7125 Old Stage Road Raleigh NC 919-322-0197
Great news just in time for the weekend. Weeping Radish dropped by this morning and delivered Uncured Hot Dogs, Beer Bratwurst, & Linguiça. Hopefully next week they will have our Pastrami & Roast Beef ready for delivery.
Hot dogs $7 lb 4 per pack in pork casing
Linguica $10.50 lb
Beer Bratwurst $10.50lb
We’ll be sampling the new products this weekend, stock up for Memorial Day cookouts.
You may have noticed that I stopped posting pictures from our hog class a while back. The reason is, some of our followers, who love us and love our food, just weren’t excited to see hog parts on their daily feed (Hi Kelsey). While knowing your food and your farmer is very important, I think we can put the killing in it’s own box for a while. I’ve uploaded the rest of the pictures to the gallery so anyone who wants to see the details from our class can scroll to their hearts content. Everyone else can use our feed to stay up on what is happening currently.
Just because we’ve stopped posting pictures doesn’t mean we have given up on our hog class. Thomas Locke, from CFSA attended our class and fully participated. He also went home and wrote up a very nice article on the class and posted it on CFSA’s website. I can’t thank Thomas enough for his and CFSA’s support of our farm. If you aren’t familiar with CFSA, they are a great organization that is behind a lot of what we enjoy in our vibrant farming community.
Of course the farm dogs got into the class as well. Here’s the rat…
And Bella Cotton
Here are some pics of our students as they waited for class to start, which started with a bang. 3 bangs actually as I had trouble with the killing shot. There’s lessons in everything, especially when things go wrong. Turns out my shot was a bit low, too close to the eyes and not far enough up the head. It still bothers me but at least everyone learned what not to do.
We were pleased to have Thomas Locke from CFSA attend our class. He wasn’t just a pretty face, he was elbow deep in bloody work and earned his keep.
We had a great turnout and fantastic weather for our hog class. I’m going to post some of the beautiful pics every few days for the next week or so, along with some comments on pics where appropriate. MANY, MANY thanks to Diane McKinney for spending her entire Saturday at our house working for carnitas and not much else to get all the great pics. Dianne is an AWESOME photographer if any of you need high end photography work.
Overall the class went well. In fact, we are not only planning on doing it again, we are going to have Brandon from Farmstead meat smith come out from Washington next year and teach. We’ll butcher another hog and also get more into charcuterie. I’ve already talked to him about coming and it looks like all we need to do is pick a date. We’ll share more details as things firm up. In the mean time, how about what happened at our first class.
The star of our show. This pink pig weighed about 340 pounds. We kept our Ossabaw boar, Lemont, in the pen with this pig so he wouldn’t be lonely or upset. We also made sure they had some yummy food to enjoy the morning.
Getting the scalding tank up to temperature. We had time for a walking tour of the farm while the water came up to 145 degrees. 
After the tour, we spent some time on the history of the farm and why each of our attendees had taken our class.
Next weekend we have our bang to bacon class. Since I don’t have time to do the prep this week, we went ahead and killed one of the two pigs we are going to use yesterday.
Getting the scalding water up to 145. Brent stopped by in the morning to help and get organized. Also Bar-B-Jew, Darryl, and the inmates were on hand. Miguel was everywhere, including being the head chef for a batch of carnitas which fed the entire farm with leftovers. As you can see it was a rainy and cold morning.
Just finishing the scraping. Spork stopped by to help for a bit.
The Princess was very keen on doing the gutting. She had missed that part before and she had been learning anatomy in school. She wanted to see it for real. She was disappointed we weren’t going to extract the brain for her to see.
The head, before being cleaned up. Brent will be making head cheese with this one for class day.
Here I am gutting the pig. The Princess wanted to do this but I had to get the heart and lungs out intact for mom for anatomy class.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo5hZQYVG38
Miguel got busy with his carnitas pot while we processed one side of the hog. We used the front and rear quarter for carnitas, salted the bacon, and left the loin to cool in the walk in. We will process the loin later.
Carnitas with pork so fresh it was still warm when it went into the pot. You can’t buy food like this.
And to celebrate, something to wash the carnitas down.
We will see all of you next weekend for class.