This is one I never would have guessed, but you can make porkchops with a sawzall!

A lot of the life skills required to live a more self-sufficient lifestyle are completely new to me. This means that I have to keep picking up new skills as I go along, and today was no different. I’ve got a few hogs myself that I plan on eating and breeding as time goes on, plus we have wild hogs running around here, so when one of my neighbors asked if I wanted to help him butcher some hogs, I jumped at the opportunity.

Now he already had someone else kill them, gut them, and cut them in half, but the butchering still needed to be done. I don’t know where all the different cuts and meat types some from, so it was a great learning experience.

We started out with two giant halves from each pig. This is one half here, and it sure was heavy!

I got to watch and help for each step along the way. Learning where the kidney was hiding, what part was bacon, where the ham came from, what kinds of roasts were in there, and where the porkchops were!

For some of the bone cutting, we used a sawzall. Ours was a Makita Sawzall, but I’m sure that a Dewalt or Milwaukee would do just as good of a job. I guess that these guys found out that a sawzall can be an excellent butchering tool, and I was very interested to see it in action.

Another thing that I learned is that the type of blade can play a huge role in how effective this method was. I have some experience with sawzalls, but I don’t remember ever seeing a “meat” blade at the hardware store.

We started off with a 14 TPI Metal Blade, but that was nowhere near as effective as a 6 TPI Wood, Nail Embedded Blade. We learned this rather quickly and switched blades. Now, you can learn from our mistake and save yourself the trouble when you cut up your next hog with a sawzall. Also, it is best to use new blades, rather than ones that have been used for other purposes.

A sawzall also works well for cutting the ribs and some other bones. It was great to see so much bacon at once too, which is what that large rectangle above is.