Tacos of Texas

Chef Jesse Griffiths: [00:00:00] Um, obviously you’re all here because you do appreciate feral hogs in some way. A lot of people do not. I do. I think that the meat can be exquisite and if you think about the genealogy of these hogs, they did come from Spain. They came from a very, very high quality source like Iberico Ham down the street at Central Market is $150 a pound, and that is essentially.

This animal right here, like genetically very similar.

Mando Rayo: What’s up Taco World? I’m Taco Journalist Mando Rayo and welcome to the Tacos of Texas podcast, El Cinco. Produced by Identity Productions in partnership with KUT and KUTH Studio. And we’re back exploring taco culture in Texas through the eyes of the people in the Lone Star state. So grab some pat tortillas and get ready for some Mui Tasty Taco conversations.[00:01:00]

In today’s episode of Tacos of Texas, I’m taking a whole hog butchering class with chef. Jesse Griffiths, co-owner of D Doit, head of the New School of Traditional Cookery, and one of the best wild game chefs out there. This is part two of the whole hog butchering episode. So if you haven’t heard part one, go back and listen to my interview with Jesse Griffiths or not.

Just keep listening. So from Caza to Colita, we’re getting real hands on. Let’s dig in.

It is taco time. And now here’s a word from our sponsor, bamo Town. Visit El Paso. It’s a hometown of this taco [00:02:00] journalist. Looking for your next outdoor adventure. Discover the Franklin Mountains right in El Paso’s backyard. Franklin Mountain State Park offers a unique blend of rugged desert landscapes, rich history, and diverse recreational opportunities.

As the largest urban state park in the continental us, it spends nearly 27,000 acres and provides over a hundred miles of trails for hiking, mountain biking, and rock climbing. Whether you’re a weekend warrior or just need a breath of fresh air, the Franklin Mountains are calling. Gracias to our friends at Visit El Paso for sponsoring this podcast episode.

Follow visit El Paso on Instagram and Facebook at visit el Paso or on their website@visitelpaso.com.

Jesse Griffiths is a Texas born chef, hunter, fisherman, and author. [00:03:00] He’s the co-owner of DUA in Austin and the Mind Behind the Hog book, which won a James Beard Award and his latest the Turkey book. As the lead instructor of the new School of traditional cookery, Jesse teaches folks how to hunt, butcher, and cook with respect for the land, bringing local, ethical food traditions to the table.

Today I’m stepping into his world with my knives out and my apron on to see what whole HOK butchering is all about. Let’s get this whole HOK butchering class started.

Chef Jesse Griffiths: I am Jesse, I’ll be teaching the class tonight. We used to do three pigs in three hours. Now for some reason I can do two pigs and three and a half hours, and I don’t understand that math at all. So we have two [00:04:00] chilled carcasses back in the walk-in. I have not seen them. I don’t know. How big they are. I don’t know how fat they are and so forth.

The reason I do this is so that we can kind of approximate a field situation where you have been hunting pigs and you’ve got a dead pig in front of you. It was dark. It didn’t know how big it was. It was just kind of a black shape, and you walk up to it and this is what you’ve got in front of you. And so if I don’t know.

How big they are or what they look like, I will have kind of that same approach. I’ll be like, okay, this is what we got. This is what we can do. They’re trapped live by a trapper, probably in the hill country, maybe east of here, like the Bastrop area, maybe on an LCRA property. Uh, they are trapped, brought in to a license processor, inspected, killed, inspected again, and they got a blue stamp on ’em.

That enables us to have ’em in [00:05:00] the building that enables us to sell them as food. Uh, but all those things have to happen to them. I am going to go over like the conceptual journey that gets ’em from fresh, dead to skin, gutted and cold. In fact, that’s really the next step of the class. But we can’t really do all that here, but we will talk about it.

So, um. Hill country is typically, and generally, I’m gonna use the word generally way too much tonight because, uh, it’s a, it’s a good descriptor for almost all things feral hog. ’cause they don’t really ascribe to any qualities. They’re all very individual and even slight differences can affect the way that hog grows and how the meat is and how much fat it has on it and so forth.

But generally. The hill country is quite good for hogs. There’s a lot of oaks there. And oaks translate to acorns. Acorns translate to high quality hogs. So I am mostly inclined to take a dead pig [00:06:00] out of the field, hang it, skin it, and then gut it. I will not argue with you if you choose to do it a different way.

If you like to field dress it and then. Uh, skin it afterwards or if you like to hang it head up and I hang it hind, legs up, whatever. None of that really matters that much. I got my way of doing it. Everybody else has their own way of doing it. Um, we like to get the skin off first and then gut it. I feel like the in in internal organs kind of give some pressure on it and enables to skin it better.

The reason I want to skin a hog meticulously is because of retention of all the fat that lays between the skin. And the carcass of it. And there’s gonna be two layers of fat on there. And they can be super thin, they could be paper thin or almost non-existent. Or they can be, there can be a lot of ’em, like my luling pigs or like a, a brownwood gold weight pig or like a, uh, lock car or college station.

And [00:07:00] when you’re butchering a feral hog, you really want as much fat left on the carcass as possible. You don’t have to eat it all. You don’t have to leave it on the individual cut. But having it there gives you that option of keeping it at its highest possible quality. Even if it has like exorbitant amounts of fat, still leave it on there, trim it off later, render it in a lard, whatever.

There’ll be a lot of uses for that. Um, the fat on a hog is highly, highly useful. A deer, not as much. It’s waxy. Um, it, it has a really terrible mouth feel. We tend to cut most of that out, but a hog, you know, fat on a pig is, is famously good. So we’re gonna want to get the hide off, the guts out. Um, edible ful that we will retain in the field would be liver heart.

Maybe the kidneys not my favorite, but. The times are tough. They’re there. Um, and also with onions. With onions. With onions, yeah. Ign. Yeah. There you go. All right. And the call fat. So that lacy membrane that holds everything in, it’s attached to the diaphragm. You can re remove that too. It’s kind of hard to describe.

We’ve got the edible oval out. We’ve got the heart, the liver, the kidneys, the cough, fat out, um, all of which are useful. Um. Okay, now we need to get that animal cold, and that’s gonna be probably the most important thing. I want to keep a hog carcass or any game animal for that matter, as cold and dry as possible.

I want to get the temperature on that thing dropped, and I want to keep it away. From any moisture. I, I did a, uh, an event at Yeti about it was, we’re talking about the Turkey book and somebody asked me what was one tip about processing game animals? And I sat there and I thought about all these technical answers that I could have come up with.

And then I realized, no, the best thing that you can do while you’re processing game is enjoy it, [00:09:00] is like, don’t think of it as this awful task that you have to do. Sit there and think about all these meals that you’re gonna make with it. Think about what you like to cook. You know, like in, in our house ground goes a long way.

I don’t do a very particularly exciting cut on a deer. I pull the back straps off and we make a lot of sausage. You know, it’s just like, that’s boring. You know? People are like, oh, you think I’m making crown roast and doing all this crazy stuff? I’m not, because that’s what we eat, you know? And I want, you know, I want the kid to be eating it and stuff.

So determine what it is. Maybe sit down and write out a list. You know, get organized, figure out what you want to make with it, and then enjoy the whole process. You know, it’s like whatever that beverage is, coffee, beer, wine, whatever. Just get into it and have fun. And so. That is my recommendation. So we’re gonna have fun and now it’s time to got a pig.

There’s three tools that I’m gonna use to break down all the pigs. One is a flexible boning knife, six to seven inches long. Um, I prefer a wide handle or handle that can, has a lot of grip on it in case you got a particularly fatty pig, which tends to make knives slip. The better. Ooh, the better the handle.

Um, and then also beyond that, a cleaver, you notice it’s a very thin bladed cleaver. I want it to be, uh, about as thin as they come. Um, I’m going to use this cleaver, um, not, not to hit it like that, but I will put the cleaver where I need it to be and then come in with a mallet and hit the cleaver. And so a nice thin cleaver, you’ll see the way this interacts with bones.

Later. And so a thin cleaver is highly effective for that. And then the third tool there will be a rubber mallet to drive that cleaver. I don’t use a bone saw. I don’t feel like you need to. I think you can do everything with these three tools. I have one backup knife, um, just so I don’t have to continually sharpen.

Uh, we’ve got [00:11:00] a little butcher’s twine for tying stuff and we’ve got a couple other esoteric tools that will come into play later on. Alright. I would estimate the weight on that pig at around 78 pounds. So we have small pigs, kind of your piglets, to up around 40 pounds of your medium sized hawks, which no matter what sex they are, pretty much gonna be about the same, um, you know, up to about 80 pounds.

And typically while it’s hanging, that’s a good opportunity to get in there and just smell, and it will tell you a lot from there. This is almost neutral. Incent. I think that this is going to be, if not fine and very good as far as an animal. It’s got beautiful fat on it. I spoke earlier of those two layers of fat, and you can kind of see them here.

Um, like this would be the outer layer and then this in here would be that bottom layer. Um, you tend to shoot a lot of bores. They, they move [00:12:00] around a lot and so just by the sheer numbers and the likelihood of interacting with a bore seems to be a little bit higher because they’re on the move more. And so if you see a single pig and it’s twilight, it’s almost guaranteed it’s a boar.

You know, there’s almost never gonna be a sow out by herself. And so boars get shot a lot. Let’s get to cut and, all right, the first cut we’re gonna make, uh, is going to be to remove the tenderloins. So the tenderloins are these two muscles that run along the inside here, along the back. So I made one cut there and I can just reach in here and then pull that tenderloin out.

So these are gonna come out pretty easily and anything that wants to stay in there, it’s okay. Um, it’s just typically just a little bit of fat and trim, things like that. So you can see they’ve got a good deal of fat on ’em. So this is a really good time to start [00:13:00] discussing the roll of silver skin. So we’ve got some waxy looking fat on here.

That’s one thing. But this right here, it’s, uh, collagen. Um, if it is cooked to about 190 degrees. It’ll, eventually, it’ll melt into gelatin, and that’s where gelatin is gonna come from, is from this collagen right here. You’re not gonna cook these tenderloins that long, therefore you need to remove the silver from the tenderloins.

So I’m gonna do that, put it in the same pile that you’re gonna put all your stock into. So bones, any silvery trim is all gonna go over there. And then you’re just gonna convert and utilize all that. So now we’ve got our cleaned tenderloin. I’m gonna start. Some sections on the table and we’re gonna just start filling them up.

This is gonna be the quick cook section. It’s gonna be a small section. There’s gonna be a long cook section. There’s gonna be stock, there’s gonna be fat, and there’s gonna be sausage trim, and then there’s gonna be stew meat [00:14:00] and trim for making stews. That was just about to talk about hot topic. Glands.

My take on glands is they get blamed for everything. Um, we’ve eaten a bunch of them. You never knew it. There’s gonna be four main ones. If you look at the very front of the animal, there’s none here. There’s a tiny bit right here. You have another gland. This is the moja. This is the sweet breads, and these are highly edible to see, and everybody loves them, you know, so some glands great, you know, I mean, you actually go outta your way and you can grill these.

Um, they’re, they’re generally not super present on hogs, um, and skipped over a lot. Um, I’m going to then put these nice fatty pieces here. There’s gonna be a lot of useful stuff on here. This hog has enough fat where [00:15:00] we’re basically gonna be able to do all the fun cuts on it. Like this is, this is a great pig.

Like if I had shot this pig, I’d be very, very happy. Um, it’s a nice looking pig and, and like I said, you can get any cut out of this that you want. So I’m about to cut, is my very, very favorite cut of the entire pig. I love this piece. Um, you can do anything. With this, this section right here, we’re gonna, we’re gonna take kind of this tubular mussel off of the top, but what we’re gonna cut here is what we call, we call it the copa, uh, because it can be, the whole mussel can be cured with salt and fennel seeds and garlic and rosemary and red pepper cured and dried into like a classic.

Slicing meat, not a salami, but like in the same vein as that. Um, it is called a Copa or capa cola. It could be cut and cooked whole or what my [00:16:00] favorite thing to do is sliced into steaks. Okay, next up. The real fun part right here. This is this where it gets exciting. So what we have, this is the head end.

This is the ham end right here. So we’ve got our ribs, we’ve got our loins, we’ve got our belly meat. And then the loin goes all the way down from here, all the way to here. So pretty straightforward. Uh, what I want to do at this point is separate the ribs from the spine. So I’ve got the spine vertically running down the middle and the ribs coming in at a horizontal here.

So I’m, I need to come in with my cleaver and just cut right through these ribs on both sides. And then that’ll free up both of the racks. Um, a saw will work. The problem with a saw is there’s a slight curvature to this, so when you’re doing a saw, your initial points of contact are here and here, and as they work down, as that saw, works down and gets to this midsection, you’re already starting to cut into your [00:17:00] loin here and here too.

So it’s a really effective way of doing it. Be careful, work slow and just work one at a time. And just tap that thing all the way down where those ribs meet that spine.

Alright, belly. So this was the back part of this rib, but here’s that entire belly that I removed earlier. So, uh, you will see a lot of people, you know, they kill a few pigs. They’re like, oh, look at all the bacon. I just made hardly ever gonna make bacon out of it. Hardly any pig is gonna have the fat and bulk to create, like grocery store bacon.

I’ve seen a few, um, killed a couple, and that’s always a pretty, pretty good day when you’ve got a bacon pig in front of you. Uh, this pig could absolutely make bacon, but by the time it’s cured, smoked. [00:18:00] Uh, and cooked. Again, it’s gonna be a very thin piece, but it’s not to say that you can’t have a smoky, salty, sweet and black peppery forward piece of pork where you could cut it into bacon bits or use it, um, for any kind of bacon type purpose.

So. We could do that, we could cure this with salt, like I said, salt and pepper, a little bit of brown sugar, maybe some molasses, maybe maple syrup, and then smoke it and then come in and slice it thin for bacon. Um, you can also take this and do what I think is probably the, the easiest, uh, home curing project that doesn’t require a curing fridge.

And that would be Panchetta. Panchetta is an unsmoked Italian bacon. Uh, so it’s just cured. And by that I mean it’s gonna be salted pretty heavily, uh, and heavily seasoned. So if you have a big [00:19:00] boar that has just a moderate amount of fat, it’s a really good candidate for panchetta because those, even if it does have a lot of strong flavors, you’re loading that thing up with nutmeg and cinnamon and bay leaves and fennel.

And black pepper and garlic and salt and stuff like that. And so you’re, you’re adding a lot of spice to it. Um, and so it, it comes out very, very nice. It’s almost better, I think, than domestic pork panchetta because it has enough flavor to, uh, counterbalance all of those spices that typically go in there.

So that would be made by curing this with the, like all those spices, uh, that I just named. There’s actually recipes for panchetta in two of those books out there. Um, but the hog book has the most updated recipe, and you would roll this up. If you’re familiar with how Panchetta looks, you will start to recognize that as.

Panchetta. Okay, next up [00:20:00] Hams. This is a really fun cut. This is one of the cuts that I typically will leave, if not whole, then very large. This, uh, along with Turkey will be Thanksgiving. I like to do a boneless ham, uh, for Thanksgiving just ’cause we typically have leftovers and it’s easier to come in and slice leftover cold ham.

For the remaining days, uh, if it’s already boneless. But I will show you all the methods for cutting the ham, be it bone end boneless or whole. But first, let’s discuss hams, uh, kind of historically and how, how this really signifies the quality of what a feral hog is. So they were feral hogs were not, they’re not indigenous to here.

They were brought over. In the 15 hundreds from Spain and there they lived in an environment of, uh, a lot of [00:21:00] open pastures with what they called mata are what we call Motts, which is a stand of oaks. And the pigs would farrow and live in there and they would forage and graze out in these more open pastures in Spain.

Obviously when those pigs arrived in Texas, they just thought they were home because this is exactly like that. In Spain, they called it the Desa. Uh, and here, uh, it is a almost i identical environment, uh, temperature range, everything that these pigs experienced in Spain. And so they’re very comfortable and they’ve done very well here.

Um, obviously you’re all here because you do appreciate feral hogs in some way. A lot of people do not. I do. I think that the meat can be exquisite and if you think about the genealogy of these hogs, they did come from Spain. They came from a very, very high quality source like iberico pork, uh, a like iberico ham down the street is, central market is $150 a [00:22:00] pound, and that is essentially.

This animal right here, like genetically very similar, very dark red meat. The two highest grades of iberico ham are beta and bat Negra. Beta means acorn In Spanish, pat Negra means black-footed. Most of these hogs are black. And their favorite thing to eat is acorns. So what you’re getting or what you can get from these hogs is a very, very, very high quality pork.

Um, especially if it’s been eating acorns or pecans. And so the Spanish, anybody from Italy? Any Italian? Okay. Okay. Spanish make the best hams in the world. Um, I mean, Italy’s a close second.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Chef Jesse Griffiths: But they make some exquisite hams there. We’re gonna talk about ham as a ham, [00:23:00] like literal ham in three different forms right now.

So you’re gonna have your cured ham, your Italian, or your Spanish style cured ham. It is nothing but beautiful pig plus salt, plus a very long time. Uh, and then you have an American style country hymn, which is going to be cured with salt and pepper and maybe some sort of red pepper. Uh, sometimes you’ll see phage, sometimes you’ll see a little sugar in there, and then it is, uh, cold smoked.

So it’s, it’s a very salty version. It’s very similar to a prosciutto or a Serrano hymn, but it has the addition of a lot of smoke in there. So they’ll smoke ’em over peanut shells, hickory corn, cobs, all kinds of stuff. We’ve also made country style hams, uh, so to make a. Prosciutto or Serrano style ham is gonna require a lot of salt by a lot.

I mean a couple, maybe four inches under this, all the way [00:24:00] around it. And then all the way over pounds and pounds and pounds of salt. About a day of cure per pound. And then it’s gonna hang in a very specific temperature. And humidity for a long time. Something we’re probably not all gonna do. I have a little curing fridge at my home and sometimes I’ll make something like that.

But it requires some commitment, but I’m just saying it can be done. Obviously these are leaner, smaller animals. You saw the size of the tenderloin. Yeah. Versus a grocery store pork tenderloin. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. You know, it’s coming off of a 350 pound fat farm raised hog. So similarly, these other cuts won’t be as giving, but if you wanted feet for certain preparations.

Like, um, you know, like pickled foot, stuff like that, you know, it’s, uh, it’s doable also with the heads. Like I said, the heads, we can’t get ’em ’cause they’re condemned ’cause he shoots ’em with a 22 and so they’re, they’re damaged so the, they don’t let ’em out. But they are not that difficult to skin out and they’re very good.

We will make [00:25:00] baracoa with them, we’ll brine ’em, marinate ’em for a day and then throw ’em on the smoker for another 12 hours. Wrapped, typically banana leaves and perfect. You get all the same things. You got paletta and, uh, lingua and uh, and then meat right behind, uh, the head. This, like this section right in here is very, very good.

I’m gonna take off the hindquarters real quick and we’re gonna talk about cutlets. So, first order of business would be to remove the tenderloins. They’re very small.

All right, so I’ve got them cut against the grain, so as I spread them out, they’re gonna become even more tender. Right now they’re gonna be very tough. These are fairly tough muscles off that hind leg, but if I tenderize them down to a nice thin cutlet. They’re gonna be very, very tender and really good, and at that point we can bread them and cook them in a bunch of different ways.

We eat these things constantly because there are so many ways that you can cook them. We eat these, uh, made of AAD [00:26:00] venison, Turkey. Hog, it doesn’t matter. You can bread and pound anything, and it’s gonna be pretty good. That’s why every single cul culture in the world does some version of this. If you’re in Japan, this is to katsu.

Uh, if you are, uh, serving this with cream, gravy and mashed potatoes, green beans, chicken fried mesa, uh, here, or I’m sorry, in Mexico or in Italy, um, it’s just. A very good preparation. So these would then go into, be seasoned into flour, egg wash, and then breadcrumbs or any kind of crunchy, dry thing I’ve used seriously.

Rice cereal, potato chips. So what we have now is our animal completely broken down. We’ve got all our ribs. We’re ready to go into our vac seal on that. We’ve got our sausage trim set aside. Had we a particularly fatty animal that might have some [00:27:00] pure fat along the back, we might portion that apart into one pound packages, and then we’re gonna take all of that, then we’re gonna throw it into the freezer, and then when it’s time to make sausage, we’re gonna be able to pull that.

Out of the freezer and make sausage. And that said, we’re gonna do sausage now. So what we have is, this is a four pound pack of trim right here. Uh, it is at a perfect temperature. It is still a little crunchy, but pliable. It’s like it was out of the freezer. It’s partially thawed. That’s exactly the, the state that you want that in.

Let’s say you go and kill a couple pigs or, and you have 12 four pound bags of trim. And so now is the time to get very organized about that. Like, what sausages do you wanna make? Um, do you wanna make them all at the same time? So this method really enables you to just kind of [00:28:00] pull out exactly what you need.

Add as much fat as you need and also create all your spice mixes specifically for that poundage. Um, so now we’re gonna get on to equipment and there’s gonna be three major phases of the sausage mixing process, starting with the grinder. And then we’re gonna go into the mixer, and then we’re gonna go over here into.

The stuffer. So we’ll go in order. The grinder. This is a Cabelas one horse grinder. This is my favorite. We have been using these for many years. They’re workhorses and they don’t break down. If you plan on making a lot of sausage, you’re gonna have it for a long time. The less time you spend cleaning the blades and so forth, the better you know, and, and a really good, powerful grinder will work really well.

This is gonna come with. A stuffing attachment, so it will cut the meat into the little pieces and also you could put it in there and you could stuff the sausage [00:29:00] into the casings if you wanted to. I prefer not to use the stuffer that comes. On or comes with the grinder. I don’t think they’re that good.

They also, they work really slow. I feel like they’re kind of overworking the meat. I have a lot of reasons why I don’t like to use the stuffer. And when you see how fast and efficient a, a hand crank stuffer is in comparison, you’ll, you’ll know that this is, this is definitely the way to go. You want the fat to be retained into the sausage, and so having everything as cold as possible, the meat, the grinder, everything.

Uh, will really help with that. So chill all of these things really well before we use it. So we’re gonna move on to the mixer. We are using this, we’re gonna use this mixer because it’s in front of you. Now, if you look over here though, there’s a very more, more plausible mixer over there. It’s a KitchenAid that’s a bigger KitchenAid.

That one works really well. Even the smallest model of KitchenAid, which I think [00:30:00] has a six quart bowl. We’ll hold five pounds of sausage barely. Next up the stuffer, so this is the whole stuffer assembled. We have had this thing obviously for a very long time. Um, it’s just pure mechanics. There’s nothing that can really break on this thing.

Uh, keep it oiled, uh, and keep it clean. And that’s it. So the sausage, the final sausage mixture will go into this hopper and then it will force it down and it’ll extrude out from there. And we will be able to link our sausage from there. So. I got my four pounds of lean meat right here that went into the freezer early on, so it’s nice and cold, and I’ve got my fat back right here, and I’m gonna take this spice S blend in the garlic.

I’m just gonna add it to the top. I’m not even gonna mix it in that. Well, it doesn’t matter. We’re going to grind [00:31:00] this a couple times and we’re gonna put it in that mixer, and so it is going to become very homogenous. Eventually, so I don’t even worry about distributing it at this point. So

what I like to do, especially with game, is I’m gonna grind it twice, both times through the medium. We don’t trim the meat. Uh, well. ’cause we have a very powerful grinder. Okay, so now we’re gonna go in grind again. And I can tell from the texture that it’s, we’ve got a good grind going on here. It’s not getting pasty, the fat’s not getting compressed or heating up or anything like that.

And now we’re gonna start the mixing process.

Alright. All right. So we’re just gonna mix it for a second. And then start to add in some cold water. So we have just ice water. Water is going to distribute seasonings and add in a little bit of moisture. And also that the addition of that cold water is gonna help maintain that lean fat bind that we’re really trying to achieve.

So I’m gonna put this into the hopper. I’m going to force it down, trying to get rid of as many air pockets as I possibly can. Kind of throw it in there. So I’ve got that pretty compressed. I want to get all those air pockets outta there so that it, uh, as I’m stuffing it, air pockets aren’t coming out into the casing and attach the hopper.

And here I have some casings. These are natural hog casings. Uh, you can buy these online. We get these, uh, from a source called Butcher and Packer, and they make very high quality, uh, SIGs. Okay, so now I’m ready. To start stuffing, I’m gonna just kind of steadily crank right hand, left hand. I’m gonna put under here and kind of just help this casing off.

Um, depending on the link that you’re making will kind of determine how, how fat you want to stuff that link. You want to nail the, the stuffing. Pretty much because it’ll really affect the, the texture of the finished sausage. You want it to be pretty much as, as full as it can in the stopping. So I’m going to just start to stuff, and I can meter that pretty easily.

You see how fast this can go once you’re kind of good at it, maybe even have a friend helping. So now I’m gonna come in and I need to form my links. Sometimes people will want to form them as it’s extruding. It’s much easier to just get this whole coil going and then come back after the fact and stuff those links.

So what I want to do is I want to create about a six inch link. Um, so once the sausage is, you know, 12 to 24 hours, so [00:34:00] let these twist firm up. Just clip ’em, bag ’em, and. Unless the back seal is like really powerful, it should be just fine to, to go in there and package ’em raw links. Totally fine. Yeah. Is that it?

We do it. Alright. You guys have been great. Maybe my favorites ever. I really, I will, like I said, I’ll be around cleaning up or cleaning up. Um, uh, and so if you have any extra questions or questions you were embarrassed to ask, then stick around and ask me and we can, we can do it. Lisa, I’ll absolutely sign a book.

Mando Rayo: Thank you, Jesse Griffith. For showing us not only the basics, but the intricacies of butchering a whole hog. And not only that, but I like how you do trust that animal, how you trust the land, and really focus on cultivating those animals to get something that you can do for your community, your family, something to feed, and something that’s locally sourced.

And you know, I did learn a lot. Everything from the whole hog, the ribs, the sausage, the baby bags. The pork steaks, tenderloin, shanks, and precisely how to cut it and ideas on how to cook it as well. And I just wanna say thank you, Jesse, for allowing us to be here. And now I’m ready to, well cut my own tenderloin.

And with that, I want to shout out some of the places that are cooking up some whole hogs, right? Some great caritas and over the pit barbecue as well. Coy barbecue, out of Houston, Texas. Barbecue beans in Juto, Texas. And Carita RO in Austin, Texas. This has been the Tacos of Texas podcast developed and produced by Identity Productions.

If you enjoyed today’s episode in our Craving More taco content, [00:36:00] go to our website at www dot identity productions or follow us on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube at Identity Productions and United Tacos of America. This is your host, Mando El Taco, journalist Rao. Bamo tacos

on the next Proximo tacos of Texas. Get in on the barbacoa craze that hit grandpa’s Mexican barbecue. Find out how that slow cooked lamb barbacoa hits differently. And then. Door above ground Busle.

Louisa Van Assche: The Tacos of Texas Podcast is presented by identity Productions in partnership with KOT and KOTX studios.

Our host and producer is Mando. Our audio is mixed by Nicholas Weden. Our story producer is me, Louisa, Vanessa, and our creative producer is Dennis Burnett. Music was created by Peligrosa in Austin, Texas. And King Benny Productions located in the Quinto Barrio of Houston.