Winston Blick has heads in his freezer. And hearts. And legs.
The legs have hooves on them, and the other body parts come from animals, too, so no need to call the authorities. The only emergency is the freezer-space kind.
Blick is running out of room for the big hunks of pig he has on his hands as a result of the laudable, but in some ways confounding, locavore dining trend.
More and more chefs, tapping into the local-foods movement, are getting their pork, beef and other meats straight from nearby farmers instead of far-off factory farms. Often, that means buying the whole animal.
By getting away from factory-farmed meats, the chefs are aiming to offer a higher quality product, help the environment and improve animal welfare. But they sometimes find themselves wondering: Once the prime cuts are gone, what do they do with the other 100 pounds of pig?
"It's easy to sell a chop," Blick said, "but everything else …"
Chefs sorting out what to do with these "off cuts" have something in common with home cooks rediscovering canning and home-fermented sauerkraut, said Warren Blasco, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County who this semester will teach a course called "The Many Meanings of Meat."
"There's kind of a sense of re-education going on," said Blasco, author of "Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food." "Pickles and jams — and it's terribly inconvenient to do it, and particularly if you don't know what you're doing. But there is a sense of wonder, 'Gee, this is what people used to do.' It's amazing the skills we have given up. … You have all these parts of the animal that people don't know what to do with anymore."
It's no coincidence that house-made charcuterie has popped up on more menus at a time when chefs find themselves saddled with lots of (local, grass-fed, free-range) mystery meat. But the scraps that happily find a high-value home in cured saucisson and pate aren't the big problem.
It's the mid-level hunks of meat that aren't typically part of high-end dining — eye of the round beef roasts, for example, or pork necks — that chefs struggle to put to good use.
"It's a huge challenge," said Patrick Morrow, chef-owner of Bluegrass in South Baltimore.
Since Bluegrass opened nine months ago, Morrow has purchased all of his beef from a small Harford County farm called Piedmont Ridge. The pasture-raised meat comes butchered, but it's the entire animal, about 800 pounds of useable meat, two to three times a month.
"It works for the farmer," Morrow said of the whole-animal arrangement. "Some farmers aren't able to break down and split the cuts. Then they're left with the middle meat and they're not making the money."
To make whole animals work for the chef, too, Morrow has needed culinary invention, creative menu-writing, a side-deal with another restaurant and a good bit of freezer space.
"At first we were, like, what are we going to do with this?" said Morrow, who last summer started buying whole pigs. "It was a learning experience."
Among the things Morrow has learned: That eye of the round makes for tasty beef carpaccio, more flavorful than the traditional filet variety, if it's sliced thinly enough. He's also found that tougher cuts of steak become fine-dining fare if cooked sous vide with butter and herbs.
"The fibers break down," he said. "You still get food flavor and it's not as chewy as if you just grilled it."
He's made head cheese with pork, but billed it with a more appealing Southern term.
"It's kind of scary when you hear 'head cheese' and people are reluctant," he said. "So you call it 'souse.'"
There's no soft-pedaling the corned beef heart and tongue, nor the pork liver mousse. "There are some people who are skeptical, and they try it and say, 'Oh my god, that's good,'" he said.
Even when Morrow is well-stocked with prime cuts, there might not be enough of any one type to feed a crowd on a busy night. So the menu features "Piedmont Ridge Cut of the Day," which could start out as rib eyes and become New York strips as the evening goes on.
"It could be the 'Cut of the Hour,'" he said.
Morrow made a side deal with nearby Abbey Burger Bistro, which takes 300 to 400 pounds of each cow in the form of ground beef. (Morrow doesn't use much burger meat and grinds what he needs himself from scraps of sirloin or fillet.)
Morrow also has reluctantly embraced the freezer for cuts like short ribs, saving them up until the quantity and weather are right to put them on the menu.
"You're getting this beautiful fresh cow in and you hate to put it in the freezer, but you kind of have to," he said. "Who wants braised short ribs and a heavy sauce [in summer]? It sounds delicious now."
The whole-animal challenge is newer to Blick, who buys most of his meats from a conventional purveyor, Fells Point Wholesale Meats. That meat is all-natural — it is raised without the routine use of antibiotics in feed — but it comes from the Midwest, something Blick does not necessarily find objectionable.
"You can't ignore the fact that the best place to grow large animals is where there's big open spaces," he said.
But Blick, who already uses local produce, eggs and chickens, has grown more interested in the local-foods movement and begun exploring nearby sources for meats. When they're available, he buys pasture-raised pigs from Forever Endeavor Farm in Baldwin and offers them as a special.
He feels very passionately that none of the animal should go to waste, thanks, in part to a lesson his grandparents taught him after he shot a groundhog as a kid.
"I shot a groundhog and wasn't supposed to, and guess what I had to eat for three days?" he said. "It was horrible. It was greasy. It was like a really big rat."
In a far more palatable way, Blick is trying to serve up the same waste-not, want-not ethic at his restaurant.
"It gives the animal dignity," he said. "I think it's arrogant to cut off the good parts and leave everything else."
Cutting up a whole pig is a challenge for Blick, who has no formal training in butchering but got pointers from Fells Point Meat. Blick and two sous chefs who cut up a pig with him a few months ago admitted they were just feeling their way with a bright yellow Sawzall.
"Any day you can cook with power tools is a good day," said sous chef Dave Whaley, who approached the job as he might an overheated engine. "Whenever may car breaks down, I pop my hood and stare at it until it makes sense. I stare at the animal and break it down with my eyes."
Which isn't to say they couldn't have used the butchering equivalent of AAA. It had come to the rescue last summer, in the form of a Laotian dishwasher, when Whaley tried to carve up a whole lamb.
"I had a whole lamb there, struggling with it, trying to figure out what to do with it," Whaley said. "He [the dishwasher] comes over and starts showing me where to cut. He literally comes over and cracks the thing in half."
Do-it-yourself butchery is not the lark in Laos that it is here.
"We do it out of luxury," Blick said. "It's a game to me. They do it out of necessity."
Even in the land of plenty, it's tough to make it in the restaurant business, especially in a bad economy. So Blick is serious about getting everything he can out of his pigs — even the skin will find a use, as dog treats.
"You have to wring as much money out of it as you can," he said.
Blick was making his own pate when he opened Clementine in April 2008 and continues to expand his charcuterie. The restaurant has added a curing room at one end of the main dining room for hams, saucisson, pepperoni and pork loin. Some diners have complained about the view: The hams, visible through a window, still have legs and hoofs attached.
Imagine if they could see the contents of the freezer.
Blick is confident his frozen stash of heads hearts and legs will soon find their way onto restaurant plates — or onto the shelves of The Green Onion, a local-foods market he plans to open this spring one block north of the Harford Road restaurant. (Along with local produce, prepared foods and cheeses, he will sell his charcuterie.)
"Even I have to admit, I'm not eager to make head cheese," Blick said. "But we will make head cheese."