One of my first chores upon arriving at Farmer’s Market is to cut the prepped loin sections into individual chops. Yesterday, when I cut the first chop the only thing I could think of was Heather and my favorite quote from a Jefferey Steingarten article, (use your best French accent here) “Is perfect, no?”. There in front of me was a perfect pork chop. Like all of our chops it contained a single rib bone that ran from top to bottom. No jagged rib shards in our chops. But that wasn’t what caught my attention. Like all of our chops it had a nice covering of back fat. We don’t scalp our chops, thank you very much! But that wasn’t it, either. What set this particular chop apart was the marbling within the loin muscle itself. Loin eye muscling is the holy grail of pig farming, if you ask me. And there it was. So I snapped a picture with my cell phone.

It is commonly said that you can’t get pork chops to marble like a fine steak. That is undoubtedly true of pork chops from modern, ultra lean breeds of pigs fed a high protein diet and rushed to market at five months of age. But is it true of old fashioned lard hogs sent to market at a leisurely pace of nine to ten months of age? I think this chop settles that debate.

About three years ago we decided to bite the bullet and buy in a breeding pair of mulefoot hogs from a herd in South Dakota. If everything went right the boar would become our main boar and the sow would allow us to maintain a line of purebred mulefoot pigs. The reason for buying the mulefoot pigs is that they are the last remaining American survivors of an older “type” of hog, the “chuffy” or “lard type” hog. This was admittedly a gamble. Although chuffy hogs would supposedly have great marbling and meat quality, they are not as long as modern pigs and they have a lower proportion of bacon and pork chops. This is bad business. Bacon and chops are very profitable cuts. To make matters worse, chuffy hogs tend to have very small loin muscles, the muscle at the center of a chop, which can make for some meager looking pork chops. Chuffy hogs generally and mulefoot hogs in particular tend to give smaller litters than modern breeds of pig which is also a huge challenge to the commercial producer. Finally, chuffy hogs are smaller framed and slower growing, which means it might take us a year or more to get a pig to market (as opposed to six months or less for a commercial hog). So we decided to hedge our bets.

A friend and mentor of ours has a line of pigs he refers to as yorkshires but are really just “pink pigs”. These are solid farm stock, known to have large litters and good mothering skills. They are fairly modern in type, but not ridiculously so. What if we crossed our boar to his sows to create “meat type” hogs (another type of hog - intermediate between the chuffy and modern types - that has basically vanished in the us)? This might give us good numbers of pigs that are intermediate in length, have acceptable loin eye size, grow at good rates but still maintain some of the meat characteristics of the mulefoot hogs. It is commonly said in hog raising circles that your meat quality should come through your boar line and that’s what we were hoping for. But it took a year to raise the boar and then four months until we had piglets and then another 10 months to raise the pigs to the size we wanted and then….

… I had the perfect chop. Yay!

OK, I may not be covering any new ground here, but I am going to go on record as saying that fried potatoes are delicious. There. I’ve said it. But what to fry them in?

Traditionally, fries were fried in lard (pork fat) or tallow (beef fat). Then the naysayers came along and said that saturated fat would kill us so we needed to start frying in vegetable oil. But vegetable oil goes rancid quickly when subjected to the high heats used in frying, so we switched to hydrogenated vegetable oils that, it turns out, kill us. So kind of a swing and a miss on that one.

Recently, butter has made resurgence and olive oil is all of the rage, but neither one is a great oil for frying. Both have distinctive flavors that alter the taste of your fries and are prone to burning, especially butter. Furthermore, olive oil isn’t exactly a local product if you live in upstate New York. Vegetable oils tend to be high in polyunsaturated fats, which oxidize and break down during high heat cooking, forming trans fats and other weird stuff.

Which brings us full circle back to lard. Lard is a locally produced fat that has a neutral flavor when used for frying. It is low in polyunsaturated fats, so it is fairly stable at high temperatures. It is significantly higher in the “healthful” monounsaturated fats than either vegetable oils or butter and we think that lard from pastured hogs is a uniquely good source of vitamin D.

Maybe the best way to think about the fat composition of lard is that it closely resembles a mixture of half butter and half olive oil. So if you’re already using butter and olive oil - and I’m sure that many of you are - you really have nothing to worry about form lard. Look, I made a graph of it:

But what about saturated fat? Lard does contain 30 to 40 percent saturated fat, significantly more than olive oil, but significantly less than butter. I would argue that saturated fat has been largely exonerated in recent health studies. Just off the top of my head, the French Paradox is still waiting to be explained, the Nurses Health Study found no correlation between saturated fat consumption and heart disease risk after following 80,000 nurses for 20 years, the recent McMaster university exhaustive review of the literature found no consistent correlation between saturated fat consumption and heart disease and low carb diets have been shown to improve cholesterol levels. (I don’t really believe the cholesterol stuff either, but this is not the place for that discussion.) I think we can safely conclude that if dietary intake of saturated fat plays a role in the progression of heart disease at all, it is a secondary role. Saturated fat has been wrongly victimized.

The Potatoes

All right! Let’s stop worrying about our health and start thinking about making some delicious fried potatoes. I’ve been working on a recipe that anyone with moderate cooking skills can consistently make at home without any special equipment and I think I’ve gotten it pretty well down.

I have several tips:

1. Slice your potatoes thin. This slices cook faster and are easier to crisp. A sharp knife helps.
2. Double fry. It’s hard to get the potatoes crispy on the first shot. Fry them until they begin to brown. Remove from the fat and let them cool. When you put them back in the hot oil they will crisp right up.
3. Use good potatoes. Ask the farmer which potatoes are best for frying. I have used Sabol Farm’s Goldens and Muddy Fingers’ Germans to good effect.

OK, so here goes. Thin sliced potatoes are easier:

Slowly melt your lard in a frying pan. I use about a half pound of lard in an eight inch cast iron skillet. The more you use, the less the heat will drop when you add your potatoes which means less greasy potatoes. When the lard has all melted, you can turn the heat up to medium high. When you see a few whisps of white smoke it is time to add the potatoes. I like to add the slices one at a time so they don’t stick. Keep your heat on medium high to high. The potatoes will drop the oil temperature and we’ll need the heat to bring it back up. Watch again for whisps of smoke (not steam) from the oil and you can back the heat off to medium or so.

You can flip the potatoes once they’re nicely browned on the side that’s facing down, after 3-5 minutes. Cook them another 3-5 minutes until they are looking nicely browned all over. Remove them from the oil and drain them on some paper towels. At this point they’ll look nice, but unless you sliced them really thin they won’t be crispy yet. Set them aside to cool while you make any other dishes to be served.

When the potatoes have cooled and you’re finishing up the accompaniments, heat the oil back up to where you see little whisps of smoke again. Add the potatoes and cook for a minute or so. If things are going right, they will crisp and brown up in just a minute or so. Remove them from the heat, salt them and serve with grilled The Piggery deli-sliced ham and Schuyler Farmstead cheese sandwiches if you’d like: