Raven & Boar is a woman-owned farm founded in 2009 in East Chatham, where Ruby Duke raises about 150 heritage-breed pigs in pastures and forests on the nearly 100-acre property. A division of the farm is Duke’s Hudson Valley Charcuterie, which makes a variety of sausage and other products using Raven & Boar pork and locally sourced ingredients. It is within weeks of opening an on-farm processing facility that will vertically integrate operations from the raising of pigs to butchering, fabricating cuts and sausage and making charcuterie, to marketing and distributing.
Free to roam fields and woodlands, Raven & Boars’s herds are mostly Large Black, Gloucester Old Spot and Red Wattle breeds, with a few others, including Berkshire, Tamworth and Mulefoot, Duke said. She said they are fed grains, grass, whey from local cheese producers, vegetables and fruits, and they naturally forage for roots and acorns. The farm processes three to five pigs a week year-round, according to Duke.
One of Hudson Valley Charcuterie’s sausages is called Atraiux, spelled atriaux or attriaux in the areas of Switzerland and France where it originated. According to the Swiss Culinary Heritage website entry for atriaux, “There are about as many different ways to make (it) as there are producers.” The only constants are pork and pork liver, with many traditions calling for additional organ meats, all ground with other flavorings, shaped into a ball and wrapped in caul fat, a membrane that (mostly) melts away when cooked.
If you’ll pardon the pun, Hudson Valley Charcuterie’s Atraiux runs hog-wild with its inclusion of non-muscle pig parts, among them salivary glands (yes, that’s first on the label, after pork meat), liver, kidney, heart, tongue, cheeks, lymph nodes and fat. The sausage also includes parsley, shallot, chive, white wine, salt, pepper, mustard, allspice, sugar and oregano.
It is a heady eating experience, bold…
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