Whole hog

I picked up our pork today. My farmer friend raises organic hogs. He takes them to Raber's to be processed. I picked up four boxes each weighing between 41 and 56 pounds.

Most of the pork fills two shelves of my large freezer. The upper shelf has roasts (2 loin roasts, 10 boneless tied hams, 4 shoulder roasts) and 9 packages of (4) butterfly pork chops.

The lower shelf has (15) 2 pound packages of bacon, 2 racks of ribs, 2 packages baby back ribs, 2 packages neck bones (they are a lot like ribs) and hocks. In the door, there are 36 packages of ground pork. I use the ground pork for so much. I make our sausage. I make Italian sausage, breakfast sausage and bratwurst.

The last box is fat to render into lard and our supper, pork tenderloin.

Since trying to go more organic, I get all the meat fresh. The bacon is not cured. The hocks are not cured and neither are the hams. I have learned that fresh bacon tastes really good. You cut it up (thanks for the new knives, Dad!), salt it and fry it. You can also cure it yourself if you want to. Fresh hams are basically pork roasts. I might try curing them with salt and brown sugar and cooking them in the Webber.

Raber charges $32 to slaughter the pig and .50/lb to process it. They processed 270 pounds of meat and the total was $167.00. In the past, I paid Bob, $.70/lb for the full weight of the hog before processing and last time, the hog weighed 340#. I paid Bob $238.00. All in all, the pork ended up being $1.64/lb.

While at Raber today, I also told them how I wanted my beef cut and packaged. I ordered a beef quarter from Bob and it goes in on Thursday. It will be after Christmas and maybe after the new year before that is ready and I'll share that too. Beef has to hang a couple of weeks to age it and then we get into Christmas.