Category: Pigs

Yesterday was the day! Inmate Brian came over after work and together we pulled all the pork out of the cooler, washed all the salt off, and then hauled all the bacon to be over to the smoke house. Miguel started us a fire in the smoke box and Brian and I fiddled and fussed with the smoker till we got the temperature and smoke as good as we knew to do it.

Three hours of smoking over oak and everything went back into the cooler. Once I get done with my next too do I will come back and get everything ready for packaging and freezing. This morning though, its time for a test piece of bacon.

And now for the most important part. The taste.

The verdict? Too salty, but mighty fine otherwise.

SWMBO decided we were having pork chops tonight. I keep forgetting how huge these pork chops are. Wow!

Today the inmates and I processed the rest of the bacon. It was another 47 pounds bringing us to the 110 pound total. We used a mix that Brian came up with which was 2.4 ounces of pink salt, 3 pounds of kosher salt, and 1.1 pounds of white sugar for our salt rub. We skinned the pork bellies, then rubbed the mix all over including the sides and any crevices. We then put the pork on racks in sheet pans and covered them with Saran Wrap.

Here is John trimming out a pork belly. Everybody got their hands dirty today.

Here are most of the pork bellies prepped and ready in the walk in. 7-10 days and we will pull them and smoke them for a few hours. Then we will pull the bacon, put it in the freezer and get it sorta hard. Then it will be a field trip to Angie’s restaurant where she is kind enough to let me borrow her meat slicer. Once sliced, we will bring the whole lot back to the house and sort it out into 1 pound packages and vacuum seal them, label them, then freeze them.

It sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but this should be totally worth it. Plus this will be our first product from the new smoke house. Mmm, smoked bacon.

Is there anything better than bacon? Maybe the love of your family. Of course, I make bacon with my family so I get a double dose. We ended up with 110 pounds of bacon from these hogs. That’s a lot of bacon! Last night we salted 60 pounds and put it in the walk in. Tonight, after I buy some more pans and racks, we will salt the remaining 50 pounds and then begin the daily process of pouring off the liquid, resalting, and testing for cure for about 7-10 days. At that point, Brian the intern and I will get up extra early one morning to take advantage of the overnight lows and fire up the smoker for the first time.

Mmm, farm fresh, non-GMO, never seen or heard of grain, home smoked bacon. Since breakfast is my favorite meal, and bacon is my favorite food group (it is a food group, you know) I am kind of excited to have this bacon done.

Speaking of the love of my family, I did have lots of help.

Porkapalooza!

I picked up the pork from the abattoir and had a mad scramble for freezer space. Luckily Bar-b-Jew showed up and reminded me that I do in fact have a walk in cooler and we could simply park the pork there till we get everything sorted out. Dope!

Once the mad scramble was over it was time for the obligatory test chop. The grill was fired, the vino was opened, and much revelry was had by all. And the verdict?

Woo hoo! We have a winner. We were testing for “boar taint” and there was absolutely none. We are still keeping the boar meat separate from the gilt so that we eat it ourselves and sell the meat with no possibility of taint. The pork chop was HUGE. My neighbor stopped by and asked what we were cooking and thought they were ribeye steaks!

We did the rough math on what the pigs weighed at slaughter weight and they were about 660-700 pounds. 100% fed from the farmers market, non-GMO, fresh veggies. The pork chops were a little chewy, which was to be expected since these pigs were way past market weight. Overall I am very pleased.

Wednesday, September 11th Spot and Weasley, our infertile breeding pair of pigs made their last trip to Sims, NC to be processed. Here they are loaded into the trailer awaiting the time to leave. We loaded them by tempting them with food, not shocking, yelling, or anything else mean. After we got them loaded we took an early morning trip to avoid the heat and they were dropped off by 9am.

Here they are after unloading. They don’t just look huge because they are closer, they ARE huge. They are estimated at about 500 lbs each compared to about 100-125 lbs for the other pigs in the background.

As you can see from the picture, Weasley is still very much all boy with his figs intact. There is a lot of concern about boar taint with uncut males. I guess we will find out how prevalent it is, or how pungent. Wild boar doesn’t seem to have this issue so hopefully Weasley will make good meat.

I know we originally were going to keep Weasley but he is just so huge compared to Penelope I don’t think he could breed her. So both Spot and Weasley get to make the trip to the freezer.

If you are stopping by for dinner next week and are wondering what’s for dinner, we are having pork. The week after that, pork. If you want some pork products, we should be in stock by next weekend.

If you’ve ever wondered what your mom means when she says you sound like a bunch of squealing pigs, now you know.

The pigs were most displeased that I had chosen to feed the adult pigs before I fed them. Every meal they act as if they have never had anything to eat and are starving to death.