As chef-cum-butcher Antonio Bettencourt pulls a dorm-room refrigerator sized box out from under our stainless steel cutting board, I get the first glimpse of our pig. A hoof sticks out of the box at an odd angle. Attached to that hoof is a notecard that read FB-87, kind of like a toe tag in a mortuary.
Seeing that tag reminds me how just how different this was going to be than picking up a pork chop from Stop and Shop. At the supermarket you don’t find pictures of animals or farms. Just row after row of plastic wrap and Styrofoam containers. In the middle of these containers sits a piece of pork, beef, or chicken, with some strange liquid accumulating around the edges. The cuts little resemble the animals they came from, and the resulting sterility seems pretty far removed from the fluorescent lights and refrigerator air bearing down on them.
FB-87 is the opposite of this. Before us sat a whole animal (gutted and drained of blood mind you, but whole nonetheless), ready to be disassembled into the various pig parts we are familiar with. A guttural, mildly salty smell wafts up from the table, something akin to, well, raw meat. If you haven’t smelled it before, there’s really nothing to compare it to.
“For some people, seeing it for the first time is kind of disgusting,” says Bettencourt, sharpening his knife on a long steel he yanked off the shelf above us. He’s dressed in your typical white chef’s outfit, ready for a long day in the kitchen of his restaurant, Sixty2 on Wharf in Salem, Massachusetts.
Time to get down to business. The first step in the process is to size up your animal. The pig that we were dealing with was about 95 pounds. That’s the biggest size hog available at this time of year, early fall, other than going “commodity.”
Our “guy,” as Chef Bettencourt called him (I prefer FB-87), is about 4-5 feet long when we first lift it out of his box. The first thing that caught my eye was the neat dime-sized hole right between its eyes- an instant reminder that this animal had given its life so that we could eat. Most livestock slaughtered on a small farm like the one this pig came from are taken in that manner: a tiny screw is shot into the animal’s brain, right through the skull. Relatively little pain.
From a culinary perspective, a pig has three parts: the hind quarters, the “middle,” and the shoulder. Bettencourt slides his knife across the hairless skin of FB-87, outlining where these sections start and end. The hind quarters begin at its tail and finish at its hip. The middle portion makes up the bulk of the hog, ranging from the front of the hip all the way up the animal to the next set of limbs. The shoulder is the front two quarters of the pig, and ends at the head.
Just about everything in pig butchering is done in twos. Whatever you do to one side must be done to the other, if for no reason other than symmetry. That’s to be our game plan for this porcine adventure. Bettencourt will handle one side, showing me what to do, and I’ll attempt to carve the other side in the same way.
The knife we use is nothing more than a boning knife, no longer than my forearm, but extremely sharp. In butchering it isn’t so much the size of the knife, but how you use it. Bettencourt makes the maiden incision right around the hip, to remove the hindquarters. The more precise you are at the beginning, the less maintenance work you have to do at the end. The first cut is a deep one, starting at the base of one hip, up over the spine, and down to the base of the other hip, to release the hindquarters from the rest of the body.
I hold down the head and body, while Bettencourt breaks FB-87’s spine at it it’s base, right across the incision he made earlier. Now we have two large pieces: the head, shoulders, and middle in one portion (the front two-thirds), and the hind quarters in the other. Next the shoulders and head have to be removed from the middle. Bettencourt makes a similar cut to the hindquarters, with the shoulder marking the border instead of the hip. His knife starts at around the pig’s armpit, runs up over the spine (this time the base of the neck), and back down the other side to the opposite armpit. We snap the spine again, breaking off the head and shoulders from the middle. Picture that kid in every class who cracks his neck all the time, multiplied a thousand times over.
We now have our three pieces, and some basic shapes are beginning to take form. The hindquarters are where we get our hams. The middle is the most fruitful portion, providing us with chops, loins, bacon and ribs. The shoulders are where we get roasts and a lot of the pulled pork seen in Southern barbecue. Sure, a machine could probably do the same thing, but we lose something when that happens. Machines can’t put a personal touch on anything, they can’t tell a customer what part of the animal they are eating, and they certainly don’t think about what they are doing.
Tim Wiechmann is the executive chef of T.W. Food, a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wiechmann’s philosophy on food is similar to Bettencourt’s: the more personal the better. Before my butchering adventure, I sat down with Wiechmann for a prep course on the idea of sustainable meat.
“Any time something comes in a bag, I’m not sure what the procedure was,” Wiechmann explains to me in the kitchen of his restaurant. For he and chefs of the same vein, that is the basic justification for the time consuming process of breaking down whole animals. Pre-packaged meat simply doesn’t cut it for those who want a personal connection to food. You can’t be exactly sure of when it was killed, who killed it, and what was added to it in the mean time.
Wiechmann takes this idea of food being personal to its logical extreme, a point to which not many of us are willing to travel. In his estimation consumers of meat must be willing to face the reality of the time old tradition of what they are engaging in: “I personally believe that if you’re going to eat it, you should be able to shoot it and kill it. You may not want to think about it, but at some point you have to come to that realization.”
Back at Sixty2 on Wharf, Chef Bettencourt disagrees. Several times over the course of our time together, he intimates that he doesn’t think that he could kill an animal himself. Breaking an animal down from its purest form, which is what we’re doing together, is good enough. This is not to say that chefs like Bettencourt are any less “moral” than those willing to go to extremes like Wiechmann. For our pig, FB-87, he made phone calls all day long to make sure what we were getting was raised in an ethical manner, under ideal conditions and was slaughtered in a humane way.
All these thoughts were swimming through my mind as I look down at FB-87, now in three parts across our cutting board. It’s time to move on to the middle section of the animal, the part that requires the most skill. The two-foot long middle is made up mostly of the rib cage, forming a two-foot tent on the table with the spine of the creature supported by the ribs and stomach meat. For stability, Bettencourt takes out another sharpening steel and hammers it down the top of the spinal column.
Once this swinish spinal tap is complete, he cuts down a ridge on the back, exposing bone underneath. We sit the middle portion straight up and down, the spine running perpendicular to the table. Realizing our knife won’t be sufficient, Bettencourt brings out a cleaver to remove the ribcage from the spine. With a few Paul Bunyan hacks we end up with two rectangles of meat, ribs still attached. Hearing the crunch of metal and bone takes some getting used to, but there’s really no other way to detach the ribs. The spine is discarded- that would either be boiled for pork stock, or added to a batch of tomato sauce for flavor.
From back to front, we had exposed the majority of what is sold in supermarkets. The meat on either side of the spine is the loin, one of the most tender parts of any livestock, hence the term “tenderloin.” All other muscles of the animal are constantly being worked by the pig, through walking or rooting around. The loin is a rope of muscle that receives little work because of its location on top of the spine, resulting in supreme tenderness. The thin tenderloin spreads out and thickens over the top rib cage, leading us to the pork chops. Chops are cut perpendicular to the spine, and are the hardest for me to visualize on FB-87. I remind myself that this was not a fully aged pig are dealing with, and its size isn’t really suited for pork chops.
Bettencourt plans to make the Tuscan dish porchetta with this middle portion, which calls for the removal of the entire rib cage from the meat, a relatively simple procedure. The cuts for the porchetta start at the top of the ribs, the only bones left in the middle section at this point. The basic idea is to peel the bones away from the rest of the meat, removing them in one piece. Short, precise strokes are key. The knife must stay as close to the bone as possible, wasting as little meat as you can in the process. Anything left on the bone can be boiled down later, but we want the majority of the meat to remain in one piece.
Bettencourt’s confident blade has the ribs removed in a matter of minutes. He grasps the bone flap firmly in one hand and cuts away the meat with other. I realize gravity will be my ally here, as the meat falls cleanly away from the bone. The result is a rectangular, doormat sized piece of meat, with all the ribs removed. My knife work is not nearly as precise, but is acceptable for the dish we were making. Porchettais made by taking that rectangular, and now boneless, piece of meat, rolling it up onto itself, and baking it for 4-5 hours. By the time anyone eats the final product, all the uneven cuts you might make are covered up. Thank God.
Several times I stray too far into the meat. Pangs of guilt wash over me. I don’t want to waste any meat, but I also have a visceral realization that I’m sawing through the flesh of what was once a living thing. Going away from the bone means wasting food, a definite butchery no-go. Cutting near the bone is akin to shaving, only with a six inch knife instead of a safety razor. My first cuts are timid, but as I work down the ribs they became easier and I get the cage off the flesh. I thought that I did a decent job in my rib removal, but a comparison to Bettencourt’s results told me otherwise.
Seeing the different cuts done professionally gives me even more of an appreciation for what we were doing. Killing an animal takes a certain amount of connection with nature, a connection I’m not sure I have. But researching the conditions under which an animal was raised and butchering it yourself can provide the same sort of connection, just a step removed.
Take foie gras, for instance. Tim Wiechmann serves the dish his restaurant, yet describes himself as an “animal rights dude.” To make foie gras, ducks are fed more than they would naturally eat by forcing a metal tube down their throat for a split second, dropping feed straight into their stomachs. All of that extra fat gets stored in the liver, which is harvested upon slaughter. His justification? “I visited that the farm because I wanted to make sure those animals were not stuck in a cage. I went with my own eyes, I saw the birds. I thought it was reasonable, so I serve it,” he says. Whether or not that validates force feeding an animal is up for discussion.
Foie gras is an extreme example of the consumption of animal products, but it does open the floor for debate. What were once hidden processes are now at least starting to be shown the light of day. We are beginning to hear terms like “conscious carnivore” and a “responsible gourmet” crop up in foodie circles. Boston based food writer Jacqueline Church has written heavily about these topics. “Ten years ago the debate was between vegetarians and meat eaters. Nowadays we’ve steered that debate to open up a whole new set of questions,” she says.
According to her we’ve accepted the fact that we are a nation of meat eaters, and now it’s time to start thinking critically about all that we consume. A disconnection with meat can have dire consequences. If we don’t care about where meat comes from, we have no problem with waste, because we don’t see it. We don’t have reverence or respect for the process as a whole, and the resources it takes to produce say, the bacon on our morning Crossainwich.
Church surmises people are starting to crave transparency and accountability in the food industry, comparing the system to the housing crisis. When we turned a blind eye to mortgage rates and faulty loans, the whole system collapsed. With food we run risks like contamination and quality issues, but the principle remains the same. When care is not taken, the system can go awry. At Sixty2 on Wharf, Bettencourt makes sure that every chef he hires has at least some experience breaking down animals. With my experience so far, I don’t think I’d make the cut.
Up next for us are the shoulder and head. Bettencourt cuts along throat of the pig, exposing the beginning of the spine at the top. After a good cracking twist, he brings out the cleaver again, and it’s off with FB-87’s head. The shoulder requires finesse cuts to remove the paddle-like blade. Bettencourt moves deftly through the flesh, getting the bone out without much of a struggle. I get lost several times. When you lose contact with the bone, you have to feel around the hacked up sinew and tendons with your hand to guide your next cut, leaving my hands with a shining with grease when we were finished.
Chef Bettencourt designates the hams we took off the back and the shoulders from the front for grinding into meatballs and sausage. To prep them we have to remove the hoof and thigh bones. For the hindquarters we snap the leg at the knee, then make a deep cut into the meat to expose bone. With the femur visible the knife must then be worked around and around the bone till all of the meat falls off. We do the same for the shoulder. A pop at the knee, then whittle away the meat till we are left with four large boneless pieces of pork
This leaves us with one more part of the hog to break down- the head. Bettencourt turns to me and say this is when it becomes “real” for most people. As we examine the head, he points out the spinal cord dangling from the base of the skull. From the head he will make a dish called coppa di testa, colloquially known as “head cheese.”
Not really a cheese, coppa di testa is made by simmering the entire head for a couple hours in chicken stock. All of the meat from the skull, skin included, falls off the bone. You then chop all those softened pieces of meat and place them back into the liquid to chill. It solidifies into a sort of savory Jell-O, with a consistency close to cheese.
To make sure the liquid is clear, however, you have to get the brain out of the skull. I’m more than OK with Bettencourt handling this part. He makes a long incision lengthwise down the skull, marking the place where he would split the bone. The cleaver comes out again, and after a few hearty whacks he manages to expose the brain cavity. With a soup spoon he scoops out the pudding pack sized pocket of brain oozing out in front of us, and our job is complete.
My time with FB-87 had drawn to a close. I look across the table at all that we had done. The hindquarters and shoulder sit completely deboned, ready to be ground. The middle portions taken separated from the rib are ready to be rolled and seasoned for the porchetta. The head still stares up at me, the screw hole now split evenly in two.
I flick some stray brain matter off my pant leg, and Chef Bettencourt comes over to give a final summation on the days’ events: “People want to joke around with this sort of stuff, and say the process is grotesque. It’s not. It’s food.”
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