Where Turkeys Come From

Hard as it may be for some consumers to believe, that turkey on the Thanksgiving table once was a living, breathing animal. Most turkeys for public consumption are raised in huge confinement lots, where they live a pretty miserable existence, all jammed together waiting for their date with the executioner. But at Mike Klein's farm in Brandywine, MD, about 35 miles outside the District of Coumbia in Prince George's County, a small flock lives on pasture. Their collapsible pen is moved from place to place so the turkeys can live outdoors and have fresh vegetagation and bugs to peck at.

Mike and his wife Michelle run a CSA subscription off their small truck patch, including lots of different vegetables, laying hens, roasters and turkeys for Thanksgiving. Mike's flock was smaller than usual this year, only around 25 birds. But it's still tough work. They eat their way through 100 pounds of feed each day and they are always in danger of escaping their pen and being eaten by the local foxes.

Finally it comes time to slaughter the turkeys and The Slow Cook lends a hand. This year it was a glorious day, sunny and calm, the farm surrounded by oak and hickory trees in a blaze of fall colors. It was a bit warmer than Mike and Michelle would like. But it felt great to the rest of the volunteer crew. Here is a gallery of photos showing the turkey butchering operation. If the sight of dead animals makes you queasy, this would be a good time to avert your eyes.

The breed of turkey Mike raised this year is a double-breasted bronze. The first task is to capture the birds, which dart around the pen to avoid us and sometimes find their way over the top of the electrified fencing and have to be chased back inside. We try to grab a bird by its leg, avoiding the flapping wings. The turkeys don't fly much, but their powerful wings can leave a nasty bruise or a bloody nose if you aren't careful. We hogtie the birds and cart them six-at-a-time back to the open-air slaughtering area.

The turkeys are treated gently while they wait their turn to be killed. We lift them out of the cart and hang them from hooks on a steel A-frame, so their heads are just a few inches above the ground. They hang very calmly and quietly. We say a few words to a turkey as we take its head in the left hand, then slit the jugular vein with a quick motion of a sharp knife.

So far, there has been hardly a word of protest from the turkeys. Even after their throats are cut, they dangle calmly from the A-frame. Then, as the last of the blood drains out of them and they lose consciousness, the birds flap their wings as if trying to escape. Apparently this is an involuntary reaction of the turkey brain as it thirsts for blood and oxygen. Perhaps animal rights groups would disapprove, but the turkeys have to die so we can eat, and to me, this method of killing seems extremely humane. Except for a few seconds of flapping wings, the whole process is reverential and calm, to the point of serene.




Mike lifts the turkey carcasses off their hooks and lowers them by the feet into a tub of scalding water, around 160 degrees. A minute or so is all it takes to loosen the feathers for plucking. Too long and the skin is damages.



Mike uses a machine to remove most of the feathers. It's a drum studded with long rubber nubs that look like knobby fingers. The drum spins at a rapid rate. You push the bird into the spinning nubs--they grab the feathers and pull them off. But hang on tight to that bird, or it will be sucked into the machine.


The bird then goes to a tub of cold water where a volunteer plucks the remaining feather and gets it ready for butchering.






The turkey is very dead and very naked at this point. We lift it out of the water and lay it on the butchering table where I remove the feet at the knees (the feet will be boiled for stock), then cut off the head. Working a boning knife through the skin I expose the neck and cut it off at the base with a pair of shears. My job is to then reach into the exposed neck cavity and remove the crop, the trachae and the esophagus.



Working at the other end of the bird are Michelle and daughter Sylvia. Michelle carefully carves around the bird's anus to reveal the intestinal tract without spilling any of its contents. The carcass must not be contaminated at this point. She reaches inside to remove all of the organs and viscera. Sylvia harvests the liver, heart, kidneys and gizzards, all to be iced and packed with the birds later.


The organs come out of the turkey carcass glistening and pristine. I cannot help marveling at how perfect in form they are, identical from one bird to the next--a miracle of creation. Michelle says she has no problem spending her day pulling the guts out of turkeys. It's the turkeys' feet she can't stand.


The gutted carcasses are cleaned in two changes of water before being chilled in an ice bath. After a quick lunch of grilled sausages, we turn our attention to the gizzards. Turkeys don't have teeth. They chew their food in an internal organ--the gizzard--where grains and food pellets are ground up by the pepples and stones the turkeys pick up in their foraging. If you've ever wondered what birds are pecking around for at the side of the road, it's little stones to fill their gizzards. We slice the gizzard in half. Inside is the pouch where the stones and food contents are located. It has to be peeled away from the meat--tough and painstaking work, like peeling the inside of a baseball mitt.

When the turkeys are good and cold, we bag them and weigh them. Mike charges $3 a pound. Some customers pick up their turkeys at the farm, the rest Mike delivers individually to clients in the Washington area the following day. Here's ours, all 31 pounds. We'll keep it in a cooler with plenty of ice until Thursday.

Calling All Pork Butt

I was preparing to grind meat for sausages yesterday and for the second time in two weeks called my local Whole Foods for pork shoulder (aka pork butt) only to be told there wasn't any.

That's not a problem any more. We are so used to the local Whole Foods not having what we need that my wife has written into our address book the phone numbers for all three Whole Foods located here in the District of Columbia.

We're not dummies. We don't drive around looking for stuff. We use the phone. In fact, if I get to Whole Foods and can't find something, I just park myself at the "customer service" desk and ask a clerk to make the calls.

Last week when the nearest Whole Foods didn't have pork shoulder I found it at the store about three miles away. No big deal. They packed it up and had it waiting for me.

But this week, none of the Whole Foods stores had pork shoulder.

"They (meaning the local distribution center) never delivered any," said the meat clerk who answered the phone at one of the stores. "This has been happening for years. It doesn't matter if we order something. If they don't have it, they just don't bring it. They don't tell us they're not bringing it and they never give an explanation. It's just a mystery and it's very frustrating."

Frustrating for the meat clerk. I, meanwhile, am pulling my hair out. I can't make sausages without pork shoulder. I had to call the local Safeway, where the butcher (I'm being generous with the term) not only had pork shoulder, but trimmed it off the bone for me and put it aside under my name.

Sometimes I forget how friendly the people can be at our poor, old, run-down neighborhood Safeway.

My disappointment is that the pork at Safeway is the kind raised in a dim, stinky corporate factory, "the other white meat" bred to contain as little fat as possible and consequently missing what I am ultimately looking for: the flavor of pork.

Whole Foods, meanwhile, carries the Niman Ranch brand of pork, a beast that has been raised by independent farmers to be fat and happy in a more outdoor setting. Just by virtue of not having the fat bred out of it, and being allowed to live its life more like a pig and less like a hamster, the Niman Ranch pork has more flavor.

Which raises the question: Why in the world would the meat department at Whole Foods be out of pork shoulder in the first place? Other than perhaps the cheeks or the shanks, cuts you rarely see for sale to the public outside restaurants and specialty butcher shops, the shoulder is the most flavorful part of the pig. It's a standard item--or at least it used to be.

Yet a stroll along the typical meat counter these days reveals that America's taste for meats runs more in the direction of style than flavor. The modern, tricked-out meat case, all chrome and glass and awash in soothing fluorescence, has more in common with a Paris fashion runway than with a true butcher's display.

Pork tenderloin marinated two different ways. Fancy shish kabobs with multi-colored vegetables you know won't be cooked when the meat is well past done. Filet mignon at $25 a pound. Miniaturized lamb loin chops. Chicken sausages a dozen different ways. Giant pork chops stuffed like Thanksgiving turkeys. To gaze upon this stylized cornucopia of protein as like standing in front of a diorama at the natural history museum: so lifelike, yet no real life there, all soul drained away.

The selection looks like something dreamed up in an editorial meeting at Bon Appetit magazine, all glitz and glam with one important component missing: the flavor.

I'm yearning for squishy livers, glistening kidneys, funky trotters. I want to see slabs of smoked bacon, gnarly hocks, fresh pork bellies.

It's the absence of these products, the backbone of our meat tradition, that tells the tale of our modern appetite. Meat these days has mostly become just another delivery vehicle for the latest magazine sauce or fruit salsa. Our concept of carnivorous has been conceptualized to the point that we don't recognize any more where the flavor comes from if not from the tropical, out-of-season marinade foisted upon us in the latest installment of Food Network.

Our meat has been mango-ized.

Again, it is those busy chefs and food writers and editors, all the stylists and studio visualists, trying to justify their salaries and cook up another trend. The consumer in his hapless disconnect from tradition, his disassociation from collective memory, his alienation from any sense of season and place, follows along, cruising for his next recipe fix.

And that brings me to the ultimate paradox: I thought the fatty flavorful cuts were the trend. I thought Fergus Henderson had made it clear--finally and for for all time--that it is the shoulder and the cheeks and the shanks we should be eating. I thought Nose to Tail Eating was the breakthrough that had finally led us home again to where the flavor is.

Could I have been mistaken? Because again I must ask: How can Whole Foods be out of pork shoulder two weeks running?

Stuffing Sausage: Matanza Day 2

By the second day of the matanza, the crew is showing signs of wear. Children are over-excited and sleep deprived. We missed much of the festivities the night before when our own daughter melted down for lack of sleep. Fireworks were canceled because of high winds. Some of the crew are feeling the effects of too much merry making.

The good news: we are way ahead of schedule. Six pigs have all been killed and butchered. Most of the meat has been carved. What remains is to package and organize the finer cuts, and turn the rest into sausages.


In past years, this was no easy chore. The group was using the most rudimentary of equipment. All of the sausage meat, for instance, was ground in a small Cuisinart in the farmhouse kitchen. "We had to throw bags of ice on the Cuisinart to cool it down," said Christine Bergmark.


One of the matanza participants, Bob Feldhaus, has solved that problem. Feldhaus operates a pet store in nearby Leonardtown with friend Ronnie Frederick. Both are frequent visitors to the farm to help process venison. They are avid sausage makers. This year Feldhaus has purchased a commercial-grade meat grinder and a Cabela brand sausage extruder that holds several gallons of meat.


Most of the "volunteer" help has departed. Now it is down to the matanza shareholders: Brett and Chris, Bobby and Ronnie and Rusty and Karen, two former neighbors from a time when the farmer-wife team lived in Arlington. For some reason, the men gravitate toward the heavy equipment, while the women begin vacuum packing and sorting the meat. I have cleaned the bathtub in the walk-in refrigerator. Now the hams and bacon slabs are curing under layers of kosher salt. I join Bobby at the sausage making station.






There has been extensive chatter and deliberation over what kind of sausages to make and which recipes to use. One of the sources the group relies on is Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing by a fellow named Rytek Kutas. Kutas, a man of simple tastes and straightforward opinions, advocates a husband and wife team for making "up to 100 pounds" of sausage a day. His recipes call for quantities no smaller than 25 pounds of meat.

This year the matanza group has decided on 7 different types of susage: Kielbasa, Italian, Sicilian, Hungarian, chorizo, breakfast patties and a "mystery" blend. Actually, two kinds of chorizo sausage emerged when one faction declared that the recipe did not have enough heat. The mix was split in half and some of Brett's incendiary homemade Tabasco sauce, along with red pepper flakes, were added to jack up the heat quotient.


To season the sausages, Bobby has brought bags of spices mail-ordered from Detroit: fennel, marjoram, paprika. After the meat has been pressed through the grinder, and after the seasonings are added, Rusty, a carpenter by trade, itches to apply his half-inch drill. The drill holds a three-foot-long mixing tool that makes child's play out of blending the meat and spices in a large plastic tub.



From there, the meat makes its way to Bobby's big Cabela extruder. Bobby's hands are practically numb from handling the cold meat. Wearing a pair of bright blue, neoprene gloves, I pitch in to keep the extruder loaded. Bobby slips a sausage casing onto the extruder. As he pulls down on the extruder's handle, the meat is forced into the casings forming one long, long sausage. I guide the finished sausage to prevent any tangles or pile-ups. As the hours pass, we cover several plastic-lined tabletops with the different varieties of sausages, about 300 pounds in all. They are laid out in long coils to dry. Later, we will twist the sausages into smaller links before cutting them into lots of five and vacuum packing them for distribution to the matanza members.


Meanwhile, back at the ranch, chef Jeffrey Heineman is hunched over a small Cuisinart, making filling for his jumbo hot dogs. The meat for hot dogs must be finely ground and emulsified. Once in their casings, the dogs are then poached slowly in a water bath in the oven.

The work, the cold, the long cocktail hours--all are taking a toll. I yearn for a nap. It's just about this point that Brett taps me to join him in one of his two greenhouses to "pick bones." The bones from the butchering operation had been placed in a huge kettle and simmered the day before. Now we get to pull a couple of milk crates up to the kettle, sit in the warmth of the greenhouse and sort through the bones for bits of meat that can be used in sauces and possibly scrapple.


I am happy to pass an hour with Brett this way, sitting and picking. We talk about the business of farming. We gab about the huge rains that fell last June, about tomato blight, the fungus that killed my squashes, planting seeds early, and whether my collards will come back from last month's snow and ice storm.

For lunch, I return to the house and help my wife prepare a platter of fresh hot dogs wrapped in baguettes. Chef Heineman has not used any nitrates in the meat, so the dogs, pink at first, look more like weisswurst--a pale greyish tan--once they are cooked. But the flavor is still there. We savor them with mustard and chopped onion and a cup of beer from Brett's keg.


When it is finally time to go, Brett points to a large cardboard box containing our reward for helping: two large, bone-in loin roasts, a slab of ribs, two pint-sized bags of breakfast sausage and an assortment of sausage links. Not a bad haul. Thanks, Brett and Christine. We had a great time.

How to Skin a Pig

I find nothing repulsive about butchering an animal. Where others see gore, I see the miracle of evolution. The innards of a pig are utterly pristine. To me this came as a revelation. It does not matter how many of the animals you slice open: on the inside, each is identical to the one before it, a marvel of genetics and mammalian engineering. The organs glisten. They are squeaky clean--the liver crimson against the steely grey of the intestines; the kidneys perfectly ovoid and efficient; the heart a mighty muscle, a compact little machine.

During the first full day of the matanza, or pig slaughter, we will kill and gut six pigs. As we work around the viscera, the first order of business is to tie off the colon, to avoid any contamination of the animal's cavity. Then these few organs--liver, kidneys, heart--we seek out and keep. The rest becomes feed for the chickens. We wrestle an empty carcass into position and hoist it off the ground with rope and pulley for skinning. Four of the original six pigs will be handled in this manner, skinned and broken down into pieces. Two others, being white pigmented, are immersed in a hot water bath, a giant metal drum filled with water heated from a fire pit underneath. These two pigs are then scraped to remove all hairs, revealing a smooth skin that will crisp up nicely around the succulent hams.

By mid-morning there are 13 adults working at various phases of the pork production. I am already weary. My day began at 3:30 am, when anticipation shook me awake in our motel room. We had agreed to serve breakfast and lunch for the workers. We made the meals ahead, so they only needed to be reheated and displayed on platters. We'd been told the men-folk would be up at the crack of dawn. It was still dark when we arrived at the farm, where farmer Brett Grohsgal, greeted us with a flashlight and guided us into the house. We started coffee. We heated the oven. We checked the menu: My wife's special strata of Panettone and Challah breads with pancetta, rosemary and Gorgonzola cheese; Tennessee smoked bacon and chicken-apple sausages; scones with dried fruit and lavender-vanilla sugar; chocolate chip banana bread; tropical fruit salad. There was food for a crowd.


One by one the shareholders in the pig operation wandered into the kitchen. The house was utterly full.


"Having a lot of people over is my favorite part of the matanza," says Christine Bergmark, the second half of the farm team. "Most years we have someone sleeping on the couch."
The matanza is into its eighth year. It started when Bergmark was trying to figure a way to deal with all the leftover tomatoes at the end of the season, the ones that weren't good enough to send to market. The tomatoes were being thrown back into the fields to rot. Bergmark thought a farm animal might take care of the tomatoes.


"I thought maybe we should get a pig," Bergmark said. "Brett went out to get a pig. He came back with five."


"They get lonely," Grohsgal explains sheepishly.


They tried raising other animals for the matanza: goats, sheep. But goats and sheep find a way to break out of their enclosures, and then they are in the fields eating Grohsgal's prized greens.


"They were eating my collards!" he declares. "You can eat my arugula, but don't mess with my collards. That sealed their fate."


No more goats and sheep.

These days there are six pigs, making plenty of work at killing time. And most years the weather is much more of a factor. The slaughter usually takes place in January, sometimes in bitter cold. But this year the sow was not impregnated on the first attempt. The pigs are a mixed breed adapted to local conditions. Weeks passed before the sow was ready to mate again, which pushed the matanza into March. Not so bad if you like warmer temperatures, and a little more daylight on either end of the workday.


Inside the barn, things are humming. Besides the skinning operation, there are several stations where workers are carving big hunks of pork, cutting and sawing loins into manageable pieces, separating choice cuts from sausage meat, trimming slabs of bacon from the bellies. Inside the walk-in refrigerator, a bathtub is filling fast with hams, shoulders and rib sections.


My job, it turns out, is official Cleaner and Sharpener of Knives. I am constantly running back to the house to the only source of hot, soapy water. I wash the knives, then give the blades a quick tune-up on the Chef's Choice grinder. There are lots and lots of knives. Knives of every size and description. My personal favorites are the ancient carbon steel chefs knives, of which Grohsgal seems to be a collector. They sharpen to a mean edge. Before the day is out, I am using one of them to separate pig heads from pig skins, then trimming the bristly skin off the jowls so they can be cured for guanciale, a bacon-like specialty.


Chef Jeffrey Heineman, one of the shareholders, will turn the pork cheeks and tongues into incredible braises. And that will be my last memory of the day: dinner of tongue and cheek, a bottle of red wine, a piece of bread. Call it a night. I'm done.



Stay tuned for tomorrow's exciting conclusion...

Killing a Pig: Matanza Day 1

The farmer raises his rifle shortly after 8 am as the sun emerges from behind a stand of oak and hickory trees. We've been waiting for full light to illuminate our deadly business. Now the moment has arrived. Except for the soft grunting of the pigs, all is calm. Then a single report from the farmer's .30-calibre Winchester cracks the air, and the first pig slumps to the ground: It is dead instantly with a bullet in the brain, but still thrashing and kicking involuntarily. We wait for the animal's spasms to subside, then grab its legs and drag the 325-pound carcass out of the holding pen. The farmer cuts a long incision along one of the pig's Achilles tendons and runs a steel chain through the hole. Moments later, the hydraulic lift on the back of a John Deere tractor hoists the pig into the air. We watch man, tractor and pig rumble and bump their way toward the barn where the pig will be gutted, skinned and cut into parts.

So began the first day of our matanza on Even' Star Farm outside Lexington Park, MD. For two years I'd been hearing stories about this annual weekend pork fest, named for the Spanish custom of community gathering and merry making around the slaughter of a large animal. The farmer, Brett Grohsgal, his wife, Christine Bergmark, along with several friends pool their funds to purchase and feed six pigs for the eight months or so it takes the swine to reach butchering size, then take the booty home to fill their freezers. I had heard there was much toil involved in turning the animals into roasts, chops and sausages, but that periods of hard work were bracketed by aggressive consumption of excellent vittles, spirit-enhancing liquids and lively camaraderie. I had groveled, pleaded and harangued for an invitation. And this year I came up lucky in a somewhat circumscribed fashion. I would not be one of the actual shareholders in the matanza, but a volunteer helper and chronicler of the event. Oh, and might I and my wife be able to provide breakfast and lunch for the first day's activities?

You bet!

So we loaded family, grub, buffet platters and a few bottles of booze into the ol' Corolla and headed for St. Mary's County, about two hours south of Washington, DC.

Right here I will address some of the thoughts I know some of you are thinking, such as, Ew, yuk! Are you really going to look those pigs in the eye and then kill them? Don't you think that's cruel? And then you're going to cut them up and get blood on everything. Isn't that disgusting?

To which I respond, yes, no, yes and no.

In fact, I wish I could reply that I've given these matters a great deal of thought, but I haven't. I don't consider myself a deeply philosophical ethicist where animal rights are concerned. Perhaps that is a failing on my part, but certainly it is a common fact of our current condition. First and foremost, I consider myself a human who exists at the top of the food chain, and who is happy to occupy that position and not one farther down. Humans are omnivores, meaning they have evolved to eat almost everything, including other animals. I eat other animals. It only follows that the other animals must die and be made ready to eat. The question is, how humanely was the animal raised and killed that was meant for my consumption? And I happen to believe that the most humane treatment for such an animal, in this case a pig, is to give it plenty of room to romp out of doors, to feed it regularly with wholesome food, and then make its death as swift and painless and reverential as possible. Most of us--even the most sanctimonious--have simply removed ourselves from the process. We don't care to know that the animals we eat were raised in factory feedlots, then killed and sliced in assembly-line fashion by human drones. We sleep so much better at night oblivious to the way our food is mistreated on an everyday basis. We prefer to imagine that the pork chop staring at us from our dinner plate arrived there by some bloodless miracle of modern science, the spiritual connection having been drained out of the equation in the interest of efficiency and corporate profit.



The plain truth is, we are complicit any way you look at it. You can't eat meat without first killing an animal and spilling blood. And although I did not come face-to-face with this truth until later in life, I do not flinch from it. I have helped Brett Grohsgal butcher deer that he has shot on his farm. I have helped him kill and butcher sheep. Brett may be unusual in that he does not shrink from the fact of death preceding life. He lives off the land and is reconciled to that most primal of needs to kill in order to survive. He brings life out of the ground with his crops, and he puts meat on the table with his gun.

Fortunately, he also knows how to have a good time in the processs. So we spent our first night on the farm not with polemics, but with some excellent prosciutto made by one of Brett's cohorts in the matanza, chef Jeffrey Heineman, owner of Grapeseed restaurant in Bethesda. We followed that with grilled burgers wrapped in baguettes, a pleasant malbec wine and eventually a few rounds of some potent homemade schnaps.

Memories of the evening are a bit vague. We were steeling ourselves for the work to come. At one point there would be 13 adults and five children involved; pigs to kill, gut and skin; roasts and chops to carve; fires to stoke; fat to separate for rendering lard; hams and bacon to salt; 300 pounds of sausage meat to grind, season and stuff into casings; many more pounds of meat to label and package. All that awaits.

To be continued...