Awesome slow-cooked pork

About a month ago, my husband and I were asked to serve pork at Stone’s Prairie Trade Days, an event held at Stone’s Prairie Market in Plainville, IL on May 30 for showcasing local vendors. Aaron and I have been doing some very limited marketing for his parents’ farm, Beebe Creek Farm, and the event organizers thought we might like to showcase the farm’s pork there. To make a long story short, we agreed, decided to serve pulled pork sandwiches, and I stressed out for the next few weeks thinking about all the little details of how to pull this off, while also putting together a brochure, a display poster, and most of the website. (Aaron is a webmaster so he did the technical stuff for the website.)

Oh, and the pork. We had no idea how much to serve, since the organizers had no idea how many people would be there – their guess was anywhere from 100 to 300 people. Aaron and I decided to just go ahead and cook up most of a whole hog, minus the chops and bacon (I just can’t pass up on chops and bacon!). We had the processing facility cut the rest of the hog up into what they called “primal cuts” which was basically just really big chunks of hog, still on the bone – the biggest chunk weighed a little over 25 pounds. We borrowed a few large roasters, and also borrowed the St. Rose Church kitchen, a nice big professional kitchen with large swaths of stainless steel to work on. Aaron had to get out the hacksaw to get some of those pieces of pork to fit in the roasters. Aaron slow-cooked all the meat at about 250 degrees, to an internal temperature of 200 degrees – that big piece of meat I mentioned earlier took over 24 hours to cook! And then we pulled all of that meat by hand, using ordinary kitchen forks. Fortunately, all the meat was “fork tender” and just fell off the bone. Although it took about forever – we probably put in a total of 3-4 man hours just pulling pork – we had some incredibly great-tasting pork. We estimate that we ended up with about 80 pounds of pulled pork.

We had already decided to serve two flavors – barbeque and regular (lightly seasoned with salt and pepper). We had “regular” because the point of this venture was to showcase the pork, so I wanted people to be able to taste the pork with as little seasoning as possible. For the barbeque pork, I didn’t even want to bother with a homemade barbeque sauce because I knew we’d be too busy with everything else, so we just used KC Masterpiece, which is a pretty good mild sauce that most people like. Well, with our pork, it was awesome. The pork already smelled good when it was cooking, and then when I added the sauce to one of the roasters of pulled pork – the smell was just heavenly.

So we had all this awesome meat, and I also made sure we had plenty of good fixins – Frank’s Red Hot sauce, sweet and dill relish, mustard, ketchup, salt and pepper. I bought enough supplies to serve just over 200 sandwiches. We decided to do this as a fundraiser for a non-profit organization (4-H), because the county health department, when granting temporary food stand permits, is more forgiving of fundraisers than for-profit events. This being the first time we’ve ever done anything like this, we figured we needed all the forgiveness we could get.

The weather was gorgeous that day, and everything went relatively smoothly. We took 4 large roasters full of pulled pork. We charged $3 for a sandwich with a very generous amount of pork (we don’t know how much! We didn’t measure) and 50 cents for a bag of chips. There was never much of a crowd, though – we estimate that we served about 100 sandwiches. We also sold some in bulk to people who requested it (fortunately I had brought along about a dozen leftover containers). I was disappointed that we didn’t serve more sandwiches, but we pulled in enough money to be able to make a donation of $173.57 to the Barry Winners 4-H club. Aaron’s father Harley donated the hog. If we had paid him full price we would have been able to donate only $20 to 4-H. We took home a roaster and a half of leftover meat.

Aaron and I just aren’t very aggressive when it comes to marketing. We were serving these amazingly good pork sandwiches, and we were too shy about the marketing to even give every customer a brochure advertising the pork. We had a poster display and the brochures available right next to where people paid, but I personally tend to ignore such things, and I would guess a lot of other people did too. We are in the odd position of having a very high-quality, reasonably-priced product to sell with very little idea of how to do so, and are also too reserved/introverted to really get ambitious about getting the word out.

We’re still not sure if we’ll ever do this again. It was a lot of work and stress, and the real point of it was to market the pork, and I don’t think we got even one half-hog sold (we haven’t heard from anyone). Of course, I also know marketing is also a long-term process – to be really effective, people have to see the product many times over a period of time, and we’re really just beginning. And this being the rural, conservative Midwest, people are not even going to assume that our pork is any better than the cheap bland confinement raised pork they get at the store – unless they are nostalgic for the great farm food they had growing up. Most people nowadays weren’t raised on great-tasting locally produced food, so they don’t even know what they are missing. And then there are people who insist that they can’t taste the difference between confinement pork and “artisan pork” (our term – what we’ve decided to call our pork). Well, I guess those people aren’t our target market.

Aaron made the comment when we were driving home after the event, that even though he cooked the meat, he didn’t really do a whole lot – that the reason the meat was so incredibly good is because it was very high quality meat in the first place. He’s right – and I just wish more people had a chance to try it and see for themselves!

Well, obviously, there are a lot of challenges we face in getting the word out. It’s a worthwhile task … I just wonder quite a bit if I am up to it. I have been writing down “lessons learned” and ways to do this better the next time, if we do. If we could do this at an event with a lot more people that would certainly be helpful.

And if we do this again, we are gonna have some of these! I find it a bit odd that they are plastic – I’d prefer stainless steel – but they still look like they’d be fun to use, and a lot easier to use for shredding pork than forks!

I wish I had taken some pictures of the pork, but I was too stressed out to think of it. Here’s our only picture related to this whole thing – a picture of our booth at Trade Days.

Tags: food, locally grown, pigs, the farm

Uncategorized | Angel | June 11, 2009 6:08 pm

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