cochon 555: pork overdose

"Family-style" dinner (served AFTER we'd all eaten our weight in pig)

Yes friends, it’s possible to eat too much pork- and if you’re interested in doing so, then don’t miss COCHON555 when it rolls through your area. I heard about the event last year, which brings five locals chefs, five pigs, and five winemakers together for an afternoon of PIG.

Here’s a quick little description from their website:

BRADY LOWE creator of COCHON 555, and his team carefully select each participant to the event. The chefs are selected based upon their support of local agriculture and heritage species.  The pigs are sourced from local ranches devoted to sustaining heritage breeds. Participating wineries are all family owned. THE CHEFS each prepare an entire heritage breed pig from head to toe for the competition. Twenty notable judges and guests taste the chef creations and vote on a winner. Winners are known as “Prince or Princess of Porc”.

I hope you didn’t miss the “from head to toe” part. The chefs are charged with using as much of the pig as possible, which means that us guests ate brains, headcheese, liver, lard, belly and MORE. Each chef came up with 3-6 different preparations for their pigs, which means that I ate a pork cupcake with icing made from lard and topped with a Red Hot, lots of different bacon ice-creams, several types of chicarrons, pulled pork that had been marinated and cooked for 16-20 hours, a pig liver pate served on a Triscut, three different types of sausages (including blood), and lord knows what else- I can’t even remember. Here’s a list of the participating chefs:

eating pork rinds topped with a fantastic spicy sauce. i was even happier than i look.

And don’t even get me started on the wines- mostly because I don’t know anything about them and I just picked the ones that looked the prettiest (and mostly stuck to the Rose) and followed Tessa’s lead. Wineries below:

• McCrea Cellars
• Long Shadows Wineries
• Buty Winery
• Fidelitas Wines
• Elk Cove Vineyards

Also of note was that this event came right after there had been a brawl between one of the chefs and the founder of the tour, resulting in broken bones and police activity. It got a little bit of press attention, which was  probably good because word on the street was that the event hadn’t done so well with their ticket sales (tickets were $125). I, of course, “volunteered” for the event (read: Tessa texted me and said I could come if I got there in 30 minutes- and I got there in 22), and therefore got in for free.

prosciutto, aged 2.5 years. courtesy of The Swinery.

Lesson for next year: make sure to drop biz card in raffle to win a piece of a pig, butchered right in front of you- you pick the piece!