Our friends John and Bri cared for the three pigs we raised. And I say "we" loosely; the most I ever had to do with the pigs was on the slaughter and butcher days. The distance, my work schedule, and convenience meant I usually just said "hey" to the piggies when we happened to be over for dinner, and helped once or twice with moving their pen around the yard. So I suppose my experience was fairly one-sided; I know the pigs more as cuts of meat than as rather terrifyingly large (320-pound) animals.
I do know the pigs all had happy lives of rooting around in fresh soil and leaves for bugs, eating grain and cottage cheese and fresh-fruit-and-veggie slop from the grocery store, being scratched by Leila, and sleeping together in a pig pile under a truck canopy.
And they died quickly, and had their meat carefully prepared by a team of people who respected and thanked them for the bounty of food they provided--food that's now been shared over many cozy wintry meals and parties. Don't you think that's a good life?
Slaughter day, we met early at John and Bri's for breakfast and prep. We were all relative newbies, book learned but sans hands-on experience except for Tim, resident expert as this was his third pig slaughter. The crew included me, Tim, John, Bri, Rory, Liam, Brook, Dom, Hannah, and Stephanie.
I decided to designate myself the official photographer. Plucking chickens still makes me squeamish, so I wanted to experience slaughter day through sights and sounds only this first time--distanced by a lens--rather than plunging all-in.
Tools: A chain hoist, which Tim hooked to a large madrone leaning over the yard, lifted the pigs in and out of the 50-gallon barrel of 140-degree water.
Bell scrapers to scrape the hair off the scalded pigs.
Bone saws and buckets.
Tim and John played rock paper scissors to see whose pig would go first--John's, the black one. The moment before the shot was quiet--the late fall breeze crisp, sun starting to peek above the trees, everyone standing back and barely breathing. The actual shot popped, didn't bang. The pig bled out quickly, no drama.
Once it had bled out, down to business.
To preserve as much fat as possible--and use skin for stock-making--we decided to scrape the pigs. When you skin them, you lose all the skin and much of the fat (unless, maybe, you're an expert skinner?).The pig was hoisted up by the chain hoist and gambrel and dipped into the barrel of water. The water is supposed to loosen the hairs.
The scraping was not particularly easy. A combo, perhaps, of dull bell scrapers and a faulty thermometer?
We eviscerated the first pig on a clean pallet and plywood sheet, as we'd read that it's easier for beginners to do the job without gravity--which causes the innards to lean out precariously when you're maybe not ready for them.
The plywood sheet wasn't the easiest. Next pig, we went for the gravity assistance.
It was like dissection in biology class, a lesson in life and the hidden things that make mammals go. The lacy caul fat, delicate as spiderwebs; the massive sheets of lung, too simple-looking to be performers of tricks with O2 and CO2; the heart that shocked us with its mass--bigger than two fists--and the spindle-like chordae tendineae hidden inside.
Slaughter day is the day to prepare and eat the offal--the heart, liver, kidney, head cheese, etc. We'd planned to have an offal feast (okay, they'd planned to have an offal feast; I'd planned to avoid it) for lunch. But, pressed for time, we had to give this up (although John did make loafs of pate later)--and even give up lunch. No time! Next year, we'll divide everyone into teams: the slaughter team, the cooking team, and the childcare team.
Pig number two as the sun started to set. After the evisceration, the pig gets cut in half down the backbone and left to cool completely. Thank goodness for a sunny, chilly November day that slid into an icebox November night.
I traded my camera for a headlamp and flashlight as darkness fell--and became the official light holder for the second pig. Of course, after the trial-run experience of pig number one, the second one went much faster.
The next morning, we were up at dawn to transform our kitchen into a butcher shop. Our kitchen island plus a huge door--balanced on sawhorses, scrubbed down, and covered with two layers of butcher paper--became our butcher tables.
I became butcher woman for the day, so don't have many pictures. We broke each half of the two pigs down separately, start to finish. You first divide the half into four quarters--the shoulder, loin, belly, and ham--and then break each quarter down into the roasts you want. It's a creative process. Believe it or not, there are no lines inside telling you where to cut. So it all depends on what you want to do with the meat. A whole leg to hang for prosciutto? Large shoulder roasts to slow-cook into pulled pork? Slabs of belly to cure? Thick pork chops to pan-fry? Any to grind into sausage?
Luckily, Tim and I had spent quite a lot of time researching--reading and watching YouTube videos--so we knew what we wanted. Still, it was an exhausting process, and we didn't eat much lunch or dinner again. Just cut and trimmed and wrapped--in winding layers of plastic wrap and butcher paper to protect against freezer burn--and labeled and carted out to the walk-in fridge.
Is it possible that the pig grew as we broke it down? I had not spent much time visualizing what a whole pig would look like when packaged up. It is a lot of meat.
Leila helped out a bit with a dull butcher knife and some scraps.
A whole ham! We decided to do each half of our pig slightly differently. We wanted a few big roasts--like a large ham--along with plenty of dinner-sized roasts and chops. I wanted half of the back fat and all of the leaf fat to render (into snowy white lard--a jaw-dropping transformation), so we left half of the pork chops fat-and-skin-on, half without. We wanted some bones packaged separately for stock, so we de-boned some roasts--but not all, figuring we'd make stock as we ate each roast. We wanted most of the bacon for curing, although the "scraps" from squaring off the edges turned into about twenty pounds of fresh bacon for roasting. We wanted plenty of sausage, too, so added half of a shoulder to our bleached and iced buckets for meat and fat trimmings.
The day sped by. Our feet ached, our stomachs grumbled, but still there was work to be done. In the late evening, when it was just us and John, we roasted a skirt steak--dusted with chipotle powder and rolled with garlic--for a quick dinner. Scarfed with zingy mustard greens, it was pure deliciousness.
But we became obsessive around midnight. How much meet had we gotten, really? We flew through a weighing session and scratched down all the stats into a notebook. End results? A total of 214 pounds of meat. I kept all the specific numbers--like pounds of fat, pounds of picnic roasts, pounds of Boston butt--but will spare you the details. The gist? We have quite enough pork in our freezer.
Reflections on this two-day marathon range from the practical to the philosophical. Practical: next time, we'll do it in three days, reserving the third day for sausage making, bacon curing, and offal feasting; and we'll have sharper knives and bell scrapers. Philosophical: dare I speak of the circle of life? I strongly believe--even more strongly now--that cutting out the slaughtering and butchering of animals from the meat-eating cycle is only harmful to us, to our minds, and to the meat industry our culture supports. The separation leads to a lack of knowledge and a lack of caring, and a waste of the myriad useful parts of an animal. The connection restores all of this--knowledge, care, full use.
More philosophical? The act of meat eating, after participating in the slaughtering and butchering process, feels whole-er to me now. I feel good about eating the meat in a way that I haven't felt before--mostly because I know it. I tend to be squeamish about eating meat; I get scared if I see bones or fat or skin. But somehow, because I participated, because saw every cut of meat as a whole, saw the bones connected to them, cut through the tendons, put the scraps of meat and fat into the sausage grinder myself, I am not so squeamish. I'm still not an eater of fat. But I feel confident, and that is enough.
Okay, philosophical thoughts over. My biggest reflection? This pork, to quote my favorite Seattle brunch place, is damn good food.
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