[Sca-cooks] What to do with this meat

[Dragon]

Sharon Gordon wrote:
>A local grocery store has been having serious sales on one meat for one day
>only in recent weeks.  It's a sort of one day loss leader.
>
>So I've been having fun experimenting with a variety of dishes.
>
>One of the recent meats has me puzzled though.  It was marketed as "Country
>Ribs" but it's really a  bar shaped piece of  pork shoulder.  Each bar sort
>of looks like a faux rib and is about  1-1.5 inches in cross section and
>weighs about 1/2 pound per bar.  From looking at the meat, it seems like an
>ideal cut to use modernly  for pulled bbq pork (slow cooked) or to grind and
>mix into meatballs.
>
>Using medieval recipes, short of timetraveling to North Carolina or Kansas
>and zipping back to the middle ages with a future recipe (and --whoops--some
>new world tomato ingredients for the bbq sauce :-) ) what sort of dishes
>could I use it for?
>
>So far I have considered slowcooking the meat with something to flavor it
>(onions, herbs, spices???) and then using it to make some pasties.  It might
>also work in some long cooking soups, but if I wasn't careful, I'd have some
>really chewy bits there.
>
>What recipes would turn this into something good?
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What you have is very probably a pork shoulder cut that is fabricated 
to resemble a "boneless rib". I don't have any specific recipes to 
recommend, just some general guidelines for using this cut.

Because it is a tougher cut, it really needs slow cooking to be 
tender. Any sort of stew recipe would be a good choice. Braising 
would be good too. Or you can grind it and add some fat back to make 
sausage or meatballs.

Pork pies would be a good choice so you are thinking along the right 
lines there.





Dragon

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