A FORMER dairy enterprise, Barossa Heritage Pork was crowned a winner at the recent Brand SA Regional Food Awards.
It was the first major award for producer Michael Wohlstadt, who said he was honoured to have received the award for the Barossa region.
The brand was the only meat product to pick up a prize, alongside other SA regional food winners such as Pope's Honey, Woodside Cheese Wrights, Sundrop Farms, Almondco Australia, Mahalia Coffee and Golden North Ice Cream.
Michael has farmed at his property, Karrawirra, at the foot of the Barossa hills near Lyndoch, since he was 23 and always had a passion for milking cows.
What started solely as a dairy farm with 30 to 40 cows, has developed into a more intimate, mixed farming enterprise, that produced quality milk-fed pork.
"I wanted to go back to milking cows but I couldn't do it for just a hobby - I needed to have a business basis to it," Michael said.
While cheese production was a possibility, it was a complex process, so Michael decided to develop another unusual product.
"It's about three years since I started - this is the first major award for Barossa Heritage Pork," he said.
But it is not the only outing for the brand this year, with chefs from across Australia sampling his delicious pork belly at the 2015 Gourmet Traveller Awards in Sydney in August.
Magill Estate chefs Scott Huggins and Emma McCaskill, now regular clients, won the award for best new talent and chose Michael's pork as the centerpiece of their dish.
Michael milks a dozen Jerseys to feed his 70 head of heritage Berkshire and Tamworth pigs.
He buys them as freshly weaned piglets from an SA breeder.
The pigs are bought as six-week-olds, and butchered at five to six months.
At feeding time, the pigs scramble and scream to get the best position along the trough to devour the full cream Jersey milk.
They are fed twice daily, in addition to a diet of crushed local grain and grazing.
While the practice of milk-fed pork was common 50 years ago, particularly in the Barossa and Mid North regions, the bulk of the industry had since switched to commercial production.
"As far as I'm aware, there is no one else who does milk-fed pigs in SA and it's one of the things you find is a point of difference for pork in the industry," Michael said.
"Pork is very sensitive to what you feed it.
"As a consequence, the texture of the meat is quite delicate, moist and creamy."
In Europe there is a long history of feeding pigs on milk, chestnuts or cherries to give meat "real depth of flavour".
Michael says heritage breeds are "more robust to being free range", partly because of their hair which protects them from sunburn, which commercial breeds are more susceptible to.
"They grow slower but they also have intramuscular fat, a bit like Wagyu beef, which adds to the flavor," he said.
* Full report in Stock Journal, November 13, 2014 issue.
