Part 1 here
Part 1 was how the pigs became pork. And then I used pork (but NOT the pork from the pigs at the harvest, this is all pork purchased at the meat counter across the street).
Last night I made sausage, delicious sausage. To make this I had a beef round bottom roast, trimmed pork loin, untrimmed pork shoulder and a lot of thick cut bacon.

For the seasoning I use some premixed sausage seasoning from Penzeys but always augment it with more herbs and spices for super deliciousness. I work roughly 1 tablespoon total of my spices to 1 pound of meat.

MMMM toasty fennel

For approximately forever I was missing the worm screw for my stand mixer grinder attachment. I finally bought the damned thing. I love that grinder, it chews up even the toughest sinew. Love it! I grind everything on the coarse grinder, I prefer that to the finer grind.

Beef

Pork loin
Unfortunately I didn’t get pictures of the pork shoulder or ground bacon, but you get the idea, pink and nubbly.
I made my regular spicy italian sausage and got about 4.5 pounds of that. I portioned that out to 8 ounce packages and froze it. That was just a thing. I make italian sausage regularly.
Then I wondered about my breakfast sausage. What is delicious for breakfast? Sausage is delicious, but so is bacon. Sometimes seems unfair to have to choose only one. Now you don’t have to choose! Made up 3.5 pounds of breakfast sausage and of that, a pound of it is ground bacon. Bacon sausage!! Broke those down to 6 ounce portions and wrapped and froze them.
And I mixed up delicious hamburger patty magic! I did 2/3 ground round to 1/3 ground pork loin and also about 8 ounces of ground bacon. Mixed all of them together with no seasoning and worked them into (roughly) 6 ounce patties. Got a total of 13 patties out of that. I made some up for dinner and wrapped and froze the rest to be easily thawed and cooked when we are feeling lazy.
I made up a really rich egg bread dough to be used for the hamburgers, a super decadent and delicious hamburger bun. And… I forgot to add the yeast. Solid pucks. I’ll be cutting and drying them and using them as dog treats.
My freezer is packed full of sausage and burger. It was a big production, all of my mixing bowls were dirty. I had to very carefully wipe down every surface afterward to make sure there were no jibbly-ickies left behind. There is something so satisfying about using something you made, whether it is my own sausage or a scarf made from wool that I dyed and spun and crocheted or cheese tart made with cheese I made. This is really what moving to Vermont means to me. I hope at some point to be able to participate in the pig cooperative and then make food with a pig I helped raise and slaughter. And then also eggs from my own chickens, chicken dinner from my own chickens, fruits and vegetables from my own garden, and trading jam for milk or something, I am glad we are here.

Pork is good, lets talk about it and lets start at the beginning.
We have a homesteading mentor. She has a little goat farm up in Bethel and that farm is clustered with a few other farms. All of the people in the cluster work together and help each other out. In this case, one person raised 5 pigs for 4 of the surrounding farms. There is no sense in everybody raising a pig and duplicating all this effort. The pigs stayed in the pasture of one farm and everybody pitched in with the feeding and care.
And everybody pitched in and helped with the slaughter.
The pigs live in an open pasture with a pen in there, a pig pen as it were. They have a lot of room to run around and do piggy things. They are fat and happy and calm. It was very very important the the pigs not be stressed or scared or otherwise upset. The ‘harvest’ took place right there in the pasture. You would think that would be upsetting to them but it absolutely was not. There was no chasing, no herding, no panicking at all. Just pigs wandering around being all pig like
We went up to watch and maybe help. I did not commit to any help because I did not know how much I could handle.
When we got there they had one pig down and had just started the skinning process. I was okay with that. It was meat in a pig suit. I know where meat comes from, it comes from there. Fine.
He went to do the next pig. The pigs were calm
He walked up to the group of pigs, put a .22 rifle with short rounds between the eyes of a pig and shot it. The gun was very quiet, the other pigs jumped away but didn’t run or panic or get upset. The shot pig fell to the ground and started seizing and then he reached down and slit the neck.
There is nothing poetic about a pig dieing, nothing beautiful about it. It is visually a bit brutal but you remember that the pig is not in pain, there is no more mind in there to register and react to things.
I forced myself to watch the whole thing. And that was okay, tough but okay. They grabbed the pig with the hooks and brought it over to where they were skinning the pigs. A pig suit meat pig was okay, a pig dieing was okay. Transitioning that pig from dead to meat what what got me. Those first few cuts, the occasional twitch, I couldn’t do it. I quietly left and walked back up to the farm.
David stayed to help and got to inspect all the organs and everything. I’m a bit envious about that, I would have liked to have seen that. But not on that day.
The next time they do this I will try again.
Once the pigs are skinned, emptied of organs and split in half they get sent to a butcher who breaks them down into the various wanted and then sent back to the people.
Part 2