Category Archives: Meat

Meat, Pork

Crackling

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A sheet of puffy, happy pork cracklingCrackling is pig skin, cooked so that it’s crisp.  Since skin contains, and is often adjacent to, a good deal of fat, it benefits from a long, slow, rendering process, followed by a quick, high-heat crisping process.

You can form perfectly good crackling while cooking a skin-on pork roast, so long as the meat beneath the skin is a cut that also benefits from a long, slow cook.  Pork head, shoulder, and hock come to mind.  After the slow cook, raise the oven temperature to 425°F and bake until the skin becomes brittle, almost glass-like.

You can also cut the skin from the meat, then render and crisp it on its own.  This yields a product more like commercial pork … Continue reading.

Meat, Pork

Rendering Lard and Making Grammeln

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Slabs of lard rendered from raw pork fatI’ve rendered animal fat many times, but I recently learned that I was doing it wrong.  Or rather, not in the most effective manner.

Rendering is the process of turning raw, fatty tissue from animals into pure fat.  We render pieces of raw pork fat to get lard, and raw beef fat to get tallow.  I used to quickly cut up, say, pork leaf lard, or beef suet, or duck breasts, then throw them in a pot over low heat and leave them for several hours.  This works, but I was always surprised by the low yield.

My exploration of an improved rendering method began last summer, in Austria, while eating at a Heuriger.  I was served light rye … Continue reading.

Charcuterie, Meat, Sausages

A Survey of Commercial Sausage Additives

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A pack of bologna, with ingredients listReading the ingredients list of an industrially-produced sausage can be daunting.  We’ve been trained to mistrust “scientific sounding” ingredients, and there are ongoing discussions about the health risks associated with many common additives.  I don’t wade into that debate too much in this post, partly because I know so little about it, but also because there are few reliable studies on the subject.  The fields of nutrition and health are so tied up with industry that it’s hard to know what to believe.  I’ll leave it for you to decide what ingredients are okay and which are not.  In this post I simply describe the role the additive plays in the sausage-making process.  Interestingly, most them are used to accelerate … Continue reading.

Austrian, Charcuterie, Meat, Pork

Alternative Pork Primals: Belly-Loin Combo

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I first learned the pork primals in culinary school, and for years I considered that information dogmatic. Then in an Austrian grocery store I saw this:

Carinthian Farmer's Bacon in a grocery store in Austria

 

It’s called Carinthian farmer bacon (Kaerntner Bauernspeck).  Carinthia is a province in southern Austria, known for its rustic food.  It took me a few moments to realize where exactly this cut would have come from on a pig.  It is in fact a pork loin, with the side or belly still attached, cured as one large piece, cold-smoked, and sold in thick slabs.

Novel cuts like this are just as easy to butcher as the classics.  Following is a quick tutorial, with photos, to prove the point.

Here is a side … Continue reading.

Meat, Pork

Pork Cutting: Head

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So.  This is the pig’s head.  It is not a true primal cut, but deserves some special attention. I’ve written about a few preparations that involve cooking the head whole, either simmered to become headcheese, or roasted for its own simple enjoyment.  This post will discuss cutting the raw head into its various constituents, namely the jowl and ear.

Pork head

By far the largest piece of meat and fat on the head is the jowl.  It is a gorgeous cut, very similar to bacon, though a bit fattier.  I remove the jowl by following the jaw bone with my knife.

Cutting along the jaw bone to remove the jowlThe head with removed jowl

The meaty circle in the centre is the cheek muscle.

The cheek muscle

The main difficulty in dealing with the jowl is the … Continue reading.

Lamb, Meat

Lamb Chops

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Raw lamb chopThis is as casual as lamb gets at my house.  Typically, serving lamb is an event.  Lamb chops are probably the only cut that we would casually remove from the freezer the day we plan to cook it, then grill it briefly for a private dinner.

Lambs can be cut however you want, but typically the loin is divided into two sections.  The thoracic section, containing the ribs, is usually formed into a rack of lamb.  The lumbar section, which has no ribs, makes lamb chops.  Lamb chops are analogous to the T-bone steaks on a side of beef.  In the picture at left, the round, white bone at the bottom of the chop is the chine bone, or backbone.  … Continue reading.

Meat, Pork

Pork Cutting: Shoulder Primal

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This is the best primal, without question.  It is the source of the best pulled pork, the best roast pork, the best sausages, the best confit, the best…  you get the idea.

Below is a pork shoulder, as it looks straight from the side.  You can see the neck bones on the left, followed by the first few thoracic vertebrae and ribs.  At the bottom is the front hock.

The pork shoulder primal

The neck, back, and rib bones separate surprisingly easily from the meaty shoulder.  I start by cutting behind the feather bones, then follow the chine and ribs…

Cutting behind the backbone on the shoulder

…which all come off it one piece, like so:

The neck bones and riblets, removed from the pork shoulder

Next I remove the hock.  As with the hind hock, I prefer to separate at … Continue reading.

Meat, Pork

Pork Cutting: Loin Primal

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You know what’s messed up?  Centre-cut pork loin is the most popular cut of pork.  At the grocery store it sells better than tenderloin (which is more tender) and way better than shoulder (which is more flavourful, juicy, and versatile).  People are crazy for lean meat that comes in uniform, round shapes.

The loin primal is usually cut into chops, notably the centre-cut loin chops.  I like a good chop as much as the next guy, but this particular loin is going to become back bacon.  We will therefore remove all the bones, the fatback, and skin so that we have what is called the eye of loin.

Here’s the loin.  On the bottom left you can see the back … Continue reading.

Meat, Pork

Pork Cutting: Belly Primal

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This is what the belly primal looks like right off the hog.  On the top left side you can see the ribs.  These are called “side ribs,” as opposed to “back ribs,” which are on the loin primal.  In fact, this entire primal is sometimes called “side pork.”

On the bottom left is the breastbone, or sternum.The pork belly primal

The ribs are covered in a membrane that doesn’t break down very well, even after extensive cooking.  When I buy side ribs from the grocery store, the first thing I do is remove that membrane.  I think it’s easiest removed while the ribs are still attached to the belly, so we’ll do it now.

Each rib has a vein running between the membrane … Continue reading.

Meat, Pork

Pork Cutting: Leg Primal

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Having divided the side of pork into primals, we will now deal with each primal in turn.  First the leg.

This is a whole leg of pork.  In the Austrian style, it was removed so that the entire hip bone was left within.  (In North America, the pig is usually divided so that part of the hip remains on the loin.)  Since the sirloin is defined as the loin section where the hip bone is, the entire sirloin is also still attached to this leg.  But we’ll talk about that later.

Whole leg of pork

First we remove the trotter.  The joint between the foot and the hock is a bit funny.  On the lower, hind side of the joint there is a long … Continue reading.