So I'd finally gotten over my information saturation induced analysis paralysis mentioned in the last post by narrowing it down to one method and process and going from there.
I had decided to use the very detailed pdf with photos and instructions contained on the CD included with Cole Ward's book, "The Gourmet Butcher's Guide to Meat". He basically starts with a picture of the entire half hog carcass laying on the table and says, "First, we're going to cut here..." and goes from there to break down the primals (shoulder, belly, loin, and ham) into sub-primals, and the into actual retails cuts. While his process goes so far as to bone out just about every cut, such as the ham, picnic shoulder, Boston Butt, etc... I'd planned to leave certain bones in based on what I wanted do with that cut. Which I'll describe more in a sec.
I know I'd mentioned Adam Danforth's book as being the one book to own, and I still stand by that. However, since one of the methods outlined in his book was the exact method that was shown in the electronic guide on Cole Ward's disc, I erred on the side of having lots of pictures to guide me. I think that aside from that pdf, the content and "meat" (if you will) contained in Danforth's book is FAR superior to Cole Ward's.
So what was my plan? Seems weird to even be typing this now... but at the time, it was kind of a big deal. I was sweating the small stuff I guess.
Rather than give a play by play in advance - I'll wait and cover that later. For now, it might be helpful to describe what it was I wanted out of the carcass from the standpoint of cuts and what I planned to do with them.
Hocks were to be removed and frozen with intent to cure and smoke later. Trotters removed and frozen to be used for something later... maybe bone stock? I figured I'd decide that once other projects had settled down.
I planned to brine the whole ham and make a "city ham". This was partly contingent on how big the ham turned out to be and whether it would fit nicely in a 5 gallon bucket (my brining vessel). If it was too monstrous to fit handily, I'd bone it out into some smaller roasts to brine separately. The idea here was for lunch meat and sandwiches after the initial cooking. I'd wanted to time it so that it would be ready for Easter Sunday but I gave up on that and decided to keep it simple and not complicate things with self subjected timelines.
I wanted the spare ribs left intact. And if possible, I wanted the baby back ribs intact too, which meant boning them out from the sirloin. Lots of sources used a table saw for that process (to remove the chine bone) and so I decided that if I couldn't do it, I'd revert to bone in loin chops.
The belly was going to be made into bacon and salt pork. I had two techniques I wanted to try. One a simple brine and the other a cure-rub. But until I had the belly cut up, I wasn't sure how much I'd be doing for either method. But the point was to do bacon with it.
The loin was going to be a mixture of boneless (or bone-in, see above) chops and roasts. I'd just kind of eyeball it once it was on the table.
The shoulder was going to broken down into a bone-in Boston Butt for pulled pork BBQ and into a bone-in picnic ham to be cured in a method to be determined later (but frozen for now).
Leaf fat was for leaf lard and back fat for regular lard. Skin was to be left on the bellies going into the brine but removed from the part getting the rub. I'd make decisions on skin once I had it on the table and could see how well it'd been scalded and scraped as I didn't really want to stink my wife's kitchen by burning a bunch of hair off.
Trim meat and some back fat (leaf lard is less desirable for sausage to my understanding - and is MUCH better used rendered into lard for baking) were to be set aside for sausage. I had no idea how much trim I'd wind up with so I was going to have to wing it in terms of how much sausage to plan for. I'd also set a 5 pound beef round roast to thaw from the last grass-fed side of beef we'd got. This way if I ran short on trim meat, I'd be able to supplement with some beef. And since I'd planned on kielbasa as one of the sausage types I was planning for (andouille was the other - both to be cold smoked as well), that would work well since there were recipes abound that included both beef and pork.
While I would have loved to have the head available for headcheese or rillette, I think that was going to push my bride out of her comfort zone. After all, she was letting me butcher a hog on her kitchen counter... no need to push my luck!
I'll get to the specifics of recipes and techniques for this stuff later... especially once I've had a chance to see how some of the initial stuff came out.
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