreed to do a demo alongside Dominique, with Kate acting as Dominique’s translator. To help us moderate, we also invited Michael Ruhlman, a prolific food writer who, in 2005, had teamed up with chef Brian Polcyn to write and publish the seminal meat-curing book Charcuterie, now a kitchen bible to many chefs and DIY charcuterie makers.

  Kate had come to the States many times to teach, and Dominique had traveled to the States a few times before to visit his son, who for a short while lived and worked in Florida, but this would be Dominique’s first time butchering in front of an audience of more than one or two people. Kate told me that his brothers had objected to the trip. It was a long time for him to be away from the cutting room and markets, and they didn’t understand how Dominique teaching butchery to a bunch of Americans would ever benefit them. Dominique was able to convince them to let him do it only by agreeing to split any profits he made with them.

  Dominique and Kate arrived a few days before the workshop, so I drove them around Portland to taste the charcuterie that a few restaurants and meat counters were producing at the time. At each stop, Dominique would pick up a piece of salami or ham or coppa, rub it with his fingers for a few seconds, and bring it to his nose to smell, before taking a bite. Then he’d chew for a while, look bewildered, and say, “I can’t taste the meat.”

  “What does he mean?” I asked Kate. I’d taken them to the restaurants and meat counters I thought were making the best charcuterie in town.

  “It’s the nitrites,” she said. “He says it’s all he can taste.” I felt a bit embarrassed that I hadn’t noticed. But once Kate said this, I remembered the Chapolards’ charcuterie, and how simple their list of ingredients was—just salt, pepper, fat, meat—yet how complex it was in flavor.

  In America, most companies who commercially produce cured meats—be they of the fermented variety like salami or cured whole muscles like coppa or ham—include the preservatives sodium nitrite and/or sodium nitrate in their recipes. (These are sometimes referred to as curing salt, pink salt, or Prague powd
er.) These curing agents are typically commercially produced by adding small amounts of nitrite or nitrate to salt, although some producers use natural ingredients that are inherently rich in nitrates, such as celery powder, so that they can legally label their charcuterie “uncured.” This is entirely misleading, though, since they are still curing their meat using nitrates, with the same intended outcomes. Regardless of whether natural or commercial forms are used, these preservatives have historically been used to inhibit the growth of the harmful bacteria that causes botulism—although the risk of botulism greatly decreased with the prevalence of refrigeration—but they also happen to extend shelf life, prevent rancidity, and keep the meat a rosy red or pink color, all important factors to be able to control in the modern commercial charcuterie world.

  Given all of this, I asked Kate how the Chapolards got away with not using nitrites or nitrates in France.

  She said it wasn’t required of producers like the Chapolards and that it wasn’t part of their culture—although, to be clear, there are plenty of charcuterie producers in France who choose to use these preservatives, and it’s not technically required of producers in the States either. She also suggested that they were using the freshest meat possible. By the time they salted their ventrèche and jambon, only a few days (at most) had passed since slaughter, and they could vouch for every moment of meat handling and storage in between.

  “The meat most chefs and butchers use in America is probably factory-farmed, and often slaughtered or processed several states over,” Kate said. “Chefs probably don’t know for sure how the meat was handled or under what environmental conditions they were transported or stored. If I were using that meat to make charcuterie I would use nitrite and nitrate, too.”

  I spoke with a meat scientist recently who has worked for some of the larger meat companies in America, and he disagreed with this, suggesting that a small butcher shop or a restaurant chef in America buying meat from a distributor would absolutely have that kind of assurance, he said, because everyone handling the meat along the way would be under strict regulations to handle it properly and keep it safe. I wanted to believe that everyone handling this kind of meat along the way would be sure to follow the rules, but given the amount of meat moving across our highways every day, and the number of people handling it, I wasn’t sure I could muster total faith in that system of strict regulations.

  Besides, Kate said, extended shelf life wasn’t a desired outcome for the Chapolards. Their goal was to always sell out of everything they produced as soon as it was ready to be consumed, and they just about always met that goal. Kate went on, saying that when you have total control over the handling of the meat prior to curing, all that is needed to keep charcuterie safe to eat is the addition of the right amount of salt and the proper humidity and temperature for fermenting and drying conditions.

  “Salt is a preservative, too,” she said. “And it has been for thousands of years.”

  But without nitrites or nitrates, how had the Chapolards’ ventrèche and saucisson still looked pink after weeks of drying and aging? That same meat scientist told me that it was entirely possible that the salt the Chapolards were using could be impure enough that it naturally contained its own nitrates, or that any water the meat came into contact with during the slaughter process could have contained nitrates as well. In addition, he said, the process of cold smoking introduces a lot of nitrogen dioxide, which can contribute to the pink color of the meat.

  Dominique took another bite of the dry-cured coppa on the wooden board between us and said something to Kate in French.

  “Even if this didn’t have preservatives in it, he says he thinks the meat would have little flavor. He can tell the animals this meat came from were young,” Kate said. “They hadn’t developed much fat by the time they were slaughtered, and so the muscles were likely watery and underdeveloped.”

  “Does it taste bad?” I asked.

  Dominique and Kate went back and forth in French for a while.

  “Not bad, exactly,” Kate said. “Just . . . American.”

  I saved our stop at Evoe for last. A month or so before, I’d finally coaxed more advanced instructions for Jehanne’s foie-gras-stuffed duck prosciutto out of Kate, and Kevin and I had attempted to emulate it. The ducks we used hadn’t been foie gras ducks, so they didn’t possess the same amount of fat that Jehanne’s birds did. These ducks had also been slaughtered at about half the age and weight of Jehanne’s birds. But they’d come from an Oregon farmer who pastured his birds and slaughtered them himself, and we’d butchered and salted them the same week they were harvested. On the other hand, we’d had to order the foie gras from a local distributor who’d bought it from a producer in California. The foie gras had come to us vacuum-sealed, and we had no way of knowing how fresh it was. But when Kevin and I tasted our creation, we’d been mostly pleased with the results. Since we weren’t planning on serving it to the public, we hadn’t used any curing salts, just regular sea salt.

  I sliced a few pieces for Dominique and Kate to try.

  “Well?” I asked Kate.

  “It tastes like it’s supposed to on the surface. But you’re missing all that nice fat that really drives the flavor of the recipe. Plus, how fresh was the liver? It doesn’t taste as fresh as Jehanne’s.” Kate reminded me that Jehanne salted her foie gras and duck breasts the same day that she slaughtered her ducks.

  “This is something we should talk about at our workshop,” Kate said. “You can’t just take the recipes from one culture and apply them to the ingredients of another culture. It’s not a one-to-one ratio. There’s an entire history and culture and method of raising animals that informed those recipes. The animals you raise don’t necessarily make sense for our recipes. You guys are either going to have to raise animals differently, or you are going to have to come up with your own recipes.”

  It felt like a scolding, but it was an important one. It seemed to me that getting modern-day Portlanders, let alone Americans in general, to invent new recipes was going to be a lot harder than getting Americans to value (nay, crave) the recipes of another time and place, and then seek out and support a food system that would make those recipes taste good. If I could create a community of people—even a small one—who, say, wanted to make their own duck prosciutto and therefore began demanding fattier ducks, wouldn’t farmers eventually change the way they raised their ducks? Wasn’t that, in a way, its own network of narrow paths across the indeterminate environment of market forces in America?

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  IN LIGHT OF KATE’S SCOLDING, I wanted to bring her and Dominique to at least one farm that I felt was working toward the sort of animal production methods that Kate was talking about—even surpassing the Chapolards in some ways—methods that had the potential to serve the principles of those Gascon recipes well.

  I’d chosen Square Peg Farm, about forty minutes away in Forest Grove, because I felt the owner, Chris Roehm, had a unique product—certified organic pork, fed locally sourced organic grains, raised on pasture. He’d forged loyal relationships with various restaurants, selling them whole and half pigs, or the equivalent in already butchered cuts, on a regular basis. And he also managed to sell a lot of cuts out of coolers at the farmers’ market, convincing people to try parts of the animal they had never tried before, even providing them with cooking tips and recipes. In addition to raising and selling pork, he also grew organic produce, some of which he fed to the pigs.

  As we snaked down the long gravel driveway to Chris’s farm, we passed apple, cherry, and plum trees in bloom. Just as the Chapolards’ property had looked like a true working farm, so did this one. There were plenty of outbuildings, sheds, and shacks. Wheelbarrows. Coiled hoses. I parked my car in front of a barn, and when we opened the car doors, we were greeted by the smell of wet Oregon soil, hay, and animals.

  Chris, a ginger-bearded man with round, professoria
l glasses and a ropy build, who looked as though he spent more time growing food than eating it, emerged from one of the barns, smiling, although in that reserved manner characteristic of so many of the farmers I met.

  “So this is it,” he said after greeting us, opening his arms and turning in a circle to show us his farm’s expanse. “We’ve got about forty acres. We rotate our vegetables on various fields over there,” he said, pointing. “Over here we’ve got some fruit trees. We’ve got a few temporary hoop houses to grow greens in during the winter months. And right now, we’ve got our pigs in this barn.” He pointed to a medium-size pole barn with a shed wall on one side and low temporary fencing making up the other “walls.” We walked over and said hello to twenty or so adolescent pigs.

  “We also rotate our pigs in the winter months into a few of those cold frames over there,” Chris said, pointing to a trio of what looked like plastic-covered greenhouses standing out in one of the fields, with the shadows of pigs moving around within them.

  “I thought you only pasture-raised your pigs,” I said.

  “We do, but it’s really not possible this time of year.”

  Chris explained that for a few years he’d tried to truly pasture his pigs year-round, but in our wet and rainy Willamette Valley, he felt it just wasn’t a viable option. His fields, he told us, were continual mud pits, where nothing could grow and erosion problems were common. Even with careful rotation, his farm wasn’t quite big enough to sustain a fully pasture-raised, two-hundred-pigs-per-year operation and a vegetable farm. So he’d eventually settled on keeping them housed in the open-air barn and the temporary cold frames from October to April. During that time, Chris fed them organic grains he bought from another farmer, alfalfa hay, spent chestnuts from a gluten-free brewer in Portland, and their own blemished fruits and vegetables, like winter squash, beets, and apples.