How-to Home Hog Harvest! Details and more about hog harvest '09!

[modern_pioneer]

hey MP!

thanks for joining us.. do you have anything to add about the hoggin?

for instance, did you scald? skin? or do it old school hillbilly and use a torch to remove the hair, part it up, THEN skin???

and what is your favorite pork preparation? ribs? scrapple? liverwurst?

We had farrowing pens, birth pens, raising pens and they roamed in a 4 acre pen outside. We did also have a slaughter house, scalding tanks, and huge gut tanks for the blood and unwanted parts. We had a hot water jacket pot used to make scrapple which we sold wholesale. I discuss a lot about my hoggin days on my journal.

If you look here, you will see whats left of my old hog farm I grew up on, very sad really.

http://www.sufficientself.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=1888&p=6

 

[Farmfresh]

Man pioneer ... that REALLY makes me feel sad.

 

[ohiofarmgirl]

Bacon update:

we just got our bacon back from the local butcher. we took him 3 of the bacons from our two hogs.

the total weight was 33 pounds from him - so with the one that we kept, it was about 40 pounds total from our two hogs. we also got oh... 5 pounds of jowl -- we did this ourselves also.

the cost per pound from the butcher was $1.45/pound - this includes curing, smoking, cutting, and wrapping. without the slicing and wrapping it would only be about $1 per pound. we very happily gave him $47-ish of our dollars... and then raced home to fry up some bacon. of COURSE its wonderful!!!

what about the belly that we kept? we used Alton Brown's method for the wet cure, then smoked for a loooooong time at a cool heat in our barrel smoker/charcoal grill.

why didnt we do it all ourselves? what are you kidding?!? we're talking about bacon here - and i'd feel horrible if i messed it up. but now we've done it with good/great/wonderful results i've got my confidence up. it also takes a long time as we can really only do one side of bacon at a time.

thats the scoop!

baconly yours,
OHG

 

[Farmfresh]

MMMMMM bacon!!

 

[ohiofarmgirl]

its so good! man....wow!

 

[2chickenrich]

We wil be killing 6 hogs the end of January we do everything but the curing ourselves the curing is quiet expensive but the meat keeps much longer I will try to get a picture or two to post

 

[becky3086]

I have totally enjoyed reading this and glad I saw the link posted on the meat chicken board.

 

[ohiofarmgirl]

oh hey Becky! welcome over here!


2chickenrich - will be looking for an update with pix! thanks for sharing!


as an update over here - we got our hams yesterday!

78 pounds of ham-i-liciousness! whoot! the cost was $1/lbsn for the smoking/curing and i got them back whole.

however, we originally requested that one be cut into 1inch steaks and wrapped individually (for all our friends!). normally that almost doubles the price - but since they over looked it, they cut-n-wrapped... while we waited at no charge!

whoot!

 

[Farmfresh]

I just found this little tune for all of you Pig Farmers out there.

This was part of a 2008 campaign in England by British grocery store Waitrose and Farmers Weekly called the "Save our Bacon" campaign, which seeks to raise awareness of the difficulties facing the pig sector and promote free range pork production.

Stand by your Ham

 

[big brown horse]

That was cool FF!!