The Pork Diaries: Brats

When Mary isn't able to join me for weekends at Hawksbill Cabin, I usually head over to Luray for dinner - a take out from Anthony's, a burger at Artisans, or those Oysters Rockefeller that I love so much at the Speakeasy.  With my ankle injury tying me down, I decided to stay in and grill on the brick terrace.

I found a small pack of brats in the freezer - from the pig Pork Chop, Jr. and this year's butchering outing. I grilled them up with some summer squash and a red pepper on the side.  I got a nice spicy brown mustard for them - tasty!

Incidentally, here's a post about making the brats.  It includes a little video of me using the sausage stuffer...

http://hawksbillcabin.blogspot.com/2013/02/everything-but-oink.html

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.

Pork Preparatory Period - 2013 edition

Over the weekend David let me know that it's getting close to the time to schedule the 2013 butchering.  We've settled on a couple of weeks from now, so I thought I might make a stop by the farm to take a look at how the hogs are growing.

They're all over 250 pounds.  I can easily see the weight gain on them from week to week, too - I might go through the photos I've taken this year to see how they've grown since they got on the farm back in August.

Chris and I got together for a little while over the weekend to discuss how we'd like to divide out the share.  Although I enjoyed the roast a lot this year, the trade-off of having them was less sausage and ground pork  He proposed that we shift some of the cuts this way, and I think it's a good idea - so we'll have the same breakfast sausage as last year, probably some brats, and then some miscellaneous ground pork that can be frozen and then spiced up into sausage later.

We'll also cut the pork chops a little thicker than I did last year, and we'll have a few other changes.  I'll post those when the time comes.

I also took a look around to see what was in the cooler at Public House Produce - a lot of apples and eggs. There was a nice fragrance in the walk-in from all the fruit in there.