Hog Hair Removal

[Slick8]

Here is our non dipping method. Its really simple.

Water to 157 degrees.

Then we lay the hog on a table and cover it with towels, then pour the hot water onto the towels.

Let it sit awhile then use the towel as if you were drying off the hog. Hair slips right off. You have to repeat on the places that were missed.

A dull butcher knife works well for scraping the parts the towel cant reach.

Bingo, did this on butchering hogs as a kid. Works really well.

[metalmangeorge]

Seams like a lot of trouble yall are going to just to avoid a little dirt and hair on the meat.
We skin our hogs and most of the time we dont even gut them.

Hang them up back legs up, remove all the skin and head. Take off the back straps. Remove the front legs and shoulders. Separate the body from the back shoulders and let it fall. Cut the back feet off and you're done. And if you're adventurous you can carefully reach inside the rib-cage and get the tenderloins.
I can quarter a 200+ pound hog in about 30 minutes with very little hair on the meat.

[metalmangeorge]

i see in one post you talk about eating with the skin. ?
With all of the ticks and scars i see on most of the hogs we shoot i would think that would be a bad idea. IMO

I would catch a few and keep them in a clean pen for a long time before i would eat the skin off a wild hog.

[huntresss]

To leave the skin on, what do you do? I have been meaning to try this, probably by burning it off with a torch...far away from camp.

Are you wanting to do this on a domestic pig or a feral hog? There's a big difference in the hair on a feral....it's longer and there's a lot more of it. I tried it once of a feral and will never ever attempt it again!

[Muddy Bud]

My grandpa used to butcher a hog every year once we got the first good front. They used to get a 55 gallon drum full of water and set it on a rack and put it to boil. Lay the rinsed hog on a table and place burlap sacks on it. They would then scoop hot water from the drum with a pot and pour it on the burlap over and over. They would then pull the burlap off and start swiping the hair off with a water scoop like you use to scoop the water off horses after you bathe them.

The hair would just pull right off with each swipe. Repeat the process over and over as the hair got harder to remove. Then they'd slice slabs off and in the fryer it went. Man those were some of the best crackling I've ever had. It was a big deal that the entire family would participate in and have a good ole time. Man I miss those days.

[SaltwaterSlick]

My grandpa used to butcher a hog every year once we got the first good front. They used to get a 55 gallon drum full of water and set it on a rack and put it to boil. Lay the rinsed hog on a table and place burlap sacks on it. They would then scoop hot water from the drum with a pot and pour it on the burlap over and over. They would then pull the burlap off and start swiping the hair off with a water scoop like you use to scoop the water off horses after you bathe them.

The hair would just pull right off with each swipe. Repeat the process over and over as the hair got harder to remove. Then they'd slice slabs off and in the fryer it went. Man those were some of the best crackling I've ever had. It was a big deal that the entire family would participate in and have a good ole time. Man I miss those days.

Yessir this thread has brought fond memories to the forefront of my mind as well! Folks just don't render lard much anymore... kind of a lost art I guess... sad in a way.

[tex4k]

Yessir this thread has brought fond memories to the forefront of my mind as well! Folks just don't render lard much anymore... kind of a lost art I guess... sad in a way.

Wish I had my grandparents old cast iron witches kettle, I'd give it a try just to find out how much I remembered from watching.

[SaltwaterSlick]

Wish I had my grandparents old cast iron witches kettle, I'd give it a try just to find out how much I remembered from watching.

Yea, don't have a clue what happened to my grandma's kettle... You can buy a brand spankin' new one here! I just discovered this old place a month or so back!

http://texastastes.com/p67.htm

[huntresss]

Did someone say lard? I saw one of our hunters skinning his hog last weekend and removing about a two inch layer of fat with the hide. When he said he was going to throw it away, I got busy and salvaged a bunch to render later. There just isn't anything better for making a nice, flaky pie crust!

The Generation X just doesn't know what Walmart and Pillsbury have deprived them of!

[SaltwaterSlick]

Dang Cheryl, just like a DQ Blizzard!! It don't even spill out that mason jar!! You gotta have it to make real tortillas too!

[geezer56]

I was raised in the mountains of North Carolina. I am 66 yrs old at current time. In the days when I was growing up, every country family raised at least one hog. Meat was expensive at the store. The hog ate table scraps and weeds the family kids pulled from the garden, plus anywhere else they could gather them. The excess produce from the garden, along with the remains of canning and freezing those vegetables also got turned in to pork. My dad ran a small country slaughter house. We processed about 1000 pigs a year on average. All were scalded and scraped. Dipped in a vat of water at 160 degrees until the hair began to slip, then flipped out on a table and scraped the hair off. The scraper of choice was a short handled hoe with the corners rounded off. Butcher knives to clean the spots the hoe wouldn't reach. Probably 75% of the pigs got, as dad said, blocked out. That meant that the ribs and backbone were removed for canning and to eat fresh. The tenderloin (backstraps) and inner loin were used fresh. The shoulders, hams and middlings (bacon) were trimmed and salt or sugar cured in a smokehouse. The skin was left on to contact the shelves in the smokehouse. Killed hogs at thanksgiving or there about, and by march the meat would resemble a block of wood it would be so dried out. To use it, you cut a chunk off and soaked it to get some of the salt out. That is the process used for the country ham that you can buy today, with some modifications for speed and preservation currently used. The trimmings from the blocked out sections were ground for sausage, the really fat chunks were rendered into lard. Cracklings were the solid bits strained out of the lard, used to add in to cornbread. Feet were pickled or cooked up and used to season beans and such. The head was usually cooked whole and the gelatin extracted was mixed with the meat from the head and spiced up for Souse Meat. Some folks cured the jowls from the head as well. The liver was cooked to death and mixed with cornmeal and lard and seasonings to make livermush. The entrails were cleaned and washed and deep fried-AKA chitterlings-or as we called them chittlins. The only thing that wasn't eaten was the hair. And yes, the meat was as bad as it sounds. I didn't like it then, still don't. Freezers were rare then, so it was the only way to preserve a whole hog that poor folks could afford.

[rebelbow]

For a hog you can handle easily (I'd say 80 pounds or so, or less) Randy's way is best for ANY size hog, but for a hog you want to scrape you can also take a 55 gallon barrel and dig a hole in the ground so that you can put the barrel in it at an angle... like 45 degrees or so. fill it with water, then build a fire under it to heat the water. Do not boil... take the UNGUTTED hog and hold it by the hind legs and slide it in the water and roll him over a time or two, pull him out, and swap ends. Put him in holding the front legs and roll him around a time or two... pull him out and lay on a sheet of plywood and using the back edge of a butcher's knife... My mom/dad used the Old Hickory butcher knives like mentioned in a post above... If you get the hog too hot, you'll "set" the hair and it won't slip out easy. We used to do all our hogs this way. once scraped clean, gut it, then take it apart without skinning it. You can then smoke the meat, by dry rubbing and smoking, or just about anything you want to do with it. You can also make the best dang bacon you ever put a lip-lock on too! We always used Morton's Sugar Cure... You can get that stuff anywhere sausage making stuff is sold along with the cheese cloth to hang the hams/shoulders in for smoking... Sure brings back memories for me!

Now if you're just trying to keep the dirt off the meat when you're skinning it, just hang that sucker up and take a water hose to him good, then use a carpet blade disposable knife (hook blade from Lowes, etc.) and cut the hog hide in strips from his neck to his butt about 2-3" wide all the way around, then peel him like a banana coming down evenly all the way around as you skin him. When you get done, he'll look like this. You can see where my cuts to the skin were as I cut the fat layer a bit too.

[ATTACH]840049[/ATTACH]

[ATTACH]840050[/ATTACH]

When getting the strips started, try to keep you knife just under the edge of the skin leaving all the fat you can on the pig...

Here's the "before"... was a big ol' sow.

[ATTACH]840051[/ATTACH]

x2

[alwaysinshorts]

Wow so much unfo

[SaltwaterSlick]

I was raised in the mountains of North Carolina. I am 66 yrs old at current time. In the days when I was growing up, every country family raised at least one hog. Meat was expensive at the store. The hog ate table scraps and weeds the family kids pulled from the garden, plus anywhere else they could gather them. The excess produce from the garden, along with the remains of canning and freezing those vegetables also got turned in to pork. My dad ran a small country slaughter house. We processed about 1000 pigs a year on average. All were scalded and scraped. Dipped in a vat of water at 160 degrees until the hair began to slip, then flipped out on a table and scraped the hair off. The scraper of choice was a short handled hoe with the corners rounded off. Butcher knives to clean the spots the hoe wouldn't reach. Probably 75% of the pigs got, as dad said, blocked out. That meant that the ribs and backbone were removed for canning and to eat fresh. The tenderloin (backstraps) and inner loin were used fresh. The shoulders, hams and middlings (bacon) were trimmed and salt or sugar cured in a smokehouse. The skin was left on to contact the shelves in the smokehouse. Killed hogs at thanksgiving or there about, and by march the meat would resemble a block of wood it would be so dried out. To use it, you cut a chunk off and soaked it to get some of the salt out. That is the process used for the country ham that you can buy today, with some modifications for speed and preservation currently used. The trimmings from the blocked out sections were ground for sausage, the really fat chunks were rendered into lard. Cracklings were the solid bits strained out of the lard, used to add in to cornbread. Feet were pickled or cooked up and used to season beans and such. The head was usually cooked whole and the gelatin extracted was mixed with the meat from the head and spiced up for Souse Meat. Some folks cured the jowls from the head as well. The liver was cooked to death and mixed with cornmeal and lard and seasonings to make livermush. The entrails were cleaned and washed and deep fried-AKA chitterlings-or as we called them chittlins. The only thing that wasn't eaten was the hair. And yes, the meat was as bad as it sounds. I didn't like it then, still don't. Freezers were rare then, so it was the only way to preserve a whole hog that poor folks could afford.

We didn't have a commercial operation, but that's pretty much how we processed our hogs too. Wild or domestic... Only domestics we had were wild woods hogs caught as pigs and fattened out in a pen... Bein' the baby of the family, it was my responsibility to rub the hams/shoulders down in the smokehouse before school and turn 'em over. They were on a rack that was sitting at an angle so they could drain... It was a lot better when my dad/grandpa got cheese cloth and made sacks to hang 'em... I didn't like it because I went to school smellin' like a smoke house myself... Smokehoues was actually a little log cabin hut that had a layer of black soot on the inside that seemed like it was an inch thick... don't get cold enough here now a days to kill a hog and process it properly (thanks to Al Gore!!). Dang hog would spoil before you got it processed these days.

[AntlerCollector]

Scald and scrape was the way my family always did them growing up. I just skin them now days.


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