My observation of others doing hogs makes me say I will buy my pork from the store. I have known several folks who butchered exactly ONE hog and the comments have always been, NEVER AGAIN!
Both sides of my family came from small family farms and butchered their own pork. Both used 55 gal steel drums over wood fires to scald the carcass before scraping it so that limited the size they could handle. It is quite an operation and not one that I would choose if there were viable alternatives.
I do or have done fish, frogs, turtles, rabbits, squirrels, and such but I don't do my own beef and am even less interested in doing my own pork.
I do recall my dad bringing home a fresh ham one time and we used Morton brand sugar cure on it to good effect. There is still salt in the sugar cure but not as much. If after the cured ham is sliced and before you do whatever it is you are going to do with it you put it in a pan of water and bring it to a boil briefly first, you will remove a lot of the salt. You can soak it in water over night in the fridge and then bring it to a boil before doing whatever you want to do with it and it reduces the salt content considerably. It doesn't spoil the flavor. You can boil and then fry and except for less salty taste the results are virtually indistinguishable.
If you cut back the salt in the curing process too much you will not get a good safe cure. I think it is better to put it in for food storage safety and take a lot of it back out with soaking/boiling rather than run risks by cutting back on the salt too much in the curing process. There are alternative chemicals besides salt but I like them even less than salt.
Pat
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