Going Whole Hog

The New York Times has a piece today about a heritage breed of pig from Hungary that has been bred back from the edge of extinction. The Mangalitsa pig has much higher levels of body fat than the pigs we're used to in the US and they take longer to mature. Much of this results from our misguided obsession with eliminating fat from our diet, so pigs have been bred much leaner in the past fifty years than they used to be. The USDA recommends cooking pork to 160 degrees internal temperature to ensure food safety, particularly against trichinosis. The thing is, we all have had pork cooked to that temperature, and it's far too dry. In fact, cooking to 137 degrees kills most of the bugs, so you can be reasonably assured of better tasting meat and little chance of illness if you cook to 135-140 (the temperature will rise another 5-10 degrees depending on cooking method as you let it rest).