Post by catherine on Apr 25, 2009 5:35:25 GMT -5
Well (drum roll please), the DAY has finally arrived when we just had to send old "One Nut", our RW freezer boar, to the butcher. We've dilly dallied about getting him processed, originally intending to do the job ourselves while the weather was cold. However, we never got reliably cold enough weather to be able to do the deed, and here it's Spring already! So, when the electric fence around the pigs' rotating pasture went on the fritz, and they decided to just free range all over our 40 acres (thankfully, they are now too big to go through the 5 strand barbed wire perimeter fencing), and THEN got so obnoxious as to decide to raid the chicken feeders IN the hen house, and removed a wall from said hen house, that was IT...time to reduce the piggie population!
We took him to Garza's Meat Processors, as they would let us watch the entire process. He loaded and unloaded like a dream. We were super impressed with the Garza's whole operation. Nice clean shady holding pens. Clean, though extremely busy processing rooms. I might add that they are super impressed with our pig, too! ;D Old "One Nut" must have been over 500 lbs. at 11 months of age and every butcher in the place was gaga over him. His hanging weight came out to be 317 lbs., out of which they expect we'll get about 180 lbs. of meat completely deboned. They are a very traditional butcher shop, and process hundreds of goats, sheep, pigs and beeves a day. They saved all our organ meat, blood and assorted offal and also cleaned out the intestines for sausage. They were prefectly ok with our whole family, plus two extra kids, crowding in to watch and photograph the whole process. Everything was surprisingly clean and relatively smell free and completely fascinating. It took about an hour for them to slaughter, bleed out, skin and eviscerate the carcass. It'll chill until Wednesday, when we'll go back to watch them break him down into cuts. But the REALLY, REALLY great news is...that he has NO BOAR TAINT!!!!!!! ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D We are all soooo relieved and thrilled! Yes, we read and believed you, Walter, that your boars have shown no signs of boar taint up to what is it now, 36 months of age?! But we have these dark red Red Wattle pigs, and we just didn't know. I was only a bit concerned about it, but then when the head butcher told us that he WOULD be tainty when we unloaded him, my heart sank. I told him that if he was tainty, we'd have lots and lots of dog meat. It's soo hard to go against a butcher who sees taint in every testicle! lol. Surely this guy would know, right? Well, WRONG! Halleluia! Walter, you are my main man!!! We were on absolutely pins and needles until they had our boy skinned and we asked them to cut out a bit of fat and meat and sear it so we could find out, definitively. Well, one of the two guys working on our boar cut a bit and put his cigarette lighter to it, but the other butcher laughed and pulled out his blow torch and put it to a bigger piece of fat! I'll post the photos tomorrow. The net result was that we smelled a bit of a bacony smell, and nothing else! The grease on my fingers from holding the fat tasted of...nothing. Woooot! It's Pork Chops for dinner, Wednesday night baby!!! We still have a few chops left from Heritage Meats, so we'll be able to compare our chops to someone else's RW, and a Berkshire and something else. I'll report back Wednesday, after dinner, ok?! lol. Sorry not to have the photos to show you right now, but the camera battery died at the end of our session at the butcher, and I need some new ones to be able to download onto the PC. Patience people. You'll see the whole story, soon enough! lol. Sorry that it won't be scratch and sniff/taste... . You'll just have to get your own RWs, now! ;D
We took him to Garza's Meat Processors, as they would let us watch the entire process. He loaded and unloaded like a dream. We were super impressed with the Garza's whole operation. Nice clean shady holding pens. Clean, though extremely busy processing rooms. I might add that they are super impressed with our pig, too! ;D Old "One Nut" must have been over 500 lbs. at 11 months of age and every butcher in the place was gaga over him. His hanging weight came out to be 317 lbs., out of which they expect we'll get about 180 lbs. of meat completely deboned. They are a very traditional butcher shop, and process hundreds of goats, sheep, pigs and beeves a day. They saved all our organ meat, blood and assorted offal and also cleaned out the intestines for sausage. They were prefectly ok with our whole family, plus two extra kids, crowding in to watch and photograph the whole process. Everything was surprisingly clean and relatively smell free and completely fascinating. It took about an hour for them to slaughter, bleed out, skin and eviscerate the carcass. It'll chill until Wednesday, when we'll go back to watch them break him down into cuts. But the REALLY, REALLY great news is...that he has NO BOAR TAINT!!!!!!! ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D We are all soooo relieved and thrilled! Yes, we read and believed you, Walter, that your boars have shown no signs of boar taint up to what is it now, 36 months of age?! But we have these dark red Red Wattle pigs, and we just didn't know. I was only a bit concerned about it, but then when the head butcher told us that he WOULD be tainty when we unloaded him, my heart sank. I told him that if he was tainty, we'd have lots and lots of dog meat. It's soo hard to go against a butcher who sees taint in every testicle! lol. Surely this guy would know, right? Well, WRONG! Halleluia! Walter, you are my main man!!! We were on absolutely pins and needles until they had our boy skinned and we asked them to cut out a bit of fat and meat and sear it so we could find out, definitively. Well, one of the two guys working on our boar cut a bit and put his cigarette lighter to it, but the other butcher laughed and pulled out his blow torch and put it to a bigger piece of fat! I'll post the photos tomorrow. The net result was that we smelled a bit of a bacony smell, and nothing else! The grease on my fingers from holding the fat tasted of...nothing. Woooot! It's Pork Chops for dinner, Wednesday night baby!!! We still have a few chops left from Heritage Meats, so we'll be able to compare our chops to someone else's RW, and a Berkshire and something else. I'll report back Wednesday, after dinner, ok?! lol. Sorry not to have the photos to show you right now, but the camera battery died at the end of our session at the butcher, and I need some new ones to be able to download onto the PC. Patience people. You'll see the whole story, soon enough! lol. Sorry that it won't be scratch and sniff/taste... . You'll just have to get your own RWs, now! ;D