Shoulders: Cut into Boston Butts and picnics. Package individually for low and slow smoking for pulled pork (BBQ)!
If pork loins (not tenderloins) are packaged rather than pork chops, cut the backbone into chunks for seasoning big pots of collards, turnip greens, and/or soups. Neckbones and backbone can go on the smoker before freezing, for even better seasoning meat.
What happened to the feet, jowels, kidneys, fatback, (you can keep the chitlins, I don't want to clean em), and the tail? ;)
Package that sausage in cotton bags and age it before packing in 1# packages for the freezer. FWIW, I'd pay twice the going rate to get a bag of good aged homemade sausage!!! There's no comparision to that plastic tubed stuff in the grocery stores.
Just 2-cents, this morning.
Lee
Not bad Lee, not bad at all. However, cutting up and wrapping up a pig is a lot like robbing Peter to pay Paul. For instance, if you want the boston butts thats ok, but from the boston butts, I was gonna put them into pork shoulder steaks. Then again, you could put the shoulders or some of them into sausage. It all depends on what you want to give up to get what you want.
And the use of the words tenderloins and loins are sometimes used interchangably, and wrongfully I might add. I was only talking about bnls. tenderloin. Sometimes people say boneless pork chops, technically there is no such thing, for it to be a pork chop it needs a bone, if its the same cut without the bone, its just called tenderloin or pork tenderloin, whatever you prefer. To me its somewhat of a you say potato I say patoto thing.
As far as the feet, they ain't worth cleaning, unless you want to clean them, jowls, unless you say otherwise, they're goin in sausage, kidneys, throwin them out, unless you say you want them, fatback, you're gettin that in your lard, unless you want it saved back and kept out and not put in your lard, the tail, if you want it you can have it, otherwise, we take what meat we get from it, put that meat in your sausage, and throw the tail away. This is the way its done by a butcher who is making money for custom butchering.
If you are doing it on the farm and want to make a project out of it, thats another story, and there's nothing wrong with that at all, as long as you got plenty of gophers to do the steppin and fetchin. Otherwise, I'm talking about an hour to butcher the hog, cool him out, and then another hour to cut him up and get him in the freezer. And then a little extra time to make the sausage etc. I'm talking about mostly by myself. If I have help, its less time. It all depends on if I'm havin fun or doin the job of prcessing a hog.
