Closing Out on the Butchering, Kelly!

Here's the pork, all packed for the trip
back to Alexandria.  I was burning some
red oak I've been curing in the background.

Today will be my last post about the pig butchering that I was part of a couple of weekends ago.  At least for now.  

Looking back on it, I am remembering some hard work – everyone of us talked about hitting the sack early after the first day’s efforts on Friday.  But as I told David when I got home on Sunday night, something about the experience was very relaxing; it’s not often that I could say that I started the work week as refreshed as I felt that Monday morning after the event.

There is still a stockpile of memories that I haven’t managed to capture in the blog, beginning with one of the tales Mark was spinning during the BS session before we went off to the slaughter.  The rest of the story will come back to me eventually, but the punchline still resonates:  “Well, roadkill is just about all I eat anymore.”

Then there was the comment from my dad about making the sausage (indicating true insider knowledge):  “Were those ‘natural sausage casings’ creek washed and stump slung?  You were born about two generations too late!”

Ted, one of my colleagues at the butchering who took a lot of pictures and shared them with me over on Shutterfly, had this to say:

A view of some of the larger roasts...
in one of the three fridges I'm storing it in!

“From pig to pot to pan to plate, the photos in this album are from last weekend's visit to Luray where I helped brother-in-law Bill and others butcher 4 hogs. … the bulk of the butcherin' took place on Friday; sausage, scrapple, packaging, and clean-up on Saturday; and Sunday breakfast. We used to do this almost annually many years ago and this is the first time for me in many years. Back then, Ann and I would buy some pork, but this year was just to participate in the process for the social camaraderie and metaphysical benefits of doing so. But that demands more commentary, so I'll let it go for now. Thanks to Bill, Jessica, Jesse, Tammy, Mark, Susie, David, Heather, Jim, and Eric for letting me get in the way.”

Among Ted's photos were a couple of shots of the breakfast he mentions.  They served up scrapple - I have to say that his photos of it in the pan and on the plate look scrumptious.  Mary and I will break down and have some soon, but in the meantime, I have enjoyed sharing some of it with the neighbors (a big part of the joy is the opportunity to regale the big city folk with my butchering tale!).

Mary and finally had a chance to enjoy some of the pork this weekend.  I made up some chops on Saturday night and served them up with a nice bit of roasted butternut squash.  There were leftovers (most of the chops are packed in fours), so for Sunday dinner we made a stirfry with some of the cabbage that is still growing out in Mary’s Alexandria truck patch.

Breakfast sausage.  Bob Evans,
 eat your heart out!

Sausage and mushroom quiche!

We also had breakfast sausage this morning – Chris told me they did too.  The simple recipe I chose, salt, pepper and sage, is a hit.  Mary and I had some leftover, so I put it in a quiche with some swiss cheese and mushrooms.  We’ll be eating on that for a few days!

So getting back to the point of all of this.  Some things finally came together for me about our little house out there – Hawksbill Cabin.  Ted’s put it best in his intro to the photos when he mentions the social camaraderie and the metaphysical benefits.  There’s something to all of this, resonating deep in one of the chromosomes that ties us all together.  I can’t wait until next year.

Parts is...parts

As folks took turns stirring the pudding,
there was quite a bit of socializing going on.

As Wikipedia has it:


Scrapple is traditionally a mush of pork scraps and trimmings combined with cornmeal and flour, often buckwheat flour, and spices. The mush is formed into a semi-solid congealed loaf, and slices of the scrapple are then pan-fried before serving. Scraps of meat left over from butchering, not used or sold elsewhere, were made into scrapple to avoid waste. Scrapple is best known as a rural American food of the Mid-Atlantic States…. Scrapple and pon haus (the Wikipedia article says this is a traditional Amish name for scrapple) are commonly considered an ethnic food of the Pennsylvania Dutch, including the Mennonites and Amish. Scrapple is found in supermarkets throughout the region in both fresh and frozen refrigerated cases.

Mark worked over the meat for the scrapple.
I turned down at least 3 invitations to try some.

The preparations for making scrapple began on Friday evening, as we were winding down from breaking the carcasses up into smaller roasts and other cuts. The organ meat, retrieved earlier during the day (after David’s short demonstration of how to rummage through the gut tub for the heart and liver, I did it myself) had been put aside for this purpose, as had some parts of the head. This was mixed with a bit of lard and other scraps to make the meat basis of the dish.

I was impressed that there was quite a bit of activity involved in making it; there was a very social aspect to it as you can see from the photos, and of course, the cooked organ meat was carefully handled and diced into appropriately sized morsels.

I politely declined tasting any of the “yummy bits” during the process, preferring to defer the pleasant surprise that surely awaits until the dish was fully prepared. Now, with a dozen or so tubs in the fridge, I’m still wondering whether we will eat any…although I have three or four neighbors signed up for tubs, and some friends in Luray are known partakers.

What's cooking?  "I don't know the word for
it in English."

Why the hesitancy? I suppose it is because my family never really ate any of the foods – separately, or in a single recipe – that are part of this dish, so it’s something I’m not used to eating. Maybe salvation lies further on down in the Wikipedia article, though:

Scrapple is usually eaten as a breakfast food, and can be served plain or with apple butter, ketchup, jelly, maple syrup, honey, or even mustard, and accompanied by eggs, potatoes, or pancakes. In some regions, such as New England, scrapple is mixed with scrambled eggs and served with toast. In the Philadelphia area, scrapple is sometimes fried and then mashed with fried eggs, horseradish and ketchup.

Scrapple is a community food - this is only part of
the yield, which was shared amongst all of us.

With enough condiments, one could probably disguise the strong tastes and make it through the first time. After that, my butchering friends assure me, I’ll be hooked.

(Note: It was my plan to conclude the butchering posts today, but there have been a number of comments on Facebook that I think I will compile into a wrap-up. Plus, one of my colleagues from the experience has sent a link to his photos of the two days, and I’d like to share that. So look for that extra post on Monday.)

The Wikipedia article on scrapple is here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple

Sausage Wrangling

Demonstrating that I can handle my
sausage (at least under close supervision).

“To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.”


There is some dispute about the author of that quote, but it’s one you hear quite a bit around here in Washington. The law making process especially has been particularly ugly these last two years, with this Congress and this President, so I figured the sausage making we planned for the second day of our butchering project was likely to be inspirational by comparison.

In some earlier posts, while preparing for the events I’ve been writing about these last few days, I mentioned the research I did before buying equipment, looking into processes, and talking over other aspects of butchering with David. He’d referred me to the Google for sausage recipes, and reassured me that I could figure that part out better once we got started. So I came prepared with the idea of doing some breakfast sausage, chorizo, and bratwursts, and with vague ideas of the recipes.

After we finished the big breaking down, there was a fairly long time that we worked on trimming down the sausage meat. My colleagues had brought along two copies of the sausage recipe book photographed below in this post, and all of them called for five pounds of meat. It appeared that I was going to have enough for four batches: 20 pounds.

Brats:  Before.

Brats:  After.

Still being down the steep part of the learning curve, I figured a quick adjustment of expectations was in order as well, so I decided to focus on the breakfast sausage and the brats. The breakfast sausage was chosen because it is a very basic recipe with only three ingredients besides the pork: salt, pepper, and sage; I chose the brats because I thought it might be interesting to figure out how to work with the casings. Also, the spices were a bit more exotic for this, including allspice and coriander, and the recipe called for some veal, which I didn’t think I’d find in the Valley on short notice.

I bought my spices after we knocked off the first day, fingers crossed (as they always are at the Food Lion) that I could find everything. Except for casings, I was successful; I made two stops on the way back to the butchering shed to find casings – at Fairview Market and Farmers Foods. They were sold out at Fairview, referring me to Gore’s (confirming for in-the-know readers that I was planning to use natural casings)…and inviting me for a chat; but I found what I needed with the helpful butcher at Farmers. Then it was off to the shed.

My first step was to weigh the meat and mix in the spices, which I did. By this time, there were a few more hands working around the shop to help with packaging. They also brought more food, so I’d go as far as to describe it as being altogether festive in the shed on Saturday morning. Breakfast sausage first; after finishing mixing the spices we went to the grinder, and after that I broke it down into one pound packs, ending up with 11 of them.

I had to regrind the brat meat from a course grind the night before to a fine grind, so I mixed in the spices first before feeding it into the machine. The one David was showing me how to use had a nozzle attachment that you could thread the casing onto. He did some practice runs to show me how it worked, and then had me sit down to finish the job.

 Now, I could go into any number of euphemisms here, because in the butchering shed there is plenty of opportunity for them. Suffice it to say that at the end of this exercise, David made note of my expertise in handling my sausage. I thanked him for the complement…the literal one.

Getting back to that opening quote, I found the sausage making efforts quite enjoyable. Maybe I regret that I didn’t get to try any more recipes, but I think there’s a good start here with ten pounds each of the bulk breakfast and the linked brats, and Chris is happy with the haul as well.

But I recently found my mother-in-laws manual sausage grinder, and I’m thinking that this is something that I could practice on in preparation for next year. I fancy that it would surprise everyone if I showed up at the butchering shop a skilled “charcuterist”…



The recipe book:  (Amazon link)
Sausage-Making Cookbook, The: Complete instructions and recipes for making 230 kinds of sausage easily in your own kitchen



Everything but the Oink

Here's David on Saturday morning after
breaking the loin down into chops
on the band saw.

“We use everything but the oink” was what I was told on the day the pigs arrived back in August. At the time, I was still on that self-styled agribusiness internship working with David at Public House Produce. The pigs were a great addition to the farm, and he was clearly enjoying having them around – he told me about sitting out there near the barn with his daughter on a warm summer night as they thought about names for the pigs.


The experience of “hugging your food” had suddenly gotten very “hands on” for me, and this time it wasn’t just about picking up a two-pound chicken running loose in a pasture. We were turning the animals into pork, a process that would take two whole days.

As we processed the whole carcasses, I was learning how true “everything but the oink” would be. There are aficionados for the organ meat – the heart, kidneys and liver – and there are people who eat these on their own merit. For us, they were mainly destined for the “pudding pot,” where we collected various cuts for use in scrapple that would be prepared on the second day.



Me, holding the "oink."



The meat saw here, hard to see, is used
to break the larger cuts down.

Once the pigs had been moved down the line in the butchering shed, the carcasses end up, usually in halves, on a table down at the end. Here, the loin is cut out, the racks of ribs cut, and the shoulder, ham, and bacon cuts are made. As these large cuts are done, we carried them back across the room to store them out of the way on the big table, since we shared the workspace on the small table and needed to keep it clear.

Here are some of the parts waiting for the
"pudding pot" - a small tenderloin,
and sausage cuts.

Time permitting on the first day, and it did for us, you might take some of the larger cuts and break them down further into small cuts that could be ground up into sausage. I did this with one of the shoulders, but some of the other butchers were taking both shoulders for this purpose. I put together 20 pounds of meat this way so that I could make breakfast sausage and bratwursts.

These are the big cuts that we had at
the end of the first day.  You can see a
ham or two, loins, shoulders, and ribs
in this photo.

So at the end of the first day, we no longer had pigs – we had pork – some of which was already recognizable as something to eat: the hams and shoulder roasts, for example. There was plenty to do the next day, although I was beginning to understand that the work would go fast now that the big physical part of the process was out of the way.

As our activities wrapped up and we were cleaning the shed, other family members began to show up to help with some organization for day 2, or to bring in some food and snacks. There was a good hour or two of socializing and catch up while things wound down. We planned for an 8:00 start the next morning, but I still had work to do, buying some spices and other goods for my sausage recipes.

I got home at 7:00 pm, grabbed a light dinner and some suds. I scrubbed myself down in a hot shower, and turned the lights out at 8:30. I woke up at 6:00 the next morning in the same position I went to sleep in, bone tired the night before, but refreshed and ready to go on a snowy Saturday morning.

Inside the Butchering Shed

The scalding tub, with the big window above.
This is the first stop for the carcass as it
enters the shed.  Note the heavy duty sawhorses
on the table here.

Looking down the line towards the big table.
Note the overhead railing, where the initial
steps in processing are done.

Call it a shop, a shed, or a shack, but the utilitarian little building we spent most of Friday and Saturday in matches all those definitions. From the outside, nestled in among some outbuildings behind a very recognizable house on the outskirts of Luray, it’s not much – just a 20x30 building simply constructed out of concrete masonry. Inside, it’s another story, as it is practically laid out for the business of processing animals into food.

These are the hooks that are used to suspend the carcass
from the rail - longer ones for the head, shorter for the carcass.
Also note the scale just visible in the upper left, it only had a 30
pound capacity...too small for our pigs!

The photos that accompany today’s post are a few that I took before any of the work had begun, even before most of our company had arrived to join us for the day’s work. Heck, the BS session hadn't even started!

I had a few minutes alone to look over the equipment, and with only the imagination of a greenhorn, to imagine what I was looking back. With the first time behind me now, I’m realizing that I don’t have the photographs to tell the whole thing – but there is plenty for the imagination.

Like so many process oriented buildings, this one is simply, linearly, laid out. The animal comes in at one end and moves down a line, progressively evolving from a carcass to a roast. That’s effectively what got done on the first day of our work as well. So here’s my layman’s version of the process.

At the front of the shed there is a large window with a barn door opening that slides the wooden covering out of the way. Below the window is the scalding tub, a large basin that the animal gets placed inside before anything else. The heat in the tub – the water is kept at 150 degrees – facilitates the removal of the hair.

After a “bath” of a few minutes, the carcass is raised up out of the water to the nearby table, and the team goes to work with some tools to take off as much hair as possible. While there was a bloody aspect to some of the work, this part of the job seemed the dirtiest to me: the pig, warmed from the water and with the hair loosened, needs to be cleaned. Along with all the hair, most of the dirt comes off, and is left behind over in this part of the shed. The cleanup begins immediately after, as this space is put back to use once the carcass is broken down.

Next, at the end of the heavy duty table there (it's supported on saw horses made from steel beams), the head is removed and hung on the steel overhead rail. The removal is a straightforward job that I didn’t do, but I did hang them up after the decapitation. Next, a little cut behind the ankle tendons on the rear legs, and the carcass is ready to hang from the rail, with the aid of more hooks and a winch. With the first one hung in this fashion, we moved back to the truck to do it over, until all four of the animals were hanging from the overhead, bodies next to heads.

Aprons and buckets for convenience.
We didn't use 'em.

In approximately the same area as these aprons and buckets, we began the process of cleaning the carcasses. (I do have photos of this activity, but I have decided not to post them yet…I think some readers will find them disturbing. So I may put them into a slide show that I can post as a video with an advisory note. That will take some time to put together.) I’ll talk about this in more detail in tomorrow’s post.

This is the little table - note the
wooden saw horses - where everything
is boken down into roasts
or smaller parts.

From there, the carcass is moved on down the line to a smaller table at the end of the building. Here is where the roasts are separated out – the hams, the ribs, the loins, and the shoulder. We seemed to be making pretty good time, as this activity was underway by late morning. Later the table was used for breaking some parts down further into sausage meat, and then it was used to prepare some of the parts for use in scrapple.