Ooooh, it works so well! It was a whole leg from trotter to top, so it couldn't fit in a fridge. So after curing in a plastic box at our front door (odd looks from postwoman) it went up in the loft hanging from a clothing rail. We didn't have cheesecloth to put around it so popped into Tesco to buy their cheapest pillow case.
This is what we just got back from our 2 pigs (admittedly over-fed - approx 2500 free portions of fruit and veg between the 5 of them over 4 months inc about 1000 mashed bananas, and we were getting a quite nonchalant about measuring out the lbs, too!
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Roast - shoulder: 21kg (10 roasts of 1.7-2.4kg)
Roast - leg: 30.8kg (10 roasts of 1.3-3.1kg plus one leg divided into a 3.7kg and a 4.4kg piece)
Roast - loin: 4.1kg (in one piece, the rest went for chops)
Chops: 76 - with bone, they're about 300g each
Steaks: 3.9kg (11 steaks)
Mince (the sausage meat type): approx 31kg - that's several hundred sausages!
Cheek / chin: 5.6kg in 4 pieces - divine in a broth
Ribs: 8 packs - some really meaty ones, barbeque tomorrow!
Belly: 10.5kg 4 pieces - 4 big slabs of irresistable bacon!
Fillet: 4
Kidneys: 4
Scored skin: a couple of square meters - we now know who to make the ultimate non-fatt(ish) supercrunchy pork crisps!
Bones, 4 half heads, 1 tail, more skin: 33.6kg - makes many gallons of stock to make soup with our homegrown tomatoes (as for the heads: the eyes are still in there - yuuuuck!
And teeth etc) Anybody into gross gifts can turn the hip bones into serving dishes
No hocks or shanks, this time. The butcher froze it all and the meat is in our two 6ft tall standing freezers in the spare bedroom with the bones and heads in the fridge/freezer downstairs. This is one porky household!
Am thinking of keeping sows, now. Hilarysmum is sooo right: pigs are addictive!!!
Eve