Who Form 8655 Quarterly 2024

My name is Brian Mayer. I'm a butcher, educator, and writer. Today, we're here at Why Brook Farms where we're going to break down a half a pig into two cuts that you would see at your local butcher shop. The first thing we're gonna do is remove the leaf lard. Leaf lard is the most neutral of all fats, which means it doesn't have a lot of taste to it. Traditionally, it would be used in things like pie crusts before the advent of shorts. Right here, I'm just removing a bit of the flank section. This is just a preliminary step. We'll come back later to remove the sirloin section. Removing the flank section makes it a little bit easier to pull the tenderloin off. Along with the leaf lard, one of the first things we'll do is also remove the kidney. Kidneys are wonderful and I usually grind them and put them into sausage. So here, I'm just following along the lumbar vertebrae right to where it turns into the sacral vertebrae and right into the H bone. I follow along a very natural seam and it's easy to pull off the tenderloin once those connections are severed. Now, we're gonna remove the shoulder section. For our purposes today, I was counting between the fifth and sixth ribs. That's traditionally where a butcher hog would be broken. If we were cutting it for charcuterie, we would want to elongate certain muscles, so we would cut between the sixth and seventh ribs. Cutting between ribs helps prolong the life of the carcass as it avoids generating heat and injecting bone dust into the muscle. Now, I'm gonna remove a little bit more of the flank section. The hog we have here has been hung for about seven days, so the skin is tough...