Day one of pig processing (again not for the squeamish)

The meat was available for collection at 10am. Before that we had to buy some last minute supplies.
At the abattoir things were very efficient. There was nearly a hitch when the first guy tried to assure me that 4 medium size boxes contained all of 2 pigs. But luckily his colleague, who knew what was going on, arrived before I had to try to sort it out in my awesome french.
The boxes contained the 'sous vide' or vacuum packed stuff. This was mostly pork chops (two different cuts, one with more fat than the other) with some ribs, the trotters and some roasting joints as well. They were neatly packaged for two people in 2 chop packages and small joints and small numbers of ribs. I was worried they would be done in 'family of 6' size portions and it would be annoying and potentially wasteful having to defrost a lot at once.

Chops

Roasts (from leg)

Trotters

The rest (well over half) was in bags, the blood was in a bag too. The back of the car was very full once it was all loaded.

The first thing we did was sort out what was going in the freezer and what we needed to deal with straight away. We put some of the 'straight away' stuff in the freezer just to keep it cold until we were ready for it. We were pretty knackered by now having carried over 100kg of meat up the stairs.

We started off with making the black pudding (Perhaps we should have made boudin noir being in France but we both find it a bit too rich to eat much of it) as that was going to take a long time to cook. Much of the advice on what to do we have got from Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's book but we didn't use his black pudding recipe as we wanted something a bit less rich. We did however use his idea of cooking the black pudding in the oven rather than in special skins (from a cow of sythetic)

As delivered in the bag

Poured out in to a bucket

The stringy bits strained out

After mixing with all the ingredients

Before cooking

After cooking

The final batch wasn't cooked until after 10pm as we could only fit 8 in the oven at once and there are 32 of them.

While the black pudding was cooking we went through all the meat in the freezer that wasn't vacuum packed to sort it out in to smaller batches for various things (eg sausages, saussicon and head cheese). We have left one batch of sausage out to do tomorrow and put A LOT back in to the freezer to do later. We made the sausage batches up from belly and leaner meat and from leaner meat and back fat for the saussicon. We have a lot of back fat frozen too. Not sure exactly what we will do with it but we have froze in 0.5kg batches anyway.

For making head cheese/brawn you boil up the head for ages to get the geletine out of the bones and then pick of any bits of meat and some fat and cut them up to go in the jelly. In the UK it sounds like (from Hugh Fearnley Whittinstall) you get the head back whole. Here we got it back skinned (looked like a pig mask) but we didn't get the skull or brain. We are going to give the head cheese a go still but we will have to improvise a bit. The tongue came still attached to various of the innards (including the lungs - so what we had a few days ago was not the lungs - not sure now what it was)

Tongue at top, liver at bottom, who knows what in the middle

We made smooth liver pate with one of the livers. We plan on making a courser one tomorrow with the other one.

We started the dried ham by putting the legs in to boxes full of salt. The boxes were just big enough - I spent ages trying to chose the right size and was a bit worried I had got too big. The legs we put on to salt weight 8.8 kg and 10.2kg.

Box ready for ham (with salt, pepper and corriander)

Rubbing salt in to the bone

Box with the ham in and topped up with salt

They will stay in the salt with a heavy weight on top for around 30 days and then be washed off and hung somewhere to dry for many months. They need to be protected of course to keep flys and animals out. We have some bags to put them in but might consider constructing some kind of protective box too as they need to be somewhere they can get a bit of a breeze to help them dry.
We have a 3rd ham in the freezer waiting for us to do something with it and the 4th was made in to roasting joints.

We put some small pieces (one off the bone and one on) in to brine to make a roasting ham. Not sure how they will come out as we didn't really focus on what we were doing with this and just lobbed them in to see how it will come out.

A few things went slightly differently to planned (eg all the back was made in to chops so we didn't have a cut for back bacon and will just have streaky) but over all very successful. We had pork chop for lunch which was yummy and black pudding for dinner.

Tomorrow we plan on making sausages and freezing the remaining potrine (to make dry cured streaky baco