Learning More Anatomy

Gorgeous free range Linderöd piglets.

As slaughter season continues, we have now taken our learnings to a different level. Last week we had the opportunity to do more hands-on slaughtering than we had ever done before. One of our self-sufficient friends has some lovely Linderöd pigs and we were able to slaughter one of the 4 month old boar piglets with her expert guidance. Tina's two sows produced a total of 12 boar piglets and she is now culling them before they become sexually mature and do the deed with their mothers and sisters. Read more about Tina and her farm on her website: www.genevadnygard.se.

"Our" pig having his last meal with mother and siblings - completely stress free.

Without any high-tech equipment, the whole process from shot to pork in suitable cuts takes pretty much all day. It is very time-consuming and quite messy: first shooting and bleeding, followed by scraping off hair, then carefully removing the stomach and guts and finally butchering.

Removing hair (to get crackling).

Very careful opening of the stomach cavity.

"What do we do with this?"

As tricky and scary as it felt, it gave us more confidence that we will be able to do the same thing with our lambs next season, saving them the journey to the butcher and us the cost of having someone else do it. 

Pork cuts ready for cooking - maybe not all in one go.

A big thank you to Tina for all her hand holding throughout!

Tina prepared rooster for dinner, while watching us work.

Cheek to Cheek

We finally made it to Lindegrens yesterday and stocked up on proper meat to last us for a few weeks. Among the slightly more weird and wonderful cuts was pig's cheek. Given Lindegrens organic/ grass-fed profile, the meat is pretty expensive, but this cut was on the affordable side. Happy days!

As per David Lindegren's suggestion, I went for a slow-cooked, rolled up cheek. I spread an herb/lemon/sundried tomato concoction evenly on both and rolled them up as tightly as I could.

The cheeks looked like this after 3 hours at 100 degrees, followed by 45 minutes of 175 to brown them.

They tasted great, but were a bit on the fatty side, meaning that one unlucky person got a huge amount of fat and not too much meat. I figure I'll try some ox cheek next time around to avoid the fat overload, especially since pork fat tends to have an unfavourable omega 3 & 6 balance.

Stock Experimentation Mode

We consume a lot of stock in our house, mostly as a hot drink alongside a savoury breakfast or as a quick way of creating soup for lunch. With a pressure cooker, making stock is a quick, easy and CHEAP way of creating wonder food. In addition, it feels good to make use of parts of the animals that would otherwise go to waste!

For this week's stock of stock (har har) mamma and I decided to go a bit crazy in the meat aisle. We've done pig's trotters before:

Dainty little trotters

But these little beauties were a first (ok, fine, they look pretty gross even to me):

As we say in Swedish: griseknorr

Verdict to follow!

The only little pesky detail is that although these pigs are of Swedish origin (as opposed to Danish, brrrr), they were conventionally reared. :-( I am working on finding ways of sourcing ethically reared meat, but it will take a bit of time. Watch this space!