The talk among customers clustering around the Hillside Heritage Farm stand at the Lexington Farmers Market often seems to be about flavor. People plaintively tell John or Clay Contini that they long for “pork that tastes like it used to.” I have made slow-cooked barbeques from Heritage Hill Boston Butt roasts and uncured hams. These cuts of (mostly) pastured, heritage pork taste better than most pork I have ever eaten.
I particularly like Hillside Heritage Canadian bacon and bratwurst. These are two types of pork for which few of us Kentuckians have childhood taste memories — at least not of locally grown and processed versions. So, really, I have no idea whether these delicious cuts taste like pork used to. To me, they taste exceptional.
Hillside Heritage is a family farm in Lancaster, Kentucky. The family members who come to the Lexington Farmers Market credit their pork’s quality to the Tamworth-Berkshire heritage breeding, the land, and the literal care and feeding the animals receive.
Our family eats lots of Stonecross Farm pork, also sold at the Lexington Farmers Market, at the Blue Moon Farm stand. In fact, we now depend on Stonecross knockwurst for a high flavor meal every two weeks or so. We grill these plump sausages, which seem to us like the world’s best hot dogs, and spend part of each meal rhapsodizing — well, at least talking with a lot of excitement and appreciation — about the taste and the texture of the gloriously crunchy crisp, dark skin.
It is exciting for us customers to have Kentucky-raised pork options expand. It is particularly sweet to have the pork be carefully raised and ultra-delicious.
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The world is coming to visit central Kentucky this year for the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games. To help our visitors know more about Kentucky’s food and food ways, Savoring Kentucky is rolling out 116 Savory Kentucky Bites, one for each of the 100 days before WEG begins, and 16 for the days during WEG, September 25 – October 10. Today’s Savory Bite is number 34 .
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