Four little piggies went out to the yard, but only three came back.
On April 23, students from Chef Jonnay Groom’s Culinary and Russell Jennings’ Agricultural classes, as well as a few students from Future Farmers of America (FFA), participated in a pig butchering lab. The lab included dressing and cutting up a pig, a procedure many students found immensely interesting to learn about.
The lab took place right outside the Culinary classroom, taking almost all day for the students to finish. Both classes learned the long process of cleaning, dressing, boiling, and cutting up a pig. The process stands as one of the competencies that must be completed if students are planning to go to culinary school after graduation.
To start, they brought the pig (purchased from a local farm) in a cooler filled with ice, so the meat wouldn’t spoil. The pig had to be boiled in water at 152 degrees F., with this part of the lab taking the longest amount of time. Boiling the water took around an hour, but in the meantime, students got to see how the “pig contraption” worked. After the water came to a boil, the pig was flash-boiled long enough to skin the pig without actually cooking it.
“It is not like butchering a deer at all, plus the skin was way tougher than I thought it would be,” said junior Lief Lines.
The skinning process took many tries, and the pig had to be set back into the boiling water many times. The process took strong hands and patience to remove most of the skin and hair still on the pig. Students used scrapper-like tools to remove the hair that didn’t seem to want to come off the first two times. Eventually, students got most of the hair off, which left the last part of the process: cutting up the pig.
The final part of the lab included cutting up the pig into pieces and showing all the parts of a pig you wouldn’t normally see in a standard grocery store, such as the nasal tube. Jennings demonstrated how to properly slice a pig, which students were later able to copy as they cut up parts like the head, hooves, and intestines.
“My favorite part about the whole lab was taking the pig’s head off,” said sophomore Kylan McComb.
“It was so great because I learned how to cut up a pig and be a part of that big team-building exercise,” said senior Noah Keech.
While many of the students were a bit intimidated by the pig at first, they later warmed up to it once they realized that the pig was completely dead.
