Slaughtering 101

Kind of like with hunting, I do not feel the need to do the slaughtering of the animals we’ll be preparing for this blog. But I did feel a certain responsibility to know what it feels like to take the life of another living thing.

I figured it should be something small and manageable (and edible), so a chicken seemed to make the most sense. Toward this end, we found a class in Kansas City taught by a self-described “urban homesteader,” Ben Wilson, who sells eggs, chicken meat, honey, and lots of other stuff from his farm Phantom Chicken to the local farmer’s market, Bad Seed. Bad Seed is the same farmer’s market that my cousin Bill happens to get a lot of his in-season produce for his own cooking adventures.

Phantom Chicken Farm logo

I forgot my phone camera in the car for this exercise, and maybe that is a good thing. Lately I tend to take utilitarian photos that probably would not have been all that appetizing. And frankly, I don’t know how much you all want to see. After we parked, Ben led us into a field, past a vegetable stand and Bad Seed’s waning tomato crop, still limping along in a droughty summer, past a chicken pen with wheels that makes it so they can graze the birds in a new patch of field each day. He took us to a small clump of trees deep in the field, where he already had a table set up in the shade, covered with newspapers, and sharp boning knives laying on top. Off to the side was a huge stock pot filled with water about to boil and a gas fire underneath. The chickens were also already there. There were four: one for Ben to demonstrate, one for each of us, and a fourth “just in case something went wrong” (don’t ask me what).

We were told that chickens really are not all that bright. They also appear to like to stay close to their people. In fact, one got out of the cage while we were standing there, and Ben wasn’t the least bit phased. The chicken just pecked at bugs and hung around nearby, seemingly unaware of the carnage that was about to take place right under her nose – or that she was going to be allowed to live another day. At Ben’s place the chickens just run free in the yard, which he said he enjoys watching while he has a cocktail on the porch after a long day’s work.

Ben Wilson showing off his urban homestead honeycomb

First, after giving us one last chance to back out, Ben demonstrated with a rooster. In addition to the pot of boiling water and the table, there was also what’s called a “killing cone.” The bird is inserted head down into the cone. This stabilizes the bird and also serves to calm it down. Once the bird is securely in the cone, you pull the head down gently, with your thumb and finger firmly under the chicken’s jaw and then, with a VERY sharp knife for purposes of speed and maximum humaneness, cut deeply (though not enough to cut off the head) in a half circle about a couple inches from the head. You continue to hold the head while the bird bleeds out.  This is done (with other livestock, too) so you don’t get excessively bloody meat. The closer they get to losing consciousness, they start to move around. But this isn’t anything like what you hear about chickens who meet their demise by having their heads cut clean off. Everything is very controlled and it’s over in probably a minute.

A rooster in the killing cone just before slaughter

You continue to hold the bird for an additional minute or so. They will go completely limp and sometimes their little eyes will close. The first time I watched it, it was kind of a sad and quiet time. Ben took the rooster out of the cone, laid it on the table, and felt its chest to make sure it wasn't breathing.  

When it was my turn to kill a chicken, I had to retrieve it from the cage myself, grabbing it by the feet and holding it upside down. There can be quite a bit of commotion at this stage, so he taught us to calm the chicken down by hanging it upside down by its feet and gently stroking it neck and chest. It worked every time he did it, kind of like rubbing the belly of an alligator to make it go to sleep.

I will say, this being the first time I've actually held a chicken, they are super sweet and very soft and fun to pet. I think I could enjoy having chickens. And I really didn't feel much like killing it after the couple minutes we bonded, but I was still committed. 

After two chickens and one rooster were done, we held them by the legs, and took turns dipping them into the boiling water. This loosens the feather follicle so they can be plucked more easily. After plucking, we gutted them and put them in a cooler to take them home.  

Ben, in his generosity, threw in the rooster he had killed. But I was later quite displeased to find that, after I had roasted it (for company, no less!), it was so tough I literally could not even cut it. I had no idea meat could be that tough. Someone told me my mistake was not boiling the **** out of it for several hours. Or better yet, leaving it to stew in a slow cooker for a day or so. I have my doubts.

Meanwhile, I have taken some time to view slaughtering of larger animals. Besides giving me a certain added connection to my food and understanding of the process that makes eating meat possible, I have a high respect for people who do this day in and day out. Not only does it take a lot of emotional toughness, but it also happens to be one of the most dangerous professions in the country. 

Widening The Scope

Well, I’m only six posts into this blog and I’m already breaking one of my ground rules: that I would only eat domesticated animals. It started innocently enough with a conversation with a co-worker who is an avid hunter and lives in far western Nebraska.  I typically don’t talk about my home butchering endeavors with people anymore because they tend to find it … odd. But I figured a hunter who just mentioned that his son has two deer  “hanging in the barn right now” probably would indulge me.

He could see how interested I was and not only offered me a very generous hind quarter of one of the deer aging in the barn (doing his part, he said, to broaden my tasting/blog experiment), but he also offered me an opportunity I couldn’t refuse: an elk hunting adventure.  A buddy of his has a herd of elk on his land and, for a fee, you can hunt one.  We agreed he will do the shooting and then let me help with the dressing and butchering. In the end, I will get half an elk for my freezer.  (Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I’d be saying that.)

There were other “wild game” themes running throughout the week that made me start rethinking this aspect of my blog. At our office chili cookoff, one co-worker brought chili made with wild turkey meat that he had hunted himself, and it was drop-dead delicious.  In addition, I had recently signed up for a deer butchering class, not because I had planned to start hunting but because it was an opportunity to practice butchering closer to where I live.

A conversation I had with another hunter friend recently also started to sway me, even before I was offered the free deer meat. “My wife, who will not eat beef or wild birds, will eat our deer because it’s so good,” he said in an e-mail. “People I’ve served it to swear it’s high-quality beef.” The same guy said he never makes his deer meat into sausage because he doesn’t want to cover up the awesome flavor of the meat with spices. Could he be exaggerating? Possibly, but it was enough to make me think it was also possible I was really missing out on something good. I had to reconsider it.

One last bit about wild game, and another sign to me that it was meant to be a part of this blog…

I happened to be in Kearney (central Nebraska) for a work conference this past week and it happened to coincide with the annual gathering of the International Association of Falconry and Conservation of Birds of Prey. They pretty much had taken over the hotel, including coming into the exhibit area for OUR conference and eating food paid for by our host! It was a hoot! And if they weren’t partying outside your door in the hallway until late into the night, their hunting dogs were barking their heads off outside your window on the other side of the room. Truly insane.

But I had to give it to these guys. They would talk to anybody for literally hours to tell you about the sport, which goes back some 3,000 years and includes using dogs to find game birds or jack rabbits, followed by the hunters who flush them out, and then finally sending the falcons or hawks into the air to catch and kill them. Whoever heard of such a thing!

An owner gets her dog and falcon (visible perched inside the truck) ready for a morning of hunting.

Falcons can either be bred or captured for this purpose. They call the process of assimilating them “imprinting.” And this is done, I am told, by making sure everything good comes from their human. The training is also carried out this way: They are tethered with increasingly longer strings until they can reliably come back from 100 feet or so to retrieve food.

A falcon gets its wing measured.

A hunter poses with his peregrine falcon.

One guy told me that hunting this way is about 11 percent the reliability that gun hunting is and “really makes you run your butt off.”  He also said the whole findprey/flush/flybirds is “more of an ideal.” It often doesn’t work that smoothly; a lot of things can and do go wrong. In fact, I was told that just yesterday a bird was released to chase a rabbit, swooped down and missed, and then just kept on flying and didn’t come back. The owner was going to try to find the bird today, with marginal odds of success (the birds do wear a tracking device).

Falcons hang out on perches in the morning prior to the hunt.

This international meeting comes to Nebraska every six years. They say this area is great in terms of game and huntable land. A lot of these folks have a lot of affection for the state. In the raptor pen at the hotel (pictured above), the birds would occasionally try to fly, only to get about a foot before being yanked back by the tether. The guy next to me said, “See, they love to exercise their wings. They can’t wait to fly.” My co-worker, who also happens to be a vegetarian, said it looked more to her like they were trying to get away, and I pretty much agreed. But they still looked majestic and powerful, even in captivity. I have seen wild ones perched alone in a high branch along the interstate when I’m making my drive between Lincoln and Kansas City and often wonder about them. I never knew they could be used in this way.

A hunter poses with the bounty (in a freezer set up by the hotel just for this conference).

Getting back to the reason I didn’t include wild game initially in this eating endeavor, it has nothing to do with hunting. I don’t have anything against the sport. It's just not anything I’m particularly interested in. I think I may have excluded it in the beginning because of sustainability reasons (which I don't consider an issue with deer, elk, etc). Also, because I'm not a hunter, I didn't foresee any circumstances where I might be able to procure wild game for my cooking adventures (this also is turning out not to be a barrier). But I think hunting is still relevant (and have decided to include it in the blog) from the standpoint of wanting to better understand people’s relationship with their food. 

Local Offerings

(Fingers drumming on the table while we wait for the hog to be ready…)

Actually, we have two pigs on the way. One is a larger hog that we’ll be breaking down as I described in my previous post. The other is a suckling pig, roughly 20 pounds, a purchase inspired by my cousin Bill’s culinary dream of roasting a whole baby pig, which we will do for a big dinner this Christmas with the whole family. An entire post on that, complete with photos and eggnog, don’t you worry. More also on my cousin, Bill, an accomplished home chef who probably has influenced me in my food life more than he realizes.

Meanwhile, this blogging thing is a pretty tough racket. What do you write about while you’re waiting for exciting stuff to happen? 

As you know, pork is not the only meat we will be trying and writing about in this blog. So a couple weeks ago we hit the road in search of a beef producer. Ergo, we met the Welsches. Dave and Deb Welsch run West Blue Farm near Milford, Nebraska, about 45 minutes west and south of Lincoln. The Welsch family has been in these parts since 1892. The original church their family built still stands, and their crops are certified organic for the past 20 years. The cows are grass-fed and grain-finished, which means their fat content is somewhere between a fully corn-fed (more fatty) and fully grass-fed (more lean) cow, and they are all-but-certified organic cows, a certification they are currently working toward.

West Blue Farm cows just hanging out

We drove out to meet the Welsches on a Saturday morning. It had rained the evening before, but it was the first big storm in months during a very deep (and continuing) drought, so no one was complaining. With all the mud and road repair work going on around their house, we weren’t able to see their herd, but we did get to see the handful of cows that were being finished (the last couple months of fattening before they are slaughtered) as well as talk with the Welsches for a good hour about their operation and what they are trying to accomplish. All of their children are grown. One son offered to work part of the family land, but when he said he planned to use “conventional methods” (i.e. not organic), Dave said “no thanks.” So it’s still just the two of them on the farm. 

They also raise chickens and have just begun raising pigs, which they say is a lot of fun. And they get their piglets from where else? The Stecs, of course! The same couple that owns Erstwhile Farm, where we are getting our hogs from. Small world!

Over the years, my family has probably eaten more beef than any other kind of meat. But I am not ready to take cows off my list. I still feel like there is a lot to discover.  We will be buying half a cow from the Welsches in January or March. The half cow will be cut into three pieces so we can butcher them at home, but those are still pretty big pieces, and I still have no plan for how to get them home. More new territory. Logistics are important. But we will worry about that later.

After we left the Welsches, we decided to visit a couple of butcher and meat shops in the area. The first one, Blue River Meats, is a great little nuts-and-bolts butcher shop just off Hwy 33 in Crete, Nebraska. Not much in the way of ambience, but you could tell the meat was fresh. The selection was amazing. Huge arm and leg pieces on display, and you could get a roast cut to order. We did not stay long. We wound up buying one ribeye steak to try, but that was consumed before it could be photographed. It was reely, reely good.

Blue River Meats

Next stop was Wilber, Nebraska. Known as the Czech Capital of the United States, Wilber had a couple places we were interested in seeing. This town has a quaint downtown Main Street that feels very festive even though Czech Days came and went months ago. Polka music is piped into the street all year round! Although it was a bit surreal, like that scene in Andromeda Strain when the researchers arrive to investigate. With no one around to listen to the music, you kind of get the feeling something bad is about to happen.

At Frank’s Smokehouse, we bought some very delicious authentic Czech sausages that I wound up slicing and sautéing with vegetables and wild rice. Incredibly beefy, and firm (and LEAN -- I had to add olive oil just to get them to render a bit) and a great crispy snap when I bit into the casing. When did I discover I liked natural cases? Hard to say. But I am all about them now. Texture is as important to me as taste.

Very straightforward, not all that adventurous, but still very delicious, very local, and very fresh

Across the street at Wilber’s Meat Market, their selection of meats, about half sausages and half regular meat cuts such as roasts and steaks, is available mostly frozen (vacuum packaging). A great selection but not the feast for your eyes that Blue River Meats was. Still, they had this little gem:

Pickled pig's tongue

The woman there told me they make their own pickled pig tongue. “Is it good?” I asked. “I don’t know, I never eat it,” she replied.  I didn’t ask why she didn’t eat it, but I was disappointed she said "no." This is clearly a local classic. Was she not from around here? 

I can tell you, as someone who has already tried and cooked beef tongue before, that tongue really is delicious and probably one of the first “parts” you want to try if you are interested in something new and adventurous, largely because it doesn’t taste all that different from a regular cut of meat and also because it is truly one of the most delicate and fine pieces of meat you will have the pleasure of putting in your mouth. Seriously. Give it a shot and tell me I’m wrong. But my guess is you will like it.

I have never had pork tongue before, however. The meat was set in a very firm gelatin that was then sliced thick, kind of like lunchmeat. So that is what we did with it: two slices of bread and some mayo to make pickled pig tongue sandwiches. No wanky taste that you would associate with liver or other organ meat. Kyle, my husband, ate it with me. He said he liked it but described it as “chewy.” I agreed, but I’d say that the texture was more just firm, not like a tough piece of meat. As I ate it, I pictured a farmer turning off his tractor, wherever he happened to be in his corn field, and pulling this out for lunch. Really yummy and definitely something I would eat again.

A New Arrival

They sure are cute little buggers. Which is why I want them to have the most humane existence (and death) possible. We owe them that much, and the livestock farmers I’ve talked to feel the exact same way. It’s just the right thing to do.

But on to the business at hand…

We have ordered our first whole hog for butchering, not a situation to be taken lightly since it will be a lot (probably days worth) of work, and we don’t even have a chest freezer yet, let alone all the tools we will need to break down and package the meat. So there’s much to do to prepare beforehand.

In addition to the whole hog butchering class we took, we also have a couple books that show step-by-step how to make all the cuts, but that is a far cry from being an experienced butcher who has thorough knowledge of the task learned through lots of repetition. We expect to make some mistakes, especially because the experience we had isn’t exactly the same circumstances we will face with the hog we are getting. For one, our hog will still have the head/legs/tail on so we will have to remove them. Ours also will still have the skin on, which we will be removing for some cuts. And lastly, our hog will not already be split down the middle lengthwise, so we’ll either need to do that (hacksaw) or plan how we will work around it. So there are some challenges. (As an aside, the head will remain whole either way. I do know of a very romantic recipe for half a roasted pig head, but we won’t be doing that this time around.) 

I am encouraged by some butchers who say not to worry about errors since it’s all “just meat,” but at the same time, I still feel there is a lot that could go wrong resulting in spoiled meat, wasted money, much sorrow and despair. So I will get some refreshers via YouTube to hopefully give me a better shot at success.

We also will have to decide how we want to butcher the animal (the old adage on multiple ways to skin a cat is appropriate here), and this is decided by what we ultimately want to do with the meat. I have recently developed a strong interest in dry curing Italian style (prosciutto, pancetta, etc). So our plan is to butcher half of the hog the traditional Italian way, to create the kinds of cuts that are common for Italian dry curing. That leaves the other half of the hog, which we will butcher American style for chops, ribs, ham, loin, sausage, and ground pork. I am still debating whether there will be enough meat on the head for head cheese if I remove both jowls to make guanciale (kind of like bacon but from the meat and fat of the cheek), but for the most part, this detail is settled. A lot more on these differences in a future post.

Then there are supplies. A scale to weigh meat and salt (LOTS of salt), butcher’s twine to wrap and hang meat , wicked-sharp cutlery, the hacksaw (which I already mentioned), a meat grinder, and a boatload of other items. Oh, and a freezer to store it all in. Can you say Craigslist? Whew!

The first day will be a bit of an endurance test. We will pick up the hog, which will have been slaughtered the day before, from the organic hog farm in Columbus, Nebr., called Erstwhile Farm and break the animal down enough to get it all refrigerated. The second day will be all about breaking down the animal further and salting the Italian cuts to get the curing process going. The third day will be about processing the American cuts so they can be packaged and frozen. The American-style cuts can be eaten immediately, whereas the cured meats will disappear into the curing room for between two to 18 months, two vastly different approaches with vastly different results. There are more things that can go wrong with curing, mostly resulting from things going wrong at the butchering stage, and since the wait is so long for the end product, sometimes more than a year, I have a genuine case of the nerves as I head into this.

Fingers crossed!