The Butcher's Apprentice

Mary and Isabelle enjoy their last few days, here chatting to
one of the westies

This is another one of those posts you might like to avoid if you do not want to know about the messier side of meat production. The back end of this week saw our two Berkshire gilts 'finished' at just over 6 months and weighing around 60 kg each live-weight. I have posted before that these ladies were way lighter than last year's Tamworths who were fed to demand and laid down what we thought was an excessive amount of fat. Even JD Bob was a little disparaging about their size, but we know he comes from a tradition of pig rearing in Ireland 40+ years ago when very fat baconers were the thing. No, we stuck to our guns and we are delighted with them.

Practise loading - the pigs get fed in the trailer for 2 days prior
to D-Day. That way they load without fuss when you need them to

They were booked into pork butcher Webb's in Castlerea for Thursday morning which puts us into needing to practise-load for the Monday afternoon and for Tuesday and Wednesday. Readers here last year will know that we built a special 'race' from their gate to the top of that slope into which we could 'plug' the trailer with no room for pigs to sneak round the sides. On D-3 we then give them a nice long, leisured explore. It doesn't do to hurry pigs anywhere. You are better off throwing down some fruit and letting them find it at their own speed.

Who needs a fridge-van? 4 half pigs and a bag
of 'bits' fit into the Fiat with the seat down.

Then on D-2 and D-1 we feed them in the trailer and they soon get into the rhythm of sprinting up the race and the trailer ramp, shoulder-barging their sister to one side in order to claim the 'best' bowl of meal. Then on D-Day morning you put the bowls in with only fruit (no nuts) and up they go so that you can quietly close the trailer door behind them. The 'no nuts' thing is just because the butchers prefer you to 'fast' pigs prior to slaughter so that the innards are more manage-able at the cleaning stage (Sorry if you're just enjoying your tea!)

I get to play with the new bone-saw

This year we had decided to have a go at the butchery ourselves. The slaughter (including cleaning the carcass, scalding and scraping and splitting in half down the spine, costs €50 per animal and the butchery costs another €50, so we were saving €100. We had a rough idea what to do and, for a laugh, we watched a You-Tube video on "Cutting up half a 'hog' ", 2 and a half minutes of American 'good aul' boys' complete with bushy beards and baseball caps plus random discussions of last night's drinking session and chicken noises off! However, this unlikely 'training resource' explained perfectly where to make the first cuts, how to pull out the 'leaf-lard' (big sheet of top-quality fat which lines the abdominal cavity) and other useful tips, so don't deride it till you've tried it.

In we went, then with all the big chopping boards mustered on the (bleached and scrubbed!) dining table and the knives and my new bone-saw all razor sharp. We completed the first animal in about an hour with a nice ham selected and readied for brining for Christmas and a whole leg chosen for a dry-cure 'Parma' ham style air-dried long mature. I took a break to walk dogs and for coffee, before we tackled the 2nd animal. We found that we were getting better with each half-carcass - some of the first cuts were a bit 'rookie apprentice' but the 4th was a better, more pro-job. I was particularly pleased with how the proper saw worked having only before experienced a carpenter hack-saw (worse than useless). If anyone reading this is contemplating butchery, then your bone-saw will be €40 or so very well spent. It cuts through bone in a jiffy and never clogs with sinew, bone fragments or myelin sheath. We also like quite thick pork chops and we were delighted to find that by sawing through the 'discs' of the spine and running a knife up between the ribs we got fewer, but thicker chops. If you look at supermarket chops you will find that they are half a vertebra and various sharp-ended part ribs because they are band-sawed through perpendicular to the spine, every half inch or so regardless of where the ribs and vertebrae sit.

The Christmas Day ham.

We weighed one of the halves and found it to be 21.3 kg, so a whole animal is 42.6 kg, which is a very useful 71.6% conversion live/carcass. That is about right for pigs. We had also had the heads, hearts and livers back from Mr Webb and the kidneys were still in the carcass halves. Mr Webb had also very generously offered to split the heads ready for the brawn (head-cheese) making and I only needed to cut them again top from bottom (separating the jaws) for them to fit into Liz's big brawn-pots. As I write this, they are now boiled or boiling gently prior to all the onward processing tomorrow. We love our brawn and Liz has found a smashing recipe which uses plenty of parsley; a herb we have in abundance growing in the polytunnel.

A leg gets well smothered in dry-cure
mix (salt, sugar, star anise,
bay, peppercorns, coriander and chilli)

We also decided to try some more salt curing. We picked out a nice cut of ham weighing 6 kg and have brined it in a wet-cure mix of salt, sugar, bay, onion, garlic, lovage, mustard seeds, cloves, chilli, allspice and peppercorns. This will get just 48 hours in brine, then be cleaned, patted dry and frozen till December. Next we chose a full leg intending to do the 'Parma' ham salt cure / air dry on it. This gets a longer cure (21 days) smothered in a dry mix of salt and sugar plus I had some fun with the big pestle and mortar "lightly crushing" a mix of star anise, bay, peppercorns, coriander and chilli. I love all that pounding. I think my favourite expression in this area is when you "pound the garlic to snot". 'Nuff said, maybe. The cure recipes have come from our lovely new books from Steak Lady. Thanks, SL!

Liz surveys the wreckage.
How am I going to fit all this into the freezer?

Well, 4 hours or so in we were all done. Mountains of bagged pork cuts and bags of scraps, dog bones and suet have been assigned to their places in the big stand-up freezer(s). The sawn-up heads are being reduced to brawn. The cured joints are sitting in their cure. There was only ever going to be one thing on the menu for supper tonight - those lovely thick pork chops.

Liz served them with slices of Ottolenghi's cauliflower cake and we both decided two small edits of the recipes to suit local conditions. OUR pork chops need nothing like the amount of butter that Nigel Slater uses for dry old supermarket chops and OUR eggs do not need the support of all that yellow turmeric to make the 'cake' look bright. The dogs have also done very well today what with some bits of raw pork rib (their absolute favourite food) during the butchery and some roasted ear and tail later on as a treat.

More dustbin lid art. This time for the turkey 'finisher'

That was that. Pigs and butchery all done for 2015. Next year we are fairly sure we will do this again but try with the Tamworth ginger pig breed again but on our 'maintenance diet' of 1.4 kg meal per animal per day; to see if we can reduce the thickness of that subcutaneous fat layer. Meanwhile the pig patch is in recovery mode, even though it is very poached up and wet. We plan to let it all dry out a bit then slot some spring bulbs into each hoof print, rake it over and sow buckwheat and more phacelia into the bare areas. We feel nicely 'Harvest Festival' ish. All is safely gathered in, freezers are rammed with meat, Autumn is looking like it is here and we are both very well fed tonight and pleasantly mellow on Lidl's very quaffable 'Baturrica 2010' (tarragona) Spanish plonk. Cheers.

Salt Cured and Air Dried

You will recall that we have been trying our hands at salt-cured and air-dried Tamworth pork meat, aiming for a 'pancetta' or 'prosciutto' type product which we could slice as thinly as possible and eat with, for example, melon as a starter or have in sandwiches or as a cold meat 'antipasti' style. For our pilot try we simply borrowed a couple of the 4 inch thick leg cuts and made a curing mixture to a recipe from a Newspaper website (Dan Leopard in the Telegraph, I seem to recall).,

New Year's Eve starter. Our own cure meat
with some (shop) melon.

The meat got salted for 4 weeks (a week per inch of thickness) and seemed to be firm and 'sweet' enough to us, so it then got 4 weeks hanging in a muslin bag in the spare room. With the radiator turned off and the loft hatch open, that's our coolest and driest room. We just had to spirit it all away and warm the room up for Airy Fox's visit in the middle, praying that it would not all go mouldy in the Tígín (which is much damper) in the mean time. It was potentially going to hang and dry for several months but the instructions say that you are aiming for 'firm' rather than rock hard.

The makings of another superb cake.

We gave it a feel on New Year's Eve and declared it firm enough, did the taste-test, quickly acquired a melon (putting the old, rusty 'Man from Del Monte' skills back to use!)  and put it on the menu as a starter before our Hogmanay-ish meal of home made haggis, our neeps, tatties and a rather fancy clementine and almond, choc-covered cake for pud. The pork was of good texture and taste, though maybe a wee bit salty, so that the "with melon" worked well. The sweet, juiciness of the melon met the salt and seemed to come to a happy compromise.

Polly (l) and Lily (r) on the front lawn.

Meanwhile, in the sheep department, four days on we are delighted with the new girls. They are already very tame and friendly; we are used to Kenny's much less frequently handled 'babies' who have taken at least 2 weeks before they will approach you and another 2 weeks before they would be 'baa'-ing for their supper and running up to you and your feed bucket. One of the last lot never did get as far as allowing me to stroke his head.

These ladies are 3 (Lily) and 5 (Polly) years old and have for all that time been almost pets round at Mayo-Liz's holding, so are well used to human contact, food coming from buckets and the idea of following people between fields and into pastures new. On the first day of being here, I went for a wander round the East Field to check the fences and the sheep came straight over to me and then followed me round as if I was taking the dogs for a walk - almost walking to heel. On my night 'patrols' with the dogs (on leads, obviously), when we wander past their gate, I hear the low 'almost grunt' of a tentative 'Baa'; one of the girls is trying it on to see if food might be available at 10 pm (!)

Fine looking, sturdy ewes. Lily (l) and Polly (r).

Today, then, I felt brave enough to 'shepherd' them from East Field to the front lawn, fenced off in 2014 to be a sheep field and save me the mowing. We do this by blocking the 'bad' exits a bit half-heartedly with terrace chairs, wheelie bins and a roll of sheep wire tied to a down pipe with a turn of baler twine - any self respecting sheep trying to do a runner would have no problems bursting out, but we trust these girls to stay calm, stay focused on me and go the right way from field to field, and so far they have.

That cake. The 'icing' is melted chocolate, butter and honey.
A bit of clementine 'zest' gets sprinkled on. This is Ottolenghi's
recipe, says Liz. 

After a few times we don't even bother with the blockages and the sheep dither about a bit and look longingly at the yard or the front drive, but at the rattle of a feed bucket and a whistle they turn back to the shepherd and follow diligently. The front drive, I should add hastily, does not imply the lane and freedom of the village - the gate at the end is always closed! As hastily, I need to re-assure you that these bucket feeds are of 'tit-bit' size. We must not over feed these lasses, we don't want any over-size lambs or fatty ..um.... 'exits' for them to pass through. Time enough for lashing them the extra rations when the ewes are feeding milk to any successful babies or those babies are weaning and growing. The professionals feed them up just pre-tupping so that they go to the tup in good and rising condition (this is called 'flushing') but then only feed to ensure healthy placenta and then lamb development and ewe health.

I guess that's it for the 'Season'. Tomorrow the decorations all come down, the fancy booze gets stacked away and the house returns briefly to 'dull' normality. Of course we quickly get acclimatized to this and start to feel the excitement of the coming Spring. 'Dull' does not last very long. I am already looking at how much weeding and cultivation I need to do, buying seeds and plants and getting the garden going again.