Chris Hennes

This is how Greweling has you make Almond Dragees (my results can be seen here). It gives a very different look, but you still wind up with chocolate covered stuff, which is OK in my book .

Interesting: I was not sure how it worked. Do you know if the market hogs are actually picked up by the new owners, or is it possible to have the folks from the abbatoir come pick them up? I don't have a truck or a trailer, so I'd have a hard time transporting my new pig anywhere. Or do you suppose you can make arrangements with the farmer to pick up the pig at a later date?

Yes, the Oklahoma State Fair is a bit later than the MN fair: it doesn't start until Sept. 11. My original plan had been to buy a hog from a local 4-H kid at auction at the fair, but when I saw this ad I figured it would be easier (and I'm sure it was). I'm still going to go to the fair to chat up the swine producers there and try to start in on a source for next years' hog.

This morning I drove out to the processor and picked up my pork (it wasn't frozen yet yesterday so the butcher called and said I had to wait to pick it up). I brought along a 54 gallon rubbermaid tub that fits (barely) across the back seat of my (small) sedan: I think she would have let me keep the boxes she brought the pork out in, but since I have the bin, and didn't need any more boxes lying around my house, I figured I'd just load it into there. It's a good thing I brought the big one (I have a smaller tub as well): by the time I had loaded up the whole beast the entire tub was full. I could have packed it more efficiently, but just tossing stuff in there filled it up fast. The pig was 207 pounds "hanging weight" which in this case meant without the skin and the head (and blood). I don't know how much of that hanging weight actually got delivered today, but my car was full . I did not end up with any offal because I forgot about it in the flurry of phone calls. Oh well, next year... it's not like I have a shortage of pork: It is all neatly packed up and labeled: I had her package the chops two per package, and cut them nice and thick, about 1 1/2 inches. I could have requested just about anything for the chops, I think. The price was fixed per pound for the fresh cuts, it did not matter how you had it divvied up. If you wanted things smoked or stuffed into casings there was an extra fee. Obviously I wanted to do that myself: I didn't even have her grind up the scraps, just toss them in bags and freeze along with all the rest. Here is a package of the pork chops: You can see it is stamped with the particular cut (in this case, normal chops, though I have blade chops and loin chops as well), as well as the address of the butcher, a "not for sale" stamp, and my name (on the masking tape). Everything is pretty nicely labeled, which is a relief since I had feared that I might just get a bunch of packages labeled "pork" . Here are the chops unpacked: You can see the substantial fat cap she left on them. For these first I'll just cook it up as-is, but later on I may trim this off as extra fat for sausage-making. The bacon had me confused: I'm used to ordering it from Niman Ranch, where is is packed flat. This is the package I got (two of them, of course): The shape confused me, so I unpacked one of them: I can't quite tell without unrolling it, but this belly seems shorter than what I get from Niman or Heritage Foods. It has a decent thickness to it, but has unfortunately been skinned, since they ended up skinning the whole hog at slaughter time. This results in a loss of quite a bit of trimmed-off fat, as well as the loss of the skin... too bad, I always make my bacon skin-on. Not this time, apparently. All told, the cost was pretty reasonable: I paid $0.80/lb for the hog, $50 for the slaughter, and $0.50/lb for the processing (all hanging weight). I figure the whole hog ended up costing around $2/lb in my freezer. My hope is that in the future I can cut the processing cost in half by doing most of it myself: I just ran out of time this week. That will have to wait for next year...

Penne alla Vodka (November 2006, p. 10) Recipe here if you have online access. This is one of my favorite Cook's Illustrated recipes, in part due to its simplicity. It only takes enough time to bring the water to a boil and cook the pasta, in one saute pan, with a minimum of ingredients, most of which are pantry staples. For me, the exception to the "Pantry Staple" list is their choice of vodka: according to their tasters, you can taste the difference between the superpremiums and the crap, and they like the pricey stuff. I bought a bottle of Belvedere a couple years ago specifically to make this recipe, and I finally ran out tonight and had to use the rotgut I had in the cupboard. To be honest, while I guess in a side-by-side tasting you could probably tell the difference, I thought it still tasted great with the garbage vodka. So fret not if you don't stock Belvedere in your liquor cabinet: anything you've got is fine, even if it comes in a plastic bottle .

How can you tell a priori whether the butcher will do a good job? I just went with the processor that the farmer uses regularly.

I'm currently in the process of purchasing a whole hog from a local breeder who posted a classified ad. I'm still learning the details, and I think the ways things work vary from farm to farm and from processor to processor. I'd like to try to get the collective eGullet Society wisdom on buying hogs direct so that next time someone tries they aren't quite as in the dark as I was/am! My breeder raises show pigs, so it's a very small operation, I think partially just a hobby. When I answered his classified ad he asked me if this was my first time purchasing a whole hog, and was happy to help, but since he didn't know what I didn't know, and neither did I, there were some details I missed. 1) The hogs were slaughtered directly on his farm, then moved to the processor's location. The processor was not allowed to put the heads or feet in his cooler with the rest of the pig, so I had to pick them up on location. Is slaughtering on the farm common for these small operators? 2) Post-slaughter the hogs were skinned. I am used to ordering my bellies skin-on so it didn't even occur to me that they would do this. Is this due to the hog being slaughtered on the farm? Is it common to skin the hogs? How do I get a hog with the skin intact? 3) In an ideal world I would have gotten the hog whole but eviscerated, with the spleen, kidneys and liver bagged up separately. This is mostly due to a somewhat irrational distrust that I will not get all the fat, etc. due to over-trimming. The trouble is, I drive a small sedan and this hog weighs, post slaughter, 207 pounds. Not only can I not lift 207 pounds, but I am not sure I can fit the whole thing into my car in one piece! So at first I was going to have the hog "quartered." I don't even know what that means, so I asked to have the hog cut into the largest pieces that it was practical for me to lift. To the processor this translated to: cut the legs off, split the torso in two, and customer will pick up fresh (unfrozen, unpackaged) meat. Well, what I was hoping to do was freeze large segments and just thaw and cut when I had time: I wanted the processor to freeze and package it. So, I modified my request to "just cut it up the way you normally do." I haven't picked it up yet, because this now translates to "pack and freeze." Any suggestions as to how to get what I want next time? If it were a steer I would ask for primals... what is the hog equivalent? Do I even really want this? 4) Any suggestions as to how to find hogs that are raised to be fat and tasty, instead of pretty? In this area it seems that most hogs are raised to be show pigs. What criteria is a judge looking for in a show pig? Is there any translation to taste? Do I need to post my own classified ad next spring, something like "WANTED: Fat tasty pig. None of this lean crap." Are there other things I don't know that I don't know? I know that my pig was a Duroc/Hampshire cross, that it ate grain, and that it lived in a relatively spacious pen (compared to a hog factory, anyway).

The ears got lost with the rest of the skin, and there's not much on the snout either. They were pretty stripped-down when I got them.

I can't tell from many of these descriptions how much prep has to be done to the head: some recipes indicate that you have to remove the eyes and brain (man, just typing that makes me quake in fear at the thought...) while others say nothing at all. What's the deal on those "extra bits." And, since my hogs' heads were skinned, am I going to have enough gelatin to set the headcheese? Should I add extra?

I think the danger is the bite where there is no chocolate to counterbalance the bitterness of the espresso bean. The advantage of using chocolate-covered beans is that you can't run into that. Your tongue always gets a bit of sugar before the bitter hits. I know it's work, but have you considered just coating them yourself? It's not like you need them to be shiny (I assume...).

I hope not, but I will find out tomorrow when I pick up the rest of the pig...

The hogs were a Duroc/Hampshire 50/50 mix. I'm not sure why the processor removes the skin on the head, though my best guess is that the skinned the whole animal before loading it into the cooler: the whole slaughter was done at the farm, and then the carcass shipped back to the abattoir. Maybe they didn't want pig fur all over everything: I can attest that it manages to go everywhere!

So I drove out to Kristdala Farm just east of Oklahoma City on Saturday to pick up five pigs' heads. I got there about an hour after the slaughter, tossed the pig heads on ice in a giant rubbermaid bin in the back of my car, and took them back home, where I filled the bin with water to help with the heat transfer, trying to get the heads chilled down quickly, since they had already been sitting out for a while: When I was done taking the jowl meat off, I put them back into the water to continue chilling down before I froze them: they were still quite heavy at this point. As I mentioned above, the farmer was just going to discard the heads, so not only did I get the head from my pig, but I got it from the other four he slaughtered that morning as well: I don't know what I was expecting, but I was a bit surprised how little you could tell what animal they came from: they had been skinned as part of the slaughter I guess, so no ears, no snout, not really any definable features that made you think "pig." It was a bit disturbing to have the eyes present, however: You can see how thick the layer of fat was that got removed during the skinning process by looking at the bit that is left on the lower jaw. Because the heads are normally just discarded, no special precaution is taken to leave fat, meat, or anything intact, so the five heads had widely varying amounts of jaw meat left on them. I guess that's what I get for free! The original plan had been to do something different with each head, but because I had no idea what I was doing, and what I really wanted was jowl to make guanciale, I decided to try taking the jowls off all of them, and then use the leftovers for head cheese and the like. I was a bit disappointed by the lack of ears, but I guess I'm glad that, for my first time with heads, they didn't look too much like pigs! Gotta ease into this sort of thing... Next up I had a go at taking the meat off the jowls. Two problems with this: 1) I have never seen a proper pork jowl before, so I have no idea what I am supposed to end up with, and 2) each of these heads seemed to have a different amount of meat and fat in the jowl area, due to the skin being removed, probably quite quickly. So, anyway, here is the procedure I followed (photos courtesy of my wife, who, despite being generally unwilling to even watch me bone out a chicken, volunteered for the task). This is a view from the back of the head: my first step was to try to feel around a little and figure out where the jaw bones were: Once I identified the main jawbone, I started carefully cutting up against it, trying to get under the nugget of meat that was directly against the bone: When that was free, I found the upper jaw bone and started cutting along it: Here you can see the piece almost separated: Here is a front view of the upside-down head after I have removed the first side and started making my first cut on the other side: hopefully this gives a better idea of where I was making those cuts. Once separated I put the jowl into a bowl of ice water: Here is one of the larger jowl pieces that I managed to recover: Next up... guanciale!

Awesome, thanks Kerry. On to my next question: regarding food safety this time. Are there any hygiene concerns with the feet that I need to be aware of? The reason I had to go pick them up myself was because some sort of local regulation prohibits the processor from putting them in his cooler with the rest of the pig. Any idea what the concern is, and anything I can do to alleviate it?

Blow torch! ← That's what I figured, but I wanted to know if there was a trick to it to prevent the skin from burning or anything along those lines.

Here are a few of my trotters: As you can see, they still have the hair attached. How do I get it off? I have seen references to both singeing it off and shaving it off. Singeing seems like the way to go if someone can explain to me how it is done...

Can you use pigs feet in a stock or something along that nature? I'm getting 20 of them tomorrow and while I think I can turn a couple into something for me to eat, I doubt my wife is going to be so game! So I'm looking for ways to use them that do not involve serving the trotters directly: suggestions?

Good thought: I've never had it, does this recipe seem reasonable? Besides beer, what do you serve it with?

I was going to use the recipe in "The Whole Beast" -- any idea how it compares (I don't have "Art" -- that needs to be remedied, but not by Saturday!!). I've also got Wolfert's "Cooking of Southwest France" -- I wonder if there is anything in there.

From a girl who loves to do things from scratch, even when it's not cost effective - how'd you figure out it was gelatin? ← I was looking at a discussion on the Bradley forums over here.

I finally have the space to put in a small curing chamber in my kitchen: I bought two of the Vinotemp 28 Bottle Thermo-Electric Wine Coolers, one for wine and one for Charcuterie, and stacked them on top of each other in the corner. I am going to black out the window of the Charcuterie chamber with something removable. I figure that way I can take the cover off to look in on things without affecting the temperature or humidity. I also put a pan of salt and water in the bottom and removed all but the top and bottom wine racks. I am going to get some Guanciale going in there pretty soon, so hopefully it works out!

I finally pulled the trigger on the 4-rack Bradley Digital Smoker. I went with the Digital because a) it was in stock and b) it looks cool. Wonderful reasons, I know . I also got to thinking about how to make my own pucks: it probably isn't cost effective when you think about the time it takes to make them, but I think it would be entertaining to try, and then you could you whatever wood type you wanted. It sounds like the binder they use is just gelatin, so if I can get some wood shavings the right consistency I am thinking of giving it a try.

Since I'm getting five pigs' heads this weekend I'm thinking that in addition to making traditional Guanciale, I will also try to make some "Smoked Guanciale" -- any thoughts as to whether I should still hang the meat for three weeks as well? Should I do that before or after smoking? I guess after, but I haven't tried to dry cure anything before, so I'm a bit new at it...

HOST'S NOTE: The recent discussion on cooling rates has been split into its own topic, which may be found here.

Wow, plans changed again. Now I am not getting one head, I am getting five! They are slaughtering five pigs Saturday and appartently no one wants the heads or feet, so the guy said I could have them all for free if I wanted them. Well, what self-respecting eGullet member would say no to that? So, now I have a new problem: what the heck do I do with five pig heads? I am going to make a bunch of guanciale and brawn, but any other suggests? I've got "The Whole Beast," "Charcuterie," and "Garde Manger." Help!