Mangalitsa

I have not blogged in quite a while. It has been a busy past month. Our chef at the restaurant left to another place. With that, they wanted to cut the charcuterie program for a while during the transition into getting a new chef. In that time, I spent a week in Los Angeles staging at a restaurant there that was interested in starting up a charcuterie program. I had a great time while I was there, meeting some new faces and learning a couple things. When I came back, our new chef, a great local talent, was hired and his first move was starting up the cured meats. It took 2 days to get what I had been asking for, for at least 5 months. We received 2 shoulders of mangalitsa pigs, each weighing around 29 lbs. After butchering, I have about 9 lbs of lardo, 6 lbs of coppa, at least 10 lbs for salami, and two 11 lb paletilla's for front leg prosciutto. I'm not quite sure if I'm going to use both for prosciutto, or use one for salami. Here are some pictures of the whole shoulders, then one leg, after butchering, for prosciutto.