In this post I’ll be discussing the butchering of a Berkshire hog. I’ve included a couple of photos, neither of which are gory in the least. However, please be warned about content and read on at your discretion.

Meat is one of those touchy subjects with many people, and often with me. My family and I are firm in our ethics when it comes to meat. We won’t eat anything which was raised using any chemicals, hormones, antibiotics, feed filler or was fed animal byproducts. Some would call this organic, however it is far more important for me to know and trust my farmer than it is for them to be certified. I will also only eat animals raised on small family farms with full access to the outdoors. Grass finished? Call it what you will.

However, this way of eating is prohibitively expensive for some. It is undesirably expensive for us. Happily I’ve discovered that much of the cost of meat is actually the processing; anything from butchering to value added processing (bacon, sausage, jerky etc.) adds layers of cost to the final product. Like so much else, if you are willing to do the work then all you pay for is the cost of the animal itself, and not the time involved in processing it.

Thus I have now started buying the whole animal from my local farmer and butchering it myself. In this case the farmer is Allan Irving of Irvings Farm Fresh Meats. Berkshire is a heritage breed with a fuller flavor than commercially raised breeds. I’m not sure how the weight compares, but the Berkshires are large.

I’ve discovered that butchering is not the least bit gruesome. Even if it was (which it isn’t, really!) I would still do it if only for the quality control. When I butcher my own animals I get to choose the portions to package, the type of cuts I will use and I know how the meat was handled. This gives me a tremendous amount of control over the finished product. Included in the cost of the animal are things like leaf lard (a post unto itself) and the organ meat. Normally these would have to be special ordered from the place where your farmer butchers their meat, if they’ll save them at all.

We started the day much later than usual (10:00am vs the crack of dawn). This made things a bit trickier later in the day when we were running out of light. We got lucky with the temperature, which never got above 8 degrees where we were working, and generally was closer to 3 degrees. The meat was consistently cold to the touch, which is very important.

Sharp knives are also very important, and we had someone on sharpening duty later in the day when they really needed touching up. I won’t go into great detail about the actual cuts to make, because there are some fantastic tutorials which cover that here and here.

I also discovered a great illustration of the cuts of pork by country (US, UK and France, specifically) in Larousse Gastronomique (2001 English edition, page 917). We didn’t follow any rigid guidelines for cuts, opting instead to cut what we preferred to cook. And eat. In my case this meant a lot of belly for bacon.

Kevin was good enough to weigh his cut meat and calculate the final cost per pound, which was around $2.00. At the market comparable meat ranged from $5.00 (simple roast cuts) to $9.00 and up (bacon and sausage). A whole hog purchased cut from the Irvings’ is $4.50 per pound.

The process, including grinding and packaging, took about 3 hours per pig. I’ve got some bacon brining, waiting to be smoked, and ground pork which will be turned into tourtière and sausage.

Well, well worth the trouble.