Bringing Home the Bacon (and Ham and Sausage)

Day one started early.  Mickey cut one end off a metal barrel, and built a fire underneath it.  He filled the barrel with snow and kept the fire going to convert the snow to scraping-temperature water.  At scraping temperature, the top layer of skin and the bristles scrape off easily -- too cold, they don't scrape off; too hot, the skin sets the bristles and they become impossible to remove.  Once the water was ready, we scalded and scraped the carcass.  We then secured the carcass to the gambrel (thanks, Grandpa and Grandma Wint, for the gambrel), and Mickey eviscerated it.  Then, closely following author John Seymour's pig-processing instructions, we drank some home-brew to round out day one.

 Day two started with halving the carcass.  (Thanks, Grandpa and Grandma Wint, for the meat saw.)

Then Mickey transformed each half into racks of ribs, sides of bacon, hams, and sausage meat.

  

Hmm, where to start?

Slicing bacon

Trimming ham

One ham, ready to go!

Dry cure for the joints, including maple sugar, which Mickey boiled out from our syrup, along with cure and salt.  (Mickey warned me it's saltier than the cookie dough that it resembles, but I couldn't resist tasting it, and it's still pretty good, in spite of the salt.)

The pickling box for the joints to be cured: holes in the bottom of the box allow the pickle (meat juices) to drain as the meat cures.

Thanks to Mickey's new chainsaw mill, all the lumber, except for the bottom of the box (scrap plywood), is ripped from a maple log.  When he showed the box to me, I was less impressed than he had expected -- because I thought it was dimensional lumber he had just cut and nailed together.  But he made it out of a log!

With the ham and bacon set aside in the pickling box to dry and cure for a few weeks, we turned our attention to the sausage.

We chopped the sausage meat, and Mickey mixed up the delicious recipe.  This will be a fermented, smoked, dried sausage.  After a couple of days, it smelled quite promisingly of salami.

 Mickey got the kitchen all set up for sausage-making.

I try to keep the hopper full and moving while Mickey does the actual grinding.

Sharpening the grinding blade.

Mickey learned that grinding meat with the skin on is extra-hard work!  Duly noted for next time.

Much-deserved break from grinding.

Less-deserved break from ... ? 

Really, the amount of lounging they do makes you wonder what they do all day that tires them out so much!

Back to work! (at least for the humans)

Stuffing the sausages: Mickey feeds the casings, and I crank the stuffer.

Not too shabby!

The sausage that didn't make it through the stuffer became pizza topping, and the extra bits of fat and skin became lard.

On to the smokehouse!

Filled with bacons and hams from the first pig, along with mutton.  Most of these meats are done smoking.

The meat hooks work great! and Mickey left lots of room for various combinations of hanging meats.

The first batch of meat properly stored, Mickey hung the hams from the first pig, along with our newly made sausages.

Mickey puts small bits of combustibles in the Dutch oven, including sawdust that he collects when he cuts wood, and keeps the fire going with coals from our wood stove.  (It leaves a very dramatic trail of sparks, especially at night, when he transports the coals from the hearth to the smoke house!)

The video shows the smokehouse (and the sap-boiling operation and the goat shed) in relationship to the cabin.

 

 Without a doubt, my least favorite part of this whole business is waiting for the meats to be ready to eat!