"From 15 pounds to 250+ I haven't had a bad piece of feral pork."
As the expert said....................
Whenever I see one of these "wild hogs aren't fit to eat" threads I am astounded by the lack of simple logic applied to the issue.
Take a moment and read the following:
After you do then do a web search of Spanish Hogs or Spanish Ham.
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American food lovers have long prized caviar and truffles, placing these gourmet foods in a class that commanded high prices for even a scant quantity. To that luxury list you can now add jamón Ibérico, the free-range long cured Spanish ham that is so prized that its arrival for the first time in the United States has caused a collective swoon in the world of fine dining. For years ham-o-philes had no choice but to do without or to sneak contraband ham through customs, packing it in innocent looking bags with all the ingenuity of world class spies or drug smugglers.
Now, thanks to Embutidos Fermín, one of Spain's finest traditional producers, real jamón Ibérico is gloriously and legally available in the United States and, although the price tag is steep, it's still a bargain compared to the aforementioned truffles and caviar.
Once upon a time, a couple of centuries back, almost all hams from Southern Europe were made in more or less the same way from hogs whose breeding hadn’t changed much since they first arrived on the scene about a million years ago. It is the combination of the ancient genetics of these pigs, the way they are raised, and how hams are made that distinguishes jamón Ibérico from every other ham in the world.
Over the course of the last hundred years European farmers have raised more and more faster growing animals that could be raised en masse in confined circumstances, other breeds supplanted the hardy Ibérico especially. With the advent of industrial hog raising in the decades since the Second World War, Ibérico hogs all but disappeared except for the west of Spain, in a three hundred mile swath extending from Salamanca to Jerez, the Ibérico continued to reign supreme.
While many high-ticket hams, such as Italian prosciutto, jambon de Bayonne, and even Serrano are almost universally made with factory-raised hybrid breeds, jamón Ibérico is still made exclusively from Ibérico hogs. The heart of traditional Spanish ham country is known as the dehesa, made up of huge landholdings originally awarded to the great lords and knights who re-took Spain from the Moorish occupiers in the late Middle Ages. The animal husbandry system they put in place nearly a millennium ago is still in practice today. Large forested tracts, interspersed with grassy meadows provide a natural, semi-wild environment for the raising of cattle, sheep, and pigs, that are rotated through the course of the year. Of these three, the pig is often referred to as "the king of the dehesa" and the land is first and foremost managed to produce fat, healthy hogs.
Ibérico hogs will have their feeding supplemented with barley and other grains from March until the first acorns fall, but from September until late February the hogs dine primarily on the fruits of the oak tree and put on nearly forty percent of their weight. All of their fat is derived from acorns. It is high in desirable monounsaturated fat, almost as much as olive oil, which is the fundamental basis of the Mediterranean diet. Only those hogs that have been left to feed on acorns for these months can bear the highest classification 100% puro de bellota-100% percent acorn.
The flavor that Ibérico hams develop is rich, nuanced, sweet and nutty, completely unlike the more pallid taste of even the most expensive conventionally raised hogs. Ibérico hogs are also allowed to live longer and put on more weight. This regimen affords them more opportunity to exercise and the meat of these hogs becomes very well marbled. This has important consequences in the production process of jamón Ibérico.
Well-marbled meat can age longer without drying out, and the longer a ham ages the more complex the flavor it develops. First cured in salt and then aged in the fresh mountain air of western Spain, the hams rely on the most natural "cuisine" of all, the four seasons. The summer heat, the winter cold, and the changes in humidity are all in perfect harmony with the maturing process of a ham. It is said that a truly rich and nuanced ham—nutty and meaty in taste, smooth and silky in texture—must pass through "dos ferias de Sevilla." This means that a great ham, first put up to age in the winter time, must mature through at least two summer seasons when Mother Nature "cooks" the raw material, turning it into a powerful and elegant delicacy.
When a ham is finally ready to be consumed, it requires an expert and loving hand to slice it into the translucent thin slices, known as lascas, that are traditionally served on plates that hold 100 grams worth of jamón Ibérico. One can also cook with this ham but eating jamón Ibérico all by itself, washed down with a glass of dry sherry or crisp albariño, is the preferred way to enjoy this ancient Iberian comfort food. The first time you taste an acorn-fed Ibérico ham you will realize that everything else in the world that calls itself ham is something quite different and nowhere near as delicious.
Ham is not the only way to enjoy the meat of Ibérico hogs— cured lomo (tenderloin), shoulders, and chorizo sausages are also very popular and somewhat less costly. If you find yourself in Extremadura or Andalucía during hog killing time, you also can buy the most delicious and juicy fresh pork you have ever tasted at the slaughterhouses of the major ham and sausage manufacturers, but this meat is so prized that you will rarely find it outside of this region.
Irma Rombauer, the celebrated author of The Joy of Cooking, once defined eternity as "a ham and two people." She was referring to how long it took to use up a country ham. I am not sure that her imaginary two people every tasted a true Ibérico ham. This jewel of Spanish gastronomy has a way of disappearing very fast!
Peter Kaminsky is a well known author on the subjects of food and flyfishing. He is the author of many books including Pig Perfect: Encounters with Remarkable Swine. His next book is "7 Fires" in collaboration with Argentina's famed Francis Mallmann
I don't dig holes in people yards. Do you?