209 Pounds of Pork

With the pigs getting out of their pen a couple of times over the last week, and the onset of cooler weather for the weekend...we made plans to butcher our boar pig this morning. We have raised them with very little commercial feed (unmedicated feed), and we managed to get them to this point with only having to buy 300# of feed so far. They have been primarily fed kitchen scraps, fresh eggs from our hens, and milk from our goats....about a gallon of milk a day for each pig.

There was very little fat on him, in fact there is no place on the bacon with fat over 1/4" thick!

We chose to skin him rather than scalding, the skinning took about an hour, then it took about 3 hours to cut the carcass into quarters, separate the hams, cut off the hocks, bacon, and trim the ribs. It's all either packaged and in the freezer, wrapped and in the fridge, or cooking now.

We'll cut the chops tomorrow....our band saw is broken so all the chops have to be hand cut. We'll mix up the dry cure for the bacon and the brine for the hams.

Tonight I'm tired, it has been a long hard day and there is still plenty of work to do. There's a rack of pork ribs on the grill, and some chops that are too beautiful for words...