The hog is hanging, the tacos are finished cooking. The first day of the pig butchering is finished. I often sit back at this point, still nibbling on the pork tacos, and think about how this pig was walking around a few hours ago. The transformation from live animal to sustenance is rapid. It reminds me of when my first dog died. A dear companion, Zetti ran into the road one night, was hit by a car and died immediately. I found her a few minutes later after she didn’t return quickly to the house. The dog that had sat next to me looking me in the eyes was now sprawled on the asphalt on the side of the road in front of the farm. I had never been this close to something that had died. I wanted the long death scene from movies, but as I learned, death is often instantaneous. The transformation from soulful being to lifeless muscles is quick and one-directional.
I think of the pigs the same way. They lead their pig lives until the shot goes off and then they are meat. There is no middle ground, no intermediate stage that they pass through as they ready themselves for their final role. Once you reach your hand into the warm gut to pull entrails out of an animal that was alive an hour earlier, this is abundantly clear.
After evening chores of day one, the pig is checked out. The evening chill has brought the temperature of the pig down to a respectable forty degrees. The meat is firm, the fat not jiggly and the whole thing begins to feel more like a culinary project than a slaughter.
Though I run a tight ship when it comes to slaughter day, sometimes surprises are inevitable. One perfect winter morning, snow on the ground but dry and crisply cold, we slaughtered a pig and hung it to chill for the night. As it happened, the temperature had plummeted during the night and frozen the pig solid. Not a bad thing, except we had to wait two days for it to thaw enough for butchering. I loved wading out into the snow to gaze upon it, hard as a rock, with the low winter sun glistening on the pork fat, not a fly in sight. We called it the pigsicle.
Thirteen
Butchering
When the day is over and the hog is hanging from the gambrel outside the kitchen window, I would prefer to be finished. It has been a long, full day slaughtering the pig, feeding all the helpers and cleaning up the place, in addition to the standard chores of the farm. But more effort is needed to transform this hanging animal to the eventual bacons, hams and pork chops that we desire. The cool evening air will have cooled the carcass down, firming the meat and fat. Cutting up an animal, any animal, is essentially the same. Sheep, pigs and cows all have four legs, ribs, shoulders, loins running down the length and so on. Learning how to break down an animal is easiest with a lamb. Lamb is rigid, small and lightweight, without the heavy fat of a pig. A lamb is easy to pick up and move around on a wooden table, as opposed to a large cow that is nearly impossible to maneuver without a great deal of help.
This book is not meant to be a forum for describing the method of breaking down an animal in detail. But the basic ideas are fascinating in their own right. Interestingly, there is no right way to cut meat. Americans have classic cuts, the French slightly different, the English as well and so on. We want our meat to look like the pork chops in the grocery store meat case; the bacon to look like the sliced pork in the slick plastic envelope at the supermarket. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The goal of specific meat cuts is to isolate pieces of meat that will cook well and consistently. If we had a fatty piece connected to a lean piece and we sautéed it, the result would be steak that was half juicy and rather raw and half dried out and quite overcooked. We want to maximize our pig to its fullest and best use. Theoretically, one option would be to remove all of the meat from the bones and grind it up for sausage. Certainly a passable option, but a lot of great pork chops would head to the grinder.
The other concept that surrounds meat cutting is that it is a zero-sum game. You can’t have everything you want in one animal. Capturing one cut means that you are letting go of other cuts. For example, the loin of the pig is the large central muscle that runs down the main torso of the animal. It is the most tender piece of any animal. In a cow it would be the filet mignon. In a pig it is customarily kept in the center of a pork chop, surrounded by the bones of the ribs and the spine. The center is the pork loin. If the loin is not sliced rib by rib into pork chops but rather is removed whole from the bones, it becomes the pork loin, which in its cured form is Canadian bacon. A choice always has to be made between numerous potential butchering plans. Rib bones left on the pork chops means that the pork ribs themselves will be a bit shorter.
As the pig is butchered, bits of trim will begin to pile up. Hunger will pile up among the butchers at the same time. A solution is in short order. “Fatty toasties” fill that bill. One of the cooks made this for me the first time he helped butcher a pig here.
A recipe is really not needed, just the general idea. Take a large loaf of great hearty country bread. Slice thinly and toast in the oven. Keep it warm. And use a whole loaf, not just a couple of slices.
In a large steel sauté pan, throw in fatty chunks and meaty chunks from the butchering of the pig. Knowing that fatty toasties will be part of lunch, a side bowl for saving such scraps is always good. Gently render all of the fat on the stove, with the meaty bits cooking up at the same time. Some thinly sliced chilies, saved from the fall harvest, add some zing; throw those in the sauté as well. Maybe even a bit of garlic, but just a small amount; we want this to be about the pork. When all is rendered and fried, there should be far more liquid fat that you can imagine consuming. A half a cup, three-quarters of a cup, maybe a full cup—that kind of quantity.
Take the toasted bread from the oven, pile it on a large platter. No need to arrange in some prissy way: pile it up. Pour over it the contents of the sauté. The fat will run over the toast, soaking into the bread. The meat will alight on the tops of the toast, the chilies as well. Salt as needed, pepper is good too. Eat it up greedily. Tomorrow’s lunch will be salad, don’t worry, just enjoy today.
Familiarity with a couple of basic cuts is in order, though: the legs and the bellies. Both are uniquely useful in a butchered pig. They are the two cuts that made me want to raise pigs.
“Belly of the pig” is a funny phrase. I have heard people confuse the stomach with the belly. The words sound like they are referring to the same thing. The stomach is an organ. In it the food that the pig consumes is digested. I would just as soon leave the stomach to the compost pile. The belly is the outer layer of muscle and fat at the bottom of the pig’s torso. The belly is split down the center when the animal is gutted. An inch and a half thick on a two-hundred-pound pig, twice that on a four-hundred-pounder.
In this inch or two or three is a nice skin with very little hair, lots of tasty fat and layers of meat in the middle streaking through the fat. The uses of this delicious cut are generally bacon, pancetta and “pork belly.” The first two have been popular for decades, while pork belly is a culinary phenomenon of the last ten years. I have no recollection of ever seeing it on a menu up until the mid-1990s, and yet it is on virtually every respectable restaurant’s menu today. I’ll leave the pork belly to restaurants; bacon is what I love.
The basic concept of curing meat is to use salt to remove enough of the moisture of the meat beyond the point where it is moist enough to grow bacteria. Salt desiccates the meat and draws out the moisture. In drying out the meat, salt also firms it up and adds flavor. In the case of bacon, the meat will also be smoked to add additional flavor and protect the meat even further.
If we look to a time prior to having efficient home freezers—and that is most of human history—preserving foods was a huge concern. Animals are big. A large hog is around four hundred pounds live weight. Cows can double or triple that weight. No family can eat that much meat at once. The options are to quickly sell the meat that your family cannot eat in the week or two before it goes off, or to preserve it.
As other local foods could be scarce in the cold winter months of Europe and the northern United States, finding a way to preserve me
ats through the winter meant a source of protein when other foods were not available. The traditions of preserving meats were born out of this need.
The biggest challenge is stopping bacteria from reproducing in the meat and spoiling it. Bacteria need two things to reproduce: warmth and moisture. Without either of these, spoilage can be discouraged. The contemporary method of preservation of meats is generally to freeze the meat. This reduces the temperature to a point where the bacteria cannot reproduce.
Certainly freezing accomplishes the goal of keeping meats fresh, although it does little to make it more interesting and tasty. In parts of the country where electricity goes out during storms, storing hundreds of pounds of meat in the freezer is a frightening prospect.
The much older and more traditional method of preservation is to remove the moisture and not worry about the temperature. Without adequate moisture, the bacteria cannot reproduce even if the temperature is above freezing. Dehydrating meat is one option, but how many of us want to chomp on beef jerky all winter? The best method is to salt the meat to remove only part of the moisture. Salt has a valuable ability to permeate the meat and draw the liquids out while at the same time seasoning the meat. You don’t generally think of salt as a desiccant. Its usual role is simply as a table seasoning, and yet if you were to place a pork chop on a plate, cover it with salt and wait a couple of hours, the pork chop would be swimming in its own juices, and the salt would have completely dissolved.
The other great challenge of preserving meats concerns flies. Big slabs of pork and beef are aromatic and flies are attracted to them. The problem is not the flies, but rather the eggs they lay on the meat. When the eggs hatch, huge numbers of maggots invade the meat, eating it as they grow. Generally the maggots will be very crafty. They will enter the meat through one hole and then hollow out the inside of the meat, eating from the inside out. Although often only a couple of maggots might be visible around the hole, hundreds may be in the center, creating a slimy, decayed interior.
Maggots are a tremendous problem on the farm. With lots of animals and lots of manure, there are always some flies around. Keeping them away from the meat is always difficult. One remedy is smoke. In addition to using salt to dry out meat to an adequate moisture level to keep bacteria from spoiling the meat, smoking the meat helps keep the flies away. The smoke dries the outside of the meat, giving the maggots less of a way of entering. The smell masks the natural scent of the meat, making it less attractive to the flies. And so bacon was born. Smoking is also used for country hams and speck, a German smoked dried pork.
It is very easy to find and cut up bellies for bacon. The bellies are large—maybe twenty-four inches by fourteen inches, one on each side of the pig. They cover the ribs and run down to, well, the belly of the animal. Loosening them off of the ribs is fairly straightforward. The ribs are long bones and are all at the same level; sliding a long, thin knife blade between those bones and the meat that will end up as bacon is simple. The result is two large, heavy, flexible, flat, fatty pieces of meat.
Lay them out on a large cutting table and start to even up the sides: turn this irregular-shaped piece into a big rectangle with straight edges. It will cut easily and cleanly, revealing the strata of the meat: layers of fat and flesh. When you look at the side it will quickly start looking like bacon; then you can get your bearings. It looks like the slice of bacon that we have all seen since childhood on the Sunday morning frying pan. As you move around the belly, you will quickly see sections that are more baconlike and others less so. Be judicious. Use the best for your bacon; the rest will certainly not go to waste. A mix of fat and lean is ideal. Too much fat and your slice will waste away quickly in the pan. Too much lean and the fatty flavor and moistness are lost.
Think of the container that they will be cured in. Four squares in an eight-by-eight-inch container are ideal. An inch less in dimension than that container will give adequate space all around for curing.
A square plastic food box is great. Round seems rather wasteful of salt, but could work just fine. It is always said to avoid metal, although I doubt the world would end if you did need to go in that direction. Gather a couple large boxes of good salt and make sure the bellies are nice and cold.
Recently I started adding nitrites to my bacon cure. Nervousness, mostly, I must admit. Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn, gives a great sensible and simple recipe for curing. Following his example, I mix a pound of kosher salt with a half a pound of sugar and just a couple of ounces of pink salt, making sure to mix the three ingredients thoroughly. I take a plastic food box, put some of the cure on the bottom, lay a slab of belly, add some more cure and so on. If I have any cure left I just pour it on the sides, add it on top. The last thing needed is another little container with a bit of salt in it.
My basic rule for the time the pork is left on salt is seven days for every inch of belly thickness. Generally the bacon will be an inch thick, so a week is standard and easy to remember. If the meat is a bit thicker, then a few more days in cure are handy. You want to have the meat salted adequately to preserve the pork but not so much that the bacon is inedible. I have experienced both. Neither is pleasurable. If the bacon had inadequate time on salt, either returning it to more cure is possible or simply cooking it quickly is an option. The pork should have a firmness to it, so the fat will feel less like the jiggly pale fat that entered the cure and more like a solid white rigid fat. Too much salt will result in a quite rigid block, cool-looking but difficult to enjoy.
Once the pork has gone through its requisite salting stage, it is removed from the cure, and any remaining salt wiped off. Dry with paper towels to remove any last bits of salty liquid. It is time to smoke the pork.
A simple smoker will suffice to further protect the precious belly slabs. Much chatter goes on about cherrywood or apple wood or hickory. Maybe my palate is simply unable to discern the subtle differences, but for me well-raised and -cured pork nicely smoked is excellent no matter which wood is used.
At my farm we use an old barbecue made from a steel drum. It has a small side chamber that is connected to the large barrel where the racks are located. In the small chamber I place a cheap hot plate from the local hardware store, the cord exiting from an air vent. On it I place an equally cheap cake pan that I’ve long since retired from baking. The pan is filled with chips of whatever tree I have recently felled. There are a great deal of old apple trees here, so often I use fruitwood, but birch makes appearances as well. Sawdust can work just fine, I have found, but soak it well first. The goal is to produce large amounts of consistent smoke; flames are in no way needed or desired. Low heat and smoldering chips work well.
Every few hours I flip and shift the bacon slabs. The leading edges near the smoke chamber always get the best exposure; the far edges barely get a kiss of smoke. Constant rotations keep the exposures even. Because the hogs are slaughtered in the late fall and winter, the smoking also occurs in the chilliest parts of the calendar. I have no worries about leaving the pork outside in the smoker day and night. A couple of days are sufficient, but three are even better. The trick is always to mound up the pile of wood late at night and turn the heater to the lowest setting so the wood can smolder through the night to keep the bacon on smoke continuously. If the pan runs dry, it tends to burn the pan out much quicker than one would want. Not much chance of danger among the bacons, but I prefer to not wear out old cake pans prematurely.
Once the bacon slabs have a leathery caramel exterior and you are content that they have been smoked enough, pull them, dry them off if necessary and chill them down. They should firm up a bit more in the cooler. Slice a bit off and fry it up. With luck, they will be tasty, not too salty, full of smoky porkness and a touch of sweetness.
Bacon was one of the first products that I made here. Prior to smoking bacon I had slaughtered animals and cooked up roasts, grown lots of vegetables and harvested a bit of honey, but bacon was a product. Bacon is a pretty common thing: ever
y supermarket has a row of shiny plastic envelopes with the bacon splayed out to see; every diner has a BLT sandwich and a bacon cheeseburger. We know what bacon looks like in America; its taste and look are fairly universal. But making your own bacon does not necessarily result in the same kind of bacon.
Store-bought food products have become the norm. It is very rare to find homemade bacon, homemade butter, even a homegrown chicken. The store-bought product grown and produced by large factories has become what we strive to emulate. We want our bacon to look like the mediocre product made in a factory hundreds or thousands of miles away. An inferiority complex sets in: “Why isn’t my butter like the block at the store?”
An additional dimension must be added to this dilemma. You can’t make bacon or butter like factory-produced bacon and butter. Even though I am confident that mine is much tastier, healthier and better for the land, not only will it not likely resemble the store-bought entirely, it also might not cook like the commercial product.
I have found farm bacon shrinks far more than commercial bacon. It is difficult to get it to crisp up without all of the fat becoming rendered in the pan. The ideal of a seven-by-one-inch crispy bacon piece with streaks of fat and lean is difficult to achieve. Butter is similar. Butter from my lovely Jersey cows is an amazing-tasting product. It has a better color, better flavor and better pedigree. But it does not necessarily have the same consistent water content from week to week. It whips a bit differently, it melts a bit differently and it bakes a bit differently. Not poorly, but differently.
Growing a Farmer Page 24