An 1/8 of a pig

It sounds like a lot, but it's not really. Blue Rooster Farm, which started selling its meat at the New Morning Farm market in DC a few months ago, emailed customers with an offer to buy 1/8 of a pig in late September. The haul is a collection of pork chops, bacon, sausage, Boston butt, cured ham slices and a couple of other cuts. Some cuts aren't included and are presumably sold separately. It is essentially a big shopping bag of frozen meat that fit easily into our limited side-by-side freezer.

So far, as with all the other meat we've gotten from Blue Rooster, the pork has been terrific. These are Berkshire pigs grown only to a year old and a hundred pounds. The bacon and ham have been flavorful and juicy (saftig in the German sense), the sausage fresh and mildly flavored. It's not that it's a big savings buying in "bulk" like this -- it's only a 10% discount from buying each cut retail -- but that you get it at all and you get it all at once so you have a nice store in your fridge.

When I picked up my 1/8 pig I jokingly told Julie Hurst from Blue Rooster that I've decided to regard buying meat frozen as a plus. For a long time, I resisted buying frozen meat at farmers' markets. I longed for the markets in France where refrigerated counters display the fresh meat openly. That's just not the way it's done here, and these vacuum-packed fresh frozen meats don't lose any quality over what you buy in the supermarket, even WholeFoods. After all, how does that lamb get here from Iceland and New Zealand?

The advantage is you get local farm-raised meat, butchered by local butchers, that is healthier, fresher, and as a rule tastier. Blue Rooster's lamb and beef are also delicious.

I'm  not quite there yet but I don't exclude the possibility of getting a deep-freeze in the basement to store a side of beef or a 1/2 pig. Once growing up, we bought a side of beef and stored it in a rented freezer locker. I thought it was pretty cool at the time to take a trip to the locker and pick up some steak and ground beef. It seemed like free food, though of course it wasn't. My mother grew up on a farm and I think for her it was a small way of recapturing that feeling. Maybe I have that gene.