Sure you can can it - pressure canned of course like all other meats. Ground, chunked, strips, cubes, or chopped.

You can also can pork chili using the Chili con Carne recipe. You can make and freeze pork stew and of course there is always seasoned sausage.

We can a lot of it plain in broth (hot pack) with just a bit of seasoning added to use in goulash and such or to cook up with sauerkraut and fried apples too.

Also check out the discussions linked below for several recipes.

Dave

Here is a link that might be useful: Pork discussions and recipes

Thanks Dave, I will troll those discussions and get some ideas. Frankly, the thought of having some pork and kraut along with the apples is about to make me swoon with hunger, LOL! I am a big pork/apple combo person, I love the flavors together. Don't you remember Alice on the Brady Bunch saying "Pork chops and applesauce?" Lori

We buy fresh pork - usually in 10-20 lb. packages. I grind it and pack in 1-2 lb. portions - put into a baggie then into a butterfly type styrofoam carton. This makes it easy to just grab a carton and have quick sausage for breakfast, or for meat in a spagetti sauce, etc.

I found this easier than making a lot of sausage at once - adding garlic, fennel, salt, pepper, etc. Some of the big portion is cut in cubes and frozen that way for convenience as well. Some pieces are cut into steak-like sizes, for use in breaded pork steak recipes - dipped in egg wash, flour and bread crumbs and fried in peanut oil and garlic.

For Italian type sausage - which we use lots of - I mix the ground pork with fresh chopped garlic, fresh fennel seeds, sometimes adding cheese or various hot peppers - as butchers would do when making sausage.

When Ken was posting, he gave me the idea, and it has worked well for our needs. I don't bother to put it in a sausage casing, but may try it some day.

Bejay

Thanks, Bejay, that is actually a very helpful suggestion. We have quite a few packages of ground pork and (duh) I never thought to add the spices to make it sausage. We don't do links very often and I've actually gone and bought sausage when I ran out of our own, still having the ground pork in the freezer. I don't know what I was thinking, LOL. We enjoy a good burger made out of ground pork, it is very delicious and very lean. I've put it in chili too, but haven't thought to maybe add it to spaghetti sauce and the like. Thanks again, sometimes I need a little thumping on the noggen to make use of our hard work with our pigs. Lori

Related. but slightly OT, is a question I have. My daughter's new farmer BF butchered a few hogs last week and said he put them in the ground in boxes where the meat was layered with salt. He says that all of it will be ready in 6 months. I don't understand what you do with all that salted pork? What happens to all those chops and hocks and tenderloins and roasts and how do they become ham and bacon if they are 90% salt? Are they all to become just salt pork for seasoning? Some other hog parts he said he made into sausage but I didn't ask him where that all went -- freezer? or salted too? or what? Not being a hog farmer, just a crop farmer, I just smiled and nodded my head like I knew what the heck he was talking about. If you know, please chime in as I don't want to look totally ignorant (which can be cured).

Nancy

Nancy he is basically doing a dry cure on them Salt does play a huge role in making ham and bacon He may or may not be planning on smokeing some of that later I would guess it is buried for temp control

Here is a link that might be useful: nchfp dry curing ham

Agree it is just a dry cure of pork as opposed to a brine cure but there is no 90% salt. ;) Salt is just one ingredients of the rub applied to the meat, sugar is another (100's of recipes for dry rubs out there) before going into cold storage. And this time of year a hole in the ground is good cold storage - think of a root cellar. Once removed, the meat can be eaten as is (like Prosciutto) or smoked or cooked.

My only question would be why 6 months? That's awfully long. We never did ours longer than 3 months.

Dave

nancedar -

About a year ago, the forum was discussing pork sausage making and curing. Perhaps you can still find some of those interesting posts, mostly by Ken Rogers.

I became interested in brine curing and sausage-making then. If you would like some interesting reading, perhaps Morton's Salt's "Meat Curing Guide" would be of interest to you. I ordered my copy on-line from the Morton Salt site. Hopefully, they are still making copies of this booklet. I found it most informative.

Bejay