Everything but the Oink - 2014 edition

When the pig Kevin Bacon went down, I was surprised that after two years of butchering my own hog, for the first time, I felt a little something for the animal.  I guess handling them a little more this year, compared to the past, meant something extra to me.  I reminded myself that this is why we raised them – and steeled myself for the next one.

Afterwards, Chris and I had a chat about how hard it must be for kids doing 4H and FFA projects with an animal, only to sell them off at the fair, and saying goodbye while knowing what lays in store for the animal you’d worked so hard with.  David’s perspective is much more practical, after nearly a year of raising these animals – on that morning, he says, “all I see is meat.”  That probably leads to a steady hand on the trigger, which is important, and makes this all that much more humane, ironically.

So we hauled the four carcasses over to the butchering shed and quickly got the next step under way – scalding, cleaning off the hair, eviscerating, and then breaking down the carcasses into big cuts.  It was a little frustrating for me that after three years I still can't remember the details of each step - it's good I have a solid partner for my share in Chris.  He cheerfully did a lot of the dirty work during the evisceration, and then pitched in with taking down the halves for the other guys to begin breaking them down.

One of the shares is taken by Jesse and his dad.  Jesse is prepared every year with a fairly detailed plan about what he wants to do, and they motor through the work.  It helps that they have been doing this for 10 years, but he told us he watches a few YouTube videos each year when it gets close to the season – it’s been a good source for things to try, besides the basic processes that are involved.

I resolved to take a little time to do this in preparation next year.  One of Jesse’s techniques was to separate out the shoulder (it’s also called the butt in butchering parlance), and the others followed suit.  I like this continuous improvement aspect of butchering day, and next year will go all the better for it, I’m sure.

By the end of the day, the four or five major cuts are all done – the ham, the loin, the side (where the bacon comes from), the ribs, and the shoulder.  Also, we’ve cut out the parts of the head that are to be saved (we don’t use it all, mainly the tongue and jowls), as well as the organ meat that will be used in the scrapple. 

And that’s where we leave things at the end of the day, with a table full of meat chilling over night.  On day two of the enterprise, which I wrote about on Monday, the first day of this series of post, we proceed with breaking down the big cuts into individual portions that eaters are more likely to recognize – the chops and roasts that I’m going to look forward to cooking throughout the year.

You can follow those posts with the "Pork Diaries" label - I've already got a few of those on the record from the last two years.  I'm particularly looking forward to the day I do the whole rack of ribs I managed to save this time (limitations on our packaging gear has meant cutting the whole rack down to two halves in the past).

To conclude these "Butchering 2014" posts - maybe somewhere along the way my motivation was to be a more sustainable eater, as @andrewzimmern says.  But there's also a good share of friendship and camaraderie that makes this event special - and that's what keeps me coming back.

Call Me a Sustainable Eater - Butchering 2014

This year is the third year that I have taken part in butchering at the little red roofed shack down near the Shenandoah River.  I’m pretty comfortable with the whole process by now, but 5am Friday still rolls around early, and no matter how you slice it, it’s cold out there on the pasture when we go to get the pigs.

The first year I blogged about the experience, I generally wouldn’t even post photos of the action, out of some sense I had that I could respect the animals that way.

I've changed my opinion about this, so this year I will include some of the milder images, especially after seeing a recent series of posts by Andrew Zimmern (Twitter handle @andrewzimmern)  – and recalled seeing an image of a beef carcass strung up for butchering.  

He gets complaints about some of those images.  I saw one where he responded recently with the comment, “Connecting to our food sources makes us more sustainable eaters.  Shocking to some, necessary for all.”

Shortly after, when there was continued discourse about how gross it was to see the process play out, a reader wrote the following in support of his post:  “That’s exactly why he posted.  It challenges us to face reality and to appreciate – to be humbled – by the animal we consume.”

Ironically, this was my justification for not posting the photos the first two years.  The thing is, I know that these animals have a good life as they are prepared for us.  They're taken care of, ranging out in their pasture; and they even have a relationship with the other animals on the farm - not to mention the humans that come and go.  I think this was the first time all four of them actually were given names (although that's not recommended!)

When I say that we have a relationship with them, I want to be clear - we don't climb in the little shed with them and hug them.  Leave that to Joel Salatin...but this year even I had the chance to do a couple of ad hoc chores with them (for the record, I know I'm not much help when the rubber hits the road) – I wrote about “wrangling” them from the barnyard out to pasture back in October, here:

http://hawksbillcabin.blogspot.com/search/label/Pig%20Wranglin%27

Back then, they were four little piglets that weighed no more than 50 pounds each.  When we harvested them last Friday, even the lightest – the runt that the farm hands had named Kevin Bacon – topped out at around an estimated 300 pounds, and the largest was probably above 350.  

Turns out that Kevin was the first to go down, and it was quick and painless.  She took a single shot and went stone dead, to start the process.  Over the course of the next half hour or so, her three siblings followed, and then we load them up to take them over to the red-roofed butchering shed, just outside of Luray.

It's about Kevin Bacon, Isn't It?

Some beautiful pork chops and t-bones.

On Saturday morning, Chris and I arrived at the butchering shed to find second day activities under way.  Truth be told, we had dilly-dallied along the way, since I had told him to stop off at the Fairview Market for some donuts, so we brought along two dozen to make up for getting there at 9am instead of the agreed upon 8:30.  David’s dad was working the band saw to make some pork chops – and David had already broken down both of his loin cuts into chops.

After the customary greetings, Chris and I began to organize ourselves for the second day’s activities, which are comprised of breaking down the large cuts from day one into sausage, chops and roasts, and then packing them up for storage.  Meanwhile, I took a couple of photos, enjoyed a couple of the donuts, and well, in the vernacular of the butchering shed, shot the shit.  The photos accompanying the post are of those beautiful pork chops and t-bones that David had already cut down, and of his parents at the band saw cutting down their pork loins into chops.

Working the band saw to make chops and roasts.

I texted Mary the photo of David’s pork chops.  We ended up having a fairly lengthy exchange over them, as follows:

Mary:  Lotta chops!

Me:  I cut ours a little thicker this year.  We got 14 chops total, and two loin roasts.

Me:  I packed the sausage in half pound packs, half the size of last year.  So there are more packs, and we won’t have leftovers to deal with when we have them for breakfast.

Mary:  I just pulled the last pack of chops from last year to make for dinner tonight.  Also, saw a pack of breakfast sausage, two packs of ribs, and a ham roast.  There are some other packs, I’m not sure of what.

Mary:  All in the kitchen freezer.  The basement is pretty much empy, except for your hops, some pie shells, and two small tubs of scrapple.

Me:  We’ll slow cook those ribs.  I kept an amazing whole rack this time!

Me:  Also, we got Kevin Bacon!

Mary:  Oh great.

Mary:  I really didn’t want to know the pig.

Me:  To be honest, I choked up a little when she went down.

Mary:  TMI.

The 2014 bunch - that's Kevin with the white band around
her shoulders.

They're Omnivores Too, You Know

Sacked out pigs, all tucked in and warm out in the poke.

I was amused recently when a friend sent along a link to a New York Times article that featured Joel Salatin – he of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Food, Inc. fame – that described his new pork venture.  Mr. Salatin is famous because of his innovative, symbiotic approach to farming, which emphasizes the connections between the land and the animals.  To us city-folk, this is incredible, ground-breaking ag-science, but I suspect that if I were to head out to Page County and engage a friend or two on the topic they’d tell me this was just common sense.

Also, call it ironic or coincidental, I’d received an update on the status of our pigs earlier in the week.  The hogs are growing nicely, and putting about a pound on a week.  David’s had them out in pasture since October (I helped wrangle ‘em, by the way, link here:  http://hawksbillcabin.blogspot.com/search/label/Pig%20Wranglin%27).

So that is the point of my post – pasturing pigs isn’t new, but the popularity of this approach as a contrast to concentrated, industrial operations is.  My pig share is pastured, and I know those swine have a good life out there on the farm.  After three years of this, I’ve learned an element of the respect they deserve is to have a relationship with us – while I wouldn’t go as far as to climb in there and hug them (some do), I do enjoy seeing them in the field and am pretty happy to hear when they’ve been given names.

Incidentally, I’m told the four pigs this year are Kevin Bacon, Lucy, Stevie Yum Yum, and Jim Bacon. I’m not sure if that last one was named after me; if he was, I’m not sure I deserved the honor.  Their time is coming in a month or so, so they’ll continue living the good life out in their field for a little bit longer.

Now, Mr. Salatin’s strategy is to move herds of 50 or so pigs through his pastures and into the hardwood forests that he has retained on his 450 acres in the Shenandoah Valley.  If you want to know more about his methods, he’s got a video you can buy, although you have to get it directly from him – just search on “Polyface Farm” and “pigs.”

The New York Times story didn’t go so far as to talk about how he plans to process those herds of pigs, but for my pig share, I do know how that part of the story goes.  One cold February morning, a team of us will go out to the field and they’ll be dispatched.  Then we’ll haul them to the butchering shed and go to work on the carcasses for two days, emerging with all kinds of chops, roasts, sausage, ham, and bacon. 

That’ll be a fulfilling weekend, I don’t mind saying. 

Charcuterie Wanna-be

There's between a month and six weeks left before the 2014 butchering event, so I have begun thinking about how to prepare.  This year, I'd like to give myself a few more options about handling the sausage making component of the enterprise.

Now, before I get much further into this post, I want to make a note about the accompanying photo - it was sent to me by a friend who was telling me about a butchering event down in Shenandoah, where they did 12 hogs over the course of a week.  Probably some venison in the mix as well.

The butchering shed that David hires out for our event can pretty much do all of this, although we will ship stuff out to a smokehouse when we want to use that approach.  Here's a post about the sausage making we did last year:  http://hawksbillcabin.blogspot.com/2013/02/everything-but-oink.html

Now the point of this post is that I am in search of sausage making gear and tips.  I'd heard that there is an attachment we can hook up to Mary's KitchenAid stand mixer - I even watched an excellent how-to video that showed pork, lamb, and chicken variations made with this tool.  However, when I went to Amazon to check it out, at least a third of the reviews are thumbs down - more than 100 poor reviews! - so I am going to keep looking.

My alternative may be to simply grind the pork at the butchering shed.  I'll go ahead and make and package the breakfast sausage there, since the recipe is so simple and we form the patties right when we're ready to cook it.  But I want to experiment further with some link-style sausages this year, thus the research.

Suggestions are welcome!

The Pork Diaries: Another February Butchering Event

Chef Nathan Anda of Red Apron Butcher demonstrates butchering.

A few weeks back, one of my work colleagues sent along an email from DC’s Living Social – the event they were promoting featured a butchering demonstration, charcuterie tasting, and beer pairing.  Who am I to say no to such an ingeniously cobbled together event?  I was like a fly attracted to a blue light – especially since this would be only a week after David, Chris and I had completed our own hog butchering event with friends out in Luray.

So last Monday, Mary and I went downtown to F Street NW – for a moment, I relived so many 9:30 Club concerts since we were on  the same block that the club used to be – and joined a warm crowd of 60 or so folks for the show.  

When I first saw the invitation and considered the butchering part of it, I thought, “Well, perhaps the butcher will take a loin and show how to cut pork chops or something;” needless to say, when we got there and there was a half carcass laying out on the stainless steel table, I knew we were in for more than that – and then the chef proceeded to saw off the head.

The chef – Nathan Anda – is a man on a mission, offering charcuterie and salami and specially prepared sandwiches made with them.  He described how he’d developed a passion for butchering over the years, and now travels to gourmet destinations like Napa and Italy to learn about new ways to cut and prepare meat for consumption.  These days, he butchers as many as 30 hogs a week, all raised at an “Animal Welfare” approved farm in North Carolina.

He runs a shop out of farmers markets called Red Apron Butchery (link:  http://www.redapronbutchery.com) but will soon open three stores that you can read about at the website. 

The charcuterie tasting included salami, bologna, mortadella, finocchio, and
and a pleasant surprise, the bourbon fig rillette.

For the charcuterie, we were offered Nate’s version of Bologna, Mortadella, Finocchio, Salami Cotta, and a Bourbon Fig Rillette.  At first, I thought the rillette was scrapple, but I’ve learned that there is a major difference – the rillette contains no corn meal or any other cereal product.  The combination of pork, lard, bourbon, and fig was quite an innovation, and one that should inspire all would-be pork enthusiasts.

I don’t know what to make of the beer pairings – we liked one of them very much, a smokey pilsener-styled beer, but there was a second that was more like a barley wine, a bit sweet for my taste.  Although the event flyer described an Eggenberg Pilsner and Schlera Marzen, I’d hesitate to say that’s what was offered. 

Overall, even though the beer pairing was something of a let down, the event was a success.  Mary and I had a great time, and I plan to follow Nate’s offerings at the Red Apron Butcher.

In part because of this event, I’m very much looking forward to cooking up some of the pork I brought back from this year’s pig, now that I think of it.

Everything But the Oink

Making 20 pounds of brats was one of the highlights on
Saturday - as was making the pudding, also shown.

David likes to say “We use everything but the oink” when we talk about butchering, but as the story goes on, he reveals that they used to use that, too.  Over the years the processing has moved away from making products like head cheese, which really does get close to using 98% of the animal, or from using various other body parts in the scrapple. 

Still, “everything but the oink” is a good way to describe the activities of the second day of butchering, which is Saturday, in our case.  That’s when we process the large cuts from Friday down into pork chops and roasts, but it’s also when we take the organ meat – the heart, kidneys and liver, cook them in the pudding pot, and make scrapple. 

When we arrived at the butchering shed on Saturday
morning, Mark was already working on the scrapple, and
on a batch of sausage.

My friends make it out of corn meal and a combination of organ meat, lard, and boiling water.  As I learned last year, it’s called Pon Haus by some, and one of the preferred ways to eat it is to grill a slice and make a sandwich.  (I’ll have a post on a meal of scrapple soon.)

As far as the activities our team went to work on, Chris fired up the band saw to cut down the loins and roasts, and I went to work on a couple of sausage recipes.  We’d planned to take about five pounds of ground pork, 10 of breakfast sausage, and then about 20 pounds of bratwurst.  Chris had made a special stop in Northern Virginia on the way out to pick up six pounds of ground veal that we blended with the pork for the brats.

I picked up all the spices we needed (my brat recipe is posted below), and found the natural casings in a store in Luray.  I loaded it all into the sausage presser and started making links…a challenging process if you’re not doing this all day long, as shown in the video below:

Here’s the brat recipe, which was taken from Jerry Predika’s “The Sausage Making Cookbook” (Amazon link below):

• 4 lbs. fine ground pork butt
• 2 lbs. fine ground veal
• ½ teaspoon ground allspice
• 1 teaspoon caraway seeds
• 1 teaspoon dried marjoram (I used ground and cut this to 1/3 tsp)
• 1.5 teaspoons white pepper
• 3 teaspoons salt (I always cut this by half or more)
• 1 cup cold water

Combine all the ingredients, mix well, grind on fine, and stuff into hog casings.

So that’s all there is to sausage making.  The brats look great though, and I can’t wait to try this year’s batch!

Here’s the Amazon link to the sausage cookbook:

Butchers at Work

At the end of the first day, the carcasses have
been broken down into large cuts.  On the second day,
these get worked down further into chops and roasts.

My take away from the butchering experience last year was summarized by Ted, who had taken a lot of pictures during the event and offered some advice along the way: 

“From pig to pot to pan to plate…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.”

Here's a picture of Chris with some "Iowa Chops" - he set the
saw up to cut the pork chops extra thick.

I knew I could count on David, Mark, Jesse and Bill for advice, as well as camaraderie and metaphysical benefits after last year, and I was hoping that my friend Chris, sharing the hog with me, would find that as well.  Catching a glimpse of him working on various tasks around the shed, I think he did – I kept busy myself, and know that I did.  Here I’ve got a few photos to share of us working on the hog; meanwhile, a little more description of the activities.

From where I left off yesterday, the pigs are moved down the line in the butchering shed, the carcasses end up 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.

Mary and I lost much of the ham last year due to freezer burn
after the power outages.  I decided to cut my ham down into
smaller roasts - here I'm skinning it prior to making those cuts.

There is also a natural break in the action during this part – the butcher pauses to process the head.  In our case, we don’t use everything, but we do save out the jowls and the tongue.  Chris wanted to send the jowl out to have it smoked; it was a great idea, and we should get some bacon out of it.  The tongue becomes part of the pudding meat, along with many other organs.

Time permitting on the first day, a second task is to take the larger cuts and start breaking them down.  Most of the time, this has meant breaking down one of the butts into smaller parts that could be ground for sausage, which is what we did.  We also took down part of the other shoulder for that purpose as well, ending up with a few roasts for pulled pork but with plenty of sausage meat – tomorrow's post.

So at the end of the first day, we no longer had hogs – we had pork – some of which was already recognizable as something to eat:  the hams and bacon, for example.  There was plenty to do the next day, but the second day’s work goes fast, since the big physical part of the process is out of the way. 

Inside the Butchering Shed

After scalding and removing the hair, the carcasses are
hung on a rack for further processing.

In yesterday’s post, I wrote about arriving at the butchering shed early on Friday morning, finding David and Chris there getting things ready for our day of processing pork.  I thought I might revisit and edit last year’s post about this place for the description of the butchering process – most of what’s below comes from that one.  Except to say, I did mark the spot on Foursquare this time, and with my second check-in, I became the mayor.

Now on with the post…

The scalding tub is the first stop for the carcasses
inside the butchering shed.

Call it a shed – as I do, or a shop or a shack – 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 – a simply constructed 20x30 building simply built of concrete masonry.  Inside, it’s another story, as it is very practically laid out for the business of processing animals into food.

I’m including a few photos of the equipment to show how the place is outfitted.  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 large cuts and roasts.  That’s effectively what gets done on the first day of the work.  

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 140 degrees – facilitates removing the hair from the animals – it also gets some of the dirt off, which was important this year, since one of them went down in the hog wallow. 

These hooks are used to hang the carcasses.

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.

Next, at the end of the big table there, 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.

This lard press is available for use...I haven't taken
advantage yet.  Next year, maybe!

From there, we began the process of cleaning the carcasses by removing the viscera and splitting them into halves.  Once it’s halved, the carcass is moved on down the line to a smaller table at the end of the building. 

We’ll cut the “trotters” off and start separating out the roasts – the hams, the ribs, the loins, and the shoulder.  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.

That is pretty much the work of the first day, and the tale only covers that side of the shed.  Butchering has begun transforming the animal into food cuts, which we generally do on the second day, using specialized equipment on the south side of the butchering shed.  

Butchering Day Arrives

The pigs were still asleep when their time came.

For the second year running, I’ve had the privilege of joining some Page County friends to do a hog butchering, a two-day event that takes place in late January or early February.  After some logistical gyrations we managed to get together last weekend to take care of business with the hogs.  My friend Chris, who shares a hog with me, was able to make it out this year, so we both have a stash of pork that will last until next winter now – and in my case, it occupies my three freezers in the two houses!

(Note:  I wrote about last year as well, and if you read those posts in 2012, some of what I write over the next three days may seem redundant.  If you haven’t read them, just click the “butchering” label at the end of this post for access to everything I’ve posted on the topic.) 

By the time I arrived at the butchering shed on Friday morning, somewhere around 6:30, I’d already been “up and at ‘em” for a while.  I’d had a late work night Thursday and decided postpone the drive out afterwards – so I set the alarm for 3:30 and slogged through a wintry mix that eventually would turn into a blizzard when it made it to New England.  As it was, I just did some minor slip and slide as I carefully drove out to Luray, making it in about two hours and twenty minutes – slightly longer than the usual two hours door-to-door.

Literally - riding shotgun.

When I arrived, David and Chris were already inside the shed, which was quickly warming up as the water in the scalding tub was heated to 140 degrees.  Chris had taken a look around and David had given him the once-over on some of the equipment, but we had some time to plan how we would divvy up the hog while we waited for the other butchers to arrive. 

They did, and at first light we went over to the farm to kill the hogs.  I photograph pretty much everything that goes on while we doing this, and while this activity is a perfectly natural thing, it is alarming for the first timer to watch, so I don’t share the photos on the blog here.  Although this week I plan to include a little more detail…there may even be some videos over on the HawksbillCabin YouTube channel!

Preparing for the deed.

The winter storm I drove through had left a dusting of snow out on the pasture, adding an authentic country atmosphere to our activities of the day.  I literally was riding shotgun in David’s truck, with the .22 there resting against my thigh (“Just like Texas!” a friend wrote on Facebook).  When we finally got to the farm, we joined the others and they quickly got out into the field to kill the pigs.

David was an efficient shot, just four bullets for the four hogs.  Jesse and Bill quickly followed, doing the knife work.  As each animal went down, they quickly moved on to the next one so that the whole thing was over in a minute or two – I’ve read that the animals have little regard for their dead comrades, even if they were litter mates, but I believe there’s a benefit to having this done with quickly and efficiently.

Once the deed is done, David picks up the carcasses with a skid steer and moves them into his pickup, and we haul them back to the butchering shed.  That’s where the real work of the day begins – and I’ll pick up there with tomorrow’s post.

The Pork Diaries: Whole Pig Roast

A few weeks back some friends of ours out in Page County invited us to a summer party to celebrate a birthday.  It was a beautiful setting - I could go on and on about how wonderful the scenery in Page County is, don't you know - we had a great time with friends that evening.

And there was another highlight - they were working a whole pig roast for dinner.  It was supplemented with some fine fresh produce from the farmers market that morning, and wine from our favorite local vineyard Wisteria.

I took a few minutes to get an overview of how this set up worked.

The pig came from a local farm that raises them organically.  It was a youngster, only at 50 pounds or so.  My friend has installed a BBQ pit in his back yard, which you can see in the first photo above.

The pig turned on a spit over those coals for between four and six hours.  It was done to perfection, and then we pulled it off of the heat.

We moved it off to a nearby table to take it off the spit and to begin carving up the meat.  First step was to remove the skin, which comes off easily after roasting at these temperatures.  Racks were installed over the pit, and the skin roasted again - to become cracklings.

Meanwhile, the "menfolk" all jumped in to strip down the carcass.  I had a little flashback here to my experience butchering last winter (click on the label butchering at the end of this post).  But I jumped right in too and started carving down the beast.

Among the last photos here are one of some of the meat that came off of this roast, and what was left of the carcass after we got through with it.

It was done perfectly, as you can only get on a pig roasted this way. Someday I'll give this a try myself!

A Page County Grown Trifecta, Part 2

On my second stop last week, I went over to Public House Produce in Luray.  David had earlier told me that the final portion of the pork was ready - this was some side meat that I had requested to be salt-cured, because my mother asked me for some fatback.  David had also offered to show me what was going on around the farm, so I made the stop on the way back from dropping Tessie off for grooming.

First things first.  The family was out taking care of business when I stopped by, so I had to take a rain check on the spring update.  Mary and I went back over on Saturday with another friend who was visiting.

The fatback.  Well, I forgot how big the cuts of side meat I put aside for this were.  I am guessing that there is easily five or six pounds of the stuff.  David's dad had salt-cured both of the hams he took from his pig back when we did the butchering, and they cured this fatback along with the hams.

In any case, that's going to make a lot of "church social" green beans.  I left the meat in the cooler, with the intention of going back and getting it as soon as I can borrow Chris's vacuum packer again.  I'll cut the big slabs down to smaller size and we'll get her done, just got to figure out how to get the stuff down to mom.

Now, this spring has featured some unpredictable weather.  After early season heat and a fear of a dry season, it turned cold and there have been some late frosts, and then we've also had copious rain in the form of storms.

For that reason, they've set up hoops and covered many of the crops that could be damaged by the cold.  I think this is lettuce under the cover here in this photo, but Public House Produce also has some tomatoes and the earliest sweet corn under cover as well.

Finally, the girls were out of the barn and came over to see me while I walked around.  Here's Delilah and Butterscotch - keeping a respectable distance from the electric fence.  They're good girls.  It seems like Delilah's ear is always flying away in this carefree pose whenever I see them.

Makin' Bacon

Chris with the cimeter and the bacon...
David in the background overseeing
the knife play.

Last week, I got the call from David that the hams and bacon were back from the smokehouse.  So I made plans with Chris to head over and do this, the second-to-last errand related to the hog butchering.  Then final one will be when the salt-curing process for the fatback is done, and I don’t yet have an idea of when that will be completed.

A side of bacon - pre-slicing.

I was really glad that Chris was able to join for this, and Mary went along with us too.  Since Chris hadn’t been able to do the “hands on” (more like “hands in”) part of the process, I offered to let him do the bacon makin’ – and he jumped at the chance.  David took us back into the cooler where our hams and meat were stored, and we brought out the two sides of bacon.

They had to be skinned first, and Chris took the Cimeter knife out for that.  Then he blocked them into about 8-inch squares, saving the cuttings for other uses. 

Meat slicing demo.  I've got to get me
one of these machines!

David and Heather have a meat slicer that they were using to prepare the bacon…for some reason, I was imagining this to be a much more complex and difficult operation than what it really is. And then of course, the Seinfeld episode where Kramer gets a deli slicer from a bankruptcy auction and then begins taking orders kept coming into my head.

Chris cut my side into fairly thin slices, and then ratcheted up the thickness for his.  When we got to the odds and ends, we left it on thick and split those portions into shares as well.  There are some residual fatty pieces with a little meat on them that should go well with greens and beans later in the spring, so we’ve kept that too.

All totaled, I have about 24 portions of bacon coming out of this, that I’ve packaged two-to-a-bag - about a pound per bag.  We left room so that we can just fold over the edge of the freezer bag to reseal the second portions until we’re ready to use them.

Some of the finished product.

I’ll post on the hams next week.  But for now, I still can’t get over all the pork.  There is just a whole lot of it!

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