Our Animals

Breed, Landscape and Flavour
At Wass Farm, flavour begins long before the curing room. The quality of charcuterie is determined first by the animal itself — its breed, its maturity, its fat, and the life it has lived. We breed all of our own pedigree rare-breed pork and use wild venison from our own land, selected not for speed or yield, but for character and depth.

Mangalitsa: The Wool Pig, Revered for Its Fat
The Mangalitsa — sometimes called the “wool pig” for its distinctive curly coat — is a slow-growing Hungarian breed prized across Europe for the quality of its fat. Unlike modern commercial breeds developed for lean efficiency, Mangalitsa matures slowly and lays down abundant, fine-textured intramuscular fat.
This fat is the reason we use it.
Mangalitsa fat is soft, creamy and richly flavoured, with a clean melt and remarkable stability during long curing. It carries seasoning gently and allows us to work with restraint rather than intensity. In charcuterie, this means depth and sweetness without heaviness.
Our Mangalitsa pigs are raised outdoors on pasture and in woodland, where they are free to root and forage naturally. Their diet is supplemented with apple mulch from a local cider producer — a by-product that adds a subtle, rounded sweetness to the meat.
Because the breed grows slowly, animals are harvested at full maturity, producing pork with developed muscle structure and well-distributed fat. This maturity is critical in long-cured charcuterie, where time amplifies quality.
We choose Mangalitsa because it behaves exceptionally well in cure and produces a finished product of depth, balance and texture.

Middle White: A Yorkshire Heritage Breed
The Middle White is a traditional Yorkshire breed once prized for its flavour and compact, well-marbled carcass. Unlike high-output commercial pigs, the Middle White was historically valued for eating quality rather than speed of growth.
It produces pork with a slightly firmer fat and a balanced meat-to-fat ratio, making it particularly well suited to certain styles of salami and whole muscle cures.
Raised outdoors at Wass Farm, our Middle Whites live in pasture and woodland environments that support steady growth and natural behaviour. The result is pork with clarity of flavour and structural integrity — qualities that matter deeply when meat is cured and air-dried over months.
Where Mangalitsa offers richness and luxurious fat, Middle White brings structure and definition. Together, the breeds allow us to produce a range of charcuterie with nuance rather than uniformity.

Wild Venison: From Our Woodland and Fields
Alongside our rare-breed pork, we also work with wild venison from our own woodland and surrounding fields.
Deer populations are carefully managed within the local landscape, and venison provides a naturally lean, deeply flavoured meat that contrasts beautifully with pork. Because wild venison contains very little fat, it requires thoughtful balancing when used in charcuterie — we pair ours with the high quality fat from our own free range pigs to achieve the right texture and cure stability.
The result is charcuterie with a darker, more mineral profile: savoury, clean, and reflective of the landscape from which it comes.
Working with wild meat connects our charcuterie directly to the rhythms of the land. It allows us to use what the environment provides responsibly and seasonally, rather than relying solely on farmed supply.

A Considered Approach
Whether farmed or wild, every ingredient we use is selected for flavour, behaviour in cure, and integrity of origin. Breed, maturity, fat quality and land all shape the finished product.
Exceptional charcuterie begins with exceptional animals.