As soon as the gunshot breaks the silence, the activities begin in rapid sequence. As the shooter, I will return to the kitchen to put the rifle back and lock it up until its next use. I then start the tractor to warm the engine. The knife-boy will jump in quickly to cut the jugular veins of the pig, as another friend or two hop on the pig to steady it. The knife will usually be a scimitar, bearing a long, curved razor-sharp blade, a potentially dangerous tool with a bucking animal on hand.
The hide of a pig is thick but not especially hairy. A very sharp knife can easily pierce the skin. The jugular veins are located on either side of the larynx, and both need to be cut through to allow the blood to exit quickly. The animal is already dead at this point. A large bullet has exploded in the pig’s brain. The heart, however, will continue to beat for some moments. It is this residual action of the heart that will cleanse the meat of blood.
Throughout the animal run blood-filled veins and arteries. If this liquid were allowed to remain in the body, a large and efficient highway would be available for bacteria. The blood also spoils faster than the meat. We want all the blood to leave the body as fast and as completely as possible. Hence the need to immediately slit the throat while the heart is still beating.
It is a quick job—the knife-boy’s—but a difficult one. The adrenaline will carry you through it, but you never know until you are right there if you can perform. I have seen guys freeze when the pig goes down, unable to jump in and do the job at hand. Most rise to the occasion and can control themselves enough to do an accurate and thorough job.
Once the throat is slit and a guy or two still are steadying the pig, the blood-boy steps up to the stage. He will place the large stainless bowl beneath the throat of the pig and try to catch as much of the blood as possible while it spurts out of the arteries. With luck he can capture three quarts of blood from a large pig. Once the heart has relaxed, the blood flow will cease and the pig will lie still. The blood-boy then will stir the blood with his fingers. Any coagulants will stick to his fingers as he passes them through the warm blood. A few quick shakes of his hand, and the coagulants will fall to the ground.
At this point of the morning experience, one thing will become oddly clear. It is always a bit of a shock to anyone witnessing it for the first time. When we first arrive at the pig yard, I pour a bucket of grain in a long line onto the ground to bring the pigs—all of the pigs—into a line side by side, where I want them, so we will have a good shot at the chosen pig. When the pig in questions falls, you expect the other pigs to run in fear or at least slowly leave the scene. As humans we really want these beasts to have human qualities—to be sad, to be fearful, to be concerned about their fellow pig friend. Nothing could be further from the truth. The other pigs, if anything, seem more energized than concerned. There is now more food for them, less competition for the grain that is in front of them. They will push their now-dead “friend” out of the way in order to get the grain that lies beneath its head. There is no mourning apparent at this point. As we tend to slaughter the largest pig, who most likely is the most aggressive and biggest eater, its death appears to be a relief to the others.
The pig now lies in Pig Forest; its heart has stopped, the blood has ceased and the crew has calmed. The excitement of the morning has ended and now the real work will begin. I have by this point driven the tractor up from the barn and up to the pig yard. Together we will roll the pig into the bucket of the tractor and lift it, to be transported back down the hill to the kitchen. The crew will follow the tractor, opening and closing the gates as the cortege progresses.
Less than ten minutes have gone by and the most drama of the day has passed.
While the bread was toasting and the eggs fried for breakfast, every large stockpot in the kitchen was filled with water and put on the range to boil. Gallons of boiling water will be used to scald and scrape the hide of the pig.
Customarily a pig is dipped in near-boiling water before it is scraped, in order to facilitate removing the bristles on its hide. Any slaughterhouse would do it this way; the pig is hung on a chain and lowered into a vat of hot water for long enough to loosen the bristles. As you can imagine, this takes a very large kettle, a proficient hoist and a lot of precautions to ensure against boiling water overfilling the top of the pot as a huge hog is lowered into it. We have never devised a way to get an animal of such size into a pot or a way to heat the water safely under it.
Instead we have devised a simpler and safer system. We boil the water in stockpots on the range, bring the water out to the pig and pour it onto the hide little by little. First the pig is placed on a concrete slab so that it is clean and stable and as hygienic as possible. Then the hot water is poured over it quart by quart to loosen the bristles. When the hair starts to give, we begin to scrape. Using knives and a round bell scraper, the bristles are removed little by little. More heated water is poured around the different areas of the carcass. It is a slow and tedious task, but a necessary one. Off flavors will remain if the hair stays on the pig. We want to keep much of the hide in place for curing the pork. The thick nature of the pig hide will help to protect the eventual hams and bacon from flies.
The most difficult areas are the ears and feet. They are small and shaped in such a way that makes maneuvering the knife difficult. Further cleanup takes place when they are cut off of the body and can be dealt with on a tabletop instead of attached to the hog.
The dousing of the animal with hot water and the scraping will continue until it is completed—maybe an hour—with the hog being flipped over halfway through to finish the other side. Eventually a bald pig will remain.
The tractor is started again and the pig rolled back into the cleaned tractor bucket to be moved to the hoist. The task next is to open the pig and remove all of the guts, leaving only the meat and bones of the pig. We want to get the temperature of the meat down as quickly as possible, and removing the guts is the most important part of that goal. The meat needs to be cool to keep any bacteria from spoiling it. The guts pose the greatest threat of bacteria entering the meat, as they contain the stomach filled with half-digested food and the intestines’ remaining manure. They must be rapidly and efficiently removed.
The first step in keeping the meat safe is to tie off the bung of the animal. While the pig lies in the bucket of the tractor horizontally, with no tension on the animal, the bung-boy steps up with a piece of string in his hand and a very sharp boning knife. The string is looped and tied into an open cinch knot. We want to seal that tract off so that any remaining manure cannot exit, in the process releasing the intestines, so that they can be easily removed when we gut the animal.
The bung-boy cuts around the anus with his boning knife. The cut must be complete, deep and accurate. The goal is to have the intestines free of the body and yet not punctured by the knife. The knife will pass through the outer hide and then through the fat and muscle at the back of the pelvis until it hits the gut cavity of the pig. We want the muscle and fat and hide cut but the intestines intact. Once the anus has been encircled, the string with the cinch knot will be looped around the intestines and tightened, sealing off the tube. A knot will be made to ensure it stays tight. At this point the bung-boy’s job is done and he can go back to the kitchen to enjoy the rest of the morning’s breakfast.
The pig is now ready to be hung and gutted. A gambrel is used to raise it for gutting. A thick stainless steel bar with a hook in the middle and two raised ends, the gambrel will connect the back feet of the pig with a cable overhead. The raised ends will keep the feet from sliding off and the cable will attach to the gambrel at the center hook. When I first began doing this, an old threaded rod with bolts on the ends seemed like it would suffice, but slippery, fatty, cold pig feet slipping on a metal rod showed me otherwise. A sturdy gambrel that can hold the weight of the hog is essential.
Slits are cut in the back legs of the pig. The tendons on the trotters will carry the full weight of the hog and therefore it is important th
at the cuts be careful. If the tendons are cut, they could tear, allowing the pig to crash to the ground in a most ungraceful manner. There are two potential spots for cutting into on the trotter—one near the hoof and one higher up on the lower leg. I had always used the higher tendon but recently switched to the lower on the advice of a cook. He explained that the chance of damaging the ham was too great with the higher cut and that the lower tendon could still carry the weight without the possibility of a cut allowing bacteria into the future ham.
Once the gambrel is attached to the pig, the cable is hoisted with a block and tackle and the pig slowly rises into the air. The goal is to have the head reach to just above the ground. The throat of the pig has been slit, but blood still remains clotted in the throat and there is the potential of bacteria if the head lies on the ground. We need easy access to the belly to cut it open and remove the guts; if the pig is too high it will be difficult to reach.
The belly of the pig is comprised of the outer thick hide—now with its hair scraped off—the fat and then the muscle. After those layers the inner cavity is mostly open; the internal organs are anchored but almost float in the cavity. We need to cut through the belly without damaging the inner organs, especially the stomach. The smell of a stomach’s contents alone is incentive enough, but the health risk is also very real.
A sharp, small boning knife works the best. The blade is short, curved and easily manipulated. The first cut is made at the center of the belly, between the legs, three inches down from the top. A few shallow cuts work well to get a sense of the thickness of the belly at this point and on an animal of this weight. There could be a great deal of fat or it could be a leaner pig with mostly muscle. After a number of short, shallow cuts, the knife will break through into the gut cavity. Often the best tell of this is a release of pressure and the smell of the organs filling the air. This is a very unique smell, but not a putrid one. I can’t say that I love it, but it brings back memories of pig slaughters past, and the friends who pitched in at each.
The knife can now be brought down to slice through the belly from legs to the beginning of the sternum. Once the cut is a few inches long, you can push your hand in to the guts, pushing them back, separating the belly from the guts. With one hand the organs are held in, while the other hand guides the knife down the belly. If the knife is turned so that the sharp edge of the blade is toward you and the dull side is toward the guts, then there is less chance of puncturing the stomach and intestines.
The pig is now hanging upside down, the belly and part of the chest are being opened up and the guts are free to move even though they are still attached to the back wall of the cavity. The guts will begin to fall out of the center of the pig. The large and small intestines and the stomach are large, heavy, slippery and tend to move. A deft balancing act must be performed to finish the cutting with one hand and hold back the emerging guts with the other.
Once the cut is completed, the guts can be removed. The cleaned bucket of the tractor is placed in front of the pig to catch the guts and a number of stainless steel bowls are readied to hold the valuable organs. If the bung was completely released earlier it will be easier to begin pulling out the intestines. If not, cut around the lower intestine at the anus from the outside and the inside of the pig until it moves freely.
The guts will begin to move. We want them to fall into the tractor bucket without touching the ground. A load of pig’s guts is a slippery, warm, wet, heavy, disconnected bundle. Imagine trying to carry a dozen half-full wetted water balloons. To make this task even more challenging, we want to keep some of the parts of this first set of guts. Surrounding the stomach is one of the most beautiful parts of nature—the caul fat. It is a large membrane—maybe twenty inches square but of an irregular shape, with a thick fatty edge and a thin gossamer center. Large veins of fat run through the center in a lacy pattern. If it was only beautiful I would still want to save it, but it also has an important culinary use.
Caul fat is just that: fat. What makes it unique and useful is that it is very thin, a large flat piece of even-thickness fat with a beautiful web pattern. The classic method is to cut it into four-inch squares used to wrap small pork patties. As a sealed disk, the patties can be cooked. The caul holds the sausage meat together, gives it a beautiful design and keeps it from drying out with the melting fat as it is cooked. The French call these crépinettes and they are divine.
Another great use for the large sheet of caul fat is to prepare a long slender pork roast and instead of tying it with string to keep its shape, wrap it with the caul, rolling it around once or twice depending on the size. During roasting, the caul will moisten the meat, keep the roast intact and hold seasonings against the meat.
After a few minutes, the guts will have been pulled from the carcass and dumped into the bucket of the tractor. The useful bits of offal are headed to the kitchen to be chilled and cleaned. The tractor will move the heavy, unwieldy mass of internal organs away from the work area and off to the compost to be covered with dirt to begin its breakdown into goodness for the soil. In an amazingly short period of time, the guts will compost away, nothing to be found in the soil. Bones will take considerably longer, but they too will eventually dissolve back into earth. Although this compost is excellent, it is only spread on the fruit trees and never onto the vegetable gardens for fear of any potential pathogens that may remain in the compost from the animal guts.
The carcass is now rinsed off completely, ridding the meat of any trace of blood or residual guts. With a bit of strength and a sharp knife, the head can be removed by cutting between two of the vertebrae at the neck. Once the head has been removed and the neck opened up, water can flow over the insides and down and out onto the ground. The water will also help cool the warm meat to a safer temperature.
If a large walk-in refrigerator is available, mechanical refrigeration can assist in the meat-cooling. The challenge is having the tools necessary to mobilize the hog. The weight of animals fascinates me. Farm animals, whether cows or pigs or lambs, look very lithe and light when they are walking around on their own. When the beasts are dead, their bodies flat on the ground, their weight appears to double from just moments earlier when they were upright. I always think I can pick up a lamb with one hand, and yet I struggle to load its bulk into the tractor.
At this point in the day, the guts have been buried, the offal is in the cooler, the meat is hanging outside cooling down and it is lunchtime. Almost as if pigs had planned it, there is a lovely little piece of meat that is great for lunch and easy to access: the hanger steak. The French call it the onglet, but I like the term hanger much better.
It is the only cut of which there is only one per animal. Animals are, thankfully, symmetrical. Each animal has a couple of legs, a kidney on each side, two rows of chops and so on, except the hanger. As the name implies, it is the muscle that connects the guts to the back of the cavity; to the spine. On a pig it is maybe six inches long depending on the size of the hog—it’s also found on cows and sheep. A couple inches round, with a long muscle structure running the length of the cut, the hanger is quite easy to access with a quick cut during the gutting of a pig.
The hanger is easily cleaned of any fat and trimmed down to tidy it up. We cook and serve it like this: Roll it in chilies and salt and pepper, grill to medium rare, turning the meat so that all the sides get nicely charred and then let it rest a few moments. With a sharp knife the hanger is sliced very thinly against the grain. A few warmed tortillas, some chopped cabbage from the field, a bit of salsa, and a nice taco awaits. It is one of the few times when driving off the farm to the store for a couple of limes seems like a good idea.
The day is half over, the hanger tacos were great, finished off with a couple of cans of ice-cold Tecate. The pig is still hanging and will continue to cool off till the next morning. Attention can be given to the organs that were pulled out and cooled in the cooler while lunch was made.
I find the offal craze a bit odd, to be
truthful. Fergus Henderson, in his book Nose to Tail Eating, makes a fine case for many of these underused bits, but I just can’t warm to them. There is a reason these parts are made into dog food.
I’ve also got two dogs to feed. They are my companions; they are a part of this farm. They need to be fed and there is no way I would feed them store-bought dog food. Alongside my epiphany that I should eat well and not consume poor-quality food products, I came to a similar realization about my dogs. They must be well fed.
There is a basic hierarchy here for all food. The very best, highest-quality products are sold. The perfect tomato, the freshest cheese, the ideal lamb chops, all go to customers. The second tier, still high-quality but not necessarily perfect, I consume with my friends at the table of Kurtwood Farms. The fact that I forgo the best things for myself will keep my therapist and I busy for many years, but I am a businessman first and foremost. After customers have been served and I have been fed, my dogs get what they need. They eat the spleens, pancreases, kidneys, ends of the cheese, overly crispy bacon slices, the bone after the leg of lamb has been roasted and so on. The next tier of food is what the dogs pass on, these things go to the pigs: stale bread, trimmings from fruits and vegetables. My dogs tend to go for the milk, meat and potatoes; they have very little interest in anything else. They are far from vegetarians.
Without much thought I boil the spleens and pancreases and odd bits. I don’t really know why, but it makes me feel better about the whole experience. Cutting up raw spleen and handing it over to my dear pups seems just wrong to me. A quick boil of the offal, time for it to cool off, and my dogs are the happiest two beasts on the farm.
I do, however, enjoy pork liver pâté.
A pig liver is rather large and unwieldy. The first task, as with the chickens, is to remove the bile sac. In the center of the pig’s liver is a small bag about the size of a walnut. In it is a liquid the most amazing shade of green. Almost fluorescent, it seems terribly unnatural in the context of the interior of an animal. For all its beauty, however, it is truly vile. Bitter, the bile sac can also taint the meat, so it must be removed. Attached to the liver by a thin seam that runs along its backside, the bag is rather fragile and yet at the same time difficult to cut off. The best method is to sacrifice some of the liver and cut around the bile sac with a bit of liver attached. To attempt to trim the sac off tightly will result in failure. Once the bile is removed, I puree the pig’s liver with a bit of pork fat, cream and seasonings and gently cook it into a smooth, silky pâté. What was once a large unwieldy slab of liver is transformed into a refined gastronomic delight.
Growing a Farmer Page 23