This Little Piggy Went To Market

Jon and I bought our first pig this year. Well, not a whole pig, just half of one (but it still took up much of our freezer). We bought it from local pig and bison farmers, Kevin and Anita Porter of Selkirk Bison Ranch. They pasture raise Tamworth pigs on their ranch in Elmira.

We’d been thinking about buying a pig for quite some time. Pork is a staple in our diet and it seemed silly to keep buying it one package at a time. Buying a whole pig would save us some money and I could experiment with making my own sausage and bacon.

When I talked to Wood’s Meat about how we wanted our pig processed, they were a bit surprised but unfazed by my request to have the belly left whole (for bacon), the shoulder just cut up and packaged in 2 pound blocks (for sausage) and all the fat saved (for rendering lard).

The night we brought our pig home from the processor, I just had to try making up a batch of sausage. It turns out that making sausage isn’t too difficult as long as you have a meat grinder. The shoulder is the perfect part of the pig to use. It naturally has the correct ratio of fat to meat that makes savory sausages.

My ancient Kitchen Aid, with its grinder attachment, made short work of the shoulder meat that Woods had cubed up for us. We were happily eating pasta with homemade sweet Italian sausage in less than an hour. It was just about the best sausage ever.

I attribute the sausage’s deliciousness to the pig. Tamworth is a rare breed of pig with its roots in England. There are thought to be less than 4000 of these tough but beautiful dark red animals left in the world. They were bred to be outdoors (not crammed into CAFOs, and thus their threatened status) and can withstand cold winters while their red skin protects them from sunburn in the summer. They are great foragers and the Porters have their pigs follow the bison to help rejuvenate the pasture. Most importantly, Tamworth pigs make great bacon.

Bacon isn’t the only reason humans have been keeping domesticated pigs for the last 12,000 years. Pigs provide a wide and diverse range of things to eat. Humans have figured out how to use everything from the ears and snout to the trotters (feet) and make it taste good. The blood is used to make sausage, the rendered fat yields one of the best shortenings for baking, the liver is prized for pates, and even the skin can be slow cooked into a succulent dish or fried up into crispy pork rinds. And that’s just the nasty bits. The hams, belly, tenderloin, and ribs offer varied flavors and preparations. When combined with salt and smoke, the taste can approach nirvana.

Sadly, most pigs in the U.S. are not raised the way our pig was. Most of the pork you can buy is raised in CAFOs where up to 700,000 hogs are raised in giant warehouses, the pigs packed together, their tails docked so they don’t bite them off, and fed a diet of corn and soy with a hefty dose of antibiotics to keep them from getting sick from their unnatural close confinement. Their waste is stored in enormous lagoons, where it can get into the water table or, in the case of a lagoon in North Carolina in 1995, release 25 million gallons of excrement into a nearby river, killing millions of fish. I can’t even imagine the smell.

CAFO pigs are not just unhealthy for the environment but they’re not that great for us either. Some of the antibiotics and growth hormones given to pigs raised on confinement farms get stored in their meat and fat and then gets passed on to us when we eat it. Plus pigs that eat an all grain diet have much higher levels of omega-6 fatty acids and very low levels of omega-3s. This distorted ratio has been linked to a variety of diseases including obesity, diabetes, inflammatory diseases, and cancer.

Grass-fed pigs, on the other hand, have a much lower ratio on omega-6 to omega-3. The total fat and the saturated fat levels in pasture-raised pork are lower and they have higher levels of antioxidants. Plus they just taste better.

We’ve been eating our grass-fed pig for over a month now and, while at first I thought it would take us a long time to eat it all, I’m now realizing that there are so many different recipes I’d like to try we might be in the market for another one soon. Next time it will be a whole pig (and maybe another freezer).


Fresh Garlic Sausage
Makes approximately 2 pounds

2 lbs pork shoulder, diced and very cold, with all visible sinew removed (there should be a 3:1 meat to fat ratio, if the meat is lean, add more fat)
.5 oz Kosher Salt
1 T minced garlic
2 t coarse ground black pepper
1 T red pepper flakes (optional)
1/3 cup good red wine (ice cold

Mix first five ingredients together in a large bowl. If you have time, refrigerate for up to 24 hours.
Place a mixing bowl into a larger bowl full of ice (if you are using a Kitchen Aid, use the mixing bowl from it). Grind the meat mixture into this bowl using the small die of a meat grinder. Make sure that the meat is coming out in distinct cylinders and that there is a distinction between the meat and fat. If the extrusion looks like pink mush, either the blades of the grinder are dull or there is sinew caught in the blade. Stop and check the blade before proceeding or the texture of the sausage may be ruined.
Once all of the meat is ground, add the wine and mix (using the paddle attachment of the Kitchen Aid or a study spoon) until all the wine is absorbed and the mixture is uniform and sticky looking. This should take about 2 minutes on medium speed and about ten minutes with a spoon.
If you have a sausage stuffer, you can stuff it into casing but I use this small batch for making pasta sauce or sausage patties. Make sure to cook the sausage gently and just to a 150F internal temperature. Overcooked fresh sausage is a sad thing.