The Pork Olympics

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The Pork Olympics By Sam Hiersteiner Cochon 555 is the most important yearly food tour and competition that celebrates heritage pig breeds, sustainable food sourcing, and local farmers and winemakers in all their glorious togetherness. Below is the story of how this culinary phenomenon was born – and how it has changing the way the food world thinks and works. You can’t fault Brady Lowe for overusing the term “blew my mind.” The man who founded Cochon 555 throws around the term freely when he talks about the chefs, winemakers, farmers, and other links in the farm-­‐to-­‐table chain that bring the “Pork Olympics,” as it has become known, to life. Interestingly for an impresario, though, he does not tend to say much about the “average people” (read: foodie freak jobs like me) who go to Cochon. So I’ll do it for him. Cochon 555, which I attended in DC last year, blew my mind right out the top of my head. It started when I stumbled on a website posting that nearly made me choke on the rib bone I was probably gnawing on at the time. Five heritage breed pigs. Five of DC’s best chefs. Five winemakers. I didn’t have to be asked twice. I quickly dropped three figures and started a vigil outside the Ritz-­‐Carlton DC. When the doors finally opened, I was physically assaulted by the smell of roasting pork. I’m not talking a mixed bag of restaurant kitchen smells with a faint trace of bacon. I’m talking the type of pure essence that is hard to find unless you’re standing next to a pit-­‐roasting hog. It was like the best punch in the face I’ve ever had. The next couple of hours were blurry. Did I just eat pig’s head torchon? Was that a pistachio truffle lollipop draped with lardo? Posole with slow-­‐roasted pork... bacon ice cream sundae… Pork Slap beer…seven kinds of pate? Is that Ryan Farr of 4505Meats fame, and did he just butcher a whole pig in an hour? Is he business card raffling all the best cuts, including the pig’s face stuffed with its own shoulder? Did my girlfriend just break up with me out of disgust? Am I in the emergency room? Yes on almost all fronts, although I survived and her adventurous performance was yet more proof that proposing was the best decision I ever made. But the over-­‐stimulation made me lose sight of what this is all about, and I slept on it for about a year. With Cochon 555 approaching again in DC, I decided to try to follow the story all the way from source to store. Given that I couldn’t find a good written history of the event’s origins, I harassed Brady Lowe mercilessly until I got him on the phone. What he told me, well, it blew what was left of my mind. Husbanding Cochon is of humble-­‐but-­‐high-­‐end origins. Lowe founded Taste Network, which quickly became the premier wine and cheese tasting event in Atlanta, in the early 2000s. As he describes it, “I was one of the first people in the country to do dedicated events around wine and cheese pairings, and over four or


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