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