Pork 101 – types, cuts and preparation

After last week’s post, I felt I was confident that I knew my gammon.  It’s is some sort of cured pork that you eat at Christmas – I mean, how complicated can that be?  But while chatting to Moira, I discovered that she wasn’t familiar with the term, and I discovered that I was unasble to come up with any techincal info about it.  Which got me thinking that in fact many of my American (or non-British colonial!) readers might also not be familiar with it. (In fact, I found gammon on one of those US vs UK English translation sites – the ones that helpflly tell you that an elevator in the US is a lift in the UK!) And in the course of my discussion with Moira I also discovered that I was hard-pressed to explain what exactly a gammon as opposed to a leg of pork as opposed to a ham is.  So that got me thinking… what about stuff like Kassler chops, which are common in supermarkets back in South Africa but unheard of here? Or Boston butt which I ADORED as a child but have never seen in the UK??  Suddenly the chasm of my ignorance yawned before me.  Talk about pig ignorant 😉

So I did a bit of delving and learned some really interesting bits and pieces.  For a start, pig breeds can broadly be classified into two types – lard breeds and bacon breeds.  The lard breeds were bred primarily for, well, their lard.  They fatten up quickly on corn and their meat contains large quantities of fat, deemed to be improve the taste and keeping qualities of the meat.  Bacon breeds are, by contrast, leaner and more muscular.  They were traditionally fed legumes, grains and dairy by-products which causes them to grow more slowly and put on more muscle than fat.

Why do you need to know this?  Well, because the definitions you find on the web will tell you that gammon is a leg cut from a “bacon pig” – and here I was thinking bacon could come from any old pig!! 😉  So that’s tidbit number one.  Then of course, there is the issue of the naming of the pork cuts.  Using this nifty diagram, I worked out that my gammon was from the area of the rump just behind the sirloin, as opposed to the shank which is a ham further down the leg and usually has a tapering end.  Progress!  Moving on then to the definitions that I found for gammon, some of them were as simple as saying that gammon was ham and the terms referred to whether the meat had been cooked or not (!!). The most comprehensive one that I found was on a rather neat site called Ted Can Cook, and reads as follows:

“the hind leg of a bacon pig, cut square off the side of bacon and not rounded like ham.  It is brine-cured and may then be left smoked or unsmoked.”

(Incidentally, the site also contains rather a good glossary of cooking terms once you scroll down a bit.  And below that is an equally nifty list of English vs American food terms.  Who would have guessed that graham crackers are digistive biscuits?!) I also found the redoubtable Delia Smith’s definition of gammon which was detailed and informative, as is to be expected:

“A bacon joint is a piece of cured pork, made with any cut of meat, unlike gammon. Correctly, gammon is the hind leg cut from a side of bacon after curing and traditionally the cure should be the mildest, but we are getting into the habit of calling any bacon joint suitable for boiling and baking a piece of gammon.”

Right.  So what’s this curing business then?  Well, think about the difference in taste between a slice of roast leg of pork, and a slice of Prosciutto and you’ll get an idea.  Curing was developed as a way to prolong the shelf-life of meat before refrigeration was available and there are two basic ways to do this.  One is to wet cure or brine cure which involves immersing your pork in (and these days, possibly also injecting it with) brine (a salt and saltpetre solution) before leaving it to mature; the other is to dry cure which involves rubbing a mixture of salt, sugar and spices on the meat and then hanging it in a cool dry place (which is how Prosciutto and Jamon Iberico are made).  From what I can see, gammon is can be either brine-cured or dry-cured but the end result still needs to be cooked, unlike Prosciutto.

That more or less covers gammon, I’d say.  That only leaves my other two beloved porcine cuts – Kassler chops and Boston butt.

I am always surprised how much of an influence German food has had on South African cuisine.  We South Africans with European ancestors all tend to think we are either English or Dutch, but of course things are a lot more complicted than that.  We had a huge influx French Huguenots who have indelibly marked Franschoek inland from Cape Town ad their own; we have a huge Portuguese community; and even people who may have come here via Holland were not in fact Dutch.  No, like my forebears, they came in service of the Dutch East India Company, but were from elsewhere.  The first of my ancestors who came to South Africa was born in Prussia (in a town which today forms part of modern Poland) in about the 1690s, making him far more German than Dutch – and there must have been many more like him.  From them we get (I suspect) our obsession with boerewors sausage, and beer – and our Kassler chops.  If you Google Kassler chops, pretty much 100% of your results will be South African sites – they are a common feature in butchers, supermarkets and on restaurant menus.  But come over to England and they are unheard of.  However, check out some German food sites and you will find… Kassler Rippchen, bone-in smoked pork chops.  So I can only assume that these chops (which my mom used to cook on a bed of cabbage and onions, smothered in apples) are another bit of our German heritage.  Mystery solved!

As for Boston Butt, I have memories of these babies – boneless pieces of cured pork rolled into a rugby ball shape and kept in that shape by a string net tied tightly around it.  My mom used to pot-roast them and serve the sliced meat on mashed potatoes and with apple jelly – one of my favourite combinations!  But I have never seen them in this country and even a native Bostonian had never heard of them.  So what’s the deal??  It would appear that this is an American import and contrary to what the name suggests, it is pork shoulder.  I also learned that it is the cut of choice for pulled pork barbecue, since it’s marbled with enough fat to keep the meat moist while cooking.  It can be bought either bone-in or boneless.  And as for the, erm, unusual name, the US National Pork Board gave this answer in response to a question submitted to O Chef:

“In pre-revolutionary New England and into the Revolutionary War, some pork cuts (not those highly valued, or “high on the hog,” like loin and ham) were packed into casks or barrels (also known as “butts”) for storage and shipment. The way the hog shoulder was cut in the Boston area became known in other regions as “Boston Butt.” This name stuck and today, Boston butt is called that almost everywhere in the US,… except in Boston.”

Things you didn’t know you didn’t know.  And if you feel you still haven’t spent enough time reading up on all thinks piggy, for the last word on everything ham related check out the Cook’s Thesaurus entry.

If you are looking for some more delicious pork recipes, try my:

… mustard crusted pork chops with caramelised apple rings

… quick pork chops with sherried mushrooms

… roast Christmas gammon

… gammon steak with spicy pineapple slices

… Mexican pork pibil (cochinita pibil)