Tuesday, November 1, 2016

October family book report (and butchering overview) by Jason

Perhaps it can be a source of gratification for us that the traditional harvest season—early autumn—is now becoming almost as busy for us as spring planting and the summer garden harvest, since it could be an indication that our lives are coming in line with nature’s rhythms.  Maybe this winter as we reflect on it it will be so.  Currently, we are simply trying not to live in a slow, lingering state of panic.

Since we guessed it would be like this, and since we had scheduled our first ever hog butchering for the end of October, we decided to keep the reading for this month simple and practical.  I borrowed a few butchering guides from a friend and former neighbor familiar with the process and with a penchant for ferreting out reliable information. It was a good idea.  I read mostly only the hog sections of the three butchering guides he loaned me, and it still took me most of the month to find the gaps in the action to accomplish that.  Mostly I read while Terah napped in my arms.  I would have preferred to also be napping, but there will be time for that.

Especially beneficial was the notion of reading three different sets of recommendations.  In that way, a person could take severe advice given in one guide less seriously when it was contradicted or toned down by the next.  The net result was a relatively complete sense of the generalities of what to expect come butchering day.

Of course nothing can truly prepare a person for the palpable reality of a hog being shot and stuck before one’s eyes, or of the wonder of opening up and parting out the body of a new kind of organism for the first time.  I am so grateful for the help and guidance of the aforementioned friend, as well as another experienced neighbor, as we navigated this process for the first time.

In the end, accomplishing the killing and preparing of our two American Guinea Hogs took significant parts of five days.

Day one was Tuesday the 25th of October.  On that day I arranged the scalding tank (borrowed) on top of two rows of concrete blocks (borrowed), and then set up four perpendicular rows of blocks a course and a half higher, upon which laid a rough-lumber platform (borrowed).  I then filled the tank and added wood ashes (ours!) to the water to plug the cracks and holes and make the hogs’ bristles stickier, which makes them easier to scrape off.  Then the neighbor that supplied nearly all the butchering equipment helped me lug the kettles and other sundry to the butchering ground.

Day two was Thursday the 27th.  I rose at 5 to accomplish chores and breakfast before daybreak.  At dawn the aforementioned guides and I converged on the hog pen and got to work.  The girls got up just in time to say their farewells (the homestead life has its discomforts) to the hogs, soon after which the first shot was fired.  I wish I could say they were both clean and perfect kills (if there is such a thing).  The fact is both pigs were deeply “stunned” and mostly immobilized by the bullets, but neither dropped silently.  The second required two shots, which is hard on my conscience.  I did not do the shooting, but it seemed that maybe the short stature of these hogs caused the shooter—accustomed to hogs in the 300lb range—to fire at a more acute angle than usual, such that the bullet entered the skull just forward of the brain or perhaps striking the brain but too peripherally.  This left the “sticker” (the person assigned to using a knife to sever the large, deep blood vessels of the neck) a tough job, but he did it very well, and all told it was over quickly.  I always comfort myself when the killing is messy that wild predators usually kill much less mercifully, yet the universe doesn’t begrudge them their food; that doesn’t obviate the need to find the best system we can contrive to minimize pain and anxiety in our food animals at all stages of their lives and deaths.  Or so think I.

Anyhow, once that stage was past it was time to set to the work of making use of them.  We used a tractor bucket to tote them up the hill to the scalding tank, which was already hot and waiting thanks to the good help of a third neighbor who had volunteered to light and tend the fire starting at 5 a.m.  By the time we got there at quarter of 8 he was gone.  It was a bit overheated, so we added cold water until the temperature got close to 150 degrees F.  Then the three of us plus a fourth neighbor (golly, what great help we had!) managed a chain-based dipping/swishing process that can’t be described easily in prose.  The result was a few minutes in the tank on each side, and once the hair was pulling easily the hog was rolled out onto the platform and descended upon by all four of us with “bell scrapers”, which are specialized hog scraping tools and look like tiny barbells with a cymbal on each end, one smaller and one larger.  I had read about this procedure, but nobody had mentioned that it was a frenzy, with the idea being that we needed to beat the clock before the hair started sticking in the rind (hide) again.  Having been scraped clean, each was then returned to the tractor bucket and transported to tripod hangers for hanging by the rear legs.

Evisceration and head removal were accomplished in the hanging position (liver and heart saved and set aside), then the carcasses were split in two with a very handy process involving a confident and knowledgeable person with a stout, sharp knife and a hatchet.  In the bargain, the backbone was removed and set aside for processing with the rest of the carcass the next day.  One person set to removing edible portions from the head for jowl bacon and “ponhoss” meat.  The others carried halves to hang in the walk-in cooler.  Things were cleaned up, and we were done in time for lunch. 

In the afternoon I took down and put away the scalding setup.

Day three (Friday the 28th) was taken with breaking down the halves into customary cuts such as bacons and hams, accumulating bits for sausage grinding, cubing fat for lard rendering, then the rendering and pressing of lard and the making of ponhoss (a southeastern specialty, as I understand).  The lard was rendered by heating cubed pork fat in a large cast iron open-topped kettle until all the moisture was out of it and the “cracklings” (leftover shrunken cubes of empty fat tissue) yielded all their lard upon squeezing against the kettle side and were beginning to get crispy around the edges.  Ponhoss is a meat/broth/milled grain mixture made by cooking pork bones and scrap meats in a kettle until the meat is falling off the bone, then straining the broth, sorting out the usable meat from the rest, grinding it and returning it to the broth, then adding cornmeal or a cornmeal/wheat flour mixture to the kettle in enough quantity to make a thickish, pudding-like slurry.  Spiced with salt and plenty of pepper, it is then poured into loaf pans to cool and solidify.  Typically it is eaten sliced and pan-fried with breakfast.  Pennsylvanians may think I am describing “scrapple”, but ponhoss is usually a lot less dense and with less emphasis on the inclusion of organ meats.  In our case, we innovated (use what you have, we say!) by replacing the flour and cornmeal with polenta-grind hand-ground popcorn.  Our neighbors had never heard of such a thing but they were willing to try it and enjoyed the new experience.  They even liked it, though I don’t think they were converts.

Both Janelle and I were surprised by how appealing this day’s processes were.  Finishing up as the sun faded in the west and people sat around the kettle fires felt like a taste of what community actually means.  Not too surprisingly, nobody was thinking or talking about it that way at the time.  We look forward to helping with the big hog butchering in February.

Day four (Saturday) involved a late start, since I coached Alida’s soccer game in the morning.  It took me from just before noon until five to double-grind 68 pounds of sausage, then clean up and put away all the equipment.  Maybe it would have been shorter if I hadn’t been nursing a back tweak from two days of heavy lifting.

Day five (Sunday and Nora’s birthday) was a few hours of bagging sausage and salting hams and bacons, before heading out on the family hike mentioned in Janelle's previous post.  I think it is better advice to apply cure to meat cuts as soon after cutting as possible, but I couldn’t make it happen.  I think it will be fine, but I am eager to check them tomorrow and re-apply salt.  All the meat to be cured (four sides of bacon, two jowls, and two twenty-pound hams…the rest went to others or to sausage) were left with skin on to the extent possible.  I applied salt to the exposed tissues, packing it on as thick as I could get it to stick, and in places where gravity allowed I left a ¼ to ½ inch layer.  My neighbors didn’t think I would have to coat the skins (they never do), but I tried to get some to stick just in case, since I had read that advice.  I left the meats to cure in the walk-in cooler, set to 38 degrees F.  Each piece is laying on a tilted rack, so that meat juices drawn to the surface by the osmotic effect of the salt can drain away into the pans positioned below.  We did not use any nitrate, nitrite, sugar, honey, or maple syrup in our cure.  Just salt.  “Should work,” the neighbors shrugged.  They usually use some brown sugar, mostly to get the salt to stick, they say, but they avoid nitrates/nitrites, too.

We have not yet decided about smoking the bacons and hams, but we are tempted.

A word about Guinea hogs:  maybe it was the diet of milk and vegetables with a few grains here and there (restaurant kitchen waste), or maybe it was the breed.  In any case, all initial reports are that this is some scrumptious pork!  That is the reputation, anyway, for the Guinea.

We knew they are “an old-fashioned lard breed” but I am not sure we knew the extent of that definition.  These guys had at least a three-inch layer of fat on their backs, and plenty on the sides, on the belly, and inside.  All told, the back fat alone from these two seven-month-old barrow hogs yielded seven gallons of rendered lard!  Each half weighed 80 pounds, so a dressed weight of 160 each, or a bit more.  I will bet around half of that was fat, because the hams and bacons are not lean, and the sausage we ate with sweet potatoes for supper needed no grease to fry in the skillet.  If you think of lard from pigs on a natural, low-grain, pastured and otherwise elemental diet as a healthy source of dietary fat (as we are inclined to), this is a boon.  But if a person were looking for lean pork, this would be a tremendous disappointment.  Such a person would want to seek out a more modern show- or production-type hog.  Over all, our experience with Guinea hogs was excellent.  We liked their ability to deal with rough feeds, and their attitudes were perfect.  Except when they laid down for naps in the middle of a move one day (I just had to come back later) they were so very easy to handle.  Great for a first experience.  One can easily see how this breed emerged on the small homesteads of this continent over the past two hundred years; a niche was available for a versatile, easily managed, resourceful source of readily storable meat and cooking fat and the Guinea Hog evolved to fill that niche.  Thankfully they were not driven to extinction by modern notions of efficiency and productivity that owe their underpinnings to the illusory assumption of fossil fuels.  I think we’ll get two more in the spring!

No comments:

Post a Comment