Ok, thank you. Hi, I’m Dave Meli from The Healthy Butcher. Today wer’e going to be breaking down a certified organic pork, Berkshire pig. It is raised on certified organic feed. This is actually a picture perfect, beautiful, beautiful pig that, something that I’d love to see when I get something in. And I’ll explain to you different features that people like in just like of a pork. There’s different things that we look for. So I guess we’ll talk about this pork from head to tail. The pork head would have been here but it’s missing. It’s because we only pay for the side of pork, there isn’t a huge consumer demand for pork head. Pork head is completely consumable and there is nothing wrong with it. It produces lovely tureens. It’s got some great muscles, pork cheeks, pork ears, pork snout. They can make a multitude of wonderful dishes from it. However, North American tasting preferences don’t generally prefer pork head and so therefore, a lot of times we just don’t get them in. We do bring them in for customers but we don’t have it in all the time.
This particular region here that’s hanging just past this part of the spine is known as the jowel. This is the pork shoulder. It moves up to about the, in between the fourth and fifth rib. This next particular region here between the fifth rib and just before the ham, this particular region here is just known as my loin. This particular region right here is my belly. This is my leaf fat. This is what I would make things like a lard out of. This is a pork kidney. Generally speaking, my kidney is always come attached to the pork. But there is usually a gash here that runs across the kidney. And this is a gash that the inspector would make to inspect the kidneys to make sure that we are dealing with a healthy animal, with healthy organs. Generally speaking, certified organic. Animals have very very healthy organs just because they are living a very healthy lifestyle.
And this is a very fresh leg of pork, otherwise known as a ham. The difference between North American, or sorry Canadian ham and British ham is that in Canada, we refer to ham as the leg of a pork whereas in England and most parts of the United States, a ham is referred to as any piece of brined pork. There are some differences there which is just nomenclature.
So this being a Berkshire pork, there’s some interesting things about it. If I turn it over quickly, this one you cannot necessarily notice. A lot of times with Berkshire pork, you can still see remnants of their hair and it’s usually a very dark-colored hair. This particular one was shaved quite well. One of the things that you will notice though is just the type of fat that you get from a Berkshire pork. It’s usually very very firm. It’s not soft at all. I can barely pinch this fat in, whereas on other types of pork, such as dirac, the fat won’t be nearly a solid. This is a classic characteristic of a Berkshire. You do see of these kinds of characteristics with things as Tamworth as well.
Generally speaking, a pork is usually killed somewhere between 10 to 14 months of age. They’re usually looking for a particular weight category so that the animals are big enough so that the farmer is able to make some money on the particular pig.
So without further adu, I guess let’s start breaking this into various pieces.
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