The Art of Butchering: A Comprehensive Guide to Working with Pork Cuts

When it comes to working with pork cuts, one must have a thorough understanding of the anatomy and various techniques for handling and processing different sections of the animal. In this guide, we will delve into the world of pork butchery, exploring the different primal cuts, how to break them down into sub-primals, and develop individual cuts suitable for cooking.

The Leg Primal Cut

The leg primal cut is a fundamental part of any butcher's repertoire. To begin with, we need to locate the area just below the patella and kneecap. This section provides an ideal spot to remove the tibia from the femur by cutting through it almost straight. With this in mind, we can proceed to remove the sirloin section, following a natural seam that connects the top round to the bottom round. The result is a more extensive piece of meat suitable for steaks or roasting.

Breaking Down the Sirloin Section

We now have a substantial piece of meat to work with. To extract individual cuts from this section, we can cut down into parts reminiscent of those found in your butcher's case. Skinning and removing excess fat is essential at this stage, as it enhances the overall flavor and texture of the final product. The sirloin section offers an abundance of muscle groups, which contribute to its exceptional flavor profile. These cuts are often preferred over pork chops, offering a more satisfying culinary experience.

Working with the Ham

Moving on to the ham primal cut, we find four primary muscles: the top round, sirloin tip, eye round, and bottom round. Our first task is to skin the ham, leaving as much fat intact as possible. We then identify the natural seam connecting the top round to the bottom round and remove this section along those lines. The resulting cut includes a top cap, also known as the gracilis muscle, which can be used for quick-cooking cuts or served in cubes for stew.

Deboning the Leg Muscles

After removing the top round, we proceed to debone the remaining muscles – the bottom round, eye round, and sirloin tip. This step allows us to access the underlying meat more efficiently. We remove any excess fat, patella (kneecap), and silver skin or fascia from the surface, preparing these cuts for further processing.

Creating Roasts

The deboned muscles can be transformed into individual roasts suitable for various cooking methods. By tying each section into its own roast, we unlock a world of culinary possibilities. The top round is ideal for creating cutlets, such as schnitzel, while the remaining pieces are suited for stew or slow-cooked dishes.

Exploring Cuts from the Head

The head primal cut offers an array of cuts and delicacies that deserve attention. We begin by removing the ears, which can be left attached or removed separately. The ears are typically cured with other head meats and used in traditional charcuterie recipes.

Skinning the Skull and Creating Porqueta de Testa or Fromage de Tete

The next step involves removing the entire skin along with the muscle from the skull, a process known as porqueta de testa or fromage de tete. We follow the natural contours of the skull, working in sections to loosen and remove the skin. This exercise requires patience and finesse, as we navigate around the forehead and snout.

Tying Up Loose Ends: The Utility of Pork Cuts

Finally, it's essential to acknowledge that every part of a pig can be used in cooking. Even after removing the skull, there is still substantial meat left on hand. We can employ these remains to create our own head cheese or incorporate them into other recipes.

In conclusion, mastering the art of pork butchery demands attention to detail and a deep understanding of the different cuts available. By exploring each primal cut, sub-primals, and individual pieces, we unlock an array of culinary possibilities that showcase the versatility and flavor profile of pork meats. Whether it's creating succulent roasts or exploring traditional charcuterie recipes, working with pork cuts can elevate your cooking to new heights.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enmy name is brian mayer i'm a butcher educator and writer today we're here at wybrook farms where we're going to break down a half a pig into cuts that you would see at your local butcher shop so the first thing that we're going to do is we remove the leaf lard leaf lard is the most neutral of all fats which means it doesn't have a lot of taste to it traditionally it would be used in things like pie crust and stuff like that before the advent of shortening so right here i'm just kind of removing a bit of the flank section this is just sort of a preliminary step we'll come back later in terms of removing the sirloin section but that just kind of gets it out of the way and also it makes it a little bit easier to pull the tenderloin off so along with the leaf lard one of the first things we'll do is also remove the kidney kidneys are wonderful i usually grind them with my grind and put them into sausage so here i just follow along the lumbar vertebrae right to where it turns into the sacral vertebrae and right into the h-bone and i just follow along a very natural scene and you can very easily pull off the tenderloin once you sever those first connections it almost comes off by hand so here we're gonna remove the shoulder section for our purposes today i was counting between the fifth and the sixth rib and that's traditionally where a butcher hog would be broken if we were cutting it for charcuterie we would want to elongate certain muscles so we would cut between say the six and the seven for charcuterie and what i'll be able to do is basically joint so i'll be able to remove this section without sawing and what that does is that helps the life of the carcass i'm not sawing through something so i'm not generating heat which will cause the muscles to oxidize a little quicker and i'm also not injecting a little bit of the bone dust into the muscle so now i'm going to remove just a little bit more of that flank section and you can see back here with that skin this hog is hung for about seven days so it's really dry so that skin is pretty tough to break through so i'm just moving it out of the way because what i want to do is expose this last vertebrae in the lumbar section and what i'll be able to do here is the same thing i'll use the weight of the animal to joint and not have to saw and that piece comes off fairly easily and then so the last cut is to separate the belly from the loin section and here we want to make sure that we get a nice enough of a tail and nice enough of a rib bone on our pork chop without cutting our bellies incredibly short bellies get turned into bacon bacon is a great value-added product for butchers everybody loves bacon so it's definitely within the butcher's best interest to have as much bacon as possible so these are the four primals your shoulder loin belly and ham along with your tenderloin leaf lard kidney and the head and then from here we're going to break them down into other cuts so we've got the shoulder section here which consists of the butt the picnic and then a hawk and a trotter here what we're doing is removing the trotter from the rest of the arm bone i was planning to do zamponi but with the skin being as dry as it was i thought maybe we'd joint the leg instead so first the trotter comes off then we're going to locate the joint between the ulna the radius and the humerus we'll cut across and then we'll use the weight of the entire shoulder to break that piece off and so we're going to saw the picnic and the butt in half right along this natural curve in the spine you don't want to saw through muscle so we'll stop we'll make a cut and then again a bit of the scapula is still in there so we'll stop we'll saw again make our way through that bone once we're through that bone we'll continue to cut through again so now we have our two sections we have the top portion which is the butt and the bottom is the picnic so here i'm just removing the spine and that's a really great cut to use if you are making something like pork riettes and so what you would do is you would take those bones along with some fat some spices and some alcohol cook those things down drain off the fat peel the meat off the bone put that meat in a jar pour the fat on top of it wait for it to solidify grab a baguette and beat here what i'm doing is i'm seaming out the lunches miss muscle and some of the other shoulder muscles and i'm just following right along the shoulder blade there's a very natural seam there that it can just peel right away and there i'm just pulling off a little bit of that excess fat that fat will get used in sausage that fat will get rendered to cook with later and the skin is really great we can take skin and turn it into things like chicharrones or we can just add it to our stock so here i'm just following this very natural seam and i'm removing the longissimus muscles which will make up the coppa from the bottom portion of that muscle which is the serratus which will get cut into the pork denver so here i'm just removing a bit of the scapula that's still left in traditionally this would get turned into sausage and i think it's really great that we pulled the top half of this section away and used this for steaks and for roasts and we're really trying to minimize the amount of trim off here so here i'm just following along the natural seam and i'm going to remove a little bit of the skin and what we can do is we'll just turn this into a boneless skinless pork roast these mussels in this particular part are pretty tough so they're going to need low moist heat to break down all that connective tissue and collagen here i'm following the natural seam and what i'm moving would be what is considered the short rib or spare rib these i'll leave whole or what i can do is cut them into individual spare ribs one of the really great things about pig is every bit is usable from the blood from the skin from all the olfal that's allowed to be used i think the the only one that we're not allowed to use are the lungs but really everything gets used and i think that pigs really exemplify whole animal butchery what i'm pulling off here is something that you don't normally see and it's the pork brisket and again it's just another way to have a sort of more usable versatile a slow cooking roast i'm gonna take the remaining section and i'm gonna tie that up into a full roast and here i'm just basically squaring it off just making it into a sort of a more manageable useful cut so here's a breakdown of the shoulder and now what i'm going to do is trim and clean these cuts in a way that you might see them in a butcher shop so i'm just removing silver skin maybe if there's excess fat i'm getting rid of it maybe if there's some oxidized areas one of the things that i love to do with hawks is to pierce the skin and what that's going to allow is some of the moisture to escape while it slow cooks so that'll get that really puffy skin here i'm taking the spare ribs and all i'm doing is just separating them right between each rib so that's the pork brisket i'm just gonna remove some excess fat again something that you don't normally see but it's a fun cut to try here we're just kind of removing some of that excess fat and that'll go into getting rendered or that'll go into sausage and then again the skin gets used in stock the skin you can make chicharrones which is wonderful and great but is a long arduous process another great thing that you can do with skin is pet treats and it's a really really healthy snack for them so now i'm working with the picnic that we have left after we remove the brisket so here i'm scoring it and i'm going down a little bit into the fat because what i want is that fat to render and almost self-baste while i slow cook this and again i can smoke this or i can just very easily just put it in the oven at a very low temp and let that cook it's going to take a substantial amount of time so this is the section of the shoulder where we removed the scapula i'm scoring it just to make it nicer visually and here we'll just tie this which will keep the shape more consistent so it'll cook more evenly so we'll take the trotter and we'll split it in half we'll expose the center of that trotter and that collagen will render much easier into our stock next up we have all the longissimus muscles and those are the longest muscle group in the body and so it'll be the eye in your pork chop or it is the coppa and that's what we're going to do here is we are going to tie a copa roast but then also cut coppa stakes so here are the final cuts from our shoulder some of these cuts if not all you'll find in your local butcher shop so the next section that we have here is the belly so here i'm just following along the spare rib bones long sweeping strokes trying to leave as much muscle as i can on the belly side and trying to remove the spare ribs and as few strokes as possible because the belly turning it into bacon is a great way for butchers to have a value-added product so here i'm just going to follow along the natural seam and you can see that the socreto or this abdominal muscle easily pulls away from the remainder of the belly there's lots of opinions as to where the secreto comes from i like to pull it from the belly because it's the most easily accessible and it's got great flavor and a lot of fat here i'm removing a little bit of the gland in the flank section unfortunately glands are one of the things that we really can't use very bitter in taste so something like this you don't want to have a gland in so the main part of the belly would be the bacon and bacon really is just salt and thyme and then maybe a little bit of smoke belly can be turned into many different kinds of bacon from streaky bacon or slab bacon canadian bacon rasher jowl bacon so many different kinds of things and these are the cuts that you can get off a belly so next up we have the loin section which includes the tenderloin so there's lots of different cuts that we can get off the loin bone in bone out roasts steaks so what we're going to do here is we're going to remove this section of the loin from the rest of the loin which is basically cutting between the vertebrae and then removing all the muscle without having to saw through it we'll later turn that into a boneless loin roast so here what i've opted to do is cut a different style of pork chop with the chine bone attached so i'm splitting between each vertebrae sawing through a bit of the rib section and then just following along the natural path of the rib and so i'll remove a full pork chop with the china on and the other thing i like to do with these is leave all the fat on as well as the skin they have a few different muscles included in there that are going to change the texture and that texture is going to change the flavor a little bit so to counter that nice and fatty with the skin on as well for the remainder of the loin what i'm going to do is chime i'm lining my saw right at the base of the spine and just a couple of quick bursts and once i'm through that section i'll take the tip of my blade and i'll work around each little piece of the vertebrae so here i'm just following down the feather bones that are on the back side of the spine and will remove the section of the vertebrae and again i'll save this for stock things like that so here i'm just following the rib bone and cutting through the vertebrae and just cutting some bone in pork chops here the skin will be off as well as the chine bone being off so this is a part of the loin towards the rear of the animal back towards an area where there are finger bones and not rib bones so i've removed the spine and finger bones i've skinned it and here i'm just removing excess fat it's always a balance between too much fat too little fat me personally i love a ton of fat but it's something that we slowly have to initiate customers into buying and then here i'm going to just score it again just for some presentation and then i'll tie it and that tying will keep it in a more uniform shape and that will aid in a more even cooking so the last part we're going to tie something that's sort of traditional holiday roast if you will so we're going to tie what is essentially a pork standing rib roast skin off leave a good amount of fat on not too much and expose or french the ribs and really this is all just presentation personally i love to leave all that fat and meat on the bone but for presentation's sake it looks really nice to go ahead and french a bone first you want to scrape between the bone and remove any of the intercostal meat so that's the meat in between each bones and then really it just depends on how you feel like doing it i kind of do a version where i scrape off as much meat and then i'll take a clean rag and use that rag to pull off some people really want to see clean clean bones i think i'd leave some meat on there just because i'm so anti-frenching things so here we're gonna remove the skin and again we're left with some fat and some skin all of which will be utilized so the tenderloin is the most tender muscle in the body what that equates to is a lack of flavor so to help mitigate that i leave a good amount of fat or as much fat as i possibly can but one of the things that we will have to remove is the silver skin so that fascia isn't going to break down when you roast it normally here are the final cuts from the loin that you'll likely see at your butcher shop so here we have the final traditional primal the ham with the sirloin attached so much like we did on the front arm we're going to do on the rear removing the rear trotter is very similar to removing the front rotor we're going to look for that joint we're going to look for articulation in the tarsal bones and we're going to cut around and then use the table to help us separate that from the hock we're going to do is we're going to de-bone around the sirline so first we'll 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 just remove the bone and not pull muscle with it so it's a much cleaner way of removing those bones so i'll cut between that cartilage remove a bit of the hip and then i'll work around the remaining section of the hip into the h-bone around the femur and then pull out that section the h-bone is a fairly tricky bone to remove there is a tendon that's attached to it so it's one of the reasons why you don't dislocate your leg the rear hawk is a little bit different from the front arm in that the rear hawk has a stifle 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 patella and the kneecap and that area right below the patella allows us to sever that section very easily so now we can remove the sirloin section so we follow right on top of the tip of the femur and as you can see we get a much more full piece of sirloin great for cutting steaks or turning it into a roast as well so here's the breakdown of the ham next i'll cut them down even further into parts that you might see in your butcher case so here again i'm just skinning and taking off some of that excess fat we're going to cut some bone out sirloin steaks a lot of flavor there's a lot of muscle groups in there so that texture is adding to the flavor i like them much better than a pork chop so next up we have the ham and the four primary muscles that are included in that the top round the sirloin tip the eye around and the bottom round for our purposes first we're going to skin it leaving as much fat on as possible you want to see the shadow of the blade underneath 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 scoring and following right around the femur there's a very natural scene there that connects the top round to the bottom round and we'll remove the top round along those lines so here what we're doing is removing this top cap this is the gracilis muscle the cut that you'll see in butcher shops in the beef case but you can totally use this in the pork case as well it's very thin it's quick cooking and definitely just a great cut for a couple of portions there's a good amount of fat on it so we'll trim that off as well as removing any of the silver skin or fascia on there so with the remainder of the muscles on the leg what i'd like to do here is just debone it so i'm just following the bone and then that femur bone is going into stock so the remainder of the muscles the bottom round the eye round and the sirloin tip traditionally would either be left together for a ham cut into cubes for stew or going into sausage but i figured the utility of this is that we can turn all of these into really great roasts i'm gonna pull off a little bit of that excess fat i'm gonna pull off the patella the kneecap which is still in the sirloin tip and then i'm going to tie each of these into individual roasts and what we'll wind up doing with the top round is taking that and cutting cutlets or schweinschnitzel and then the remainder of the pieces that are left on the leg i cut those up for stew so when you're pounding the schnitzel i use two pieces of saran wrap and you want to make sure that you don't hit directly straight down you want to push away so as not to push through the muscle these are the final cuts from the leg that you might find at your butcher's case and then we have the head which i like to call the fifth primal so first things i do is i remove the ears you can leave them attached but traditionally what will happen is those will get sliced into strips they'll get cured along with the head and the tongue and those will get put into the skin and rolled up and cooked along with it so i'll remove those what we're going to do here is something that's very typical in charcuterie which is removing the entire skin along with the muscle from the skull into something that's called porqueta de testa or fromage de tete and here i just follow around the skull i start at the top of the head and then working down along the sides of the skull so i work in sections i work one side loosening it up and then i'll flip over to the other side joining them in the middle right around the forehead and then peel down the snout of the animal just like organ meats that people have this sort of negative connotation with head you know it has a face and so i can understand that it makes it really difficult for people to even think about consuming but again talking about pigs and their overall utility it's just so great that you can take every single part of this animal and turn it into food even when you're done the skull has a lot of meat left on it so you can totally throw that into a pot and that can be your head cheese and these are the cuts you get from the head and finally these are just some of the many cuts that you can get from a side of a pig youmy name is brian mayer i'm a butcher educator and writer today we're here at wybrook farms where we're going to break down a half a pig into cuts that you would see at your local butcher shop so the first thing that we're going to do is we remove the leaf lard leaf lard is the most neutral of all fats which means it doesn't have a lot of taste to it traditionally it would be used in things like pie crust and stuff like that before the advent of shortening so right here i'm just kind of removing a bit of the flank section this is just sort of a preliminary step we'll come back later in terms of removing the sirloin section but that just kind of gets it out of the way and also it makes it a little bit easier to pull the tenderloin off so along with the leaf lard one of the first things we'll do is also remove the kidney kidneys are wonderful i usually grind them with my grind and put them into sausage so here i just follow along the lumbar vertebrae right to where it turns into the sacral vertebrae and right into the h-bone and i just follow along a very natural scene and you can very easily pull off the tenderloin once you sever those first connections it almost comes off by hand so here we're gonna remove the shoulder section for our purposes today i was counting between the fifth and the sixth rib and that's traditionally where a butcher hog would be broken if we were cutting it for charcuterie we would want to elongate certain muscles so we would cut between say the six and the seven for charcuterie and what i'll be able to do is basically joint so i'll be able to remove this section without sawing and what that does is that helps the life of the carcass i'm not sawing through something so i'm not generating heat which will cause the muscles to oxidize a little quicker and i'm also not injecting a little bit of the bone dust into the muscle so now i'm going to remove just a little bit more of that flank section and you can see back here with that skin this hog is hung for about seven days so it's really dry so that skin is pretty tough to break through so i'm just moving it out of the way because what i want to do is expose this last vertebrae in the lumbar section and what i'll be able to do here is the same thing i'll use the weight of the animal to joint and not have to saw and that piece comes off fairly easily and then so the last cut is to separate the belly from the loin section and here we want to make sure that we get a nice enough of a tail and nice enough of a rib bone on our pork chop without cutting our bellies incredibly short bellies get turned into bacon bacon is a great value-added product for butchers everybody loves bacon so it's definitely within the butcher's best interest to have as much bacon as possible so these are the four primals your shoulder loin belly and ham along with your tenderloin leaf lard kidney and the head and then from here we're going to break them down into other cuts so we've got the shoulder section here which consists of the butt the picnic and then a hawk and a trotter here what we're doing is removing the trotter from the rest of the arm bone i was planning to do zamponi but with the skin being as dry as it was i thought maybe we'd joint the leg instead so first the trotter comes off then we're going to locate the joint between the ulna the radius and the humerus we'll cut across and then we'll use the weight of the entire shoulder to break that piece off and so we're going to saw the picnic and the butt in half right along this natural curve in the spine you don't want to saw through muscle so we'll stop we'll make a cut and then again a bit of the scapula is still in there so we'll stop we'll saw again make our way through that bone once we're through that bone we'll continue to cut through again so now we have our two sections we have the top portion which is the butt and the bottom is the picnic so here i'm just removing the spine and that's a really great cut to use if you are making something like pork riettes and so what you would do is you would take those bones along with some fat some spices and some alcohol cook those things down drain off the fat peel the meat off the bone put that meat in a jar pour the fat on top of it wait for it to solidify grab a baguette and beat here what i'm doing is i'm seaming out the lunches miss muscle and some of the other shoulder muscles and i'm just following right along the shoulder blade there's a very natural seam there that it can just peel right away and there i'm just pulling off a little bit of that excess fat that fat will get used in sausage that fat will get rendered to cook with later and the skin is really great we can take skin and turn it into things like chicharrones or we can just add it to our stock so here i'm just following this very natural seam and i'm removing the longissimus muscles which will make up the coppa from the bottom portion of that muscle which is the serratus which will get cut into the pork denver so here i'm just removing a bit of the scapula that's still left in traditionally this would get turned into sausage and i think it's really great that we pulled the top half of this section away and used this for steaks and for roasts and we're really trying to minimize the amount of trim off here so here i'm just following along the natural seam and i'm going to remove a little bit of the skin and what we can do is we'll just turn this into a boneless skinless pork roast these mussels in this particular part are pretty tough so they're going to need low moist heat to break down all that connective tissue and collagen here i'm following the natural seam and what i'm moving would be what is considered the short rib or spare rib these i'll leave whole or what i can do is cut them into individual spare ribs one of the really great things about pig is every bit is usable from the blood from the skin from all the olfal that's allowed to be used i think the the only one that we're not allowed to use are the lungs but really everything gets used and i think that pigs really exemplify whole animal butchery what i'm pulling off here is something that you don't normally see and it's the pork brisket and again it's just another way to have a sort of more usable versatile a slow cooking roast i'm gonna take the remaining section and i'm gonna tie that up into a full roast and here i'm just basically squaring it off just making it into a sort of a more manageable useful cut so here's a breakdown of the shoulder and now what i'm going to do is trim and clean these cuts in a way that you might see them in a butcher shop so i'm just removing silver skin maybe if there's excess fat i'm getting rid of it maybe if there's some oxidized areas one of the things that i love to do with hawks is to pierce the skin and what that's going to allow is some of the moisture to escape while it slow cooks so that'll get that really puffy skin here i'm taking the spare ribs and all i'm doing is just separating them right between each rib so that's the pork brisket i'm just gonna remove some excess fat again something that you don't normally see but it's a fun cut to try here we're just kind of removing some of that excess fat and that'll go into getting rendered or that'll go into sausage and then again the skin gets used in stock the skin you can make chicharrones which is wonderful and great but is a long arduous process another great thing that you can do with skin is pet treats and it's a really really healthy snack for them so now i'm working with the picnic that we have left after we remove the brisket so here i'm scoring it and i'm going down a little bit into the fat because what i want is that fat to render and almost self-baste while i slow cook this and again i can smoke this or i can just very easily just put it in the oven at a very low temp and let that cook it's going to take a substantial amount of time so this is the section of the shoulder where we removed the scapula i'm scoring it just to make it nicer visually and here we'll just tie this which will keep the shape more consistent so it'll cook more evenly so we'll take the trotter and we'll split it in half we'll expose the center of that trotter and that collagen will render much easier into our stock next up we have all the longissimus muscles and those are the longest muscle group in the body and so it'll be the eye in your pork chop or it is the coppa and that's what we're going to do here is we are going to tie a copa roast but then also cut coppa stakes so here are the final cuts from our shoulder some of these cuts if not all you'll find in your local butcher shop so the next section that we have here is the belly so here i'm just following along the spare rib bones long sweeping strokes trying to leave as much muscle as i can on the belly side and trying to remove the spare ribs and as few strokes as possible because the belly turning it into bacon is a great way for butchers to have a value-added product so here i'm just going to follow along the natural seam and you can see that the socreto or this abdominal muscle easily pulls away from the remainder of the belly there's lots of opinions as to where the secreto comes from i like to pull it from the belly because it's the most easily accessible and it's got great flavor and a lot of fat here i'm removing a little bit of the gland in the flank section unfortunately glands are one of the things that we really can't use very bitter in taste so something like this you don't want to have a gland in so the main part of the belly would be the bacon and bacon really is just salt and thyme and then maybe a little bit of smoke belly can be turned into many different kinds of bacon from streaky bacon or slab bacon canadian bacon rasher jowl bacon so many different kinds of things and these are the cuts that you can get off a belly so next up we have the loin section which includes the tenderloin so there's lots of different cuts that we can get off the loin bone in bone out roasts steaks so what we're going to do here is we're going to remove this section of the loin from the rest of the loin which is basically cutting between the vertebrae and then removing all the muscle without having to saw through it we'll later turn that into a boneless loin roast so here what i've opted to do is cut a different style of pork chop with the chine bone attached so i'm splitting between each vertebrae sawing through a bit of the rib section and then just following along the natural path of the rib and so i'll remove a full pork chop with the china on and the other thing i like to do with these is leave all the fat on as well as the skin they have a few different muscles included in there that are going to change the texture and that texture is going to change the flavor a little bit so to counter that nice and fatty with the skin on as well for the remainder of the loin what i'm going to do is chime i'm lining my saw right at the base of the spine and just a couple of quick bursts and once i'm through that section i'll take the tip of my blade and i'll work around each little piece of the vertebrae so here i'm just following down the feather bones that are on the back side of the spine and will remove the section of the vertebrae and again i'll save this for stock things like that so here i'm just following the rib bone and cutting through the vertebrae and just cutting some bone in pork chops here the skin will be off as well as the chine bone being off so this is a part of the loin towards the rear of the animal back towards an area where there are finger bones and not rib bones so i've removed the spine and finger bones i've skinned it and here i'm just removing excess fat it's always a balance between too much fat too little fat me personally i love a ton of fat but it's something that we slowly have to initiate customers into buying and then here i'm going to just score it again just for some presentation and then i'll tie it and that tying will keep it in a more uniform shape and that will aid in a more even cooking so the last part we're going to tie something that's sort of traditional holiday roast if you will so we're going to tie what is essentially a pork standing rib roast skin off leave a good amount of fat on not too much and expose or french the ribs and really this is all just presentation personally i love to leave all that fat and meat on the bone but for presentation's sake it looks really nice to go ahead and french a bone first you want to scrape between the bone and remove any of the intercostal meat so that's the meat in between each bones and then really it just depends on how you feel like doing it i kind of do a version where i scrape off as much meat and then i'll take a clean rag and use that rag to pull off some people really want to see clean clean bones i think i'd leave some meat on there just because i'm so anti-frenching things so here we're gonna remove the skin and again we're left with some fat and some skin all of which will be utilized so the tenderloin is the most tender muscle in the body what that equates to is a lack of flavor so to help mitigate that i leave a good amount of fat or as much fat as i possibly can but one of the things that we will have to remove is the silver skin so that fascia isn't going to break down when you roast it normally here are the final cuts from the loin that you'll likely see at your butcher shop so here we have the final traditional primal the ham with the sirloin attached so much like we did on the front arm we're going to do on the rear removing the rear trotter is very similar to removing the front rotor we're going to look for that joint we're going to look for articulation in the tarsal bones and we're going to cut around and then use the table to help us separate that from the hock we're going to do is we're going to de-bone around the sirline so first we'll 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 just remove the bone and not pull muscle with it so it's a much cleaner way of removing those bones so i'll cut between that cartilage remove a bit of the hip and then i'll work around the remaining section of the hip into the h-bone around the femur and then pull out that section the h-bone is a fairly tricky bone to remove there is a tendon that's attached to it so it's one of the reasons why you don't dislocate your leg the rear hawk is a little bit different from the front arm in that the rear hawk has a stifle 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 patella and the kneecap and that area right below the patella allows us to sever that section very easily so now we can remove the sirloin section so we follow right on top of the tip of the femur and as you can see we get a much more full piece of sirloin great for cutting steaks or turning it into a roast as well so here's the breakdown of the ham next i'll cut them down even further into parts that you might see in your butcher case so here again i'm just skinning and taking off some of that excess fat we're going to cut some bone out sirloin steaks a lot of flavor there's a lot of muscle groups in there so that texture is adding to the flavor i like them much better than a pork chop so next up we have the ham and the four primary muscles that are included in that the top round the sirloin tip the eye around and the bottom round for our purposes first we're going to skin it leaving as much fat on as possible you want to see the shadow of the blade underneath 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 scoring and following right around the femur there's a very natural scene there that connects the top round to the bottom round and we'll remove the top round along those lines so here what we're doing is removing this top cap this is the gracilis muscle the cut that you'll see in butcher shops in the beef case but you can totally use this in the pork case as well it's very thin it's quick cooking and definitely just a great cut for a couple of portions there's a good amount of fat on it so we'll trim that off as well as removing any of the silver skin or fascia on there so with the remainder of the muscles on the leg what i'd like to do here is just debone it so i'm just following the bone and then that femur bone is going into stock so the remainder of the muscles the bottom round the eye round and the sirloin tip traditionally would either be left together for a ham cut into cubes for stew or going into sausage but i figured the utility of this is that we can turn all of these into really great roasts i'm gonna pull off a little bit of that excess fat i'm gonna pull off the patella the kneecap which is still in the sirloin tip and then i'm going to tie each of these into individual roasts and what we'll wind up doing with the top round is taking that and cutting cutlets or schweinschnitzel and then the remainder of the pieces that are left on the leg i cut those up for stew so when you're pounding the schnitzel i use two pieces of saran wrap and you want to make sure that you don't hit directly straight down you want to push away so as not to push through the muscle these are the final cuts from the leg that you might find at your butcher's case and then we have the head which i like to call the fifth primal so first things i do is i remove the ears you can leave them attached but traditionally what will happen is those will get sliced into strips they'll get cured along with the head and the tongue and those will get put into the skin and rolled up and cooked along with it so i'll remove those what we're going to do here is something that's very typical in charcuterie which is removing the entire skin along with the muscle from the skull into something that's called porqueta de testa or fromage de tete and here i just follow around the skull i start at the top of the head and then working down along the sides of the skull so i work in sections i work one side loosening it up and then i'll flip over to the other side joining them in the middle right around the forehead and then peel down the snout of the animal just like organ meats that people have this sort of negative connotation with head you know it has a face and so i can understand that it makes it really difficult for people to even think about consuming but again talking about pigs and their overall utility it's just so great that you can take every single part of this animal and turn it into food even when you're done the skull has a lot of meat left on it so you can totally throw that into a pot and that can be your head cheese and these are the cuts you get from the head and finally these are just some of the many cuts that you can get from a side of a pig you\n"