How a Very Special Ice Cream Saved a Farm
Patrice and Catherine Riauté’s farm was on the verge of bankruptcy, and the couple was already planning to sell the cows. Until a very special ice cream turned everything upside down. What kind of ice cream is it? Hold on to your hats: pork rillettes ice cream.
The farming couple lives in the French countryside, in the small village of Parce-sur-Sarthe, which has only two thousand inhabitants. On their dairy farm, they keep cows and produce around 350,000 liters of milk per year. Years ago, the pair concluded that this wasn’t enough to keep their heads financially above water. They decided to quit, sell the animals, and close the barn doors.
No, Mom, we’re not going to do that
Until they shared that decision with their son Mathieu. He was adamantly opposed and came up with a plan together with his parents to increase their earnings after all. Not selling milk, but dairy products: cheese, cream, and ice cream. They got to work experimenting with recipes. In the end, success came from an unexpected direction: their pork ice cream became a huge hit.
No bits of bacon
What does pork ice cream taste like? The Vice reporter who wrote down this story naturally had to try some. He expected a brown scoop of ice cream with bits of bacon, but that’s not what it looks like. It’s cream-colored, tastes of vanilla and milk, and is also slightly salty. The main ingredient in this unusual ice cream is the pork rillettes from the village butcher. Rillettes are a soft, spreadable meat pâté made from meat that is slowly cooked in fat. Especially for the ice cream, butcher Sébastian makes rillettes with extra fat and less salt, which are churned into ice cream with cream from the Riauté farm.
A little too much
The pork ice cream is a bestseller: when Patrice and Catherine sell it at the market, they sell out in no time. It even became so busy that Catherine decided to stop making ice cream for a while. International television programs, the radio, and other media outlets were all calling to taste her bizarre ice cream, and it became a bit too much for her. The unique ice cream meant salvation for the farm. Catherine and Patrice won’t reveal the recipe; it remains their secret.
Also read:
- Why don’t we drink pig’s milk?
- Holy cow: this cheese miracle happened to the monks of Citeaux Abbey
- American school lunches are ridiculously unhealthy (and just look at France!)
Source: Vice.com
