pig headed

uhh. warning! this post is kinna graphic. actually it's really graphic, and long (twss), and the videos are graphic, too. so don't tell me i didn't warn you. but this is how food is prepared. so you might as well read along if you eat pork.

if you followed my gchat status at all, you prolly already know that for thanksgiving/thankstaking i cooked a pig's head.

but if you didn't know, i cooked a pig's head for thanksgiving. turned it into sisig, a pilipino dish i had never heard of until cjay told me that it's one of her favorite dishes. she had asked me to make it for her like 3 or 4 years ago. but back then i didn't know where to get a pig's head and was far too sheepish to inquire for one anywhere. now, i am more like a lion or a shark, and not a sheep, so i went to a butcher and asked for one. sorry it took so long cjay, and sorry you didn't get to try the dish you had waited 3 or 4 years for.

actually, i was inspired to do so by my kuya, this guy, and this video.



and recently, i have also tried to make a conscious effort to appreciate as many parts of the animals that we eat (fish eyes anybody? chicken feet?). well, at least the parts that i can stomach for now.

AND, i think deep down inside, part of me wants to become a butcher. a real one. like this guy, except cooler.


anyways, i wish i had pictures to show you the progress of my dish and as proof that i did use an actual pig's head, but i did not have a camera to use, so you'll just have to trust me.

first, i cooked the pig's head for hours in some simmering salted water, with some aromatics. actually that's what i would've done, my mom got tired of my pig's head being in kitchen so she did it herself.

and then, after it had cooled sufficiently, i cut off the ears and then cut a separating line down the middle of the head and proceeded to peel off the two sides of the face, which was skin with whatever meat i could leave attached to the skin. this took some time maybe up to one and a half hours. and i also cut my finger early in this butchering process and had to use at least 4 bandages for this tiny ass cut while cutting up this head. the cheeks of my pig were huge. i thought i had done an ok job, except i left the temples (or at least what i thought were his temples) on the skull, instead of with the skin, so i had to take those out separately.

then i took out the tongue. it was suprisingly hard to open the mouth of my pig, so i had to reach in from the back of the head. it's a pretty odd feeling grabbing a pig's tongue from the back of its mouth. the tongue is also pretty firmly attached to the mouth so it took some real effort, and some precarious cuts to get it out.

my mom then took the skull and made some soup with it. it was pretty crazy cuz after a while in the stock pot, the bottom part of the jaw came off of the skull (i don't really know what was holding it there in the first place) and my mom took it out of the pot and just left it on the counter for a while. i will just say that the most chilling moment of this whole experience was seeing that pig's bottom set of teeth on my kitchen counter, it was just weird. for a while i couldn't bring myself to eat the soup that my mom had made. i mean it was flavored with teeth!

then after mass on thursday, my dad and i fired up the grill (always a manly experience), and i started to grill the meat as entire hemispheres of the face, if that makes sense. this was huge a mistake, cuz the sides weren't really even pieces of meat. so like a total n00b i ended up burning the skin before the meat in the middle could get warm. long story short, i burned most of the skin, so i had to discard a lot of it and one of the ears. luckily skin is excellent at protecting the fat and the meat from getting overdone, so my losses were minimal at worst.

after grilling i started chopping up the various parts. and, of course, as i came to a different part of the face, i had to try it to see what it tasted like.
- pig's ear is just skin and cartilege, and mine was crunchy, not crunchy like a potato chip, crunchy like the end of a chicken drumstick, between the meat and the bone end. i had read that i should've boiled them for a really long time, to make them tender, but like i said before, i wasn't in charge of the initial boiling.
- pig cheek, or pig jowl, as they should be called, is a lot like bacon, except there's a ton more fat than lean. as a result, it is pretty delicious.
- pig snout is surprisingly tender. well it's not so surprising if you touch your nose. sorry if that's weird.
- pig tongue, or lengua, is delish!!! i admit it's pretty hard getting over the fact that it's a tongue. but by the time i had it at this point, it hardly looked or felt like a tongue.

after it's all chopped up, just add some finely diced onions and finely diced jalepenos, some soy sauce and a combination of lemon and vinegar equal to the amount of soy sauce you put in. (i ended up using a whole cup of soy sauce, i think).

if it's still warm, (my kuya would say it's done, and) you can serve, but since i took forever cutting the meat, with the door open, some of my pig's head meat was pretty cold, so i took the opportunity to pan fry the meat (for all of you counting at home, that's right, i cooked this meat 3 different times), rendering a little bit of the fat, then sauteing the onions and jalepenos in said fat. and then i added the soy/vinegar/lemon combo, so not to reduce the sauce too much. i actually chopped up more onions to add as a garnish as well, and then lightly dusted it with some cayenne pepper cuz my wimpy jalepenos weren't really that hot at all.

(twss)

and the cayenne made it look prettier.

when i brought it over to thanksgiving and told all my cousins, none of them wanted any of it. none. even as i had asked them to just try it. none. and throughout the day, people (my uncles and aunties) would tell me what i should've done, "it should tasted more sour.... it shoulda had more spice... blah blah blah"

but by the end of the night, even though there was an abundance of the different desserts everybody else made, and leftover turkey, there were no leftovers for sisig.
none.
pig's head.
eat that.