Farmhouse Lunch

For every butchering group of pigs, we reserve back 1/2 a pig for our own family. From that we can taste the quality of the meat, the cures, and in general quality control. Today we broke out the best bacon our farm has produced.

The best? Honestly, it tasted much like our other best bacon, from the sows....but this bacon was different in a really important way. These pigs had no corn or soy input the last 6 weeks of their life. They had very little before that too. We were able to get enough real food inputs, with enough variety that they didn't have to eat the grain ration. That was awesome.Our worry was that the bacon  and the pork might not taste as good?

A couple observations right off: the fat that was bagged up for me to render into lard was very bright in colour, a lovely pink/peach. It will render white, but the colour is indicative of vitamin and nutrient content. I am excited about that.

The bacon fried up slow and had a good sound to it while sizzling. That is something I started noticing once we started paying attention to quality. The end product was the perfect crisp/chew ration.

So, for lunch I served up local apples, white cheddar, and bacon. My little foodies were all very attentive and gave good feedback too. Lily said the fat was very bright in taste, Holly thought it was just salty enough. Isaac liked to eat it with the apples.



Me? I liked how well it went with my maple cream coffee. It was that kind of day, y'all.