Two and a half weeks ago, I slaughtered the hogs that resided in my backyard by the river. I detailed the experience in a blog post with some photos. Of course, that was only part of the process. It was the biggest part of the process and the most time sensitive. In short, the slaughter and butchery of two hogs is a timely ordeal. As soon as you slaughter the hog, a timer starts to get the hog bled out, hanging and emptied of its insides. As long as temperatures are low, hanging in an enclosed space free of bugs is the time to finally relax. Some higher end butchery shops and restaurants brag about “rest time” their carcasses have. You can rest a carcass in good conditions for a few weeks. Rest time allows the meat texture to improve. It loosens things up. I only allowed 24 hours of rest time because the temperature was in the high 40s and now low 30s as I had hoped.
It has already been detailed the process of butchering and placing each cut of meat into freezer bags and labeling. That was challenging but also I followed guides. The how-to was documented pretty well in what I read but it took a while. The processing of the pork was something I was unfamiliar with. In addition, I grew up eating chicken and fish so I’m not exactly familiar with cooking pork so the act of cooking various cuts of admittedly amateur butchered pork was an unknown.
The biggest unknown…how would this meat taste?
Bringing Home the Bacon
The processing of pork belly into bacon is fairly straightforward. There are a lot of various steps that can be taken and also you can choose exactly how you want your bacon to taste. You can make it more salty or less, be peppered, contain maple flavoring and choose what kind of wood it’s smoked on. You can mess up pretty easily if you’re not careful especially if you did your own butchering. Did you cut too much fat off the pork belly? Did you forget to remove 1 or 2 of the smaller ribs? Well, there’s going to be issues. The biggest problem with a ll home curing / smoking operations is failure to remove the curing salt completely before smoking or failure to get a good cure.
You should put an average pork belly in a curing solution for 10 days at minimum. Two weeks would be even better if you have the fridge space. I think in total, I did 20+ pounds of bacon so it took up a lot of fridge space. I had to rotate and massage the bellies daily to move the curing solution evenly and then, wash each cut for 5 minutes a piece and soak in luke warm water and then wash again. If you don’t get all of the cure off, you can do damage to your heart with an overload of nitrites on each bite and you’ll end up with bacon that tastes like you’re pouring gobs of salt on your tongue. It’s disgusting and very unhealthy. The bacon will be salty from the cure but you need to get rid of every excess ounce of i from the outside.
Smoking is also problematic. If you use harsh wood like hickory or mesquite, you can have issues or if you smoke the bacon too short, too long or too hot, it’s a failure. A lot can go wrong so take caution at each step.
My bacon came out perfectly except for being just a tad too salty but this was only an issue on the thinner cuts of bacon that had little fat. They should have been taken out of the curing solution earlier because they only needed 7 days and I left them in for 12 days. Everything else was great.
I used a standard curing recipe from The Art of Charcuterie book. I washed all of the meat completely and even cured a cut of pork chops, tenderloin and a ham. I then smoked it all on Applewood for about 3-4 hours (more for the ham since it was larger).
The cuts of bacon are thicker than you’d expect. Bacon is difficult to get razor thin without a professional deli slicer but I did an okay job. Cutting 10 slabs of bacon at once gave me severe arm cramps. I’d recommend borrowing a slicer from a friend for 2 whole hogs of pork belly.
Sliced Ham for Sandwiches
This was an easy thing to do. I was tired of cutting hams into various roast portions so I decided to save one and cure / smoke it with the bacon. It came out tasting great and I diced it up and stored it in half pound servings in freezer bags. I can use it for stews, with country-style green beans or as a topping to salads and sandwiches. I’m happy with how it came out. It’s also a bigger cut of meat than the bacon so the curing salt taste isn’t as severe.
Making Sausage at Home
This was a difficult process because all of the steps were difficult.
1. Dicing up 25 pounds of “scraps” which were cuts of meat with fat trimmed off but weren’t cuts I was a fan of or cuts that I had too much of already or cuts that I screwed up on and didn’t feel like saving. Most of it was picnic and butt roasts and some sirloins.
2. I had to chop each cut of meat into 1×1 inch cubes which took about 2 hours
3. Then I had to grind all of it into 3 large mixing bowls.
4. I had to make 3 different sausage mixes (Sweet Italian, Breakfast, Maple)
5. I had to individually case 25 pounds of meat into casings and tie each off and hopefully not tear any casings (I tore one) and not have any air pockets
It was a LOT of work! As you can see in the photos below, I eventually just stopped doing casings and made some packs of 2 per pack each of breakfast sausage patties.
=============
So, how does it all taste?
The night I did the casings, I took one of the sweet italian sausage links and fried it in the cast iron skillet with some butter. Worried about the health concerns, I cooked it completely end to end and then it was used on homemade pizza which was 30 minutes in the oven at 400. The result is DRY sausage. It was very dry despite being pretty fatty pork despite trimming fat off. I should have cooked it just enough and then had the oven do the rest of the cooking so..stage one taste test was not so good.
The rest of the meats including the bacon and sausage are all frozen but the bacon and ham I did try following the smoking was delicious.
This past weekend, I wanted to use more of the pork since I have 2 freezers full of it and no room for any other meat. So, I defrosted some pork chops, a tenderloin and a picnic roast (which is the top of the shoulder roast). Picnic is the smaller cut of shoulder after the Boston roast.
On friday, I made pork chops. We enjoyed them with a wine reduction and plenty of delicious spices. They were outstanding. Seriously, the best pork chops I’ve ever had. Superior in every way to grocery store chops and they were thicker, less white and more pink and the only complaint was my chopping job on the vertebrae itself was inadequate so the bone chop on the top end had a few very sharp edges so eating down to th bone with your hands was slightly dangerous. Still, an all around perfect meal.
On Sunday, I took the picnic roast and got creative with a ton of veggies that were left over from previous dishes. I placed the picnic roast in two pieces in a pyrex casserole dish. I put a thin layer of olive oil, a cup of chicken stock and the rest of the space was 2 inches high of garlic, onions, green peppers, jalapeño, potatoes and Brussels sprouts diced and chopped finely. I baked this at 175 for 6 hours and then turned it up to 350 for another hour and enjoyed it like a soup chopping the picnic roast pieces up as I ate.
It may have been the best semi-stew I’ve ever had. Rich and tasty and I ate it 3 days in a row and ended up freezing the rest for enjoyment in a few weeks on an extra cold day. I skimmed the fat off which is a result of that picnic roast even though there was no visible fat on the roast, there’s a lot in it. I don’t eat fatty dishes so that was the only complaint. It is pork so that’s to be expected.
=======
A lot of the meat is going to neighbors and now that all of the processing is done, I can decide what to divvy up. I can’t eat only pork. I don’t care for it and prefer chicken but, what I have had so far from the pork and chicken slaughters this year is that the meat from my backyard is superior to any meat from any market..yes, even Whole Foods. The cost is slightly higher overall when you factor time and money spent but the taste and incomparable to anything I’ve ever had from a restaurant or grocery.
I look forward to enjoying more fruits of my labor and I’m always thankful for the lives given by the animals that resided in my back yard.
This is the last pork post for a while but, after all of the processing was done, I felt it appropriate to go ahead and write a conclusion that the meat is great and I’ll be doing it again next year.