Just One Thing Missing

I’m very lucky to have several freezers that stay well-stocked with a variety — you might say “bio-diversity” — of wild meat and fishes.

There are the staples, of course, beautiful maroon steaks of venison from whitetail deer, big, burly roasts of black bear, tender breasts of wild turkey, and flakey white fillets of haddock and pollock. And there are the transient visitors too, occasional denizens of the deep-freeze, like gray squirrel or green iguana. If we dig around in the lower layers, surely there’s a moose roast to be found, or a tenderloin of alligator, or perhaps a salmon or a sea-duck breast or two.

While it certainly isn’t Noah’s Arc, it does keep us afloat in the deluge of factory-reared beef, chicken, and pork that fills the store-shelves in modern America.

Whatever the recipe calls for, we have a game meat to substitute — supplant might be a better word — anything you’d find in a typical recipe.

Beef is replaced by deer or bear.

Chicken by turkey or squirrel.

Pork by, um … wait… ok, that’s “the one thing that’s missing”! I’ve had no pork substitute. In fact, for the last several years I haven’t had to buy any meat at all, except the occasional bacon.

So when my good friend Tony Seichrist, owner and head chef of The Wyld, Savannah, Georgia’s celebrated dockside restaurant, invited me down South for a hog hunt, I was ‘game’.

As I packed my bags, my wife Avani’s only request was that I “bring home the bacon”. And that’s just what I intended to do.

Suffice it to say, that hunt was a success, and you can hear all the details here: WildFed Podcast Episode #66 — The Wild Hog Conundrum with Tony Seichrist. We discuss the hunt itself, but also the butchering and processing, which resulted in some wild-inspired porchetta, pancetta, and of course… some smokey maple bacon too.

Here in the state of Maine, the country’s wild hog “problem” feels pretty remote. We simply don’t have feral hogs here on our landscape. And while I lament the severity of the damage this deleterious, non-native species can do to local ecology, the idea of a problem made of pork sometimes sounds like a problem I wish we had. It motivates me, at least, to become part of the solution!

So, after flying home with a pair of rifles, 50 pounds of meat in a checked cooler, and another 25 pounds in my carry-on — I was, as requested, bringing home that bacon.

We’re slowly experimenting with the meat, and of course the rendered lard, from these feral hogs. While much of it is still curing, the meat we have eaten has been incredible. The fat is neutral and clean and adds some variety to the bear oil that I’ve grown so fond of.

So now, there’s nothing missing. We have it all! For now at least. I just need that invite from Tony again next year, so I can help with his pork problem. In this case, one person’s problem is another person’s solution!