This explosion of flavor and intermuscular fat and health and robustness.

"Consistently, the thing that we always have is the pig shown off in different parts. So when you get a pork dish, you’re getting all different parts of the animal; you’ll never just get a loin here. It's served all together — sort of a pig plate. Sometimes there’s forms of it that are in sausages, sometimes there’s a cured portion; we make bacon from the face a lot. The pigs are raised outdoors in the woods, they move around a lot. Their feed is a high-quality grain mix that is grown mostly by a farmer we’re quite close to. Since we’ve been utilizing his grains, I think the taste of the pork has improved. They’re generally happy pigs and they live all winter outside. We slaughter three pigs a week here, so we have a lot of pigs.

We’re now moving into crossing breeds — we’re crossing Berkshire and Ossabow (the pigs that are the lineage to the jamón Ibérico). The first generation after a cross, you get what’s called hybrid vigor. You get this boost of weight gain and fat conversion, and you get a boost in flavor. It’s not fatty, it’s an infiltration of fat; it’s like a well-marbled steak. We’re getting a cross with all these characteristics that explode with more flavor. It’s such a phenomenon in nature that we forget about. It’s almost like somebody is up in the sky encouraging diversity by giving you the benefits of mixing breeds. When you taste a good mixed breed, it’s just better in every respect. The breeding to me is the most interesting subject in the world. As much as Jean-Francois loved that pork because we did something good, there’s something so much more powerful in raising a good pig — it’s in the genetics. This explosion of flavor and intermuscular fat and health and robustness. And the interesting thing is you only get it in the first generation, then it disappears. I think breeding is the next thing."