I I’m mucking around in the pig pens with a Michelin-starred chef. Black pigs covered in soft hair, with taut hinds like a bull terrier and floppy ears like a pug, are tumbling all over each other. They’re extremely cute—especially when they’re rubbing snouts with their pink cousins, who are waddling their more traditionally rounded backsides on the other side of a fence. “I fell in love with the pigs very quickly,” says American expat and IT consultant–turned–hog wrangler Randall Ellis, while showing me and chef Antony Scholtmeyer around the well-kept, super sustainable Surin Farm, which he owns with his wife in Santapong, Thailand, 30 kilometers south of Chiang Mai. “They’re really smart, they love people if you treat them well, and they grow a lot of meat real fast.” The high-dollar market for Surin Farm consists of pigs of up to 110 kilograms, the optimum weight for the finest cuts of pork. Although many of Surin Farm’s 500-plus pigs are red Duroc or white Landrace, black pigs are the most valuable because of their highly desirable meat, especially among chefs and consumers in Thailand’s evergrowing fine-dining arena. Scholtmeyer, who headed Elements restaurant in Bangkok when it first earned a Michelin star, is now executive chef at Capella Bangkok, a 101-room luxury hotel slated to open
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on the banks of the Chao Phraya River later this year. He will be buying a steady stream of Ellis’s black pigs to use in the hotel in everything from porchetta to pâté. “It’s a premium product,” he says. His admiration is validated by chefs across the culinary spectrum. Example: Menya Itto is Tokyo’s No. 1–rated ramen shop, and for its Bangkok branch, co-owner Nicholas Lam buys Ellis’s black pork when available to cook a deluxe version of their signature tsukemen, in which noodles and an intensely flavored broth are served separately. “Thai black pork beats anything we can import,” Lam says. “Whenever we’re able to get it, I use it for rosu chashu (pinkish roast pork) and pork belly chashu, very lightly simmered to create a dense but melting texture with the pure taste of pork.” One smells a sizzling trend. It wasn’t that many years ago that Thai black pigs were favored only by northern Thai hilltribes, who presumably lacked the cash for nice fat hogs with bloodlines stretching back to Denmark, Belgium, England or New Jersey, the kind fancy people dined on. But over the last three or four years, that once-widespread attitude has been changing. There’s a growing craving for perfectly marbled pieces of all-natural pork, reared in-country. “I try to use products that are as authentic and local as possible,” Scholtmeyer says.
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“Plus, the Thai black pig comes with a story, a mystique about it, that sells, like Thailand itself.”
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Berkshire black pigs have been praised for centuries for their intramuscular fat that makes the meat marbled—the result being juicier, tenderer and tastier. The British crown gifted some of them to Japan during the Meiji period and the Japanese were so impressed with the pork that they bred the Berkshires over the next hundred years to become Kurobuta (“black pig”), a closely related pedigree whose legs are black rather than white—and which in recent years have become as popular an export for Japan as Wagyu and Kobe beef. Where did those sweet British swine come from in the first place? A study published in Nature magazine found a significant amount of domesticated Chinese-pig DNA in Berkshire pigs, which the authors say dates to the onset of the agricultural revolution—when fleshy, waste-fed Asian pigs were brought in to fatten up the stock of their leaner, free-range Euro cousins. “In the county of Berkshire in England, a reddish or sandy colored pig strain (sometimes spotted) was latterly refined with a cross of Siamese and Chinese blood (~300 years ago), bringing the color ngland’s