This weekend the inmates and I finally were able to make smoke. Two of the hams were ready to wash and put into the smoke house, one was washed and put back in the cooler. Inmate Brian is leading this process and has done all the reading and math to make sure we are doing everything correctly. Here you see three hams being soaked down and getting ready to go.
John also helped out with the hams. That’s when he wasn’t busy learning how to weld. We stopped him from welding to pose with a ham. Can you tell what he would rather be doing?
Here he is happy behind the mask. John is working on our new scalding tank. We’ll use this next month during our hog killing class. We had a few small leaks in the bottom that needed to be skinned over. We also made legs so the tank can sit above a fire and be heated by logs.
Brian with one of the hams getting it ready. There is a lot of work getting the hams to this point. We started off with 50 pound feeder pigs and ended up here, ready to go in the smoker. Its a proud moment.
Here is Brian hanging up his last ham of the day. We followed up with a bunch of other stuff so the hams wouldn’t get lonely. You can see all the items we put into the smoker in the following short video.