Meat, meat, meat, and more meat!

Meat! Glorious meat! What a day....here are some quick pix from Sunday.

The sides of the pork were huge... Technically this is just the center cut. The ham and the shoulder had already been taken off!

The shoulders alone were enormous. This is the shoulder with the hock removed and cut in half for the picnic ham and the boston butt cuts.

 and check out that lovely layer of fat on the shoulder.

Which was nothing compared to the back fat! Can you believe it?

And then there was the bacon. For heavens sakes, we did win the lottery!

Our reference for doing these cuts is here. And also this guy really seems to have good info. I think he put more of his information in his "for sale" products because last year he had a better step-by-step guide.  The free video is pretty good (and funny, I like him talking over the other guy).

However, ahem.. someone I know really needs to get his act together and gimme the pix of "how to" do these cuts so I can post them for you folks. You know who you are. We only kinda know what we are doing and even tho we sometimes have a "what the heck is that?" moment, we've been happy with our results.

Folks sometimes ask me what cuts they should get when they have a butcher dressing their hog. The answer is - whatever you like. I'm not sure there is a wrong selection - its what you use. Primarily we use fresh ground pork, "stew" meat, bacon (of course), pork chops, and ham. We also really like "country style ribs" and also blade steaks. Because there is just the two of us we really don't like big roasts. So we take off the best parts for the grill and the rest of it goes for stew meat or ground for fresh pork.

What about sausage? Lean in, friend, I got a secret for you..... sausage is just seasoned meat. At any time you can make sausage - even just before cooking it. Now you know. We never want links anyway because we only use bulk sausage.  So any time we need sausage we just grab one of our handy prepackaged frozen 1 pound packs of fresh pork and season it up. Voila! Easy peasy.

The only tools we used for cutting up the sides of pork were a meat saw and a couple knives. I like my good boning knife and my chef's knife (actually I have two - a bigger and a smaller one). We took up the fat and will make lard out of it later.

Can you do this yourself? Yes you can! Once you read the instructions a couple of times and look at the side of pork in front of you, it seems to make sense. And if you do monkey it up - for heavens sakes its just meat. More than likely its about how you cook it and not if its a perfectly butchered side of pork.

Monday is more meat meat meat and more meat. We still need to do the grinding and also finish up the last side. And I have to call the butcher - I hope he doesn't freak out when I tell him we're on the way with fresh hams. Our deer season just ended and I'm sure he has his hands full.

Say, if you're inspired by all this lovely pork and are in central Ohio, check out my buddy D at Spring Hill Farms. He'll bring you a box of pork all cut and ready for action. When you talk to him, tell him that OFG says "hi" and wow these porkers turned out great!