welcome friends welcome back to the kitchen today we are breaking down the
shoulder of the pig my friend Jamie is here he is a butcher educator author and
he works with Westside beef who has provided us with this hog so what are we
gonna do with the shoulder so we're gonna get the shoulder down to the
picnic and the Boston butt but we're also gonna be removing the
front Trotter and the front hawk as well too okay okay but Boston butt it's from
the front of the animal a lot of people a lot of people make that mistake that's
true and it was called it ended up being called a butt because they were taking
these and putting them into barrels which were called butts and packing them
up and sending them back over to Europe in salt I imagine I would imagine so -
okay yeah okay so the first cut I want to do and then I'm gonna turn you loose
well I'm going to navigate you through okay so the first one we do is we'd like
to go through a lot of the joint work so that we're not just taking this on
cutting everything in everything along lines so what I'd like to do is I'd like
to actually just kind of joint out this front Trotter and I'm just looking for
there's like a bit of an indent here after this bone there's a really thick
tendon in there so what I need to do is just get through that tenon so maybe I
won't translate too good on camera but I'll just try to hold it up here so what
I'm looking for is that really thick tendon that I'm getting through into the
tendon and now that just allows me to put a little bit of down pressure on
this joint here so I'm just gonna pick it up to make it a little easier and
I'll cut through the bone just like so and round it out Trotter one Trotter
excellent okay so the next thing we're gonna do and I'm gonna let you do this
Glen is I want to take off this front hawk okay so yeah so not to humanize it
for the points that I'm looking for but there's there's like an elbow almost in
this section here okay right there and then if we were to humanize it even more
which is maybe not the greatest thing to do but I look for the armpit okay so I
go from this point to this point and that's where I'm gonna take my knife and
I'm just gonna draw and cut down on line okay over the two I'm gonna take
the song I'm gonna cut through that bone okay
what's underneath okay so right there exactly yep perfect line through as a as
a guide that's right and I can hold this side if you like and we just we'll just
go right to the bone perfect and then we'll just take the knife and finish off
the cut okay Hawk one Hawk excellent all right so now what we've got left is the
butt and the picnic of the shoulder okay and I think for right now what we'll do
is we're just gonna cut right through the middle okay so you're gonna go
through these four ribs that were our marker when we were removing the
shoulder from the loin and belly we're gonna go right underneath where this
backbone is it becomes the neck bone here okay we're just gonna take the saw
and we're gonna cut right along that line there okay okay
okay perfect so from here we'll take the knife again we're gonna cut through that
line there's gonna be another bone okay but I don't want to just keep using this
odd of tears through the muscle fibers I want to make as many cuts as I can with
the knife so there's like the bone there that's right there's that's the shoulder
blade okay so now what we do we'll just get this out and just cut through that
shoulder blade there we go cut through with the knife mm-hmm okay perfect so
now we've got our picnic and our Boston so both of these can be broken down even
farther that's right so you take the bones off I'm gonna make sausages yep so
essentially we just need to focus on getting the bones up getting the bones
out okay yep and we can do that for sure so we'll put the Boston butt aside okay
and we can focus on the picnic here okay I'm gonna watch you sure sounds good
I'll take the knife thank you sir so first things first I'm just gonna remove
this these first four ribs okay and to do that I'm just gonna come under the
ribs like so I'll make a few passes until I can get a better line of sight
where I'm cutting and I'm just gonna remove those first four ribs like so
okay okay those are done so the next cut that I'm gonna work on is just a little
piece of cartilage here the next kind I'm gonna take off is something that we
don't normally see on the pig at least merchandise but it's I think it's well
worth noting and taking a look this is just gonna be just some basic trim that
I pull off this is an extension of the coppa which was on the Boston bite
that's just that's gonna find its way into sausage okay it's going to be this
muscle right here that I'm focused on which is the brisket and it's actually
quite sizable on a pig all you have to just find the seam and once I find the
seam in the meat I can seem out the brisket and this is going to be actually
a sizable cut and it's something that we could
actually put into practice and find a utilization for so at the grocery store
I have never seen this cut no you never generally would but once we've got it to
this point now this is like that's your brisket I mean it is a lot smaller than
a beef brisket but I would wager you could probably feed three to four people
off of that and treat it exactly the same way um porks a little bit different
and in fact that I don't know that you would need to cook it nearly as long but
you certainly could put it on some smoke and it would be just absolutely
delicious fantastic so there's a brisket anyway that's gonna get me into sausage
side note what we will focus on is getting this shoulder blade out and into
the the humerus here so that shoulder blade runs right here this and then I'm
just gonna come in there's a joint that connects the shoulder blade to the
humerus here okay right so I'm just gonna focus on getting to that humerus
bone and I can change my grip a little bit and now I'm just gonna navigate
around this bone up to the shoulder blade like so okay once I do that get
around this joint so now what I can do is I just need to kind of flip it around
in order to get underneath that humerus bone and then underneath the shoulder
blade so now I've got a boneless picnic shoulder so this picnic shoulder when
you see it in jet net at the grocery store at the Captur shop that's this
this hole that's right albeit a bit more cosmetically cleaned up for presentation
but exactly so they would just kind of jet in it something like so take the
skin off take the skin off clean up any of these bloody bits and any of the
membranes and then you're pretty good to go there's not a lot of there's not a
lot of glands in here okay but there's a couple that you should be looking for
where we took the head off yep there's gonna be some more of those glands that
we were taking off the cheek we can just kind of cut down just a little bit to
remove some of them okay so I see I see this client here that's right okay yep
there's that one and then on the other side of the shoulder I'm just going to
be
some extra fatty bits in here that you may or may not find some in we're okay
on that side and then again yeah it's just kind of like focusing on getting
this bloody residual blood out and it's fruit in pretty good shape now what I
will do is I'll just turn it over real quick and maybe I'll get the skin off
okay so I'm taking the skin off this can be another one of those kind of like
things that people think is really easy and it doesn't need to be difficult as
long as you've got a sharp knife so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to be
trying to make just those long fluid passes that we were talking about mhm
right so we'll make long fluid passes till we get all that skin off skins off
no homeless yeah there you go excellent yeah okay and so then the but same same
situation I mean the it's obviously different skeletal structure so we want
to make sure that we're getting these bones off but I'd like to actually start
by skinning the Bossin but as it is with the bone on it okay so I'll just take it
from the top here and I'll just peel off the skin and the shoulder really is kind
of like the perfect ratio of skin or sorry meat to fat ratio for making
sausages so now what we've got is the neck bone and a little bit of that
backbone in there so I'm just going to come in underneath the backbone here
release those bits of the backbone okay okay and then this is all kind of
connected into this neck bone here so what I can do is I can just apply a
little bit of pressure to the backbone as I'm navigating myself around this
neck bone which is like notoriously kind of difficult to get out without leaving
a little bit of meat on it I'm sure that somebody might have an ulterior opinion
of that but because there's so many like nooks and crannies in the vertebrae
it's kind of tricky to get it without just leaving a little bit of meat we
don't want to make the world's greatest soup bone that's not that that's not the
idea here like to minimize the damage but it is the world's grace yeah and you
can of course if you want but we'll leave that just like so cool so from
here it's a continuation of this bone that's correct that's right yeah exactly
that's where we split the picnic off here so we really only really need to
finish out that that's scapula so if we were talking about a boneless pork
shoulder okay like or the Coppa this would be that muscle right here that I'm
gonna see mo right now and pull it right off that shoulder blade this muscle
right here so Coppa yep that is the og capicola right that is the og capicola
that's exactly the muscle you want to use for that so just again that perfect
ratio of like meat to fat and then cured and sliced is yeah decadent that's when
that is done correctly that is just absolutely amazing to me I love that oh
for sure and you know again in in the hands of a skilled charcuterie master I
don't even know I think maybe I've maybe even said that word wrong but well I I
know there's people in New Jersey saying it's not capicola it's gabagool oh right
so there I'll say it for you it's gabagool yeah but Google heard that
before No so I'm just finishing out this last
bit of the scapula here okay in order to get that out so there's our last minutes
capicola there's a little bit more trim for our sausage we'll put that in with
the brisket and voila there's our boneless pork shoulder ready for your
sausage so we've got lots of bones for soup in this which is amazing so a lot
of stock Trotter for stock as well stock yeah there's a little bit of meat in
there so I would wager you could actually make that part of your head
cheese recipe excellent and ham hock again something that is great cured and
smoked yep and then used in soups smoked cure and smoked this and then put it in
a french-canadian pea soup yeah and it's just unbelievable very reasonably
specific fantastic yeah yeah so that is the front shoulder of the pig
come on back for the next one where we're going to break down the belly the
belly so we'll do that we'll do the belly next thanks for stopping by see
you again soon capicola or but picnic shoulder Trotter pork hock bones
you