Lucking out with neighbors... PORK!

We recently sold our house in the "burbs" and bought a small house with a few acres out in the sticks.  I was pleased to find out that our next door neighbor's significant other is a life-long farmer who raises cattle, pigs, etc...  At some point in the next few years, I hope to raise a few wiener pigs (pigs that you get when they are very young for the purposes of slaughtering and butchering them for your own use) for our family.  It'll sure be handy to have someone close-by to run ideas when it comes to doing it ourselves.

In the short-term, we're hoping to get chickens for eggs this spring and perhaps next spring, we'll do a run of 30 broiler chickens for our own meat.  That's the plan at least.

In the meantime, I recently managed to get my Big Green Egg setup and ready to go after our move.  I can't tell you how happy this makes me as I've been unable to fire up the smoker in anger for months on end.

To celebrate, I did some BBQ this past weekend.  Down south, that means pulled pork.  As such, I secured a couple 8lb boston butts (you'll remember from the butchering posts that this actually isn't from the butt area of the hog, but instead its the top part of the shoulder area).

The process is pretty simple when you break it down - put some kind of spice rub on the meat.  Get your cooker set for indirect (like oven heat as opposed to grilling heat) cooking and get the temp to about 225-250 degrees.

Rubbed with Harvest Eating Carolina BBQ Rub

It also wouldn't be proper to do it without smoke.  As such, you need some means of putting smoke in the cooking chamber.  Wood is generally the answer - be they chunks, chips, or logs.  In my case, since I lost all my hardwood in the move (donated to a friend who had a wood burning stove), I made up some foil packets to put pellets in (the same pellets I used when I smoked the ham, bacon, and sausage last year).   made little foil pouches full of the pellets and tossed them on the coals.  This seemed to work fine but I'd like to experiment some more on packet design and placement.

At any rate, the idea is to "smoke" those butts until you have reached an internal meat temperature of about 190-205 degrees.  At a cooking temperature of 225, that can take upwards of 1.5-2 hours per pound.  I put mine on the Egg at about 1am and they came off about 15 hours later.

When the meat draws back off the bone, your getting close!

I was a little concerned; this being the first cook in the new place, as we get a great deal more breeze here and I wasn't sure how much that would affect the temperature fluctuations.  I sat up too late to babysit... in the end, the Egg did what it always does.  Once you get it adjusted, you just leave it be and it does its thing.  That afternoon, it was time to get them off the grill, let them cool, and pull the pork.

This was a cool pull for me because my five year old pitched in.  Pulling is a pretty labor intensive process that requires you to essentially pull the pork meat apart in strands/shreds.  Some folks like to use big knives and chop it all up but I don't like the texture that way and feel like it dries out too quickly.  That's just my opinion - and in the world of BBQ, everyone has one.

The end result, after all the cooking, fat rendering, bone-removal, and trimming during the pulling process, we wound up with about 7lbs of pulled pork.  I see pork tacos in my future!  Left-overs are a wonderful thing and since it takes as long to cook two butts as it does one, you might as well cook plenty.

I may post some additional articles in the coming weeks to talk about some of the specifics of the process.

I'm hungry again just looking at the pictures.

Lessons Learned - Observations of a Novice

So now that its over (or at least the butchery and initial curing is over), what do I think?  Was it all I dreamed it to be?

Well, I gotta admit that when I finally sat down that first night, I was WAY more tired than I expected.  I remember thinking that perhaps next time, I'd let the processor do it.  But after a day or two and lots of reflection, I came to the conclusion that there were lots of areas that could be done better now that I had some experience.  And if I could incorporate lessons learned, it would make the next time that much easier.

So what are the lessons learned?  In no meaningful order, I'd have to say that I learned the following and would advise anyone who was trying this for the first time to consider these:

- Work.  Its way more physical than I expected.  Muscles get used that don't normally get used.  And its a good thing that the parts get lighter and smaller as the day goes on.

- Help is a good thing.  That said, it should be purposeful help.  I had lots of help but I wasn't familiar enough with the process to set anyone to working on a task.  Next time, I'll have one person cubing the lard and another person vacuum sealing as we go.

- Prep.  Make your brines ahead of time.  Make your cure rubs ahead of time.  Mix your spices for sausage the day before.  Anything you can do ahead of time to avoid having to mess with it on the day of, the better.

- Work the Bugs out.  Meaning, get all your crap together.  Don't wait until you have a fridge full of brining hams and bacon to decide you need to defrost that fridge so it doesn't go belly up 15 days into the ham curing.  Familiarize yourself with any new processes and equipment.  Butcher day isn't that day for trying out your new FoodSaver.  Play with ahead of time.

- Bowls.  You don't have enough,  Trust me.  I know, you just went to Costco and got two new stainless steel bowls... big ones.  But, you'll need four.  If you have four, you'll need 5.  Its a universal law of the universe or something.

- Space.  See above.  You won't have enough.  Get the fridge cleaned out ahead of time.  Its going to fill up fast.  If your freezer is full of three year old pop-sicles and the person who is putting that pork in the freezer doesn't know it can be tossed, they're going to come back and tell you there is no room.  Now you have to wash up and go see.  So yeah, toss the ancient Stouffers stuff ahead of time... you shouldn't be eating that crap anyway!

- Bar towels.  You'll go through them like crazy.  Get a dozen more.  They are cheap at Sam's.

- Saw.  I need another one.  Maybe a shorter one with a less finer toothed blade.  Mine sucks.

- Knives.  If you are going to have someone else cutting up fat for lard while you make chops, then don't make them use the dull chef's knife in your drawer.  Get them something decent to use.  It'll be much cheaper than a trip to the ER because they were trying to do the right thing with the wrong tool.

- Be flexible.  Having watched a ton of different videos helped to give me the aforementioned analysis paralysis.  But, it also gave me enough knowledge to zig when I'd planned to zag.  You just have to know when to stop trying to force something to happen and punt!  In the end, you still wind up with pork.  And that's not a bad thing.

- Enjoy it.  You've spent some time, effort, and money to get to the moment where that hog is on the counter.  Take a moment to stop and smell the roses (err.. pork).  This is supposed to be enjoyable.

So will I do it again?  Yep - no doubt!  The longer I go the more it feels like Army basic training.  While you are in the middle of it, it seems a miserable experience.  But after you are done you think, "That wasn't so bad."  I don't mean to make this sound like it was a miserable experience at all.  But I think I'd built it up to be such a complicated monster of a process that it was like child-birth or something.  It was great fun and I learned SO much.

Next time, I'll take some of my own advice, streamline the process, do some different things to prepare, and have even more fun because it won't seem so foreign.

I highly recommend this journey to anyone who has a predisposition to wanting to know your meat as well as your possibly can (short of raising and slaughtering it yourself).

I hope these articles will be useful.  I tried to write them to be what I'd wished I'd been able to find when I was researching the process.

A Plan! So Just What IS My Plan?

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.