City Bites
August/September, 2006
A Breed Apart
The city’s best butchers and chefs are turning to rare meats
to bring new flavours to our plates—just like the old days
Written by Pamela Cuthbert
The fat of the land is getting tastier. In the popular hunt for rare-breed meats, chefs and adventurous butchers around town are bagging succulent, full-flavoured delights. This is a two-way street: as consumers have come to appreciate exotic tastes such as ostrich, wild boar and caribou, they have revealed an openness to looking to the past to revive flavours. With support for non-industrialized agriculture on the rise, there is also a recognition of preservation and traceability.
Take pork, for starters. Rare breeds are not new on the chopping block—many have been around longer than the common domesticated varieties. Some breeds such as Red Wattle were near extinction until dedicated farmers stepped in.
Local farmers such as Michael Schmidt and his chefs-in-arms, including Michael Stadtlander and Jamie Kennedy, have been doing the rare-breed dance for some time. Now you can expect to find Berskhire, Tamworth and occasionally Red Wattle pork at a good dozen restaurants and carnivore food shops like The Healthy Butcher and Cumbrae’s.
The supply is limited and a bit erratic, being small-scale, so consumers hungry for these tastes have to look around. Is it worth it to go out of your way for a pork chop that actually has flavour? “Absolutely,” says Stephen Alexander at Cumbrae’s Meats, which stocks various cuts of the Berkshire pig. “There’s more fat through the meat so it’s incredibly juicy,” he says. Alexander has a local supplier in Ontario, a rarity since most of the tawny-red breed comes from Manitoba and Saskatchewan. “These farmers raise the animals with love.”
Anthony Walsh, executive chef of Canoe, sources all the Berkshire bellies he can get his hands on—it’s upwards of 40 per cent fat content in these cuts—and says “I love the cleanliness of it. That other white meat [regular pork] can have a real stench to it.”
Restaurateurs are predicting regular pork will soon be a thing of the past for fine dining in Toronto. “Heritage varieties like Berkshire and Yorkshire pigs will become the new standard,” says Doug Penfold at Cava, where he and co-chef Chris Macdonald are making pork liver mousse and curing haunches in cider. Penfold is on the trail for a Red Wattle pig, one of the rarest breeds in North America.
Chef Toby Nemeth at Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar makes a hunter’s sausage, smoked and seasoned with mustard seeds, using the Berkshire porker, plus bacon and Westphalian-style ham. To ensure a steady supply Nemeth is working with Mark Trealout at Kawartha Ecological Growers Co-operative. There is also talk of heritage turkeys.
At Czehoski, chef Nathan Iseberg prepares Berkshire-pig rustic paté in consommé aspic, and guanciale, or pig jowl, is in the works. It’s not the only rare meat Iseberg is after. One of his suppliers is raising a limited number of rare-breed cows.
And speaking of cows, North 44 also prefers its beef rare. The midtown restaurant has the Japanese breed Wagyu imported live and aged in Canada for a pricey take on Kobe beef (which must be slaughtered in Japan to claim that name). Server Jeffrey Marsh says “It’s ridiculously marbled. It’s the foie gras of steak.”
David Lee, chef at Splendido, gets Wagyu from an American farm where the meat is guaranteed purebred. Working with brisket, he either smokes it with applewood or brines it and then poaches it off in a court bouillon. “A strip loin costs a fortune, but some customers are prepared to pay the price,” he says. “It’s all about the marbling. That’s what everyone is fighting for.”
While it may sound like a contradiction, in the world of rare farm animals, getting the word out about these tasty alternatives is the best way to ensure the breeds survive.
