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Butcher & The Burger Offers Butchery Classes

By Amy Cavanaugh in Food on Jun 10, 2012 6:00PM

If you know Butcher & The Burger, you're probably more familiar with the second half of the name. The Lincoln Park restaurant offers excellent burgers that you can customize with spices, cheeses, and other toppings; results include a richly flavored bison burger with griddled onions, mushrooms, and Swiss. But there's also a butchery program, and on a recent night we stopped in to see Chef Allen Sternweiler break down an Ossabaw hog.

Sternweiler started with half of an Ossabaw hog, which is a heritage breed that descended from Spanish pigs brought to North America more than 400 years ago. The pigs, which originally lived on Ossabaw Island, Georgia (now there are small breeding groups on the mainland), have a large amount of fat, which they needed to get through the winter. There isn't much meat on each animal, but what's there is much darker than you'd expect for a pig.

As Sternweiler started cutting the pig apart, he set aside slabs of fat to turn into lard, sliced out the tenderloin, isolated chops, and Frenched the ribs. He saved bits here and there to use for sausage. You can buy cuts of meat at the end of the class, and what's leftover goes into the pork burgers, is sold in the meat case, or becomes lard, sausage, or other products. The class is a great intro to butchery, and we left wanting to take a hands-on class.

The observation portion lasted a little more than an hour, and it's BYOB, so you can watch while sipping beer. After the class, we went out to the new patio for pork burgers topped with salt and pepper seasoning, lettuce, tomato, and onion, along with fries and truffle mayo.

The hog classes are held a couple times a month, and there are also classes that focus on duck, chicken, and seafood. Classes are $75 (which includes dinner) and you can find the upcoming schedule here.