How to Butcher an Entire Pig: Every Cut of Pork Explained | Handcrafted | Bon Appetit

my name is brian mayer i'm a

butcher

y educator and writer today we're here at wybrook farms where we're going to divide half a pig into cuts that you would see at your local

butcher

shop so the first thing we're going to do is remove the lard. Lard is the most neutral of all fats, meaning it doesn't have much flavor. Traditionally, it was used in things like pie crust and things like that before arrival. of lard, so here I'm just removing a little bit from the flank section. This is just a kind of preliminary step. We'll come back to it later in terms of removing the sirloin section, but that just gets it out of the way. and it also makes it a little easier to remove the loin, so along with the lard, one of the first things we're going to do is remove the kidneys as well.

Kidneys are wonderful. I usually grind them with my ground and put them in sausages. here I just follow the lumbar vertebrae all the way to where they become the sacral vertebrae and right into the h bone and I just follow a very natural scene and you can take the loin out very easily once you cut those first few connections it almost comes off by hand so here we are going to remove the shoulder section for our purposes today. I was counting between the fifth and sixth rib and that's where traditionally a butcher's pig would break if we were cutting it for sausages and wanted to lengthen it. certain muscles, so we would cut between, say, the six and the seven for charcuterie and what I will be able to do is basically a joint, so I will be able to remove this section without sawing and what that does is it helps the life of the I'm not cutting the corpse, so I'm not generating heat, which will cause the muscles to oxidize a little faster and I'm also not going to inject some bone powder into the muscle, so now I'm going to remove it.

Just a little bit more of that flank section and you can see back here with that skin. This pig has been hanging for about seven days, so it's very dry, so the skin is quite difficult to get through, so I'm just moving it aside. because what I want to do is expose this last vertebra in the lumbar section and what I am going to be able to do here is the same thing, I will use the weight of the animal to join and not have to saw and that piece will come off quite easily and then the last cut is separate the belly from the loin section and here we want to make sure we get a nice enough tail and a nice enough rib on our

pork

chop without cutting our belly incredibly short. bellies become bacon bacon is a great value added product for butchers,

every

one loves bacon so it is definitely in the butcher's best interest to have as much bacon as possible so these are the four basic elements: the belly of the loin and the ham along with the loin leaf. lard kidney and the head and then from here we will divide them into other cuts, so we have the shoulder section here which consists of the picnic butt and then a hawk and a trotter.

Here what we are doing is Removing the little hand from the rest of the arm bone, I was planning to make zamponi, but since the skin was so dry I thought maybe we could attach the leg, so first the little hand is removed and then we are going to locate the joint between the ulna, the radius and the humerus, we're going to cut it and then we're going to use the weight of the

entire

shoulder to break that piece off, so we're going to cut the picnic and the butt in half right along this natural. curve in the spine you don't want to cut the muscle, so we'll stop, make a cut and then again a little bit of the scapula is still there, so we'll stop and cut again. that bone, once we get through that bone, we're going to continue cutting it again, so now we have our two sections, we have the top part which is the butt and the bottom part is the picnic, so here I'm just removing the spine and that's . a really great cut to use if you're making something like

pork

riettes, then what you would do is take those bones along with a little bit of fat, some spices and a little bit of alcohol, cook that stuff, drain the fat, peel the meat off the bone. that meat in a jar pour the fat on top wait for it to solidify take a baguette and beat here what I'm doing is sewing the lunches missing muscles and some of the other shoulder muscles and I'm just Following along the shoulder blade there are a very natural seam there that you can peel right away and there I'm just removing a little bit of that excess fat that the fat will be used in the sausages and the fat will be used for cooking later. and the skin is really cool, we can take skin and turn it into things like cracklings or we can just add it to our broth, so here I'm just following this very natural seam and I'm removing the longissimus muscles that will form the coppa on the bottom of that muscle, which is the serratus, which will be cut into the Denver pork, so here I'm just removing a little bit of the scapula that's still left, traditionally this would be made into sausage and I think it's really cool.

We remove the top half of this section and we use it for steaks and roasts and we're really trying to minimize the amount of trimming here, so here I'm just following the natural seam and I'm going to remove a little bit of skin and what we can do is turn this into a boneless, skinless pork roast. These mussels in this particular part are quite tough so they will need low, moist heat to break down all that connective tissue and collagen here I am following the natural seam and what I am moving would be what is considered the short rib or pork rib I will leave these whole or what I can do is cut them into individual pork ribs one of the really great things about pork,

every

thing can be used from the blood from the skin of all the olfal that is allowed to be used.

I think the only thing we can't use is our lungs, but in reality everything gets used to it and I think pigs really do. exemplifies whole animal butchery, what I'm achieving here is something you don't normally see and that's pork brisket and again it's just another way to have a more versatile and usable slow cooker roast. I'll take the rest. section and I'm going to put that together into a full roast and here I'm basically squaring it up to make it into a more manageable sort of useful cut, so here's a breakdown of the shoulder and now what I'm going to do.

What I do is trim and clean these cuts in a way that you could see them in a butcher shop, so I'm just removing the silver skin, maybe if there is excess fat I'm getting rid of it, maybe if there are some rusty areas, a One of the things that I love to do with falcons is pierce the skin and what that will allow is some of the moisture to escape while it's simmering so that you get that really puffy skin. Here I am taking the ribs and everything I do. What I do is I just separate them right between each rib, so that's the pork brisket.

I'm going to trim off a little bit of excess fat again, something you don't normally see, but it's a fun cut to try. Here we're just going to take some of that away. The excess fat will be used for processing or making sausages and then again the skin is used in the broth. The skin can be made into cracklings, which is wonderful and excellent, but it is a long and arduous process, another great thing you can do. with skin are treats for pets and it is a really very healthy snack for them, so now I am working with the picnic that we had left after removing the breast, so here I am marking it and going down a little bit towards the fat because what I want is that the fat renders and almost bastes itself as I simmer this and again I can smoke it or I can just put it in the oven at a very low temperature and let it cook.

It takes a considerable amount of time, so this is the section of the shoulder where we remove the scapula. I'm marking it just to make it more visually pleasing and here we'll just tie this to keep the shape more consistent so it cooks. more evenly, so we'll take the trotter and divide it in half, we'll expose the center of that trotter and that collagen will be much easier in our broth. Next we have all the longissimus muscles and those are the longest muscles. group on the body and then it's going to be the eye on your pork chop or it's the coppa and that's what we're going to do here is we're going to tie a roast cup but then we're also going to cut the coppa stakes so here are the Cortes ends of our shoulder, some of these cuts, if not all, you'll find at your local butcher shop, so the next section we have here is the belly, so here I'm just following the rib bones with long, wide strokes trying to get out. as much muscle as I can on the side of the belly and trying to remove the ribs and as little beating as possible because turning the belly into bacon is a great way for butchers to have a value added product so here I go. follow the natural seam and you can see that the socretum or this abdominal muscle is easily separated from the rest of the belly.

There are many opinions about where the secret comes from. I like to take it out of the belly because it is the easiest accessible and it has a great flavor and lots of fat. Here I'm removing a bit of the gland in the flank section, unfortunately glands are one of the things we can't really use because they taste very bitter, so something like this can't be done. I don't want to have a gland so the main part of the belly would be bacon and bacon is really just salt and thyme and then maybe some smoked belly can be made into many different types of bacon from striped bacon or slab . bacon canadian bacon rasher jowl bacon many different types of things and these are the cuts that you can make from the belly so next we have the tenderloin section which includes the tenderloin so there are many different cuts that we can take from the bone of the Bone-in tenderloin roasts steaks, so what we're going to do here is remove this section of the tenderloin from the rest of the tenderloin, which is basically cutting between the vertebrae and then removing all of the muscle without having to cut it.

We will then turn it into a boneless tenderloin roast, so here what I have chosen to do is cut a different style of pork chop with the tenderloin bone attached, so I divide it between each vertebra by cutting a little bit of the rib section . and then just following the natural path of the rib and that's how I get a complete pork chop with the porcelain on and the other thing I like to do with these is leave all the fat and skin on them. There are different muscles included in there that will change the texture and that texture will change the flavor a little bit, so to counteract that nice and fatty with the skin as well for the rest of the loin, what I'm going to do.

It's the buzzer, I'm lining up my saw right at the base of the spine and just a couple quick bursts and once I've gotten through that section, I'm going to take the tip of my blade and work around each little bit of the vertebrae, so here I'm just following the feather bones that are at the back of the spine and I'll delete the vertebrae section and again I'll save this for things like that, so here I'm just following the rib. bone and cutting the vertebrae and just cutting a little bit of bone into the pork chops, here you will remove the skin and also the bone from the loin, so this is a part of the loin towards the back of the animal, towards an area where there are fingers bones and not ribs, so I removed the spine and finger bones, skinned them and here I'm just removing the excess fat.

There is always a balance between too much fat and too little fat. I personally love a ton of fat, but it's something that we slowly have to start customers buying and then here I'm going to rate it again just for a presentation and then I'm going to tie it and that tie will keep it in a more uniform shape and that will help in more even cooking, so in the last part we are going to tie something that is a kind of traditional Christmas roast, if you will, so we are going to tie what is essentially a pork rib roast without skin, leaving a good amount of fat, not too much. and expose or fry the ribs and really this is all just presentation.

Personally, I love leaving all that fat and meat on the bone, but for presentation purposes, it looks great to go ahead and fry a bone first that you want to scrape between the bone and remove the intercostal meat, so that's the meat between each bone and then it really depends on how you feel like doing it. I make a version where I scrape off as much meat and then take a clean rag and use that rag to remove some people really want to see nice clean bones, I think I would leave a little bit of meat there just because I'm very anti-French so here we're going to remove the skin and again we're left with some fat and some skin, all of which will be used to make the tenderloin the most tender muscle in the body, which that equates to a lack of flavor, so to help mitigate that I leave a good amount of fat or as much fat as I want. possibly you can, but one of the things we will have to remove is the silver skin so that the fascia doesn't tear when you grill it normally.

Here are the final cuts of thetenderloin that you will probably see in your butcher shop. so here we have the final traditional primary, the ham with the sirloin attached, just like we did on the front arm, we're going to do on the back, removing the rear arm is very similar to removing the front rotor that we're going to look at. for that joint we are going to look for articulation in the tarsal bones and we are going to cut and then use the table to help us separate that from the hock we are going to do is boning around the sir line, so first we will remove part of the sacral vertebrae and then we'll remove part of the hip that's still attached to the h bone and what that allows me to do is make sure I'm removing the bone and not pulling the muscle with it, so it's a much cleaner way to remove those bones, so that I'll cut through that cartilage, remove a little bit of the hip and then work around it. the remaining hip section into the h bone around the femur and then remove that section.

The h bone is a pretty difficult bone to remove, there is a tendon attached to it so that is one of the reasons why it doesn't. To dislocate the leg, the rear hawk is a little different from the front arm in that the rear hawk has a knee joint, so it's almost a straight cut through that section, so we'll remove the tibia from the femur by locating an area just below the kneecap and the patella and that area just below the kneecap allows us to cut that section very easily so now we can remove the tenderloin section so we continue right above the tip of the femur and as you can see, we get a much more complete section. piece of sirloin ideal for slicing steaks or turning into a roast, so here's the ham breakdown below.

I'm going to cut them up even further into pieces that you might see in your butcher case, so here again I'm just skinning and removing a little bit of that excess fat we're going to cut up some really flavorful sirloin steaks, there's a lot of muscle groups in there, so which texture increases the flavor. I like them a lot better than a pork chop, so next we have the ham and the four main muscles that include the top, the sirloin tip, the eye and the bottom, for our purposes let's skin it first leaving as much fat as possible, you want to see the shadow of the blade under the skin and that's how you know you're getting a really clean piece, so here we're following the natural seam and I'm just marking and following around the femur.

There is a very natural scene there that connects the upper round to the lower round and we will remove the upper round along those lines, so here what we are doing is removing this upper cap, this is the gracilis muscle, the cut that you will see in butcher shops in the case of meat, but It can totally be used in the pork box, it is also very thin, cooks quickly and is definitely an excellent cut for a couple of servings. It has a good amount of fat, so we'll trim it and remove the silver. skin or fascia there so with the rest of the leg muscles what I would like to do here is just bone it out so I just follow the bone and then the femur bone is stored so that the rest of the muscles the bottom around the eye and tip of the sirloin would traditionally be left together for a cubed ham for stew or for sausages, but I thought the usefulness of this is that we can turn all of these into really great roasts.

I'm going to remove some of that excess fat. I'm going to remove the patella, the patella that's still on the tip of the sirloin and then I'm going to tie each of these into individual roasts and what we'll end up doing. the top round take that and cut chops or schweinschnitzel and then the rest of the pieces that are left on the leg I cut to stew, so when you mash the schnitzel I use two pieces of saran wrap and you want to make sure you don't hit it straight down, You must push so as not to pierce the muscle.

These are the final cuts of the leg that you can find at your butcher shop and then we have the head which I like to call. the fifth primary, so the first thing I do is remove the ears, you can leave them attached, but traditionally what will happen is they will be cut into strips, cured along with the head and tongue and put on the skin. and it curls up and cooks along with it, so I'll remove them. What we are going to do here is something very typical in charcuterie, which is to remove all the skin along with the muscle of the skull in something called porta de testa or fromage de tete and here I simply continue around the skull.

I start at the top of the head and then work down along the sides of the skull, so I work in sections. I work one side loosening it and then turn it over. The other side joins them in the middle right around the forehead and then peels the animal's snout like viscera. People have this kind of negative connotation with their heads. You know he has a face, so I can understand what he really does. It's hard for people to even think about consuming it, but again, talking about pigs and their general usefulness, it's so great that you can take every part of this animal and turn it into food, even when you're done, the skull has a lot of meat left. in it so you can totally throw it in a pot and that can be your head cheese and these are the cuts that you get from the head and finally these are just a few of the many cuts that you can get from the side of a pig that