A Whole Pig

I didn't kill the pig.

When you tell people you are going to butcher a pig, most people think that includes killing the pig.  But it doesn't.  Slaughtering the pig is the process of killing it, and that's handled by a USDA certified slaughter house.  Butchering the pig is the process of cutting it up.  Slaughtering is an efficient and mechanical process (when done right), but butchering is a creative process.

I'm getting ahead of myself...

Going Full Piggy
This all started because my family has been talking about getting a pig for a long time.  We already get whole chickens and have gotten a quarter of beef.  A pig seemed the next step. 

A few weeks ago my family did seven days 100% local. During that week we did not eat anything that was not sourced locally. The experience was interesting, fun, challenging, and enlightening. Some parts were easier than others and some were harder. One thing that came clear was that eating takes a certain amount of skill. It takes different skills than we normally work on in an everyday home kitchen. Cooking skills and presentation skills are nice--they create and refine the meal. But what we seldom work on are production skills. These production skills are normally left to other people, like butchers, and they add to the price of what we buy. The price of everything can be brought down if you learn to do some of the production yourself. Pound for pound, steaks cost more than a loin.  When price becomes an issue, as it can when eating locally sourced food, learning to buy big can help you spend smaller.

Through Foodbuzz, I found a local vendor, Eat Oregon First, that sells whole pigs.  Normally they sell to local Portland restaurants but they are starting to branch out into consumer direct sales.  So I gave them a call.

Here is the catch.  When you buy a hog from Eat Oregon First, you buy the whole hog.  And it comes whole, which is to say slaughtered but not butchered, because they normally sell to restaurants who employ talented chefs who know how to break down an animal (Eat Oregon First does sell amazing beef by the cut, but not pig). To take care of the butchering, I hired Tracey "Tray" Satterfield of the Portland Meat Collective.  She was my own personal butcher for the day, and she was awesome. (If you ever need of a personal butcher, contact Tray at traceysatterfield@gmail.com)

The Three C's -- From Country to Corpse to Cuisine
Let me digress for a minute.  When you look at it from the basest perspective, eating animals is all about killing something, cutting up the corpse into manageable pieces, cooking it, and eating it.  Most of us deal only with the last two parts of that sequence, but there is a lot that comes before.  With wild animals we leave the care and feeding to Mother Nature.  Domesticated animals are different.  With domestic animals, how they are raised and what they are fed is directly the responsibility of the farmer. 

Everything starts with how the animal is raised. 

Get A Life, Pig!
It is important to me that the meat I eat is raised "well".  What does "well" mean?  To be completely honest, I'm not sure. It's something I'm still working out.  But I do know that "well" begins with pigs having a life.  I understand that these are domesticated animals raised solely for the purpose of food production, but food is not just about meat in the same way meals are not just about eating.  A home is more than a house.  Family means something different than relatives. There is more to what we eat than what we eat, and how we approach the dinner plate has meaning.  For me, ethical meat eating begins with understanding where your meat comes from and how it lived before it became delicious.  Pastures are an important part of this.  Wind and rain too.  Mud and pigs go together in my book.  Knowing the name of the farmer that raised the animal you are going to eat is very important
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This pig came from Payne Family Farm in Carlton, Oregon and was raised by Mark Payne.  I spoke with Mark Payne over the phone about his farm and his pigs (hence no pictures, sorry).

Mark Payne is a fourth generation Oregon farmer, located just outside McMinneville.  In the 60s, it became clear to the Payne family that,due to the changing realities of modern farming and agricultural economics, they had to move away from the diverse family farm and focus on something that could provide the volume.  The Paynes chose Pigs.  Mark believes in taking good care of his pigs--a decent life and decent death--while understanding that the economic realities of modern farming necessitate a certain amount of production volume.

Mark's pigs eat grain that is locally grown in the Tygh Valley in Eastern Oregon.  Through partnerships with Basque Ranch, Eat Oregon First, and Rogue Brewery, Payne Family Farm is able to be the final part of a completely locally sourced cycle of food production.  I'll have more about this in another post. It's really remarkable what these guys have put together.

Back To The Bloody Parts
When I arrived at the Eat Oregon First warehouse, the pig had already been delivered and Tray was just starting work. Half the beast was laid on the table in front of Tray.  The other half lay on a second table along with the head.  Tray was just beginning to make the first cuts.  

Cutting the side into portions was not nearly has hard as I thought it would be.  I'd seen the pig diagrams many time and even have a copy of Basic Butchering of Livestock and Game that describes very clearly how to process a whole animal.  However, looking at pictures and actually cutting an animal are different things.  I knew I didn't want to try to take this on my own.  Tray really made it all simpler.  She walked through the animal, showing me what the lines were, how to find them, where the divisions made sense.  Watching her make the cuts and comparing them to the drawings in the book brought it all together. 


Inside of a side of pork, head removed, before cutting.

Slowly, methodically, the pig carcass was turned into stacks of the most wonderful cuts of meat.  1.5 inch thick bone-in chops started piling up.  A Boston Butt was magically pulled from the animal along with its twin, the picnic ham.  We found bacon tucked in under a sheet of spare ribs.  Hams sat in a clustered huddle, hiding inside the legs.  Tray's cutting was so well placed, that we wasted almost nothing.  I was pressed to figure out what to use for sausage meat!

Cutting out the spare ribs.

Sirloin Chop

Wrapping was like a carnivore's Christmas. I was a ghoulish Santa, I driving home with a load of meaty presents.

Home Is Where The Heart Is, and the rib chops, and the...

Honestly, a whole pig is a lot of meat.  221 lbs. of meat in my case.  I filled both freezers and still had the head left over, sitting in the refrigerator, in a plastic bag.  This did not make my wife happy, and I was a little unsure what to do.  Everything was fresh so I knew it would hold in the refrigerator for a couple days.  But I needed to make a decision quick before I ended up with a rotten pig head in my refrigerator.

The answer came from Jane Grigson's book, Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery.  She has a simple pate recipe specifically for pig head.  Exactly what I was looking for!  Here is my modification to the recipe based on what I had on hand:

1.5 lbs. meat cut from the head (jowls)
0.5 lbs ground pork (I ground the trimmings and the heart together)
1 large egg
2 oz. Madeira
1 large onion
1 Tbs. flour
Salt and pepper and dried herbs

It was toward the end of the day that I took this recipe on.  I'd already ground up several pounds of trimmings and the heart for sausage meat.  I'd started a slab of bacon curing in the refrigerator (based on the instructions in Charcuterie).  My last task for the day was to deal with the head.  It couldn't wait.  The next day was garbage day and I didn't want to miss my chance to get rid of whatever was left over. 

I cut the ears off and gave them to my dogs. Then I got out my boning knife and started with the fatty cheeks because that seemed easiest.  Keeping the thin knife as close to the bones as possible, I peeled the meat away from the face, exposing the jawline and teeth and moving upward toward the cheek bones and the open eyes.  The tongue was in there; I could see left over food (or blackened blood) in the pig's teeth.  It had a distinct odor--not like rot or sour.  It had a strange smell like blood, fat, fresh meat, and bad breath all together.  It smelled in a way that was different than any of the other parts of the body.  Maybe it was the amount of glands that are in the head.  Maybe it was the tongue.  Either way, it made me take a step back and gather myself.  At this point I thought about skipping the head.  It seemed an unnecessary trouble--it was difficult cutting.  And the smell was getting stronger and making me sick.

Jonah was in his bouncy chair by the kitchen doorway watching the whole thing.  Kim and Hazel had gone Christmas shopping, so he stayed home with me.  He was smiling and bouncing and having a good time chewing on his hands and his toys and watching me trying to cut up a pig's head.  He was unaffected by the smell.  It didn't bother him at all.  He was having a great time doing his baby stuff right where he was.  I was the only one feeling sick.  I was making myself feel sick.   It was all mental.  Jonah wasn't sick, so why should I be?  After all, I choose to do this.  I requested this pig be killed for me.  He's not chomping on acorns and checking out the sows.  He's sitting in my freezers and in my refrigerator.  And his head is sitting, open eyed, on my cutting board, because this is what I wanted.  I had to finish what I'd started.  Throwing out a whole pig's head just because I didn't have the stomach to finish the job would have been...disrespectful.  Disrespectful to what I was learning.  Disrespectful to what I was trying to do.  And disrespectful to the pig.  That is not what I wanted this to be.

Pate. (colors adjusted a bit for poor lighting)

I gathered myself, stepped back up, and then the job became easier.  I had not use for the brains, so I didn't crack open the skull.  I've never liked head cheese either, so I didn't make that.  I got as much from the jowls as I could, took out the tongue, and went on to make my pate.

If you want to see pictures of the pig's head here are the links.  Warning: you might get grossed out.

Pig's head before.
Pig's head after. 

Over the next week, we had a dinner party for the solstice and the pate was well liked by everyone.  For that same party I did an 8-bone loin roast with a salt, garlic, and pepper rub that turned out great.  The bacon finished also.  The day was clear so I smoked it with hardwood outside, then cut it by hand and vacuum sealed half pound packages.

I'm working on a brown sugar glazed ham for Christmas dinner--it's brining in the refrigerator right now.  The Christmas ham--I guess I really was wrapping presents.

Oregon Olive Oil Update feat. Red Ridge Farms

Harvest is here and Winter is just around the corner.  It had been a while since I looked into how the Oregon oil farms were doing. The trees have had a chance to root and grow all summer.  But winter is coming and winter has not been nice to Oregon olive oil in recent years. To find out how things are looking, I visited Red Ridge Farms in Dayton.

Drive an hour out of the city, and you can find Red Ridge Farms owned by the Durant family.  On a hill top, surrounded by Oregon wine country, step out of your car it almost feels like you've been transported to another place.  Manicured gravel pathways.  Herb gardens and green houses.  Fountains and teak patio sets from which you can survey olive orchards, clusters of birch, oak, and distant golden rows of autumn pinot vines under the pale autumn sky. 

Although the Durants have been Oregon wine pioneers since the early 70's, now it is the olive trees that are the hot topic. 

Arbequina olives.

Because of the cooler climate, most olive growers in Oregon are planting super high density Arbequina trees.  Although most olive trees thrive in warmer weather, this variety can withstand temperatures down into the 20s.  But even that may not be enough.  For the past two years Oregon winters have had cold snaps down into the single digits, and this has devastated the industry.  

"We lost about 60-65% of the Arbequina last year," says Paul Durant.  And that was not the worst of it. The Durants also planted a acres of Arbosana and Koroneiki.  Not quite as cold tolerant as the Arbequina, both of those crops took almost 100% losses.  The impact was great enough that the Durants have decided to move on from Arbosana.  The few bottles left in the gift shop from last year's harvest are all that is left.

The Koroneiki is another story.  After milling what little crop they harvest and combining with olives bought in California, the results were outstanding.  "We're thrilled with the Koroneiki this year," says Paul.  And I have to agree.  Koroneiki is a darker green Greek variety with a smooth and buttery richness that is outstanding on bread with a little salt. 

Fresh Oil and A Fresh Start?

 At the Olio Nuovo Festa this weekend, the excitement about the new oils was clear. The parking lot was full and the tasting room was bustling.  There was wine tasting of the Durant Vineyards Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris.  Caterers set out bruschetta and crushed garlic with, of course, olive oil to drizzle over the top.   But the focus was the tasting tables featuring the three types of oil Red Ridge is producing this year--Arbequina, Koroneiki, and a Tuscan blend of three northern Italian olives which the Durants are experimenting with to replace the Arbosana. 

Fresh olive oil tastes really different than aged olive oil.  It is cloudy with fruit particulates that have not had time to settle.  In fact, all the oils had been pressed just a few days before the Festa started.  Having so much fruit still suspended in the oil gives the oil a heavier texture.  Low quality fresh oil tastes pungent, bitter, and burns your throat.  Good fresh oil catches you off guard with its penetrating flavor of herbs and black pepper.  Here again the Koroneiki was the favorite. 

It's because of its amazing flavor that the Durants replanted their Koroneiki orchard this year, even though it took devastating losses last year.  "We just like it that much," says Paul. 

Hopefully the excitement and good wishes of this year's Olio Nuovo Festa can hold back the harsh winter weather.  A third deep freeze in a row could be a catastrophe for Red Ridge Farm and the handful of other Oregon olive oil pioneers.  Like Red Ridge, all the other Oregon farms, such as Belle Ragazze, have been taking a heavy beating.  For a fledgling industry it is a lot to bear. But as more people and restaurants realize how good Oregon olive oil is,  the risks may all be worth while.

Fresh Tuscan Olive Oil

7 Days 100% Local--Completed

We did it!

It wasn't easy, but we managed to get through 7 whole days of eating nothing but locally sourced food. 

It Was Good Stuff
For all of us, it was a fun family challenge that we all worked on together.   

My wife was happy that we ate everything we bought.  We had very little food waste.  We even ate the bread, although it was frustrating and coming out too dense.  My daughter thought the bread was better this way, and when toasted with a little butter, I think so too.

All of us recognized that our meals were more colorful than they typically are.  They were fresher.  They had less sweeteners and no refined sugar at all.  In fact, the only sweetener we used all week was honey.  This could get a little repetitive, but also it was healthier.

It was a learning experience.  Kim and I went out to some of the farms and were able to have more meaningful conversations with the vendors at the market because of it.  Learning about where your food actually comes from was interesting for all of us, even Hazel got into it. 

Would you like a side of eggs with that...and that...and that?

Sunday Breakfast--scrambled eggs with onions, Anaheim chilies and heirloom tomatoes on handmade tortillas.

Eggs became a central part of our daily diet.  So much so that we ate a total of 3 dozen eggs in 7 days (combined from Noris dairy and Sweet Briar Farms).  Their versatility made them really important.  Eggs scramble with vegetables for breakfast or poached on toast.  Hard boiled eggs are super portable and great for lunches on the go.  Eggs in egg noodle pasta. How did we use so many eggs...I don't even remember.  But by the end of the week, it was 36 eggs eaten.  We had anticipated that we would be relying on eggs more than normal, but none of us expected just how much.

How about some mushrooms with that...and that...and that?
This was more about finding a great deal than anything else.  Springwater farms was selling 6 lbs boxes of chantrelles for $25 at the farmer's market. Consequently, we had mushrooms with almost everything.  The nice thing about mushrooms is how versatile they are and how mildly flavored.  They go with meats, eggs, and vegetables.  They can be a side dish or sauced or the featured flavor.   Having something that could add a flavor layer when needed (especially since we had no spices) was really helpful.

School Lunch: Better than ever!
One thing that we thought would be a real sticking point was school lunch.  This was something that we thought a lot about over the weekend.  A normal sack lunch that we pack for my 4th grader is something like:

• PB&J sandwich
• apple slices
• cliff bar or some kind of cereal-fruit bar
• tings
• Tillamook cheese slices
• carrot sticks

Everything except the apples and carrots were off the table.  What we came up with was basically this:

Building blocks for a new school lunch.

• Hazelnut butter and Jelly sandwich (homemade hazelnut butter, our own jelly sweetened with honey, and homemade bread)
• apple slices
• hard boiled egg
• carrot sticks
• honey sticks
• apple (or pear) cider

The verdict?  She liked it better that the original! Especially the bread. School lunch turned out to be easier than we thought.

Unexpected Local Gems
There were a few things that were really great.

Mint Tea from Seely Family Farm.  With no coffee, we were hoping to find some kind of warm morning drink when we ran into Seely family farm at the PSU farmer's market.  Mike and Candy were running their booth.  They are the nicest people you could meet and make some of the best mint tea I've ever had.  Their peppermint-spearmint blend got us through the week splendidly.  They don't have a website, so if you want to find out more about their tea, call 503-728-4603.

5 Grain Cereal from Gee Creek Farm (aka Gruel).  Although they mill several different kinds of hot cereals, we bought the 5 Grain Flourless mix for the week.  It comes in a 2 lbs bag for $4.  This oat, rye, brown rice, barley, and flax mix turned out to be one of our favorite things to eat.  I made a trip to the PSU market this past weekend just to get another bag. 


Scottish Wheat Flour from Eat Oregon First.  We used this flour to make pasta and were really happy with the results.  The texture stayed firm giving the noodles a good bite. I had low expectations because non-durum pasta usually comes out pretty soft, but this wheat was not.  I should have known it would be good when Scot, the owner, told me Pastaworks also buys his flour for their noodles.

The Hardest Parts
Overall, the week was a bit of a shock.  Being constantly faced with very limited food choices was easily the hardest part of all.  Going cold-turkey on any kind of modernized food was a bigger shift than we thought it would be.  No coffee. No chocolate.  No bananas. No pizza.  No ketchup or mustard (it is possible to make this yourself from local ingredients, more about that later). No black pepper or imported spices of any kind.  No prepared foods.  No eating out.  No convenience.  Everywhere you go there are restaurants and easy food--all of which we just had to ignore.  By the time Wednesday rolled around, we were gritting our teeth and forcing ourselves not to order pizza for dinner (which we didn't).

Take for instance, the bread.  Even though I though we had figured out how to make bread, it turned out very dense and generally not so great.  But we had to eat it.  It was all the bread we had.  There was no throwing it out and picking up a new loaf at the store while we worked out the kinks in the recipe.

Another example--I had a work meeting where the client wanted to take me out to lunch.  We went to a deli and they order the most amazing cheese steak sandwiches.  Oh my god they smelled good.  I sat and watched  knowing I had a sack lunch of carrot sticks, apple slices, and hard boiled egg in the car.  It was a killer. 

Local week was expensive.  It was shocking how expensive it was.  I understand why this kind of food is more expensive and what that cost represents, but it was still surprising just how much more expensive it turned out to be.  Truly local food is treated like gourmet food and given gourmet prices.  When you drop almost $200 at the farmer's market in one day for groceries for three people, it makes you think twice.  Granted some of those costs were recouped throughout the week because we had to eat home all the time. There are some remedies for this, but that is a matter for another post.

The Best Part, by far
Perhaps the thing that all of us recognized this past week was how eating 100% local brought us all together around the shared experience of food even more.  We normally eat dinner together as much as possible, but this time it was different.  All of us were interested in what dinner was going to be.  We could talk about making it, because almost everything we ate was made by us from scratch, even the hazelnut butter. We could talk about where it came from.  We could point out what we liked about it, complain about the lack of pepper and spices, and laugh about how many times we'd eaten the same ingredient over and over.  Kim said it was almost ceremonial the way we all came together around the food we were eating and preparing.  It gave every meal an extra, deeper dimension that we could all take part in, together.  That was the best part of the whole week.

A Run-Down of Our Week's Menu
Here is a quick summary of what we ate for the week.  I'm leaving out the flowery descriptions because we got a whole week to cover.  You'll see there are some themes.  You could call it repetitive, but really it's the local, seasonal reality.  With more planning and preparation it would be possible to branch out more, but this is what we ate.

Saturday
Breakfast: 5 grain cereal with milk and honey. 
Lunch: Apples and hazelnut butter, hazel nut butter and jelly sandwich
Dinner: Braised SuDan Farms Lamb shoulder with white wine and chantrelle sauce and roast root vegetables

Sunday
Breakfast: scrambled eggs with anaheim chiles, heirloom tomatoes and homemade tortillas.
Lunch: Apples with hazelnut butter and cheese quesadilla.
Dinner: Chantrelle soup with 5 grain bread.

Monday
Breakfast: 5 grain cereal
Dinner: Clams in white wine and butter.  Bread.  Chantrelle soup.

Tuesday
Breakfast: Poached eggs on toast
Lunch: hard boiled egg.  carrot sticks.  bread.
Dinner: Roasted Eliza Chicken.  Roasted root vegetables. Steamed Purple Califlower and broccoli, bread.

Wednesday
Breakfast: 5 grain cereal
Lunch: Hard boiled egg, apples with hazelnut butter,  salad with chicken on top
Dinner: Sweet Briar Farms Pork chops with creamed mushrooms.  Sauted broccoli and brussel sprouts.

Thursday
Breakfast: Poached eggs on toast
Lunch: Hardboiled eggs and apples, cheese quesadilla
Dinner: Homemade pasta with pumpkin and chantrelles

Friday
Breakfast: scrambled eggs with onions, chiles, and cheddar cheese
Lunch: Hardboiled eggs and apples, leftover pasta
Dinner: Lamb Chops with chantrelles.  Roasted root vegetables.  Mashed potatoes.

Two Exceptions
There were two items that we did not 100% local source--cheese and olive oil.
We bought 2 kinds of cheese--an aged cheddar from Willamette Valley and a soft farm house style cheese from Fraga farms. Both are local companies that produce their own product using their own milk from animals they raise, but they also use salt and enzymes in the processing that are not local.

We also used olive oil from Red Ridge Farms.  This oil is primarily from olives grown in California and crushed at their mill outside McMinnville, Oregon.  They do grow and crush their own olives, but the volume is still very low and constitutes just a small percentage of the actual oil.  I included this because of my desire to support the fledgling olive oil industry in Oregon.  More about Red Ridge Farms in an upcoming post.

Otherwise, everything else we ate or drank for the entire week was as locally sourced as we could get it.   The grains came from a little further away than the other stuff.

Would We Do It Again?  Yes.
Even though we drooled our way past restaurants and longed for orange juice with breakfast, we would do it again.  With more planning and preparation, the 100% local diet could actually be workable.   Might be a great project for the spring.