Charcuterie_ The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing - Michael Ruhlman [13]
Drifting down from the ribs toward the ham is the pork tenderloin (c), the muscle nestled in the underside of the back ribs. Because it is not strenuously used, it is very tender and so needs little cooking.
The large long muscle riding on top of the ribs is the pork loin (d). Brian has tied it to be roasted. Notice how low the ribs are and how tall the spine. Normally the loin is covered by a very thick layer of back fat. You can get a sense of the thickness of the back fat in the shoulder piece to the right of the loin.
The shoulder butt (e) is the muscular fatty cut from which sausage is made. Below it is what is called the picnic ham (f). Both the shoulder and picnic ham must be cooked low and slow before they will become tender. When working with these cuts, it’s important to be on the lookout for glands scattered between the shoulder and the head. About the size of a quarter, they’re more brown than pink and squishy rather than firm, neither fat nor flesh. These should be trimmed away and discarded.
At the back end of the hog is the ham (g). This is the cut that can become the great jamón ibérico or prosciutto or Smithfield ham (or even a honey-baked ham). Each pig, of course, has two of them. Between them, not pictured here, is the tail, which can also be braised to good effect.
Extending from each picnic ham and ham is a shank, or hock (h). Ham hocks are best known smoked, used to flavor stews and the like, but they can be very good simply braised. Extending from the hocks are the feet, the trotters (i). These pieces are filled with a lot of bones and very little meat, but they can be cleaned out, stuffed and braised for the eponymous bistro dish. (This dish is actually much better made from hock meat.)
The jowl (j) is a wide slender slab of meat and fat that can be cured like pancetta and hung to dry, then used like pancetta or bacon or sliced paper-thin and eaten as is. It’s fantastic, and probably the easiest meat to cure for the home cook. It’s especially important with the jowl to check the meat for glands.
The ears (k) can be braised, peeled, and julienned, then used as garnish in pâtés and headcheese, which is made by simmering the entire head until the meat is falling off the bone, then chilling the shredded meat and julienned ears with vegetables and herbs with some of the highly gelatinized stock in a terrine mold.
LIVE WEIGHT: BUYING A WHOLE HOG
At a local growers’ market on the eastern edge of Cleveland, I got to know an Amish family selling a variety of grains, eggs, fruits, vegetables, and pork. I asked Daniel, the one responsible for raising the hogs, if we could buy one whole. I wanted to work with some of the more difficult-to-obtain items, such as intestines and blood. I also wanted to see the difference firsthand between the factory-raised hogs and a farm-raised hog, one that had fed on the apples and nuts and corn that grew at Daniel’s farm.
Daniel said he’d charge me eighty cents per pound, live weight. I spoke with Brian about this, and he said he’d like one too. By late October, our hogs weighed just under 300 pounds. (For the record, pigs can be called hogs when they reach sexual maturity at about seven months or weigh over 160 pounds.) With a small fee for delivering them to the butchery, and a fee by the butcher to take the bristles off the skin, stun, kill, clean, and halve the hogs, the total cost for each of us came to about $275.
I was able, just, to fit the two slaughtered beasts in the back of our Jeep Grand Cherokee, covered with sacks of ice, and I took them to our friends Mark and Giovanna Daverio, who own Battuto, our favorite Italian restaurant. Giovanna used to work in the kitchen of Zuni Café, cooking with the legendary Judy Rodgers, and Mark had worked at Oliveto under Paul Bertolli, whose skill with hogs is probably unparalleled among American chefs. We enlisted their help, or rather their walk-in cooler, to store the hogs