I'm the Culinary God
Chapter 1356 - 533: Slaughtering New Year’s Pigs, Making Blood Sausage and Pork Grease—The Aroma Is Irresistible! Chen Yuanyuan: Are You Throwing Shade at Me? [Subscription Requested]
Chapter 1356: Chapter 533: Slaughtering New Year’s Pigs, Making Blood Sausage and Pork Grease—The Aroma Is Irresistible! Chen Yuanyuan: Are You Throwing Shade at Me? [Subscription Requested]
He was quite puzzled and couldn’t help but ask.
While scraping the pig’s hair, Lin Xu said:
"Since opening the restaurant in Beijing, I’ve handled more pigs, and I’m used to it."
Once the pig was entirely scraped clean, it looked much whiter and more tender.
Everyone lifted the pig up. Originally, they wanted to hang it up, but given its weight of over three hundred pounds, they weren’t sure if the frame could hold it. So Lin Xu directly split open the pig’s belly and took out the viscera.
After busying with these tasks, they took off the pig’s head, then hooked its front legs with a meat hook, and hung the "slimmed" pig on the rack.
The pig was fully split open from the belly, and with a large bone chopper, Lin Xu broke the backbone.
In this way, the whole pig was separated into two halves.
Next was the meat cutting.
First, remove the hind legs, then with a small knife, take away the pork trotters, remove the elbow, extract the big bone from the hind legs, and finally extract the spine, revealing the entire hind leg meat.
The meat on the pig’s rump is half-fat, half-lean, relatively firm, suitable for making garlic paste pork or stir-fried fried pork. This piece would be cooked with the bones later.
After processing both hind legs, Lin Xu removed the flat ribs of the pig.
This is the middle section of the pig’s body, containing pork ribs, hard belly pork, soft belly pork, and spine. It’s a superior meat part that usually isn’t used in butcher’s meals.
For butcher’s meals, front leg meat is used for frying, hind leg meat for boiling.
Only this middle section is generally saved for New Year’s consumption.
Lin Xu extracted the spine along with the ribs, cutting the spine into big chunks and adding them to the meat boiling later — it would smell delicious!
After handling the flat rib section, it was time to process the front leg.
Relatively speaking, the front leg meat was simpler; remove the pork trotters and elbow, then take out the spoon bone and spine, finally placing the blood groove meat aside separately — the front leg meat was now processed.
While he was busy, Zhang Chunsheng and Shi Wenming were busy cleaning the pig’s viscera.
The cleaning steps mainly involved the large intestines, small intestines, pork stomach, and other digestive organs. The outer visceral fat needed to be torn off and then flipped over, clearing out the feces thoroughly before scrubbing them with ingredients like flour, liquor, and cooking oil.
Uncle Jia Xingwang placed the other viscera of the pig into a basin to soak and conveniently sent the lard extracted from the belly to the kitchen for Chen Meijuan to refine into pork lard.
At this point, refining pork lard wasn’t just about eating the oil, but more about eating the pork grease.
Freshly refined pork grease tastes superb whether dipped in pepper salt, dry chili powder, or fine white sugar, perfect for the children to indulge in.
The courtyard was filled with busy figures; only Dundun was more leisurely, squatting by the pigsty. Whenever the pigs inside snorted, the little guy would roar loudly.
As if he were a temperamental pig farm boss.
After handling the pork, Lin Xu turned to glance at Dundun, finding the little guy had made significant progress.
Last time he visited, whether it was slaughtering geese or big fish, Dundun was terribly frightened. Today, he wasn’t showing any fear; instead, he had an air of authority.
Was he considering himself as one of the humans now?
It’s said that cats, after spending long with humans, start seeing themselves as one too. He always thought this saying was nonsense, yet Dundun showed more and more signs of it.
But Lin Xu didn’t intend to alter the situation.
The little guy could do as he pleased; love shouldn’t be an excuse for forced intervention.
He washed the blood off his hands, meanwhile washing the boning knife too.
Being a chef, it’s a habit to wash everything clean and put them back in their places after use.
At the kitchen door, Lin Hongqi set up a small pot, boiling rosin inside.
In the past, pigs were specifically stuck with rosin on their heads for cleaner meat. However, since rosin is costly, many unscrupulous people, in order to save money, have used harmful tar instead.
This led to a ban, and now large slaughterhouses run a machine over pigs to remove hair, looking clean on the surface but leaving stubble everywhere.
Good traditional rosin is still the most handy and effective.
Once the rosin was boiled, it was applied on the surface of the pig’s head, poured into eye sockets and pig ears, and finally used to coat pork trotters.
Set aside to cool naturally; once the temperature dropped, pulling off the rosin resulted in a significantly cleaner pig head.
Using an axe, the pig head was split from the back portion, opening it up, carefully spooning the pig brain into a bowl, hanging it up. Once all pigs were slaughtered, they would stew them all together, making pig head steamed starch.
Once everyone was done with their work, they started slaughtering the second pig.
This time, everyone coordinated even better, and the slaughtering process went more smoothly.
After pulling out all the bones from both pigs, Shi Wenming set up another large pot in the yard, putting all the extracted spine, ribs, leg bones, spoon bones, and other bones inside, along with several pieces of pork hind leg meat, adding water to start boiling.
As the water boiled, the foam was skimmed off, then scallion and ginger, along with commonly used meat boiling ingredients, and finally a whole packet of salt based on the water level in the pot was added.
Once the pot’s meat was cooked, it could be eaten, and the broth would not be wasted.
This broth wasn’t just the base soup for butcher’s meals, but also a necessary component for filling blood sausage.
Filling blood sausage wasn’t just pouring blood into the small intestines simply; rather, it involved mixing cooled meat broth with scallion, ginger, garlic paste, five-spice powder, salt, and other seasonings, using a funnel to fill the small intestines.
The presence of meat broth made the blood sausage taste even more delicious.
The filled blood sausage needed to be cooked in a pot immediately, with cold water constantly drizzled into the pot during cooking, similar to cooling water when boiling dumplings, artificially lowering the water temperature.
The benefit of doing this was preventing the blood sausage from bursting, while keeping the pig blood inside tender.
While everyone was busy, Chen Meijuan had already finished refining the pork lard. She scooped out the pork grease, got several plates, and filled them with fine white sugar, pepper salt, and dry chili dipping sauce respectively.
Once prepared, she carried them outside along with the pork grease.
"Yueyue, come try the pork grease. It’s little Xu’s childhood favorite treat; he even sneaked into the kitchen to eat them at midnight, making his bedding full of crumbs."
Shen Jiayue covered her mouth and laughed upon hearing this:
"He used to mock me for being a greedy girl, yet little Xu was quite greedy himself as a child!"
Leading Chen Shaokang, Shi Molli, and other little helpers who couldn’t assist much, Shen Jiayue approached. Grabbing freshly cooked pork grease from the pot, she dipped it in pepper salt and brought it to her mouth, her eyes turning into crescents:
"Wow, it really tastes delicious! Yuanyuan, come and have some, this pork grease is super tasty!"
Chen Yuanyuan had just helped Chen Meiliang wash the pork lung repeatedly, turning it completely white. Today, with so many people, Lin Xu planned to boil the pork lung into silver lung soup for the elders to nourish their lungs.
Seeing her sister-in-law devouring the pork grease, Chen Yuanyuan asked:
"Aren’t you afraid of gaining weight?"
"I used to fear it before getting married, but now... I’ve found my lifelong meal ticket, so I’m not scared anymore."
Chen Yuanyuan: ??????
Why does it feel like you’re mocking me?
She washed her hands, went over, grabbed a piece of pork grease, dipped it in fine white sugar, and enjoyed the crispy texture and sweet taste — it was truly super delicious.
Especially with the contained fat, enhancing the aroma of the pork grease.
"It’s indeed tasty. Later, I’ll tease those in Beijing who can’t have it in the group — show them how wonderful it is to go home for New Year!"
Chen Yuanyuan couldn’t counter her sister-in-law and shifted her target to the group of ladies who still fit their bras without shrinking.
Humph, true friends need to love and spar with each other!
————————
I’ve witnessed pig slaughter before. As a child, I found it dirty and didn’t watch closely; growing up I missed such occasions, so in the evening I experienced cloud slaughter online, watching a bunch of pig slaughter videos to finally understand the process... This Chapter is 5500 words, begging for monthly tickets, brothers!
If you find any errors (non-standard content, ads redirect, broken links, etc..), Please let us know so we can fix it as soon as possible.
ReportUse arrow keys (or A / D) to PREV/NEXT chapter
Loading comments…