Butchering the Pig October 17, 2008

The definition of “butchering” in this case is cutting up, not the actual slaughtering. When we arrived at Bruce and Hannah’s around noon a few days later, Bruce had already taken care of that part. It had hung overnight, gutted and skinned, so the meat would cool, making the butchering process easier. Bruce was clearing off the big table inside, and Hannah was mixing a large batch of playdough. She placed it on a low bench in the living room along with a tubful of farm/jungle animals, and the children were busy for the next few hours. Bruce brought in half the pig and laid it on the table. It was over four feet long. Bruce asked us what kind of cuts we wanted, then drew light lines on the pig with his knife. The hindquarters was the ham. The sowbelly, which is trimmed off the ribs becomes the bacon. The ribs underneath were cut into manageable sizes and packaged as spareribs. Above the ribs along the backbone is the loin of the pig, the most tender part, which can either be sliced into porkchops, or deboned and packaged as loin roast, which is what we opted for. We got three good size loin roasts from each half of the pig. Towards the front of the pig are some not so tender roasts – good for making green chile stew – and the front leg can also be smoked as smaller hams. All the scrap meat went into a sausage tub. The large chunks of fat also went into a separate tub to be rendered into lard. The best fat lies along the back and the belly. This pig, however wasn’t particularly fatty. This is quite a simplification of the butchering options – merely the choices we made. The book Bruce had (The Art of Chacuterie, an out-of print book by the English Jane Grigson – I want it!) showed diagrams of the American, English, and French usage of a pig.

Bruce butchered the first half. I trimmed, and Hannah wrapped. Nick tackled the second half under Bruce’s supervision. They mostly used a hand-held meat saw for cutting through bones, though Bruce has used a band saw which he said was the best way to cut steaks and chops. The meat saw left little chips which we scraped away with a knife before wrapping. All the meat to be brined was put into a large tub. Sausage scraps and fat were bagged separately. I froze the sausage scraps and will make sausage later when I have a leaner meat such a buffalo to combine it with. Bones were also bagged, and I will combine them with beef or buffalo bones to make stock. The whole process from start to finish, took less than two hours, and we were sitting down at a clean table eating fresh tomato sandwiches by 2 pm.

Buckets of brine

Brining the Pig

The reason I said that butchering was not as simple as it seemed is that the task did not end there. We took our meat home, and froze the packages. Then we mixed a brine using Hannah’s recipe – water, salt, brown sugar, bay leaf, and peppercorn – placed the meat in buckets, poured the brine over top, and carried them to the root cellar to maintain a 40 F temperature. It would have been much easier to put it all in one barrel or tub, however, we were leaving in a day to spend Canadian Thanksgiving with my parents and brother’s family in Smithers, B.C., about an nine-hour drive. The meat needed to brine for at least two days before smoking. Yes, we like to make things complicated for ourselves, but my brother Josh loves a project (like myself), and we thought between he and Nick, they could rig up something for smoking.

Grinding Fat for Lard

Rendering Lard

I decided to try my hand at making lard from the pig fat. My reasons: I don’t like to waste any usable part of an animal; I am a purist when it comes to fat (the less processed source, the better – I would rather use my own lard for cooking than most other fats available ie, vegie oil, shortening, even canola); I think there is a wisdom in the way people USED to do things; and the French, who hold animal fats in high esteem, just can’t be wrong when it comes to food. So, I will now proceed to tell you what NOT to do when making lard. First, we resurrected a meat grinder from the basement of the old dining hall. It was covered in dust, and a bit rusty. Nick took some steel wool to it, and gave it a second life. He is quite attached to it now. I took the fat out of the fridge, and left it out at room temperature for an hour or so while we work working some kinks out with the grinder. First lesson: never grind warm fat. (You can also cut the fat up finely, but you get more volume in a shorter time if you grind it.) It was tough, and really messy, but we managed. Lyra and Marley were helping.

Marley: What if you were inside there? That would be scaaaaary!
Lyra: You would come out in lots of little pieces!

Mid-morning, I put the fat in a stainless steel pot with a little water in the bottom. The water keeps the fat from sticking, and evaporates as the fat heats up. Second lesson: keep your heat as low as possible. I had it to high at first, and my lard turned kind of grey and blobby. It turned it down, but wasn’t off to a great start. It would have been better in cast iron, over a wood stove. Third lesson: be prepared to take all day. It was 11 pm when I finally washed my last dish. From maybe five pounds of fat, I was left with two quarts of satisfactory-looking lard; the second quart darker than the first, as it darkened with cooking time. I can’t wait to try it in tortillas… the way they were meant to be made!

The Smokehouse

Smoking the pig

This is getting really long… so I will be brief about smoking the pig; the last step. We transported the brined meat with minimum mess. On a cold and grey Saturday morning at my brother’s, Nick and Josh took a look at Josh’s smoker. It was an old fridge, converted to smokehouse, with an electric hotplate at the bottom. We couldn’t find any alder (what Bruce uses), so Nick bought a bag of cherry and a bag of hickory wood chips. They loaded up the smoker, put some chips on the plate and plugged it in. It took a while to get the system down, and the temperature up in the smoker. Ham and bacon are best “cold-smoked” – when the heats hovers around 80-90 F. The first batch was in maybe eight hours, and got a little oversmoked. The second batch, hickory, went smoother, and was ready in about five hours. We tried some bacon right away. It was fabulous. The next night, we cooked a small ham and took it to a friend’s house. The flavor and the aroma were haunting. The project was a grand success, and we will be repeating it next year!

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