A few weeks ago I took a whole hog butchering class in Milwaukee. Photos and info are posted at my “home” blog, Life in the Great Midwest. The photos may be disturbing to some, however the dispatching and evisceration of the animal are not part of the class. More importantly, if you go to part one you get to see a picture of Dan from Madison with a hair and beard net on.
Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.
Part 4.
2 thoughts on “Whole Hog Butchering Class”
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Fascinating … I have a cookbook with color plates of how both a hog and a cow are ‘parted out’ into the different cuts of meat. When I was researching for one of my books (Deep in the Heart – about the early days in Austin, Texas) I actually went looking for blog-posts and videos of how to butcher a hog. Before the boom in beef cattle after the Civil War, pork was the preferred meat animal … and the characters that I wrote about kept pigs for meat, and had a smokehouse and all. Everybody does know that the intestines were used for sausage casings, right? And every single edible scrap of the pig was used for something, even the liver, and the extraneous fat rendered down for lard. No waste on the frontier.
Some still use intestines for casings – the “snap” is certainly better when you bite into those brats. As far as parting out the pig, the teacher of the class made sure we all knew that there was no right or correct way to butcher the pig – different people like different cuts. We did a standard cut so everyone could see where the market cuts came from. The biggest source of confusion and the part with the most questions was the loin primal – so many ways to cut that up it is interesting and it doesn’t help that the same cuts many times have different names.