Buitengewone Varkens

Who's behind it

Cas den Boer and Josse Haarhuis keep pigs at Ingen, along the Rhine in Gelderland, that live outside their whole lives. They started small and grow at about 25 percent per year. The base is a herd of around ten sows, with about two hundred market pigs spread across several locations. The sows are Berkshire and Bonte Bentheimer, bred by a Duroc boar. That cross gives meat with firm intramuscular marbling.

How the pigs live

The pigs are born outside and stay outside. A market pig here has at least sixty square metres, often more, which comes to 25 to 40 times the space of an organic pig. Sows build their own nest, piglets grow up in family groups and stay with the sow for eight to twelve weeks. Slaughter happens at around ten months; in conventional farming it's six. The extra time, the movement and the rooting in the soil show in the colour and flavour of the meat, and in fat that comes to temperature slowly.

The feed is circular: waste streams from the food industry. Every piece of meat traces back to the farm. Buitengewone Varkens works with the whole animal and makes its own charcuterie, from coppa and lomo to salami, pancetta, guanciale and lardo. About eighty percent goes to restaurants, the rest directly to consumers.

In your kitchen

Breed, age, space and origin are all verifiable, so you can simply talk about it at the table. Guanciale and lardo give a dish its fat and flavour, coppa and lomo go straight onto the board. Because you get the whole animal, you can build a menu that runs from prime cuts to sausage, with little waste. When a guest asks where it comes from, you name the farm at Ingen, pigs that live outside and get ten months to grow.