18 Reasons Hog Butchery Demo With Morgan Maki, Week 1

So, a few weeks ago, on a rainy Tuesday evening, myself and several other swine enthusiasts/Bi-Rite hangers-on, gathered at the little 18 Reasons gallery on Guerrero, to watch Morgan Maki break down the market's weekly half-a-hog.

The guest of honor is pictured above, open side up. It had arrived into the the store a few days before. It came headless. It could be that the head travelled with the other half of the hog. Sometimes, Morgan explained, you get a half a head, or a whole head, or, as in the present pig, no head whatsoever. Different cutters have different methods, and sometimes, because markets don't have a huge demand for pig faces, workers at the slaughterhouse can take the head home and make head cheese or something I think is called manchale. I'm pretty sure that is what they were saying. I haven't been able to find it searching on the web for any of the ways I have thought of spelling it, or anything on Mexican or Filipino cooking sites that seems like it might be it. The butchers kept mentioning it, though, and my not being able to find any information on it has piqued my curiosity, so if you know anything, come forth please.

The 232 there refers to the weight of the whole pig, we are looking at something less than half that weight here on the block. He, meat artist Morgan Maki, mostly used that little pirate's-dagger looking knife laying on the table there. The hacksaw only came out to cut through a bone, and the cleaver only made a couple of cuts all nights. In this picture, he is separating the shoulder. He will cut the trotter off. He said he had customer had requested them, but the next week we would learn that the customer had not only not shown up to collect them, but had called in to request the next set.

After making the cuts in the shoulder, into the butt and the picnic, we moved on to the belly, the middle section. First he removed the back leg. Then he flipped the belly over and removed the tenderloin, the most expensive cut on the hog, which runs right underneath the animal's spine, from about where the ribs stop to just past where he has separated the leg. In this picture, Morgan is pointing the tenderloin he has cut off as it tapers into the back leg.

The prime cuts. Belly, which will be bacon or pancetta or porcetta. He will make a rack of ribs by cutting those meaty bones there off that rack of chops. Then he will french (An excellent and extremely dirty sounding term I learned or maybe relearned here, meaning exposing the ends of the bones in preparation to cook. There was, I note with equal parts disappointment and relief, no tongue involved.) the tips of the bones and tie it up with rosemary and butcher's twine to be sold as a roast or cut into individual chops.

He's separating some of the primer cuts here. There was a lot of discussion of off cuts and bones and skin and fat, all of which were collected for use in the store's kitchen, to be made into sausages or cooked into stocks and sauces and what have you and sold to the public or eaten by the store staff. Several times reference was made to "the boys", who I visualized as somewhat puppyish just from the initial gloss, but then became aggressively canine in my imagination when it was revealed that sometimes they will take a bone from a scrap bucket, roast it, and then stand around picking and gnawing at it. At one point, he, Morgan, takes a  hunk of fat cut from another part of the animal and lashes it to a lean roast with butcher's twine, so that it will melt and sort of baste the leaner cut as it cooks.

Removing the trotter from the back leg. 

"H-bone" removal. Separating meat from the leg for pierna, pork knuckle, &c.

Pork leg. Could be submerged in salt at this point and then hung or smoked and made into a prosciutto or country ham.

Shaggy, bespectacled, native New Orleanian Morgan Maki butterflies a pork leg. I'm not so big on the mancrush/bromance thing anymore, but if I was, this dude could be a candidate. A solid candidate.

Since I said mancrush, I will also say bone bucket. Mancrush. Manchale. Bone bucket.

Final products of our evening. In the next installment, we will discuss cutting up the hog in preparation for curing.