Forgotten or oddball cuts when butchering a boar

I am getting one of my Kune boars butchered tomorrow and I was wondering if anyone had advice on any forgotten/oddball cuts of meat that I should request back from the processor?

I always ask them for lots of pork cutlets, hmm good ! You've never had a real chicken fried steak until its made with a pork cutlet !   I also have then give me unflavored ground pork & fat, so I can make my own flavor sausage (east coast hot Italian ) is our favorite.  I like to smoke pork roasts so I have them cut plenty of those.  I also have them cut 10# of fat into cubes and freeze it. I then take that and mix it with 100# of elk meat for a tasty burger mix, much better than beef fat and its made with my own organic piggy fat.

Yrah I am most definitely going to have them save alot of fat. I have also heard the jowl is an amazing cut as well, but its rarely shown on alot of pork processing breakdowns.

Jowl, Fat back, Hocks, Feet, Ears, Snout, Tail.  These are the parts that most folks don't know about and so the butcher doesn't give them or usually even offer them.

Fat = Lard, one of the best cooking items and also one of the most healthy oils you can use.

Redhawk

Bryant RedHawk wrote:Fat = Lard, one of the best cooking items and also one of the most healthy oils you can use.

Redhawk

especially when you know where the shit comes from. I don't trust the stuff from the grocery store knowing what I know about how pigs are raised.

Of course you know that they had to specially breed confinement pigs for stronger hoofs- heritage pig hoofs can't survive a lifetime on concrete.

With the jowls, I make guanciale. It's the traditional Italian jowl bacon that's used in Pasta Carbonara. It's not at all difficult, given it's small size and cure time.

The head makes a lovely stock, as do all the bones. I've made head cheese once at one restaurant, so that's an idea. Typically, I get the offal for the dogs. And pork skin is very good fried. I'm still perfectly my technique, still too many tough bits, but the dogs get those to. All and all, I have to say a pig is an incredibly useful animal.

Don't forget the bacon!  

All the offal: liver, kidneys, brain and tongue. Intestines if making sausages.

The head is good for making homemade brawn: combine the meat gathered from the cooked head with diced shin beef, parsley, salt and pepper. No need for gelatine since both meats have naturally high levels of it. Once chilled, it won't last a week because it tastes so good - perfect summer meal.

If you're planning to make sausage links, the intestine is handy to have.

I just got my first taste of 'buche' (no idea how to spell it, it' pronounced BOO-chey) recently. It's a mexican preparation of pork neck used to make tacos. It is mostly skin and fat with a bit of meat and it appears that big slabs of it are pan fried and then the crispy/greasy mass is coarsely chopped and added to tacos along with whatever else you like in your tacos (I would recommend shredded cabbage and pico for a nice contrast of texture and flavor). It was amazing.

It also occurs to me that getting a bunch of the skin is something a lot of people don't do, but real, fresh chicharones were another revelation for me. a world apart from the weird styrofoam like things I always detested out of a bag. Deep fried in big chunks they are a beautiful mix of creamy fat and crispy skin that delivers all the guilty pleasure of eating the skin of a roasted chicken but in a much more substantial form. Pairs well with drinking beer while waiting for the real meat to finish smoking.

I'm not yet on the land and therefore not butchering anything myself, but I currently get my meat from a local small butcher shop. They buy their animals from 4H and FFA kids and local small farms. So anyways, I'm always getting bones, belly, jowl, and mince from them. Their breakfast sausage is pretty good too and that is trimmings. We sometimes get heart or tongue. We used to get lard and cracklins from them, but the state made new rules about lard that forced all the mom and pop butchers to either raise their prices to rediculous heights to pay for testing each batch or to stop making it period. They went with the latter. Big butchery factories have to test every batch too, but their batches are huge and can absorb the cost without changing the price more than a few cents. It is gentrification masqued by saftey.

Ryan Hobbs wrote:I'm not yet on the land and therefore not butchering anything myself, but I currently get my meat from a local small butcher shop. They buy their animals from 4H and FFA kids and local small farms. So anyways, I'm always getting bones, belly, jowl, and mince from them. Their breakfast sausage is pretty good too and that is trimmings. We sometimes get heart or tongue. We used to get lard and cracklins from them, but the state made new rules about lard that forced all the mom and pop butchers to either raise their prices to rediculous heights to pay for testing each batch or to stop making it period. They went with the latter. Big butchery factories have to test every batch too, but their batches are huge and can absorb the cost without changing the price more than a few cents. It is gentrification masqued by saftey.

What are they testing for?

Can you get them to give you the fat, and then you can render it yourself?

Andrew Mayflower wrote:

Ryan Hobbs wrote:I'm not yet on the land and therefore not butchering anything myself, but I currently get my meat from a local small butcher shop. They buy their animals from 4H and FFA kids and local small farms. So anyways, I'm always getting bones, belly, jowl, and mince from them. Their breakfast sausage is pretty good too and that is trimmings. We sometimes get heart or tongue. We used to get lard and cracklins from them, but the state made new rules about lard that forced all the mom and pop butchers to either raise their prices to rediculous heights to pay for testing each batch or to stop making it period. They went with the latter. Big butchery factories have to test every batch too, but their batches are huge and can absorb the cost without changing the price more than a few cents. It is gentrification masqued by saftey.

What are they testing for?

Can you get them to give you the fat, and then you can render it yourself?

I discussed this with the butcher, he wanted to charge the same as for meat and I think that is too much tbh. They used to carge $1 per lb of lard so that is rediculous for $2.50 per lb of raw fat.