Wake up time was 0400. I made coffee, dressed and started breakfast. I awoke my friend, Andy shortly after 0500. Scott arrived about 0530. For breakfast, we had sourdough biscuits, jowl bacon, ham, grits and red eye gravy.
I left breakfast in the charge of my wife while Andy, Scott and I went to the deer camp to set up the water pots and put them on to boil.
We returned to the house and ate heartily.
We left the house about daylight to make our final preps which took, as was to be expected, far longer than anticipated. Many of those preps could have been made the day previous but for the steady rain that fell all day.
At about 0800 we met the consulting Cajun at the gate into the pasture. I fed the Berky babies a bunch of table scraps, reserving back a couple biscuits with which to distract The One Pig. I dropped the biscuits on the ground and The One Pig starting alternating between eating a biscuit and looking at all of the commotion around his pen. He finally got still and my rifle reported with good effect. He was bled by the consulting Cajun while the rest of us looked on with an academic fascination noting things like angle of penetration, depth of penetration, direction of sweep, etc. Another Cajun on scene was responsible for collecting a pot full of blood for use in some recipe they intended to cook for supper.
Once the bleed-out was complete, the carcass was transported the 1/4 mile to their deer camp. Once there, it was transferred to a table hastily constructed out of 3/4" treated plywood partially covered with a large swatch of burlap and supported by three sawhorses. The water had been previously heated in a pair of 60 quart crab pots to ~180 degrees. Once the pig was positioned on the table, another piece of burlap was draped over the head, the hot water was poured over the burlap and left until the hair began to pull out easily. Once the pull-test was deemed positive, the burlap was drawn back and we went to work. We worked for a very long time but were never able to bring the head area to a stage that resembled what I thought to be completion. The head Cajun decided to increase the temperature of the water another 10 degrees and decreed we move down the carcass to the shoulder area. The hair there seemed to turn loose a good bit easier than around the head but was still more difficult than I had visualized. On e the hair was removed to the head Cajun's satisfaction, we moved back another increment and he increased the temperature of he water another 10 degrees causing the hair to slip more easily still. We continued moving back and increasing the temperature of the water until it was boiling. The hair slipped most easily with water at the boil. The hypothesis was that the boiling water coupled with the cold water that was retained by the burlap between dousings averaged the temperature out to perfect or nearly so. So as we went, the faster we went.
Once the hair was mostly scrapped off, the Cajuns appeared with several disposable razors and using them, we removed the last of the the more difficult hairs. (This operation occasioned much joking especially as we entered his nether regions.)
We next removed the trotters and the head. Doing so was a very straight forward affair and seems easily reproducible. Doing so though gave us our first mess up - by removing the rear feet, we didn't have a way to suspend the carcass so all butchering had to take place with the pig on its back. The Cajuns didn't seem daunted by this at all. One of the more aggressive (drunk?) ones simply jumped in with a knife and like an experienced mafia hit-man, started slicing into the carcass along the abdominal and thoracic cavities. Once the flesh was penetrated, he used a sawzall to split the sternum during which time we experienced mishap #2 and he cut through the heart and he went slightly off-center and into the first and second ribs. Once everything was opened up, the rear of the pig was slid off the end of the table and all of the abdominal offal was dumped into a waiting container except for the liver which was cut out and laid aside. Next the contents of the thoracic cavity were removed and the heart reserved. The gall bladder was cut free from the liver and discarded and the interior was hosed out well.
The last act the Cajuns performed was to split the carcass in half using a sawzall. Once completed, they stepped aside to allow me to step up to the plate for the actual sectioning of the meat. As best as I could remember from the weeks of self-teaching that brought this moment about, I picked up a large knife and made the first cut while sweating buckets in spite of being saturated from the waist down in 40 degree weather. The pig was separated into the five primal cuts, the ribs removed from the bellies, the hams shaped and all manner of fine tuning took place with mistakes aplenty before calling the process done.
The cuts of meat were divided among four coolers and transported to my house. There they were placed in a shady, elevated position with the lids open such that the north wind was directed onto the meat. They were left there to chill until about 8:00 p.m. at which time the lids were closed.
Youngblood and I intend to apply the cure after everything has chilled for 24ish hours.
Lessons learned:
•Home butchering a hog is, by no stretch of the imagination, ever to be attempted solo. It was a tough several hours work for three of us Mississippi boys aged 35 - 45 while being directed and supported to varying degrees by three Cajuns and (to a much lesser extent) Youngblood.
•Hanging a hog certainly appears more conducive to a neat job of eviscerating and splitting the carcass than having it in supine.
•A sixteen hour fast is insufficient to have the digestive tract cleaned out.
•That French dude in the video makes separating a carcass into the five primal cuts look a lot easier than it really is for a first-timer in real life.
•The table used to butcher the carcass should be well perforated to allow the water a place to go before making it to the edge and wetting those leaning against it while they work.
•As long as the weather is on your side, don't hesitate to take a break to walk away and gather your thoughts, consult your reference material, get a chew of tobacco, etc.
•The conditions associated with killing a hog are not for the soft. By necessity it must be done when the weather is sufficiently cold to aid in the preservation of the meat. By necessity, much water is required. Since there is no way to avoid the cold and no realistic chance to avoid the wet, you will likely be both cold and wet throughout most of the process. There are some few words of advice that anyone intimidated by this process ought to consider: suck it up. If ya can't, don't.
"Solve world hunger, tell no one." "The, the, the . . . The Grinch!"
"If you can't beat them, bite them."