New York chef Seamus Mullen knows a farmer in Vermont who slaughters a hog on Monday, hangs it for all of Tuesday and then delivers it to Boqueria, Mullen’s Spanish tapas restaurant in Manhattan, on Wednesday. “We pretty much move from one end to the other,” Mullen says of the pig, serving the tail and ears—confit in pig fat—as part of a salad or tapas on Wednesday night and then using the rest of the animal throughout the course of the week.
“I don’t use commodity pork, so if I were just to buy a rack of [specialty] pork, I’d be selling it at a loss, because people aren’t going to spend $34 on a pork chop,” he says.
By using the whole animal, the head—which he poaches and rolls together with the smoked tongue and kidneys, breads and pan-fries for what he calls a “ballotine of pork”—and part of the belly generate enough income to pay for the pig.
“Everything else is gravy,” he says.
Most commodity prices have spiked radically over the past year, but pork has remained relatively stable, and chefs are finding that this protein, often forgotten after breakfast, garners appreciation from their customers and bookkeepers alike.
On Wednesday Mullen also starts brining the pork bellies, chops and head in a 6-percent salt solution with sugar, orange peel and various aromatics. He starts turning the hams and shoulders into sausages, and he makes blood sausage, too.
On Thursday he serves the chops and tenderloins. The bellies are served on Friday. Not only is such an approach economical, but also it helps him keep his kitchen staff engaged.
“Everyone’s excited when a whole pig comes to a restaurant,” he says, “and also ethically there’s something really nice about having a relationship with the person who raised it and knowing what’s going into it.”
At Park Place in Louisville, Ky., chef Jay Denham also buys whole hogs, from a local Mennonite farmer who finishes them on acorns, persimmons and other fall fruits.
“Customers are excited about knowing where the meat comes from,” he says.
Much of that pig ends up on the “pickled, potted and cured,” section at the top of the restaurant’s menu in the form of country ham, cured shoulder and even head cheese.
He says the shoulder has more surface area than the ham, so it picks up more of the flavor from the garlic and herbs in which he dresses it, which vary them depending on what’s in season.
Each charcuterie item is $5.
“We get a lot of people that come in and just kind of mix and match,” he says. “It’s a good way to start off the meal and break the ice.”
Other chefs might be less philosophical, but they still enjoy pork’s diversity.
Joe Ng, executive of Chinatown Brasserie in New York, uses boneless pork butt for a range of preparations, from a spicy sliced pork stir-fry to his signature ground pork with flowering chives and goji berry. He charges $17 for each of those dishes.
Ng says the ground-pork dish, served with deep-fried shrimp chips, works as a shared plate and is versatile enough to wrap in won ton wrappers, moo shoo pancakes, lettuce or anything else a chef might feel like wrapping it in.
For the dish, he mixes ground pork with egg, five-spice powder, soy and a little corn-starch. He adds garlic and chopped flowering chives to hot vegetable oil in a wok, and then adds the pork, oyster sauce, soy sauce, salt, and sugar and cooks it quickly, adding bean sprouts near the end and finishing it with the goji berries.
For the sliced pork dish Ng uses Cantonese techniques mixed with Southeast Asian aromatics such as lemon grass and kaffir lime leaf.
He mixes potato starch with water and lets the pork soak in that for about 20 minutes, which helps keep the pork from drying out. Meanwhile, he heats chopped garlic, ginger and scallion in vegetable oil in a wok. Then he adds chile paste followed by the pork.
Then he removes the pork and adds sliced oyster mushroom and red bell pepper along with chopped lemon grass and kaffir lime leaf and whole raw string beans. He adds the pork back in and adjust the seasoning using sugar and soy sauce. Ng says the dish is particularly popular in the fall and winter.
A number of chefs in Atlanta are finding success with pork shoulder. Cameron Thompson of Two Urban Licks in Atlanta braises it in chicken stock for three hours along with mirepoix, fennel seed, cinnamon stick, star anise and bay leaf—“almost like a big pork roast”—and sells it with individually baked mac and cheese for $19.
“It’s one of my most popular dishes,” Thompson says, “and it’s one of the first things people mention on the menu.”
At sister restaurant One Midtown Kitchen, chef Tom Harvey coats shoulder in a classic Memphis-style barbecue rub—including smoked paprika, garlic, onion, salt, sugar and celery salt—and hot-smokes it over hickory for two hours, and then cold-smokes it for three more hours.
“The smoking step sort of replaces the searing process before the braise,” he says.
Then he braises it at about 225 degrees Fahrenheit for another three hours.
He cools it overnight in the braising liquid, brings it to room temperature and flash-fries it before serving.
“The dish is like a perfect piece of pulled pork that has not yet been pulled apart: sizzling crispy exterior, molten interior, just the right amount of fat and sauce,” he says.
The sauce is a veal jus with North Carolina-style vinegar-based barbecue sauce. He serves it with red-pepper grits and vinegar cole slaw and charges $20 for it.
“Typically the number of braises we do goes down in warm weather,” he says. “But this is warming and soulful in the wintertime. It also fits the warm weather here in Georgia. It’s a year-round-appropriate dish, and there aren’t that many of those.”
Tim Magee of the newly opened Parish in Atlanta has been buying shoulder from a farmer in nearby Columbia, S.C., and offering it as a special for around $19.
“It’s a little bit fattier than typical pork,” he says. “Basically, I just add lots of salt and pepper, cold-smoke it, and then braise it.”
He braises it for 12 to 14 hours in vegetable stock with thyme, rosemary, mirepoix, tomato and a little Creole mustard.
Then he cools it overnight and serves it with creamed leeks and roasted Brussels sprouts.
Parish is a New Orleans Creole-theme restaurant, and Magee’s pork dish is basically straight-up Southern, so he is trying to figure out how to rework it to offer it on his regular menu.
At Rioja in Denver, Jennifer Jasinski’s top-selling appetizer is a kurobuta pork belly dish, but she calls it “fresh bacon.”
“It’s one of our signature dishes,” Jasinski says.
She brines it for 24 hours in water seasoned with ground cardamom, peeled and sliced ginger, garlic, salt, honey and sugar. She says she uses both honey and sugar because too much honey gave the dish “too much of a caramelly flavor.”
Then she cooks it for 12 hours at 140-160 degrees Fahrenheit—“below a simmer.”
As it cools she weighs it down with another hotel pan filled with ice and some canned food. At service she cuts it into portions, scores it and reheats it in her 700-degree pizza oven.
“It caramelizes the top really nicely,” she says. She serves it with a curry-scented garbanzo purée for $9.
