What to do with meat containing lots of tiny little bones?

June 28, 2017 12:44 PM

Today I trimmed some pork spare ribs (following these directions). I'm left with quite a bit of meat (the rib tips and some other bits) containing lots of bone, cartilage, and connective tissue. What should I do with it? My inclination would be to slow cook it for tacos, but will picking out all the bones be a pain?
posted by quaking fajita to Food & Drink (7 answers total)

nice pork broth? Tokatsu ramen?
posted by H. Roark at 12:52 PM on June 28, 2017

If you're OK with just using the remaining meat for flavour, then yes, use it to make stock. But properly braised meat is worth the extra labour of picking out the bones. West Side Beef / Richmond Station in Toronto braises their beef necks and uses all the meat that slides off the bone to stuff inside their burgers.

This looks amazing, although you'd probably have to scale the ingredients.
posted by maudlin at 1:22 PM on June 28, 2017

Boil it in water and strain the bones out. Much easier than picking the meat off when dry. It will make a nice base for soup. I made pork soup last week with corn, tomatoes, okra, one large potato, 4 garlic cloves, one sweet onion, oregano, bay leaves, salt, and pepper. I added a dash each of balsamic vinegar and white wine. Was delicious.
posted by Beethoven's Sith at 1:24 PM on June 28, 2017

Cook it at very low heat, where you can just see active convection going on, for about 2.5 hours, let it cool until you can handle it comfortably, and the meat will yield easily to thumbnail pressure. Return the bones to the water and cook for another 5.5 hours, and the tendons and cartilage will also yield.
posted by Bruce H. at 1:30 PM on June 28, 2017

I found going through the meat with my clean fingers once it's cooled is a surprisingly fast way of doing this, not onerous at all.
posted by smoke at 2:06 PM on June 28, 2017

The meat cartilage, and connective tissue makes this excellent material for really silky broth/consomme.

If you go this route, brine the meat bits overnight in the fridge, rinse off before turning it into stock. If there is a lot of bone (especially with marrow/insides exposed), parboil until the cruddy stuff comes out (5-10 minutes?), run the entire thing through a sieve (discard liquids), rinse, then do the low and slow simmer. This step will increase the clarity of the final broth product.
posted by porpoise at 3:09 PM on June 28, 2017

You've convinced me that delicious pork stock is the way to go for this one.

PS I made these Thai-style ribs last night and they were dynamite.
posted by quaking fajita at 7:56 PM on June 29, 2017