Below, you can see pictures of the guys removing the skin off the pig carcass. We'll be using the skin to make pork rinds (for now, it's all in the freezer, until I have a chance to find out how to cook pork rinds).
There was so much skin! I shared with Russell and both the workers, and still have a pile of it in the freezer! 
Here's the almost finished skinning job. After this was done, the guys were finally ready to cut chunks of meat!
Here's a fresh pork shoulder.
Here are the ribs, about to be cut off the carcass. I can't look at them without thinking about them on the barbeque grill. 
If you squint, and use your imagination, you can see what I see when I look at this picture . . . two hams! That's it for pics of our butchering. In answer to an obvious question, we butchered this pig while it was still awfully small because we didn't have housing for it any longer (we still have three smaller - but growing - pigs in the pig fortress), and also because we wanted this first butchering to be a less daunting task than it would be with a larger pig.
Now that we have a bit of experience, we can take on a larger hog, and eventually be ready for butchering a cow!
3 comments:
Sounds like it went well.
Butchering a beef is easier in that you don't have to remove the hair, you just remove the whole hide, unless they do it differently there.
Happy eating.
Great photo journalism Trish. And kudos to the pig butchering team--very nice work!!
I was raised in South Louisiana. A boucherie is the name we had for pig butchering. It was an occasion for everyone to help. I never went, but now I can say I know what one looks like. Yech. Now I know why my sister and her husband named their pigs as Bacon and Pork Chop. It was easier on the kiddo when the time came for the boucherie.
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