Before the Sausage - What They Don't Show in the Supermarket (Rated PG-13)

Last week I wrote about making sausage and smoking it. Well, we cheated, we bought the pork at a local supermarket. To make REAL sausage you have to start a little closer to the pig's home, like here. A neighbor of our daughter was going to slaughter a pig and we were going to be lucky enough to get all those "inside" things that nobody else wanted. Sandra didn't want to view the actual "slaughter" so she stayed back at the house until the pig was good and dead then she would make her appearance and gather the goodies. The neighbor lives about 1/4 mile from our daughter and keeps the pigs in a pen near their house. This is not the pig that we have been raising but an "extra" pig that was getting too large to keep and eating too much. We trekked through the snow to the pen and began to plan our attack.
The pig greeted us with curiosity, completely innocent of what was coming.

What was coming was a rifle loaded with a copper-jacketed bullet.

One well-aimed shot right between the eyes and the pig dropped without even a squeal.

As we struggled to lift the pig over the edge of the pen, the other pig went about eating as if nothing had happened. A discussion developed about how to get the pig out of the pen (remember none of these are professional pig slayers) - who would get in the pen, who would grab which foot, should we grab it by the ears? Finally they just muscled it over the edge onto the ground.

A short drag to the truck then up onto the tailgate.

Where a strategically placed knife blade would begin the letting of blood necessary to drain the body.

Since we were getting everything nobody else wanted we collected the blood in a clean bucket.

After a short ride we unloaded the pig onto a tarp to drag it to the barn where we could proceed further. Sandra now made her appearance, but because of her twisted ankle (from an earlier fall on ice) she couldn't make the trek up the hill so she remained in the car and received periodic progress reports. We offered to carry her up the hill but she declined; I later learned that she was afraid we would think she was as heavy as the pig!

In case you hadn't noticed, the pig had been wallowing in the mud. So the next step was to use a pressure washer to clean it up. There is a lot of elk and deer hunting done in our area in addition to the slaughtering of pigs, goats, and sheep. The clean-up of the animal is always a problem. Recently a local car wash discovered an unidentifiable "body part" in the machine area while they were cleaning up. No one could explain what it was or how it got there. They called the local sheriff's office who investigated and finally took it to a local hospital for identification. They determined it was a pig's heart. Seems like the hunters and farmers like to load the animal into a pick-up truck then run the truck through the car wash.

After a good hosing off the next task was to hang the pig, estimated at 250 pounds. A rope over the rafters in the barn gave us a good working area.

You might ask where am I; well, I'm on the end of the rope out of sight tying it off to the garage door track after it is lifted sufficiently high off the floor.

OK, take a break while we decide what comes next.

Well, we'll start by cutting around the "exit point" including the tail; that way everything inside will stay together and it can be removed without loosing anything held in the intestines.Next the belly is opened to allow access to all those goodies inside that nobody wanted.

This was a castrated male pig, no one wanted this part.

The more the belly was opened up the more goodies became available.

After removing the heart, lungs, liver, spleen, kidneys, stomach, small AND large intestines, and a lot of net fat there wasn't anything left inside. Just one more look inside to be sure nothing was missed.

Now for a cup of coffee and a hand wash in the snow while we prepare for the next step.

The carcass needs to cool as quickly as possible. It's colder in the barn than in the refrigerated locker so we decided to leave the carcass hanging in the barn for two days to finish the bleed and let it get fully chilled. To speed up the cooling, we used a water hose to wash out the body cavity and wash down the pig one more time. We took the large intestines outside to flush them and hoped to use them for sausage casings. We determined that this pig had been supplementing his diet with table scraps, including artichokes. After a few attempts at cleaning the intestines we gave up; it was so cold we couldn't feel our fingers and kept perforating them. We buried them along with what washed out of them so they wouldn't attract coyotes that might try to get into the barn and ravage the pig carcass. So it will be store-bought casings for the next batch of sausage.

We did make it home with some goodies. Sandra has already had liver soup and kidney noodles. We delivered the heart to a friend this morning. I'm remaining silent about how much of these things I actually ate.

Now, tomorrow the feet and head arrive; but that's another story.