Slow cookers make life easier in many households, but what if the cut of meat is too big to fit in it? STEVE BAIN explains how to cut a pork shoulder to size, for the slow cooker or the oven.
Pork shoulder, also known as pork butt or Boston butt (because of a ‘butt’ being the container they were stored in up in the New England corner of the United States, up Boston way), is the traditional cut of meat for pulled pork.
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However, a pork shoulder on the bone can be quite large — often too large to fit into a household’s slow cooker. It may also need a little home butchery to trim it into your oven’s baking tray.
The solution is to bone-out the shoulder. This is easily accomplished by cutting the meat along its seams to expose the bone, then working your knife around the bone to remove the shoulder blade and the attached leg bone. I explain this in more detail in the accompanying photos.
Handy hack: As an aside, of you want to use your slow cooker, try a smaller piece of boneless pork, or a different meat cut such as a beef cheek.
Step 1: Yes! The pork shoulder’s leg bone sticks out of the pan. This makes covering it with al foil trickier than it needs to be. Also, if the oven is small, the odd shape may not fit.
Step 2
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Step 2: You can begin the boning-out by starting either at a bone, or opening up one of the seams between the muscles to get to the bone. Here it begins at the end of the shoulder blade (because it was obvious and sticking out slightly exposed). Run your knife between the top of the shoulder blade and the meat to separate the meat from the bone.
Step 3
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Step 3: Continue 'flensing' the meat away from the shoulder blade, working towards the join where the leg bone connects.
Step 4
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Step 4: Note that there is a ridge in the middle of the ‘outside’ of the shoulder blade. Carefully work your knife along both sides of this ridge and separate meat from bone on both sides.
Step 5
Step 5: Next work your knife in and around the bones in the joint. Take your time and do most of the cutting with your knife tip area. The more joints you bone-out, the more you’ll get a picture of how the bones are orientated, thus making your job easier.
Step 6
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Step 6: Continue cutting around the bone (run your knife along the bone where you can) to expose it on one side of the shoulder of pork. If you need to, when cutting into the meat to get to the bone, try to do this by cutting downwards between the muscles.
Step 7
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Step 7: Then start cutting under the bone and completely separate bone from meat. Hint: completely undercutting the leg bone first will give you a safe handle to hang on to when you are cutting away at the remainder of the attached meat at both the joint and under the shoulder blade.
Step 8
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Step 8: Lift the leg bone up and work away with your knife to completely separate the meat from the joint of leg bone and blade.
Step 9
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Step 9: Finally, continue cutting underneath the bone(s) to separate the underside of the blade from the pork flesh. You may flip the shoulder over to do this — it is up to you, whatever feels comfortable and safest. Remove the bone and you are left with the pork shoulder for slow cooking.
Step 10
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Step 10: And there you have it. Jostle the pork around a little in the dish and you’ll have a ‘slab’ of shoulder meat that not only fits in the baking tray, but also is approximately of uniform thickness in the pan for equal cooking/doneness.
