Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

Here’s how my pig skull turned out (prep post is here).

Verdict? I’m reasonably happy with it. As Mike wrote in the post that kicked off the “Things to Make and Do” series, “a pig skull is a serious piece of kit”. It’s big and substantial and it looks awesome sitting on the shelf. I learned a lot prepping it, and in particular I learned a couple of things that I will do differently next time:

1. From now on I will cut the meat off first and grill only that, and not put the skull through the thermal stress of getting dry-cooked. Even with indirect heat, I think smoking the whole head did adversely affect the quality of the bone. The forehead and the rami of the mandibles in particular lost a little integrity. I painted the whole skull with a mix of 50% PVA (white glue, like Elmer’s) and 50% water, so it’s solid, but the surface bone is just slightly rough, I think because of degradation of the cortical bone.
2. Before this I had only prepped small bones–small mammal and reptile skulls, vertebrae and long bones of domestic fowl, cannon bones and hooves of cattle. Stuff like that takes maybe an hour or two max to simmer, and to whiten, and that’s how I approached the pig skull. And it took forever, because I was doing short cycles, which meant doing a lot of them. I did a sheep skull this past holiday break, which I will post about soon, and I learned that the trick with bigger bones is just time. Simmer for 12 hours, not 2 hours, whiten for 2 or 3 nights, not just one. The sheep skull probably took more time from start to finish, but it was a lot less effort, because for much of that time it was just simmering, or soaking in dilute hydrogen peroxide.

With their deep lower jaws, pig skulls look rather lumpen in lateral view. But they look awesome in anterodorsal view, like dragon skulls. Here you can see that the prenasal bone is a little darker and less crisp than the other bones of the face. That’s because it was still ossifying from a big block of cartilage. I scraped off most of the cartilage, but not all, and what remained dried and hardened into an incredibly tough, translucent, slightly yellowish shell. 

I still have two pig heads on ice. I probably won’t do anything with either of them until I get some more time off, but I am looking forward to prepping another pig skull, in part to see how much better I can do the next time. But I’m still happy to have this one. To paraphrase another line from Mike’s old post, this is something that everyone ought to do.

Edit: here are some links about cooking pig heads and prepping skulls.

• Will it Sous Vide?: The Head of a Pig (Lifehacker)
• How to Clean Animal Bones So You May Proudly Display Them in Your Home (Lifehacker)
• Why Pig’s Head Should Headline Your Next Cookout (Thrillist)
• Porchetta di Testa – Pig’s Head Roulade (West Coast Prime Meats)