A freezer full of pork

On Wednesday, we processed the pig we'd saved for ourselves.

A couple of friends came and helped Abe with the nitty gritty. We had prepped pretty well and things went very smoothly. Nonetheless it was a lot of work. They began at 7am and finished at 12pm. All three were pretty tired, but a hearty meal of, yep you guessed it, pork helped out.

I weighed and bagged the meat before putting it in the freezer:
7lbs 14oz ribs, 1lb 5oz back strap, 12lb 4oz steaks, 17lb 12oz roast cuts, 1lb sidepork, 2lb 1oz stewing meat.

On Thursday we rendered the lard, which took a LONG time, but produced 9 liters of lard, and some leaf lard (we're rendering that today, so not sure how much, although considerably less than regular lard). Plus there was a bunch of cracklings, over 7 pounds.

Also on Thursday we ground up all the meat we'd put aside for ground pork and sausage - 7lb 4 oz ground pork and 8lb 11 oz sausage.

Not sure how much the hams and bacon weigh. We will weigh them when we take them out of their cure in 10 days.

The guys that helped us took the head to make tamales, the skin to do crackling and the liver. Plus we'll give them some steaks when we cut them up and some sausage and ham when they're done.

In all, a year's supply of meat for us, and extremely tasty meat too from what we've already sampled.


We'll be posting full instructions on our site soon:
http://www.velacreations.com/pigs.html

For more photos, click here.