we've finally gotten our half hog (all 81 lbs. of it)!
saturday morning cavin and i made the trek out to the farm to pick up our pork. there was some confusion, because a friend of leigh's had ordered a certain cut of pork, and couldn't find it. it was somehow placed with our boxes of meat. he had our short ribs, while we had his whole side. i'm still unsure what the "whole side" is. on the cut sheet, we were given the option of either "whole side" or "short ribs". we didn't know, so we checked both. but, as you may recall from an earlier post, the butcher called cavin back telling him that we couldn't check both, and that we had to choose either or. so we chose short ribs.
but on saturday, i saw both cuts, and was thoroughly confused (and still am). i was thinking the short ribs would be similar to beef short ribs, but in actuality, they just looked like ribs, and non-meaty ribs at that. meanwhile, the whole side cut was at least 2 times heavier, and looked like it was all the meat taken off the side of the ribs. in other words, it looked like we got the bone-in ribs with little meat, whereas the other guy got the rest of the meat attached to the ribs, possibly without the bone. it's all fine and dandy to me, except, where did our whole side meat go? i guess it went into the sausage?
so here's a breakdown of the different cuts of pork we got this time around:
chops (bone-in)
shoulder
fresh ham (cut in half)
short ribs (1 slab)
sausage (hot and sage)
i'm a little bit disappointed that we didn't get any pork belly (perhaps we have to ask for that specifically). but it's ok. despite being pork cut novices, everything turned out fine. one thing that was nice: all of the meat was pre-packaged in vacuum sealed plastic in smaller portions (so we didn't get all the pork chops in one vacuum sealed plastic, but instead was divided into 2-4 pork chops per package; similarly, we got our sausaged packaged in 2 lb. portions - no casing, no links, just the sausage). they were also labeled, though, i'm pretty sure we would have been able to figure out which was the fresh ham, which was the sausage, and what not.
i also was able to find out that the butcher does not raise the pigs, but another woman who leigh knows, raises the pigs. this woman, susannah, contributed her certified organic eggs to the csa subscription (cavin and i, though, did not participate in the egg share). so while we don't know if the pigs are "certified organic," i have a good feeling that the pigs were treated humanely and are as close to organic as possible, based on the fact that she deals with organic eggs. (but this is just a guess.)
we're defrosting pork chops in the fridge right now, so hopefully tonight they will be defrosted and we'll be able to taste them and see if there is a difference than just getting regular pork in the grocery store. leigh said he was only breaking even on the pork deal: $2.35/lb. i think it's a pretty good deal, considering different cuts of pork may be more than the set rate we got, and unlike buying from the grocery store, we know where our pork came from (well, more or less).
Labels: pork