This content was created by Victor Justin Rhodes. This content was uploaded by Victor Justin Rhodes. This is a YouTube instructional video titled "How to Scald (and Scrape) Your Pig for Butchering" (created 2019-03-27, last edited 2026-04-10). The excerpt is a spoken monologue by a single presenter (SPEAKER A) and is part 2 of a 3-part how-to series on home pig butchering. The presenter gives a practical, step-by-step overview of scalding and scraping a hog (hang on a gimbal or pulley, scald in ~150°F water — example uses a 100-gallon tank and a 4–5 minute dunk, then scrape with a scraper tool while avoiding piercing the skin), notes trouble spots (head, armpits), and explains why scalding may be preferred to skinning. The presenter also promotes a longer paid/bonus video with more details (including alternate scalding methods, tool recommendations, how to save blood) and describes that part 1 covers humane killing/bleeding and part 3 will cover evisceration.
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This is lesson 2 in my 3-part series on how to harvest your own pigs and prepare them for butchering. In this video, I'm going to give you a brief overview of how you go about scalding and scraping your pig. In the first video, I talked about how do you actually kill in a quick, humane way and why that's important. If you missed that, I'll put the link to that down in the description. So after you've killed, you need to scald and then scrape, get the hair off. So how do you do that? One, you hang your hog on a gimbal. We used a tractor to hang it up in the air. If you don't have that, you could use a pulley system or several different people. Two, now you go into the scald. This is where you get water up to about 150 degrees. In my case, we have this huge 100-gallon tank that we heated up prior, and we dunk the pig down in there with the tractor, and it took about— I took several minutes, I would say 4-ish, 5-ish minutes. And, you know, just jostling that around, letting the hot water get in there. It works a lot like— if you've butchered chicken, it works a lot like scalding for plucking chickens. It just makes that hair to come off easier. What we couldn't get, say the rump sticking out, we would splash water over it. There are ways to do it without a huge scalding tank. I go into that more in my extra bonus video, links in the description for that. It's basically this video but expanded, like 20 minutes long-ish, like all these points, more info on that. So check that out. After you scald, you want to scrape. So you want to set up this pallet table, and we show you how to do that in the video. You set up this pallet table so it's very comfortable for you, and you grab this tool, this scraper tool, and you scrape. Scrape fairly hard, but if you go too hard with the bells, they will, they will pierce through the skin, which is not ideal. If you've done it right, the hair goes off right. You can test that before you pull it out of the the scald. We don't need too long. It's ready. Yeah, we need more. Yeah, but that gets the hair off. And there are reasons why you want to go through the trouble of scald as opposed to skinning. We'll go over that in the video as well. And as you scrape, you just want to make sure you thoroughly go over it. The more difficult parts are parts around the head. They're hard to get to. The other parts are maybe— I had a hard time scraping the armpit, but around the arms and legs, you just want to spend a little extra time there and make sure you get all the hair off. That's a real quick informational video for you on how to, how to scald and scrape your hog. Guys, if you really want to do this, get the detailed video. It's down in the description. I think, like I said, it's about 20-ish minutes. And once you sign up for that video, you also get the, the kill and bleed video. So check it out. There's more info in there, like, um, how to save the blood, like if you actually want to consume that respect the entire pig, use as much as you can, saving the blood. We go into the tools, we go into how to scald if you don't have a big tank. We actually give you 3 options, one of them being a big tank, but we'll give you 2 other options. So check that out, it's part 2 of my 3-part series. When you sign up for that, you're going to get part 3 too, and part 3 will be on how to actually eviscerate, get the guts and the organs out, and so that then you can take it to the butcher or you can butcher it yourself. So That'll be my 3-part series. If you've signed up for video number 1, you don't have to sign up for 2. You should have gotten an email about it, and you'll get automatically video number 3. Thanks, guys. Hope you're learning from this series.
