To Butcher A Pig

I have no idea why or where I got the idea to butcher a pig.  I probably started with my wallet, as most things do.  I tend to be somewhat cheap ("tight" as my wife would say) and I'm forever looking to save a buck or two with the idea that the less I can pay for something, the more I get to buy of it.  And when ideas don't originate with my wallet, they almost always can be traced back to my stomach.

Last fall we attended a Farm to Table event put on by Country Gardens Farm near Newnan, Georgia.  We had joined Mike and Judy Cunningham's Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program the previous spring, which provided us with all sorts of fresh seasonal veggies grown naturally (don't get me started on a USDA Organic rant...) as well as raw milk from their dairy and eggs from their flock of hens.  At the Farm to Table meal, Mike served a pork roast that had come from their hogs.  I was floored at the difference in quality as compared to the pork I'd had in stores.  They raise their pigs on pasture, which means that the animals have to work more for their food by foraging and grazing.  Finding grasses, greens, nuts, roots, and whatever else they can scrounge up from their environment runs totally counter to the way that most pork is raised for your grocer's meat case.

Confinement hog operation - used without permission from Bamesberger Farms

Most commercially raised hogs are raised in confinement; in such tight quarters that the farmers remove their tails when they are piglets so that they don't get bored and chew each others tails off all together; and fed mostly commercial feed which contains lots of the stuff my family is trying to avoid (chemical fertilizers, GMO enabled pesticides, etc...).  Furthermore, as America has waged war on fat for the last four decades or so, commercially raised hogs have been selectively bred to be leaner and contain less fat (after all, they even consider it "the other white meat").  And for those who aren't wise to this yet, FAT = FLAVOR!

Mike and Judy raise heritage breed hogs (Tamworth), which are much more happy on pasture than say the pigs you'd see at a conventional hog farm.  Heritage breeds (the American Livestock Conservancy lists 10 heritage breeds of pig) have not had that ability to thrive on forage bred out of them yet.

I have to believe that is what accounted for the difference in taste.  Similar to grass-fed beef, pastured pork has a richer and more robust flavor and the fat is so palatable that I found myself eating it rather than cutting around it and scooting it to the edge of my plate.  Imagine this comparison;  a lean chicken breast tastes like chicken and a chicken thigh tastes even more like chicken.  Grass-fed beef tastes like "beefier" beef.  Pastured pork tastes even more like pork.  I don't know how else to describe it... you just need to get your hands on some!

So all that being said, my appetite was now whetted for better pork than I'd been cooking.  I was salivating at the thought of how much better a slow cooked Boston Butt would taste when it came from one of Mike's hogs instead of from the grocery store.  But... Mike didn't have any available and wouldn't for quite some time.  I had to go elsewhere.

One of the farmers I contacted asked me if I wanted the hog butchered or not.  There was a price difference... it was cheaper to get it un-butchered (a point of clarification here - 'slaughtering' is the process by which animal is killed, skinned, and cleaned - 'butchering' is the process by which an animal is prepared for use by breaking it down from a carcass into something you and I would consider retail cuts).  See my above comment about my wallet being a powerful motivator...

I'd seen Chris Kimble on America's Test Kitchen episodes on PBS stand in front of a model of a pig and point to the loin or the shoulder sections.  People used to butcher hogs on farms, right?  How hard could it be?

And so the quest began...