Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Pig butchering pictures

Two oblivious pigs enjoying their last meal, a few chicken eggs and some fresh kale.

 We never did measure these pigs, but the boar that was with them that was taken to the meat processors (crazy story coming), was just shy of three hundred pounds.


Washing and scrubbing the dirt off. The kids were tentative at first but once they got going they were fighting over the scrub brushes.

My pathetic attempt to scrape as small section of the pig's hair off.

Gutted.

Last night my brother cut up three out of four quarters of pig before running out of time. I scraped any extra fat I could get off the skin and cut extra fat off of chunks of meat. Some fat seemed like it would make better lard, so I had a rendering bag and a sausage fat bag. I wrapped meat for freezing in saran wrap and freezer butcher paper. We had a meat scrap bag for grinding. I put the hooves and lower legs in the freezer for smoking later. We kept out one ham and all the belly for brining and curing right away. I also kept out a rack of ribs for later this week. We are going to have fresh tenderloin tonight.

4 comments:

Plickety Cat said...

Yum Emily, those will sure make good eats :)

If you don't have a scalder and a bell scraper to get that hair off, you can also use a hand butane torch to scorch it off instead. That sometimes makes scraping the skin for lard a bit easier too.

You planning on doing anything with the heads?

Bruce King said...

It's a lot harder to scrape the pig with it hanging than it is with it lying on the ground or on a table or platform. As you press the spatula against it it'll swing away from you and make it much more difficult.

Emily said...

I figured as much. We already had it hanging and the guys wanted to gut it hanging so they weren't keen on lowering it, moving it so I could scrape it and then hoisting it back up. Next time... Thanks again, Emily

Vegetable Garden Cook said...

Hi Emily, thanks for posting your experiences. I'm posting a link to my blog... hope you don't mind. www.amysoddities.blogspot.com