Philip Hasheider - The Complete Book of Butchering, Smoking, Curing, and Sausage Making

The first edition of this book came out just as there was a renewed interest in butchery in the United States. It was well received by a large audience, and the popularity of different topics and sections within it resulted in several more books that expanded upon specific subjects. (These include The Hunters Guide to Butchering, Smoking, and Curing Wild Game and Fish; The Complete Book of Jerky: How to Process, Prepare, and Dry Beef, Venison, Turkey, Fish, and More; and The Complete Book of Pork Butchering, Smoking, Curing, Sausage Making, and Cooking.)

The purpose of this revised edition remains the same as the original volume: to provide the reader with accurate and useful information on all aspects of butchering, from slaughtering to processing to the preservation of meat. In these pages, you will find all the fundamental processes involved with safely handling beef, pigs, sheep, and wild game. Detailed step-by-step instructionsfrom securing an animal to deconstructing the carcasswill allow you to safely and humanely transform a carcass to a family meal. Both domestically raised animals and wild game are explained. Different meat cuts are discussed in each section, and other products, such as sausages, receive attention too. The recipes are included as examples and represent only a fraction of what you can do with each animal.

Many readers of the original edition wanted more information on smoking and preserving their meat. This makes sense, as with whole-animal butchering, you are often faced with many more pounds of meat than you can reasonably eat freshor sometimes even freeze. To that end, this book contains an expanded chapter on smoking and curing, nearly triple the size of the original chapter.

It is difficult to envision our society reverting back to a hunter-gatherer system, regardless of the publicity and support it receives in some circles. There simply is not enough land, space, or wild game available to sustain such a dynamic. Yet butchering and processing your own meat does not need to be the sole province of rural landowners, meat markets, or food conglomerates either. If you are interested in making your own meat products, you can do so with a little ingenuity, the right resources, and a deliberate plan of action. The information in this book will set you on the path to providing meat safely for yourself, your family, or even potential customers.

The US Department of Agriculture reported its 2015 estimate of meat consumed in the United States, which is shown in the chart above. It is based on a per capita consumption of 210.8 pounds of poultry and livestock.

It does not require owning a large acreage to raise meat animals. Small pastures of one to two acres would be sufficient to raise several meat goats or sheep for home use.