A Pig in Pictures

Christmas was bountiful in many ways this year. We have much to be thankful for in our family. But this year's Christmas dinner will most likely be remembered by our time spent planning for, preparing, and eating this little guy:

But I'm getting ahead of myself. As I have mentioned before, the inspiration for this project came from my cousin Bill, who saw the suckling pig recipe in April Bloomfield's book A Girl and Her Pig and wanted to give it a shot. This is a very simple recipe, something that appealed to Bill because as a purist, he really wanted to be sure to focus on cooking the meat just right and teasing out the best natural flavor of the pig. Other recipes we saw called for filling the cavity of the pig with a mix of seasoned bread and certain organs (from the same pig) and then roasting it, kind of like a stuffing you might make for a Thanksgiving turkey. But April's recipe is mind-numblingly straightforward: Season with salt. Roast for 3 hours. Enjoy.

Unwrapped suckling pig after a couple days of defrosting. This 15-pound, organic pig was a special order from Erstwhile Farm near Columbus, Nebraska.

Bill rinsing the pig

Removing the eyes. This was not in the recipe but Bill heard this was a good idea. I don't think any of the dinner guests regretted it.

Bill makes slits in the skin all around the pig to allow better penetration of the salt and promote maximum crispiness of the skin during roasting. The recipe says be sure to make shallow cuts, not cutting into the flesh. 

Hanging out in the fridge for a day after salting.
Bill doesn't drink, of course. The fancy beers in the background are just for show  ;) 

45 minutes into the roasting process (350 degrees for 2 1/2 hours).

The foil on the ears, snout, and tail protects them from burning.  

Done and resting for 15 minutes before we dig in. The last half hour of cooking, we "blasted" it with heat by turning the oven up to 450 degrees. This gives the crispy factor one last little boost before serving. The ears were eaten by tasters who shall remain anonymous.

Proud parents!

Bill samples, just to be sure it's edible :)
By this time, my husband Kyle had put two olives where the eyes used to be, for aesthetics.

Bill's favorite part of the recipe is the last sentence: "Go at it with tongs." So we had several small pairs available and people used them to pick small pieces of meat and skin off the pig. It was ready before dinner, so it wound up being kind of like a fun hors d'oeurve. We highly recommend trying it if you're looking for a show-stopping conversation piece. It was all people were talking about. Bill described a perfect bite as the crispiness of the skin, the stickiness of the fat right underneath, and the sweetness of the meat and the fat together. 

Going...

going...

going...

Gone.
A ringing endorsement.

Bill used what was left to make a stock. The remaining meat he said he planned to use to make a couple of pork pies. 

Part 2: Best Laid Plans

(With my luck, the right word is probably “lain.” I’ll let my editor friends chime in if that is the case.)

Meanwhile, we arrived home with the pig around 4 p.m. with a ton of work ahead of us, the first item of which was getting the garage set up to work. Most of the supplies we needed were handy, but the table wasn’t ready.  We worked with aprons over parkas. It was pretty damn cold in the garage but kind of necessary to keep the pig cool. I really worried about this. I’m a freak about making sure food stays at the right temperature to keep it safe for eating. I’ve been sick so many times with food-borne illness that I am super careful about it now. For that reason, there was a sense of urgency about the whole process. Never having done a whole animal totally on our own, I worried that we would be too slow. We bit the proverbial bullet and got used to working with cold hands early on.

Me in my fashionable butchering outfit.
I had just wrapped up the torso in cellophane after working for about three
hours so we could take a break and continue the following day.

The second thing that concerned me was neighbors seeing what we were doing in the garage and thinking who-knows-what. For the first half hour we worked with both garage doors open to take advantage of all the natural light we could. But then people started after-work dog walking and we decided to close the side where we were working and keep the other side open. Of all the planning we had done, zero planning had gone into lighting. Going into this, I guess I thought we’d be getting a much earlier start, say noonish, not working into the night. So as I kept at it, Kyle attached one of the brightest desk lamps he could find to the top of a 7-foot ladder. This helped enormously. We were able to see just fine with both garage doors closed while at the same time protecting our neighbors from being traumatized.

When my girls got home from school, I met them at the entrance of the garage and warned them that they may want to come in the house through the front door, that the pig was here and that they may not want to see it. But their response as they barreled past me to take a look was, “Cool. Is it all bloody and stuff?” Poor things. It probably just hadn’t sunken in yet.

Hey buddy!
(Ever the Monty Python fan, Kyle's favorite
joke is to say, "No, no. He's just resting.")

I went back and forth between the pig and my butchering books, barely aware that I was using the tip of this razor-sharp Japanese knife as a pointer to follow the text and the diagrams. In the end, the books were only marginally helpful. Initially, as you may recall, my plan was to very methodically cut half of the pig up via the Italian butchering method and half of the pig with the American method. But I was about half successful. By the end, on some parts, my only strategy was getting off as much meat as possible, employing no plan or skill whatsoever.

Kyle removes the feet with a saw.

For the first cut, after removing the tail and ears, I figured the simplest thing to remove would be the jowls (cheeks). I mangled the first one pretty badly and managed to miss a lot of meat on the side of the neck, but I learned from that and did a better job on the second one. Removing the head was the next task. Not as gruesome as it sounds, but it does give a person a new perspective on things. From the back of the head, you can see the very back of the tongue. I found a diagram for how to remove the tongue, but this was a complete disaster. I would cut where I thought the diagram showed to release the tongue from the bottom of the mouth but succeeded only in puncturing it several times, ruining it in the process. I gave up and put the whole head in the freezer to deal with later.

Fresh jowl, ready for curing.

We then removed the feet and finished for the day by removing all four legs. I don’t know why I hadn’t read about this in all my research leading up to this moment, but it turns out the arms were not attached with any bone or ball-in-socket joint. Only ligaments and muscle. This made removing them a relative cinch. The back legs do, however, have a solid bone connection to the pelvis so use of a saw was required there. With all four legs and the ribs/backbone wrapped and in the fridge, we called it a day, grilling and eating the tenderloin from the pig for dinner.

Diving the body in such a way that both the neck muscle (coppa)
and the loin (lonza) remain in tact for curing.

On day two, I learned that I knew nothing about deboning a leg. It was a mess. We got a lot of meat (probably 25 lbs) for grinding and several large hunks for roasting and slow cooking, but it wasn’t the prosciutto holy grail that I had hoped it would be. Someone with more skill and experience would easily have been more successful. I need to do a lot more research on this before attempting it again. For dinner, we mixed a pound of the ground pork with some spicy breakfast sausage seasoning (procured from Amish country) and cooked up some patties to eat along with scrambled eggs.

On the final day, we removed the ribs and the loin along the back. This long solid muscle is what often becomes the pork chop. But we took it out whole for salt curing, probably my most successful part of the whole butchering experience. (Much more on the curing and our setup in a near-future post.) For dinner, we used another pound of the spicy sausage to make a red sauce for pasta. Dynamite.

Ready for grinding

Happy As Hogs

As mentioned in a previous post, we had ordered two pigs, one suckling and one half-grown, from Erstwhile Farm run by Larry and Lanette Stec near Silver Creek, Nebraska. The couple, who met in their teens, run a 300-plus-acre organic operation with hogs, egg-laying chickens, and grains. Larry, who took over the three-generation farm when his father Leo died, converted it from a conventional farming operation to an organic one, saying he prefers working a smaller amount of land and "not handling materials that require a skull and crossbones on the label."

Larry and Lanette Stec

All three of their kids are grown, so the two hold the fort down on their own now. Work beckons constantly. In addition to the hogs, chickens, and fields, they also have a large home garden, the fruits of which I was fortunate enough to sample when they generously invited Kyle and me to sit and stay for lunch. Two kinds of homemade salsa, deviled eggs from their hens, hot pickled green beans, a really wonderful pickled eggplant, and of course, pork steak and grilled bacon.  “Nothing fancy,” she texted me in her invitation. But that's not how I would describe it.

An advertisement for Stec pork back when Leo's dad was still running the farm.   The sign sits above the kitchen sink now.

Today was the day to pick up the pigs. I took a day off work to make sure we could get them the day right after the larger one was slaughtered so it wouldn’t be frozen. That way, we could break it down pretty much right away. There is also a part of me that wanted the butchering experience as close to the time of slaughter as possible; I just thought it would feel more honest and real that way.  

But first Lanette took us on a short driving tour of their farm, which is home to a wonderful and loyal watchdog named Ida. Bless her heart. She barked at me as we arrived AND as we were leaving the house! The Stec’s farm is divided up into several pens to accommodate the life cycle of the pigs. One pen is for mothers that are still nursing, one is for pigs that have just been weaned, one is for first-time mothers, or gilts, that are being bred with the males, and another is for hogs that are just biding their time and putting on weight.

Pigs rooting around for food in the corn field.

Larry built an indoor “nursery” for the moms but quickly realized the nursery was overkill and that the pigs, including the babies, needed to be outside. So in addition to having plenty of room to roam, they have huts scattered throughout the farm to bed down for the night and to have a warm place to stay when it gets colder. The pigs spend a lot of time foraging in the fields for roots and leftover grain.

Huts for pigs that are farrowing (with piglets).

Pigs produce a contented grunting sound as a greeting to strangers and to talk to each other. Lanette said they also make this sound when they are nursing the babies. These pigs did appear to be a little leery of us, but they also appeared to really enjoy being scratched behind the ears and thus were tolerant of some human contact. Overall, it was really satisfying to see and interact with these guys up close. All they require for containment is a thin electric wire about two-and-a-half feet off the ground and learn quickly to avoid coming in contact with it.

Kyle giving this one a good scratch.

Alive, the pig weighed 120 pounds. But even gutted, it was a serious challenge to get in our car. The Stecs had put a clever, makeshift harness around it to help pick it up, but it was super unwieldy. The day after loading it into and out of the car, my entire chest ached and my arms were so sore. And this wasn't even a full-grown hog. We had built a wooden crate to contain the animal and bags of ice for the 1 1/2-hour ride home, but in an epic failure to plan, the box did not fit in our vehicle. Fortunately the pig was cold enough already. A couple of bags of ice purchased on the way home and laid over the top kept it cool and their was zero mess in the car. It worked out pretty well.

We paid our bill for the suckling and the hog and said our good-byes. I casually asked if their hens were still laying, if they had any eggs to sell. They said yes, so we added a couple dozen eggs to our order and were on our way.

Next: The Best Laid Plans. Part two of this post will describe the three crazy days it took to get this guy ready to eat and in our freezer.

Close Your Eyes, Rudolph

Farming families who raise and butcher their own meat are eating VERY well in this country. And I mean restaurant-quality, way-better-than-a-grocery-store (choose your animal) filet mignon. It may be in a back room somewhere with a wood-burning stove and a concrete floor wearing a blood-spattered apron, sitting on a cooler because there are no chairs and eating with a toothpick off of a makeshift plate or, even more likely, straight out of the pan (all theoretical, of course ;) But believe me when I tell you that people who handle meat at the source are getting a better product than any of the rest of us. It’s fresh. It’s high-quality. And it’s so tender that a toothless infant could eat it. It’s that good.

I initially met Dave and Lori Sanders by signing up for their deer-butchering workshop through the local community college. After a false start and hours wasted driving around lost in the country because I (and apparently Google, too) am incapable of deciphering rural addresses, we rescheduled for this past Sunday. When I had spoken to him on the phone a couple days before the class, I was disappointed when he said, contrary to the course description, this would not be a hands-on demonstration. As a former psychiatric nurse who has seen just about everything, he didn’t feel comfortable handing a knife over to someone he’d never met before. I pressed him a little and explained that I might be certifiable but I was safe with a knife. He relented somewhat and said he would reconsider once he had “a chance to look me in the eyes.”

Their farm, called Sanders Country Kitchen, is located just north and west of Valparaiso, Nebraska, and is a marvel of one man’s amazing handiwork: Dave built just about every structure on the property himself, including storage buildings, a slaughter house, a meat processing building, a walk-in refrigerator for aging meat, a smokehouse, and a commercial kitchen. When I met him, I realized I had already met him before (and bought his food) at the farmer’s market in Lincoln. The Sanders and their 14-year-old son, Nick, do everything: mushrooms, jellies, jerky, sausage, and eggs. They used to do rabbits but recently sold that business. They work a seven-day-a-week farming life. He left nursing a few years ago and now works full-time on the farm, while Lori still does part-time nursing to supplement the family’s income. They all, including their son, work extremely hard for a life that they happen to love. “It’s not a job, it’s a lifestyle,” Lori told me.

Seeing a carcass hanging is a little jarring, even with my high interest in the butchering craft. Today we would be breaking down a female mule deer, the first step of which is removing the hide. The meat has been aging in a cooler for one or two weeks, which breaks down the meat to unimaginable tenderness. It is aged with the hide on so the meat doesn’t dry out. After the meat is aged, it is so tender that you can rip and ruin good meat if you try to pull the hide off, so this is instead done slowly with lots of little cuts with a very sharp knife. After the hide is removed, he wipes the animal down with a cloth that’s damp with white vinegar. This acts like Velcro and does a great job of picking up stray hairs so they don’t wind up in the packaged meat. I have personally eaten summer sausage with deer hair in it (not pointing fingers or naming names here) and it’s not appetizing in the least. So I was pleased to see him taking such care at this step.

Removing the  hide

While the basic technique of butchering is the same regardless of the animal, it had been a while since my hog butchering class, so my memory was not great. Long story short: first the “arms/shoulders” come off, followed by the backstrap (tenderloin), and then finally the hind legs. After these larger parts are removed, the process, again, is mostly the same: remove the bone; clean off fat and “trash” such as membrane, cartilage, and goo; then finally separate the larger piece into muscles or muscle groups, depending on the final product.

Lori helps her husband Dave keep the deer stable while he cuts.

Removing the "backstrap" or tenderloin, which you can see underneath the layer of fat that Dave is pulling back (a sign of a very healthy deer). This is where the big steaks come from.

Shoulder and arm with bone in (top) and after deboning (bottom).

If it will become hamburger, you can simply hack away at it after it has been cleaned up, cutting it into pieces small enough to fit in the grinder. (I had great fun doing that with one of the hind quarters. Dave just set me loose. “See?” he said. “Now you’re a butcher!” That Dave. What a sense of humor.) A bundle of smaller muscles can make a wonderful roast, with all kinds of muscle layers for inserting whole cloves of garlic, herbs, and spices before tying the whole thing up and throwing it in the oven. Smaller whole muscles make great little medallions, while large whole muscles make beautiful steaks, as we were about to see.

Backstraps removed and ready to cut into steaks.

Lunch is almost ready!

 Break time was savored this day while we sampled the fruits of our labor. Lori seared a few of the steaks on the top of a wood-fueled stove, seasoned with garlic and salt. Steak. That was all we had. Best all-protein lunch ever. And as I ate, I couldn’t help but think about how many times I’ve paid a lot of money for steak that was not even close to this good.

Of course, nothing on the farm goes to waste. After as much of the meat as possible had been removed from the carcass, Dave put it in the chicken coop and the chickens were falling all over themselves to clean the bones. I didn't realize chickens could be quite so...carnivorous.

He said it would probably take me about a dozen times before I would have the process memorized. Repetition is key. He offered to let me stay and watch/help on a second deer and, thusly, a 2-hour course became a 3 ½-hour course. The option to exchange free labor for instruction may also be a possibility with the Sanders, so I was pretty happy to establish this connection after previous failed attempts for a similar work-for-education trade with other meat lockers.