Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with pork

Roast Beast

Miko — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 09:33:49 -0800

I recently bought a share of a pig from a farmer, and it came wrapped in various cuts. One of the cuts is a large, meaty, bony one called "chine end roast." How should I cook this? My Googling seems to indicate it comes from the back of the pig and includes some of the bones of the spine, and that it's kind of next to the rib roast. Should I cook it like a rib roast? Or maybe a pot roast? Or braised? I'm just not sure what kind of treatment might do this big ol' meaty cut justice. Thanks for any ideas.

But where has the pork gone?

cabbages — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:22:33 -0800

Where can I find a state by state break down of pork consumption per capita in the USA? Preferably from the early 90s but I'm willing to compromise. GIS data would be nice but not necessary. I'm a student so I can't pay for it.

Random piece of pork belly needs route to my stomach

melissam — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:15:49 -0800

What do I do with a random piece of pork belly? I got a random piece of pork belly in my CSA share. It's about an inch thick and 5 in by 4 in....yeah, and all my pork belly recipes call for lbs of pork belly in braises of about 4 hours. SHould I do the same with this? Any other ideas?

Google can't read my hamhock-ridden mind!

Phyltre — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:00:21 -0800

Help me find the right crockpot-esque Chinese ham hock preparation. I'm a huge fan of a particular Chinese ham hock preparation I see turn up a lot at Chinese New Year celebrations (I have no idea if this is related.) The ham hock is cooked, apparently very slowly, until it turns into basically a melty mass with bits meat mixed in (but it's still all in one piece). I remember them sitting inside a ceramic pot, along with a rather thick sauce that really reinforced the pork taste. Googling shows me "Chinese" recipes for roasting, for ham hock with black beans, and for braised ham hocks. I don't know if black beans are even involved in the recipes I've had, they could have been, but I don't remember seeing them. It's a recipe I've seen on several more expensive Chinese buffets, so I know it's some kind of standard. Can anyone validate which recipe I might be thinking of, and point me in the right direction? One catch, I'm looking for a recipe that is crock-pot friendly. I'm guessing that won't be much of a problem.

Bonus/Related: Can anyone tell me specifically what recipe might have been used to generate this lovely piece of work? By the way, the crock pot I'm-guessing-braised version this post is about looks just like that, except there's more sauce all over it and presumably it's softer.

oops?

acidic — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 02:14:04 -0800

Braising pork belly: did I ruin my Momofuku Pork Buns? My pork belly has been braising for about 30 minutes. Am I doing it incorrectly? I've only cooked meat a few times before. I live in Korea, so I bought ogyeopsal (the 5-layer version of ssamgyeopsal) that was pre-sliced to look like this photo. Basically, very thick uncured bacon. I also don't have an oven, so I used a very big pot.

The recipe called for a cup of liquid, which basically covered the meat. 30 minutes later, it's sort of grey and disgusting-looking. It seems that I boiled it. Finally I looked up photos of braising and saw that usually the meat isn't submerged (because it is whole not sliced). So I quickly reduced the level of liquid. But did I ruin the dish? What can I do to salvage it? And how should I braise meat (sans oven) in the future?

Thank you.

Wanted: Madhur Jaffrey's Ultimate Curry Bible

lioness — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:11:31 -0800

Do you have Madhur Jaffrey's Ultimate Curry Bible on your bookshelf? Could you flip through in search of a pork recipe with mustard seeds? I'm hosting a small informal dinner tonight and was planning on making one of my favourite recipes from Madhur Jaffrey's Curry bible. Alas, I can't find my book and I need to start prepping!

The recipe was on the top of a left page and the title was in the vein of 'pork with mustard spices'. It entailed making your own spice mix with the usual suspects. Frying mustard seeds, adding pork strips, the spices, curry leaves and bean sprouts. Maybe some diced tomatoes were added, I'm not sure.

Could you find it for me?

As a last resort I will head to my library, but I'm hoping on a faster response here.

Recipe for Pork Tenderloin

cheechman85 — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:36:11 -0800

Does the hive mind have any recipes for a pre-seasoned pork tenderloin? Any good complimentary foods?

Get in mah belly, belly

chalbe — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:58:03 -0800

Safe to eat raw refrozen meats that've been defrosted several times? I bought a slab of vacuum sealed raw pork belly and tried to turn this specimen into delicious BACON, but due to scheduling problems, etc. never got around to actually cooking it.

I'd defrost the meat in the fridge in the morning, only to find out later that night that I couldn't cook and 3 days later end up throwing it back into the freezer. The slab's gone through about 3 of these cycles of defrosting and refreezing.

Is it still safe to eat?

Help me cook teh pigmeetz.

dirtynumbangelboy — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 11:24:53 -0800

PorkFilter: give me your recipes for our tasty piggy friends. I'm working with some of my fellow students on a dinner party, in which we are going to try and use a pig from snout to tail. So far we've already got deep-fried ears as a crunchy pre-meal snack, and a few other recipes.

So I'm looking for two things:

1) I'm doing the cold app, which will involve a hunk o pigmeat cooked sous vide, then sliced carpaccio thin, and wrapped around a takeoff of Ferran Adria's liquid olives. The dish will be four (bite-sized) pieces, and I want to make the four kinds of 'caviar' to be four classic flavour profiles that go with pork, before we launch into the rest of the meal which will be (hopefully) a bit more inventive. I've already figured one needs to be a classic barbecue (the vinegary sort, not the thick molasses/tomato), one will be oregano/lemon/garlic (think pork souvlaki), and one apple/mustard. I'm a bit stuck on the fourth, and I'm well open to changing any of the others. So I'd love to hear your classic pork recipes from around the world, to look at the flavour profiles.

2) We're also looking for recipes that use uncommon cuts or parts of the animal. There will probably be some variation on collard greens (though not collard; whatever bitter greens are fresh at the time) using a ham hock, but we're looking at how to use some other bits. We're largely staying away from most offal, though we might do something with tongue.

Note: we will be staying away from bacon for the most part, because bacon in a meal is kind of a gimme. We're open to using lardo if we can find someone making it locally from organic free range pigs.

Thoughts?

Ham ham ham ham

samph — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 13:23:33 -0800

What happened to my ham? I cooked a 9.7 pound ham yesterday, following this recipe. The ham came out very, very dry. It was white and not pink. It didn't slice like ham, it was more like pulled pork. I am quite sure this ham was not pre-cooked.

It was tasty enough, and people ate plenty of it, but I just wonder why it wasn't very ham-like.

Half-arsed pork chop preparation! Help!

chihiro — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:20:58 -0800

I have 3 pork chops which have been dipped in garlic butter and then dredged in panko. Can I now pan fry them or shall I bake them? They're sitting in my kitchen right now. This is the result of some bastardized "little of this, little of that" cooking approach. If I fry them will the breadcrumbs fall off because the only thing holding them on the pork is melted butter? If I cook them in the oven, at what temperature and for how long? Help!

Good sausage of the month club?

lackutrol — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:12:59 -0800

Does anyone have any recommendations for a good "sausage of the month" club? The intended recipient is not exactly a foodie but appreciates good food and good sausages in particular. He lives in New York, as I do, so New York City sources, though tasty, might not be ideal. Googling seems to yield relatively few places and almost no critical opinion.

Makin' Bacon

arcticwoman — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:20:48 -0800

I just opened up my box of pork bellies (to cure my own bacon, duh) and discovered that the skin in still on. This wasn't mentioned in my recipe and I can't find any real info about it! Do I leave the skin on? Remove it? Remove it before it's been cured (wet-cure), before it's been cold-smoked, or before I eat it? I'm using the recipe from this episode of Good Eats.

Make my pork and beans taste good

shelleycat — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:08:05 -0800

I need a kick arse recipe for pork and beans that's slow cooker compatible. I've tried a few found via google with lack luster results, so now I'm looking for something tried and true. There's a school of thought that says pork should be cooked with overly sweet fruit, apricots or pineapple or whatever. I don't really belong to that school. I like all kinds of beans except black beans and green beans, and am sure that they could be added to pork to make a really nice casserole in my slow cooker (aka crockpot). But there needs to be something else in there because so far every recipe I've tried is really bland.

The only other condition is that the dish be low fat (the pork is already lean) and reasonably low in salt, otherwise I'm open to all kind of flavourings or whatever to make this taste good. Oh yeah, and it's winter here just in case that matters.

Why was my pork so pink?

otherwordlyglow — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:45:16 -0800

Why did my pork roast turn pink? Friday night I roasted a 2.5 lb boneless pork blade loin roast. I used a Cook's Illustrated recipe that calls for you to first sear the loin on the stovetop for about 10 minutes to brown the exterior and then to roast at 300 degrees for about 45-50 minutes or until 135 degrees. It was in the oven for about 70 minutes before my meat thermometer registered over 135 degrees (checked at several locations) and then I took it out and let it rest for about 20 minutes, covered in foil, still on the roasting rack but over a carving board.

The recipe suggests that the roast will continue to rise in temp while it's resting by about 10-15 degrees. (I never checked the temp again though and by the time we sat down to eat it, the roast was somewhat cooler.)

In the intervening 20 minutes or resting, the roast dripped a couple teaspoons of bright red juice and then when I carved it, the end pieces were noticeably pink. Not something you'd normally want to see in a pork roast. However, the middle pieces of the roast were much less pink. In fact, they looked pretty normal.

As far as I know, both the oven and my meat thermometer work fine and the roast was in there much longer than suggested. Why would only the (thinner) ends be pink while the (thicker) mid section was white? We actually ate some of the pink pieces and had no ill effects so I think it was fine, it just looked weird. However, I'm curious as to what was going on. I've heard that a lot of pork from the grocery store (I got this meat at Safeway) is injected with liquid to make it juicier, could that have played a part?

Iron Chef RavinDave

RavinDave — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:10:17 -0800

Need tips on cooking Chicken in a Crockpot. Okay ... over the past few weeks, I've been having startlingly good (for me) success making ribs in a slowcooker. I used an ultra-simple batchelor-centric recipe: Cut slab of ribs into 8-9 pieces, submerge in BBQ sauce diluted a bit with water. Simmer on LOW for 8 hours. I tossed in a few onion slices, adding a touch of brown sugar & cider vinegar along with various spices ... works perfect.

I want to try something similar with chicken.

QUESTION: I'm thinking 8 hours -- even on LOW -- would be way too much cooking time for chicken. Am I right?

Any other pointers (or QUICK-n-EZ crockpot recipes) welcomed!

Bad pork or just a bad smell?

Bookhouse — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 16:46:07 -0800

Another round of "Should I eat this?" I have a pork tenderloin which I purchased an hour ago at a reputable grocery store, sealed in a plastic bag. Opening the bag, the pork smells horrible, sorta like rotten eggs. Rinsing it off reduced but did not eliminate the smell.

How can I tell the difference between rotten pork and funky plastic-sealed smell? I really don't want to go back to the store or chuck my V-Day meal plans.

Why is ham pork and not not pork?

Foam Pants — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 23:12:15 -0800

Why is ham a pork thing? Are other meats preserved in this way around the world? I was baking a ham today and was asking myself, why ham? You have country hams, you got city hams... ham, ham ham! *wacks ham in the nose with football* Why don't we have Hillshire Farms lamb ham? Or beef ham? I don't mean that turkey stuff that tastes like ham, I mean actual legs of animals salted, smoked, and hung up like traditional country ham. Is there something about the hog that makes it ideal for preserving in this way? Would you consider dried beef, salt cod, corned beef, etc. to be ham like?

Now that I've written it, I'm already feeling bad for the pig

joaniemcchicken — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 16:13:16 -0800

How do you buy good old fashioned, "heirloom" pork? When I was in London, I had great pork roast, like pork used to be before they bred all the fat out and it just became dry white meat. I want to cook a pork roast for Christmas dinner and I want tasty pork. I'm in Los Angeles, so where would I get this?

Am I going to get sick from eating this pulled pork?

Loto — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 19:56:49 -0800

Am I going to get sick from eating this pulled pork? So, my neighbor made some very, very delicious pulled pork. It cooked over the course of two days, from Friday to Saturday. Saturday afternoon it was placed in an air conditioned room where it stayed for about 6 hours. After, it was put into a fridge. The next day, it came out and spent 3 hours in the car at about room-temp. It went right back into the fridge again afterwards. This was Sunday.

So now it is Tuesday, and I really, really want to eat some of this delicious meat but I'm unsure how sick it will make me. So, does Metafilter thing this is safe to eat?

What's the name of the French pig ad?

Etta Hollis — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 04:45:03 -0800

Looking for the name and/or pictures of a classic French advert with a pig. There was at least one in Paris on Rue d'Alesia around Christmas. My friend explained the ads were something that that was classic and everyone knew about. The Paris example had just a cartoon of a pig and something to the effect "Don't cry little pig, you're going to _____ (name of Butcher/store)"

Here is a similar example, just more violent.

Merci.

What's a good side dish for spicy Pork Tenderloin?

otherwordlyglow — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 15:09:18 -0800

I need suggestions for side dishes that would accompany Island Pork Tenderloin. I've made this recipe for Island Pork Tenderloin a bunch of times and it's really really good. The recipe includes a salad component that I may or may not also make. The pork is really good by itself though and given the more wintery weather that's coming, something a little more robust and hearty might be better than the salad or in addition to the salad.

The recipe is called "Island Pork" but given the spices involved I'm not sure what island it refers to (cumin, chili, cinnamon, sugar, garlic, Tabasco). It's kinda Caribbean, kinda fusion-ish so I'm at a loss for what to make with it. Ideas? There's nothing that's off limits though my dining companion has expressed a dislike for tripe. So that's off the menu.

And if it matters, this is for a dinner I'm making for a guy that I want to impress and have fall madly in love with me.

Lots of undercooked pork alert!

nasreddin — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 22:04:26 -0800

PorkFilter: Is there anything medically wrong with eating large amounts of pork, sometimes irregularly prepared? I'm a college student, and the only meat I can afford is pork (shoulder, loin end, etc.) I like meat, so I end up eating it almost every day. I don't get tired of it because I'm a pretty good cook and can use different sauces and such. I like my pork juicy, so sometimes I'll find that my chop is pinkish near the bone area.

I haven't experienced any problems, (other than rustling from my Jewish ancestors rolling in their graves) so I'm tempted to conclude it's okay. My momma always said to cook pork very thoroughly, though. Is this habit dangerous?

The other white meat.

zardoz — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 17:45:16 -0800

I have a question about bacon. And sausage. I currently live in Japan, and the bacon here is...well...different. Try to fry it like American bacon and it just sort of scorches--it's more like regular ham in that respect. The sausage here too is strange, like hot dogs but not as good (if that's even possible). But it's not just Japan... Once I hopped to Vancouver and the sausage there was a little weird--yellowish with an almost gamey taste. The bacon was strange as well (and it was different from the "Canadian bacon" Americans get on pizza.) Years ago in the States, I made some Jimmy Dean sausage links for a British friend, who had to muster the courage to eat them, saying they looked shriveled up and dry (but changed his mind completely upon trying one).

So why all this disparity with pork products? It's all from the same animal, so what is the difference in the curing process? Anyone eat any really weird pork in a foreign country?

Pork poster en français?

rorycberger — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 22:59:57 -0800

Where can I buy a pig poster like they have in french butcher shops? I'm looking for a poster approximately like these plates, preferably with the primal cuts identified in french. I want one that is nice enough looking to hang on my wall, not totally utilitarian like this one. Oh yeah, a beef one would be cool too. Thanks in advance.