Thread: Wild pork, any good for ham?

I’ve always heard wild pork can taste quiet strong and not too nice. We always get them done into sausages/ rissoles and patties with a bit of beef fat in there so it’s always been good. I was thinking with Xmas coming we could possibly get the next one done into something else and even a Christmas ham but I don’t want to pay a fortune if it won’t be very nice, iv only done homekill pork into ham.
What does everyone else get their wild pork done into? Other than sausages and all the basics I have no idea about what’s good and what’s not.

The right pig will make good bacon and ham, you just need to keep shooting them till you find it.
Wild pork is often too lean to do either you need a fat one. The skin can also be thicker and a lot hairier and I've never succeeded in getting crackling on wild pork.
Diet is the main contributer to taste though and that is where the lottery is the smell of the stomach cavity use as a guide. Pretty easy to know who's been eating dead animals or porina compared to fern root and worms.

When you gut and breakdown the pig, you should be able to tell what it’s good for.

Which usually isn’t a great deal outside of sausages, patties etc.

It takes a very good, fat, pasture fed pig to be worthwhile spending any money on. Wouldn’t even occur to me to take a standard grade feral pig to a butcher.

Your personal norms have a lot to do with what you do with a pig. It’s true that most people who only occasionally eat wild pork will find a typical omnivorous scavenging pig very off putting, they won’t like the taste at all. Then there is the population of rural people who grew up eating a lot of feral pork and will eat pretty much anything that comes their way. Me and my mates caught a bunch of winter pigs not long ago, attracted by dumps of dead sheep and cattle. The cavity smell was horrible and I wouldn’t have touched them with a barge pole, but they were all taken by a couple of local families and turned into who knows what.

I have done hundreds, I used to exchange them as currency. Smaller pigs are better all around but medium boars can be hammed to kill the boar taint.
I always skin pigs - leg cuts, up the brisket and in front of ears on the ground then hang by the snout, then split the skin right down the backbone. Grip an ear and pull the skin off in two halves. Skinning this way leaves the fat with an attractive 'gooseflesh' finish.

Take the hams to a good butcher who has a proper smoke house. Get them back raw uncooked from the butcher then you can freeze them. When you want one, defrost and bake in the oven in an oven bag at low heat until juice runs clear

Thanks all. We are farming on the back of some forestry and they come out into the dry stock paddocks. I don’t think they would be eating too much dead stuff with where they can and do go but I’m new to pigs so have no idea really. The ones we have picked off haven’t been fatty at all and haven’t had a noticeable stench. The butcher has been adding beef fat to the sausage mix and they have been really nice. Might take a younger one and have a crack at a leg myself and see if it turns out ok.

A really good (and fast to sort) way to use a nice wild pig is to skin and split with a saw, freeze the two sides of pork flat then get the butcher to bandsaw the whole lot into chops. Freeze as free-flow chops. Bake covered in a roasting dish at 140 - 150c for 2 + hrs on thin slices of kumera with onion and a dash of chilli on top. Can be cooked from frozen while you mow the lawn after work.

We ate a lot of wild pork growing up but the old man was very picky, most was sold through consolidated traders ,even the stuff that I wouldn't have fed to the dogs was worth .40 -60 cents a lb. All pigs are omnivores and opportunistic feeders so you wont really know what they've been eating or how long they've been eating it. Ill go against the grain a bit because I think pigs are alchemists to a degree. Dead animal is simply protein to a pig and it will just turn it into fat. We bait them where we are now using beef/mutton fat from the home kill guys, lately wev'e been getting leftovers from a bakery, dounts, cream buns, pies etc. Its imposable to tell the pork that's been on the old maggoty fat to the latter ones off the bakery stuff. I personally think the dislike of the offal eating pigs is more a mindset thing and sometimes of the smell comes more from them rolling in it . Though I will avoid one if I think its been living on fern roots and Iv inherited Dads pickyness, only taking the young 50-80lbers and only in top condition. Iv had a couple of hams done but wont do anymore, just not to my taste really.

Good wild pork bacon


from a top condition porker

@Chelsea if you are already using a butcher to do your sausages, why not ask him? I am sure he will be able to make a call judged on experience.

Fat is flavour. I watch them for a week or three with the game cams to follow progress. We loose plenty as they will wander off but that's cool, we give plenty away but we can onlyuse os much .. Someone will get the benefit

I've not any experience, with wild pork myself, but I'll pass on what could be a good ham making, procedure.

It's from one of those idiot cooking travel celebrity shows, Anthony Bourdain I think.

In Portugal, the local farm family, cut up a Boar.

The legs, singed and scraped exhaustively, were placed in pine boxes in sack-loads of salt and left in a cool dark corner of an outbuilding, for months until the juices stopped seeping out of the box.

They were then given a quick wash and dry, before being hung at the back of the fire hearth in the kitchen where the family did all their cooking, big hearth, some 6 feet across.

After some more months they'd smoked and become mahogany brown. Perfect! Similar method to making Pancetta I think.

If you could get approval from the clipboard fascists, they'd sell for $100 Kg.

Here’s a trailer load of pig dump bait. Believe me, when they’ve been on this kind of thing (they like to leave it a while to make sure it’s properly rotten), you won’t want to be preparing them for the table... it’s also worth pointing out that the mob of pigs that cleaned this lot up went through it in 2 days. Couple of huge sows and half a dozen medium-sized “eating” pigs. We know this because we had two video cameras on the dump.

The pickiest pig eaters I know are all pig hunters. Very, very selective as to what they will choose to eat for themselves.

Each to his own. I wouldn't hesitate putting one of those "eating pigs" on the hook if it was in good enough condition though only 2 days on high protein wouldn't be enough to change their condition much. They need a good couple of weeks.
What have you tasted in the eating that has put you off?

Smell and taste. It’s a very specific kind of gaminess that isn’t pleasant on the palate. You can taste it and smell it as it goes up the back of your nose from the throat. None of us like it, and we are all very open minded when it comes to food from pretty much any animal or plant, prepared in any way. The pigs I am talking about are all Ruapehu District pigs.

It’s interesting because we had a conversation about this a while back over a dinner of roast feral pig that I shot over the road from me here in the northern Waikato. We don’t get many pigs here, and those that do show themselves look quite different to the ones down on the hill country farms in the Ruapehu. A lot longer in the body and a lot less Razorback. We knew about this pig for quite awhile before I eventually shot it as I wanted it to be as clean as possible - it was staying put at the bottom of the paddock against the native. We wondered if it was an escaped captain cooker from somewhere, but our enquiries came to nought.

Anyway, that pig was absolutely delicious and a world apart from any of those that I have caught with dogs down in the Ruapehu.

Incidentally, according to the testimony of people who have actually eaten other people, the taste of human meat does not reflect its beef-like appearance. Both serial killers and Polynesian cannibals have described human as being most akin to pork.
Having smelled both decayed type of corpse...well, I'll leave it to the imagination.

And you put that taste down to feeding on offal? Its the sort of thing Id expect from a fern root diet or something out of the native bush down this way or pretty much any old boar.
One of ex brother in laws roasted leg from a big ol' boar he shot, he soaked it in milk for 24 hrs and reckoned it was great. Im not so sure, i think there was a bit of positive bias from the hunter
Never ate many pigs off the dogs, anything small and young enough to eat the dogs chewed up a bit unless we were right on their heals. Best eating came from the spotlight. If it had been rolling in the shit we would leave it in the creek overnight and hope the eels weren't to hungry.