Mastering the Butchery of a Pig's Shoulder: Traditional Techniques

bringing the people behind our food to life so now I'll work on the shoulder first things first we need to take off the Trotter and the hawk Trotters can be a little scary but they're actually the best part of the pig in my opinion the reason for that is that there's a lot of gelatin in this Trotter so if you put this in your stock pot the gelatin starts to seep out over time as you cook it on low and that's going to not only thicken the stock but it's going to make it the flavor much more intense so I tend to use the Trotters in my stock pot if I have a larger Trotter that has a little more meat in it I'll actually bone it out and put um ground sausage and herbs and then tie it up and I'll poach that in my stock so to take the Trotter off you're going to use your your small boning knife and you're going to kind of wiggle it around and figure out where the articulation between the bones are so there's a ball in socket there that you want to try and find so I'm just going to going to take my knife and pretty much just score around there and if I'm lucky I'll actually get right where those two bones meet so I don't even need to use my saw all I need to do is just kind of jiggle my knife in there to release the tendon and take that Trotter off like that then we've got our Hawk this is a nice sized Hawk um I'll use usually try and look for that elbow and I'll go just a little bit Above That Elbow for my Hawk if you want to leave more meat on the shoulder for sausage say that's fine but let that kind of be your guideline so again I'm going use my knife to score and whenever you're working on your pig really try to move the the primals around around so they're working for you if you feel like you're at an awkward angle then move this so that it's closer to your body you're standing up straight and you have a good angle with your knife so I've cut through uh the skin there and the flesh so now I'm going to use my saw to get through that leg bone and this is something you can also do before you turn your pig into primals think I've gotten through that okay so there's a nice Hawk so you can also stuff this like you would the Trotter or you can just leave that bone in um set it in brine for about 2 days or so and then smoke this and then put that in a pot of beans delicious so there's our shoulder so now we have um the Copa which runs like this we have the Boston butt which is the Copa plus a few more little muscles right in here and we have the picnic now traditionally the picnic is used to make ground sausage and the ca or the Boston but are typically roasted slow with lots of smoke and then it just starts to fall apart there's beautiful fat in there you get pulled pork in France you get what's called estad um in Italy you get what they call kianti Tuna um and the idea is that you're salting it cooking it in some sort of liquid wine beer milk uh water stock and just letting it all break down so you can turn this into two large bone in roast by simply sawing um I like to actually take the bone out on the shoulder so I'll show you how to do that so you'll recognize what I'm about to do is just like what I did taking these ribs off the belly so again I'm just sticking my knife under there and letting the articulation between the bone and the muscle guide me and I'm pushing up up towards the ribs now when I get to about here I'm going to be really careful because I don't want to cut into this beautiful Copa here so I'm going to stop there I'm going to start working up here on that spine and always make sure you can see where the point of your knife is so that's why I'm pulling this back so that I can see exactly where it's going if you can't see where it's going you're likely to cut into something pretty valuable and look how this is just wanting to kind of pull off so my knife is barely doing any work and then we've got a few what we call feather bones because they actually are about as thin as feathers so I just got to get under there and release those and we're done so here we've got nice bones I I like to leave a little meat on those bones for stocks but that can goes right into the stock pot and then what we've got left is again the Copa or Boston butt and the picnic so for the Copa I like to sort of keep it on its own but I keep this fat and skin on for cooking so you can see where this muscle group ends right here so I'm just going to cut straight down and I'm hitting the shoulder blade there so I'm going to cut over that and then I just take the tip of my knife and carve along the top of that shoulder blade just around it like so to just release it from that shoulder blade so I can go ahead there's a little Gap there but that's fine you can just go ahead and you can stick some herbs in there some salt and then I would tie this up and again salt it pepper it slow braze it slow roast it cook it in the best tasting liquid you can find this is my favorite cut of the entire Pig and it is so overlooked so keep your Copa intact okay so now we have the picnic this is where the leg was we have a bone there that's coming in this way and meeting up with the shoulder blade blade this is the shoulder blade right here so I'm going to again open this like a book to reveal what's beneath and try to get that bone out so I'm going to kind of cut diagonally across to try and get these muscle groups off this shoulder blade as much as possible and to also reveal where that leg bone is at the same time I'm following seams so you can see here there's kind of a bluish whitish whitish fascia there that's my guide that's always my guide when I butcher so I can stick my fingers in there and basically pull it apart with my hands if I want to so I'm going to say okay here's one little roast this fascia is telling me where to cut okay go ahead and just cut this funny shaped little roast off here it almost looks like a fake Copa in a way and this I can also tie up as a roast roll it up leave that skin and fat on so that's another roast for now this part of the picnic I actually will use all for shoulder so I don't have to be quite as precise when I'm cutting this off but I do like to keep large chunks intact I'm just slicing this off and this will go into grind now you'll see there's a little bit of blood and what looks almost like uh bone fluid basically uh you want to cut that out um but that's basically ready to go into the grinder and now I revealed where that arm bone comes in and hits the shoulder bone so my goal here is to do kind of what I did with that Trotter in the beginning which is toine that articulation of the ball and socket which is right there so I've released that tendon by just jiggling my knife in and around that ball and socket joint and then I'm just carving around the shoulder blade and this can be a bit of a tricky bone to um to get out and partially it's because the shoulder blade underneath here comes down like this so it's not as intuitive as say just a regular leg bone there's a lot of meat in and under there that can be really difficult to to stay keep it on the on the shoulder so what I like to do is try to work at the top where it's a little less complicated and release it that way and then when I've released it enough hopefully can take my towel and just rip that right off and that's going to be a much cleaner cut now because I can see exactly the shape of that bone so all that meat will stay with the shoulder roast like so okay so there's that shoulder blade there's that funny shape that's hard to really get your knife into precisely okay and then just need to cut out this leg bone which is much easier to do and again if you leave a little bit of meat on the bone that's fine because you're going to stick it in your stock pot and you want a little meat in your stock that's what's going to flavor it so you're just working around that big ball at the end of the bone which can get a little tricky there's a couple of little pieces of senu in there that keep it on there okay so now we've got this sort of funny looking piece of meat um this is why uh people will often turn this into sausage but this can also be a roast um I will actually take my knife and kind of cut it up like this get salt in there get lots of herbs in there get breadcrumbs in there and then go ahead and roll it up tie it and that's going to be a beautiful roast as well you can trim off these little pieces that are hanging right here to make it look pretty but that's going to taste good or you can turn it into sausage meat which requires you basically to take all this skin off and I try to leave as much fat as I can on the meat um shoulder is the best meat to use for sausage because it has the usually has the perfect ratio of fat to meat if you leave all that fat on or as much as you can and the skin is also actually very flavorful um I will take pieces of skin about this big roll it up like that and tie it and just keep those pieces in my freezer and then I'll use that throw that into a stock pot um you can also fry it up make chichiron um sometimes if I have a leaner uh cut of meat like say venison or lamb for instance I will keep these pieces of pork skin and actually wrap the pork skin around that lean roast um or lean piece of meat and that provides moisture and fat to flavor the meat um and it keeps it moist as well so it won't dry out as quickly so there's some lovely pieces of skin and there's our picnic

Channel: Food Farmer Earth

Views: 224,741

Keywords: pig butchery, shoulder cuts, traditional techniques, Trotter, Hawk, Boston butt, picnic shoulder, culinary preparation.

Id: VJy7nGS11VY

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 12 2012