The Cottage Smallholder

Our friends had two Tamworths and we had one Middle White and one Gloucester Old Spot/Berkshire X.

This afternoon I have salted my belly pork to make bacon and hubby is just building me a wooden box to salt the leg in - we hadn't got anything big enough!!!

I also got a bag of bones out of the freezer to make a stock.

Having the first taste tonight - 2 pork chops from each of our breeds to see if they taste any different.

Ours were just kept in with electric fencing and we didn't have any problems with them escaping but maybe we were just lucky.  We had the fencing pretty low when they were small and then moved it up as they got bigger.  Once they had had a couple of shocks from it they stayed well away.

There was very little waste Danny.  It was helpful going along to see them be butchered as we could talk to the butcher about the cuts we wanted and he gave us tips about what to do with certain cuts.

The pigs were already halved and hanging when we arrived - this is done at the abbatoir to remove the back bone.  The offal had been removed (apart from the kidneys) and was all mixed up together (all four pigs) in a separate bag.  

I would say that all that was thrown away in total from all four pigs was about half a washing up bowl (if that) full of rind.   We brought all the bones home to make stocks with - I am just about to put my stock pot on in a minute, any scraps of meat and fat (which there was very little of) went into bowls to be made into sausages (the sausages come home today).

From the offal bag we had two livers and two hearts - we didn't want the lungs or anything else.  I am not sure what our friends had from it but I would guess the same as us.  Next time I intend to have the blood to make black pudding.