The Pig Adventure Threak - Day by Day - Updated with all four days!!

For some reason, I have decided to separate the actual play-by-play from my preview pics. Anyway, here is Day One. On day one we worked a lot, doing a lot of butchering, which is not pictured, and we made the blood sausage, which is quite time intensive. One interesting thing about the entire experience is that it takes absolutely no foundational skills when you have a good teacher. There is very little knife work and almost zero work on presentation. What it takes is a good attitude, a strong back and a hell of a lot of energy.

So, here is a somewhat step by step, or at least day by day, recap of the our Great Pig Adventure of 2010. Warning, there are a lot of pics.
We arrived at the house at which we prepared the pig on Monday. It is a truly beautiful area of the world, and the work was done in a very old farmhouse on our instructor's property.
The drive in:

At arrival, the pig was in four pieces:

The first thing which must be prepared is the boudin noir, or blood sausage. It needs to go first because the blood will spoil more quickly than anything else. It is a pretty simple procedure. First, the least noble parts of the pig are boiled in a strong court bouillon, and then they are chopped by hand to a very fine paste.

To them is added a large quantity of sautéed, sliced onions:

Then the blood and spices:

Unlike regular sausages which are fed through an attachment on a meat grinder, blood sausage must be filled by hand, with a funnel, because the filling is very liquid:

Here they are, ready to boil:

And going in the broth made from the pig parts boiled to make the filling:

When they come out, they are a dark grayish brown, but after being covered by a cloth and set to cool, they turn the characteristic black color.

After all of this it was hard to imagine eating dinner, and in fact, the traditional dinner after the first day is a light vegetable soup, some bread and some cheese. I don't know if I could have taken much more than that. The rest of the time, we ate a small bit of what we had prepared the day before, or if it was something preserved needing a bit of age, we ate the version our teacher made last year.

I'll try to put day two together tomorrow or the next day, if wi-fi and energy are willing to cooperate.

So, it looks like night three brings some sort of strange insomnia...


Day Two:
Day two seems to move a bit slowly as well, but we are chipping away at the pig. By the end of the morning of day one, with a bit of professional help and some power tools, the pig is in usable pieces:

Then the meat must be ground, and it is my responsibility. The ground pork, which is about two thirds fat one third lean forms the backbone of much of what we do. Initially, we have about thirty pounds:

Time for lunch. We prepare "grillades (I think)" which is sliced pork from various tender parts which is first browned in duck fat with whole cloves of garlic, then sprinkled with flour and finally white wine is added and then the whole mixture is cooked until the sauce is quite thick:


With this we serve brochettes of pork kidney, pork fat and pork grilled in the fireplace:

After lunch we begin to prepare the rillettes. They are made from fatty meat to which the mostly cleaned bones are added so as to utilize every bit of flesh available. The first picture is of the sort of meat:

This must be salted and then let to sit overnight:

Next we work on the pate de foie gras, which will be canned and preserved. First the foie gras must be cleaned:

Then the cans are lined with a thin layer of seasoned, ground pork, and then large pieces of foie gras are added:



Finally, the foie gras is again covered with the pork:


Wow, we are not lacking for pate de foie gras!


The last thing we make on day two is conserved petit jambonneau. This meat is from the calf of the pig. It is butterflied, seasoned and spread with ground pork:


Then, it too goes into the cans:

After that we went into town and closed up the cans at the local hardware store. I don't have pics. Then we went home and slept very, very well.