[Sca-cooks] Pork fat

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Robin Carroll-Mann:
>I made some sausage earlier this summer, using ordinary ground
>pork from Costco.  The sausages were tasty, but a touch dry.
>Recipes on the web call for pork fat to be added to the ground meat
>(which already has a fair amount of fat in it).  What kind of pork fat
>should be used, and where do I get it?  In my supermarkets I see
>salt pork, fatback, and lard.  Would any of these work?

Salt pork probably wouldn't work, not because of the type of fat it
is (commercial salt pork is usually from pretty high up on the side
"bacon", similar to what Americans call bacon) but because it's
brined and pickled, somewhat like corned beef, with that sourish tang
that corned beef generally has. If you want sausages that are like
that (and some are supposed to be that way, generally cured or
semi-cured sausages), using salt pork would be one way to make them
closer to that type, because it would introduce  small amounts of
antioxidants like saltpeter and other nitrates and nitrites, and
possibly some lactobacilli. Fatback, if fresh or just packed, dry, in
salt, would also work reasonably well. Again, it's usually more or
less the same actual fat, just treated differently.

Lard, OTOH, is supposed to refer to kidney fat (the piggy equivalent
of beef or veal suet), but, since what most people think of as lard
is rendered lard, it's possible you may run across any old fat
suitable for rendering being called "lard", and if it isn't actual
kidney/internal loin fat, or some other "hard" fat, you may have
problems.

The deal is that sausages seem to require an absolute minimum of
10-15% fat, and can even go as high as 30% or more without serious
character flaws. One way to do this is to mix certain fatty cuts of
pork with lean ones to get the mix you want. Pork shoulder butt
(a.ka. blade roast or Boston Butt -- I kid you not), which is _not_
to be confused with picnic shoulder or pernil, is one good cut to
grind for the leaner end of the acceptable range. My Italian butcher
(the guy whose grandpa used to bone quail for me) uses shoulder butt
for Italian sausages, and they have a nice amount of connective
tissue, if a little low in fat, so if you overcook them, just as all
the fat is essentially leaving the sausage through casing splits and
fork holes, the moisture provided by the breaking-down collagen in
the various gristly bits (yes, even gristle _can_ be our friend
sometimes!) keeps the sausage moist. Fresh side bacon or pork belly
is another good cut; this is fattier, but has more waste as it is
generally sold with skin and bone attached. By meat standards,
though, it's still fairly cheap (ranging, around here, from
$1.29-$1.79/lb, at the most; shoulder butt is about the same, as I
recall), so if you have time and the inclination to trim and grind
this meat yourself, it has more fat than shoulder meat, and so
provides a moister sausage. (BTW, the bone structure and skin are
very simple to remove from this cut; it's kind of like a sandwich,
with a layer of skin, a layer of fat, a layer of meat, and a layer of
bone and cartilage, all in a flattish rectangle.)

A mixture of the two also works very well.

The basic theory is that you want hard fat (fat tissue which is
densely packed with actual fat, rather than a lot of stringy, slimy
epithelium and connective tissue with a little fat in it, which is
more or less what the softer fats are; you can tell hard fats by your
ability to slice them cleanly and easily when they're reasonably
cold, like slab bacon or butter. Soft fats are tougher, but render
easily and essentially leave you with flabby stuff and grease,
creating an unpleasant, grainy texture in the finished, cooked
sausage. Hard fat remains firm, but renders slowly as the meat cooks,
basting it internally, and keeping it moist.

You might consider asking the supermarket butcher if he can get some
of these two cuts in for you, and if he's really really really nice,
maybe he'd even grind it for you. In which case your final cost would
probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of the fresh Italian
sausage the supermarket sells. If you just order the meat, and
butcher it yourself, it's much cheaper.

Adamantius
--
"No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes
deserves to be called a scholar."
	-DONALD FOSTER