Owner and chef Michael Beard of 715 restaurant uses a whole pig on the average of once a week. The pigs come from Good Family Farms in Olsburg.

Chef Beard continues to prep a pig, which has a hanging weight of 250 pounds.

Chef Beard cuts some center-cut chops from the pig.

Making something yourself from scratch isn’t just cheap. It’s more satisfying and, in the case of food, it’s often way more tasty.

Which is why, once a week, Michael Beard buys a whole pig, head and all.

“I am kind of a pig snob,” jokes Beard, the executive at 715 restaurant, located at 715 Mass. “It would be different if we were just saying this is better and it wasn’t, it’s the same, you couldn’t taste the difference. But you can. You can taste the difference.”

With the delivery of each weekly pig, Beard, who spent a month learning the ins and outs of butchering in Italy, divvies up all 250 pounds of pork himself to make such delicacies as soppressata, salami and porchetta.

Each type of house-made meat has its own distinct process, and Beard has to carefully plan out the use of each pig to avoid shortages that wouldn’t happen if he were just hitting the order button on a restaurant supply site.

“Some parts have multiple applications, so we have to figure out what we need where,” Beard says. “And then how we break it down depends on what applications we need.”

Those applications can, at any one time, include bacon, sausage, ham, porchetta, salami, pancetta, soppressata, pepperoni, mortadella, Milanese, meatballs, ribs, pork chops, ravioli filling, sausage and anything else Beard is willing to tackle.

So, how does one man use an entire pig? The butcher himself breaks it down for us.

Soppressata

Made from: Head and trotters

Popular pig: The House Soppressata pizza is easily one of the restaurant’s most ordered pizzas.

Milanese

Made from: Neck

Something familiar: “We’ll pound that out and make, we call it Milanese, it’s basically a chicken-fried pork steak,” Beard says. “We also make coppa out of this, which is a type of cured whole meat.”

Sausage

Made from: Shoulder

Dual usage: It’s a fatty powerhouse perfect for barbecue-worthy pulled pork, too. “There’s a lot of nice marbling in there, as well,” Beard says. “And if we want to, we can slow-roast that as pulled pork for specials.”

Salami

Made from: Shoulder, belly, neck (depending on what style)

Careful, careful: “You have to be a lot more strict about your production because it’s an uncooked product,” says Beard, whose salami takes at least 30 days to make. “We have certain holding vessels, certain cutting boards, certain knives that I use just for our salami because I don’t want to cross-contaminate, even though we clean … I’m not even chancing it.”

Bacon

Made from: Belly

Interesting tidbit: Beard gets his pigs from Good Family Farm in Olsburg, a farm that specializes in the Duroc pig. “Those are known for meat quality and bellies, they have nice bellies on them for bacon,” says Beard, who has a 12-day process to make his bacon. Also made from the pig belly are the Italian specialties porchetta and pancetta.

Ham

Made from: Thigh and rump (haunch)

Such a ham: “The ham …,” says Beard, using the culinary term for a pig’s haunch. “That’s pretty much what we use that for.”