- 3 months ago
From a single pig to eight delicious creations–butcher John Ratliff of Ends Meat joins Bon Appétit to demonstrate the full transformation of pork through nose-to-tail butchery. Watch as one pig becomes bacon, hot dogs, dry-aged pork chops, ham, coppa, guanciale, salami, and terrine, through centuries-old techniques of curing, smoking, and fermentation.
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00:00You're about to see this pig expertly butchered and transformed into eight different dishes over the next few hours, days, and months.
00:08From one animal, you can get products so different they barely seem related.
00:13Today we're following butcher John Ratliff in his shop Ends Neat as he transforms this pig.
00:19From a half pig, the options for what you can make are pretty endless.
00:24Well put, John. Where should we begin?
00:26It can be hard to grasp the full range of what a pig can become,
00:32so John has chosen eight distinct pork products that capture its remarkable range of textures, flavors, and craftsmanship.
00:39This picnic ham is going to yield some lean meat for hot dogs.
00:45Hot dogs are essentially flavorful cooked sausages, but many joke that they contain mystery meat.
00:51Here, the mystery is solved.
00:52Hot dogs get a little bit of a rough wrap. Maybe some deserve it. I don't know. I don't make all the hot dogs out there.
00:59We just make our hot dogs.
01:01These hot dogs are coming from beautiful cuts of fatty meat from the shoulder and the hind leg.
01:08It's the same protein we'd be using to make any sausage that we work with.
01:12Ingredients are salt, turbinado, mustard, coriander, white pepper, garlic, mace, paprika, and nitrite.
01:21Nitrite produces nitric oxide, and it's a preservative for the product. It helps retain color.
01:27We're going to go ahead and grind this protein first to break it down in the small particulates.
01:3270-30 lean pork to fat. We keep them super cold so that the fat doesn't over-smear and become greasy and separate out.
01:43We're going to let this refrigerate. It's super-duper cold, and then we're going to put it in the bowl cutter with ice,
01:48which is a bunch of blades. It's been in quick succession, and we make an emulsion with our spices and our salts and sugars.
01:55I wanted one of these my entire career, and I finally got one.
01:59This is all probably about 36 degrees. The bowl is ice cold.
02:05We want to break down the protein particulate. Super-duper fine.
02:09An emulsion is just a fancy word for getting fat and water to stick together.
02:13If you didn't emulsify, the hot dog would break apart.
02:16Add some water, salt, and plenty of mixing, and the pork turns sticky like glue.
02:21It grabs onto the fat and water and keeps them from running away.
02:24Everything came together. From this point, I'm going into our sausage stuffer.
02:29This is a vacuum stuffer. I love it so much.
02:32It has portion control, the ability to vacuum out all air pockets before casing,
02:37and it is just really good-looking.
02:41This is a sheep casing. It's part of the intestinal tract.
02:44The casing is like shrink wrap for meat.
02:46It squeezes everything together and removes the oxygen, which keeps the bacteria at bay.
02:51Now we're going to hang it in our smoker and let it cook all the way.
02:56So this is a pro-smoker.
02:59When I say pro-smoker, I mean the company's name pro-smoker.
03:03It makes me look like a pro-smoker, but I really just program it to do everything it needs to do.
03:10When you cook protein, it loses a percentage of its water content.
03:15One of the many points of emulsifying protein is so that it doesn't lose its water content.
03:21These are cased at 80 grams, and by the time it's smoked and cooled,
03:25it should still maintain at roughly 80 grams because it is an emulsified product.
03:30This program runs it through its dry cycle, smoke cycle, then a steam cycle, then a water shower cycle.
03:37We put these hot dogs in a little over three hours ago.
03:42We're going to take these over to our blast chiller.
03:45A blast chiller is an extremely effective and controllable refrigerator.
03:49And let them chill fully before packaging them and sending them to the butcher shop and sending them out to restaurants.
03:58Now, John's moving on from a complicated product to one that's comparatively simple.
04:02This is the belly. You can use it for a million things. Today, I'm making bacon.
04:09Bacon. Crispy, chewy, smoky, salty, sweet-y.
04:15It's one of the most popular and versatile products that comes from a pig.
04:19And it all starts with the belly.
04:21This will be a good slammer.
04:24Woo!
04:24Just because pork belly tends to be a single muscle doesn't mean it's straightforward.
04:29Countless layers of protein and delicious fat.
04:33Fats that are soft, fats that are hard.
04:35The road to bacon begins with a few small ingredients, known collectively as a cure.
04:40The cure consists of kosher salt, turbinado sugar, finely ground cinnamon, and ground black peppercorn.
04:47Once I apply this cure, it's going to sit for 10 days, allowing the salts and sugars and spices to penetrate the protein.
04:59We just took our bacon off of a 10-day cure.
05:02We're going to smoke this at a cooler temperature for three hours.
05:06Smoking was once a way to protect meat.
05:08Today, we use smoke mostly for flavor.
05:10And then cook it with moist heat for the remainder of its cooking period, just so we can retain some moisture in the protein and the exterior doesn't dry out too bad.
05:22Bacon's been smoking.
05:24We're going to transfer it over to our blast chiller.
05:29Bacon is nice and chilled.
05:31This is ready to be packaged and vacuum-sealed and sent to our butcher shop to be sliced and served on burgers or sold directly to customers.
05:43The uses of bacon are only limited by one's imagination.
05:46But John is moving on to another whole muscle, one very different from pork belly.
05:51Out of the boss and butt, I'm going to yield the copa, also known as the capicola, the gabagool.
05:57Copa, or gabagool, is both simple and complex.
06:02From a single muscle comes the perfect mix of tender meat and buttery fat.
06:07But patience is key because a great copa can take half a year to be ready.
06:14A mixture of muscles in here that all have webs of beautiful intermuscular fat.
06:19The muscle is extremely active, so it has a lot of flavor.
06:23You can see how dark the protein is, a darker red hue to it.
06:26The more active the muscle is, there's more oxygen, there's more myoglobin in the protein.
06:31Because it has these kind of webbed layers of fat, once this gets cured with salt, sugar, garlic, and chili,
06:39and aged for six months, the sliceability of it stays very moist.
06:44It's nice little strands of fat that keep it soft and supple on the palate.
06:49Supple?
06:50Sure.
06:51Sick.
06:52I'm going to apply the cure to the protein.
06:57The less moisture is, the less chance for bacteria to survive.
07:01Also, salt tastes good.
07:06Coming off of its 14-day cure, we're ready to encase this in call fat.
07:12Call fat is pork stomach lining.
07:15And this is going to act as our barrier between the outside oxygen and the protein surface.
07:24Nice tubular shape.
07:26We're going to go ahead and truss this.
07:28This helps give us the tension.
07:30I'm going up and over.
07:32As the product dries, the more pressure from the exterior, the better the final texture and shape of the copa.
07:37And we are ready for fermentation process.
07:43Outside of the bacterial prevention aspect, what that fermentation does, it gives us a really nice sliceability.
07:50Binds this protein together.
07:52The protein strands shrink up and then they expand out.
07:57These units go through the wall.
08:00We put raw product in on one side and take cooked or fermented or dried product out on the other.
08:06We put on fermentation about 48 hours ago on the other side of this through our production room.
08:13These are going to go for a nice long rest.
08:17They'll lose 35 to 40 percent of their original water weight.
08:21This is the copa.
08:23A couple of months into drying,
08:25we're going to see a really nice mold coverage start to form.
08:29This casing is really starting to dry out and shrink onto the product.
08:34For once, this is mold we want.
08:36It slows the rate of drying, blocks more harmful microbes from entering, and even adds a bit of flavor.
08:41That is a very beneficial mold and it produces so much flavor and aroma.
08:46After about four months, we have casing that is pretty much fully formed onto the product.
08:53The mold is kind of chilling out because not as much moisture is being pulled to the surface.
08:59After about six months, the casing is going to get sliced and removed.
09:03And then we're going to vacuum seal this, let it hang out for a couple of weeks.
09:08And then these are going to get shipped out to restaurants and sold as sliced cured meats through our deli case.
09:15The ropa dopa copa.
09:18This copa needs to dry for several more months.
09:20So let's move on to one of the most simple cuts of all.
09:23We have the sixth through the thirteenth rib separating two loin parts here.
09:29We're going to leave the skin on this and dry-age this for dry-aged pork chops.
09:36Dry-aging a pork chop is as simple as it gets.
09:39No spice blends, no smoke, just a sharp knife, thyme, and a whole lot of flavor.
09:45Our dry-aged pork chop is going to be going into a box that's temperature and humidity controlled.
09:52Dry-aged pork is a little different from dry-aging beef in the regard that we're not trying to go for tenderness and crazy amounts of mold on the exterior.
10:02We're really just trying to pull some moisture out of it and intensify the natural porkiness.
10:08Dry out that pork fat so it renders nicer and just basically tighten things up.
10:14We're going to put it up on the top shelf with a lot of air movement to just pull off as much moisture as we can.
10:20Here's our dry version.
10:23This has been dry-aging for about 30 days.
10:26Got a nice little crust on the outside.
10:28Skin's really, really hard.
10:31You can see our rib bones starting to protrude from the dehydration.
10:35And we're going to go put it on the bandsaw and cut ourselves a nice pork chop.
10:40This is an insane amount of fat.
10:42Nobody actually eats that much.
10:44So we just try to take off a nice even amount, leaving a responsible fat cap on there that I like to open up so it renders out.
10:59Once it renders, it gets really crispy and really nice.
11:03That's our beautiful dry-aged pork chop.
11:07The pork chop was about as simple as things get.
11:09It's time to switch gears into one of the most complex products you can make.
11:12This guy we want to be able to get some lean meat out of for our salami.
11:19Salami isn't found in nature.
11:21Only the hubris of man could combine these separate parts of the pig into something so much greater.
11:27Salami picante is a type of salumi that is a mixture of very lean meat ground with very solid fat.
11:35This hard fat back we cube up, throw it in the freezer, and grind it with this very lean protein for our salumi.
11:45This is lean meat blend of brisket, clawed heart, underblade, petite tender, spices and salts and sugars, kosher salt, turbinado, finely ground New Mexico red chili, coarsely ground New Mexico red chili.
11:59I grew up in New Mexico, so I always bring a little bit of New Mexico with me in everything I do.
12:05These are both versions of a dried hat shred chili that have a medium spice level to it.
12:12A little bit of picante.
12:13Nitrate, fennel seed, and our starter culture, which we apply to allow beneficial bacterias to produce lactic acid and preserve the product.
12:23We're going to grind all of our proteins with all of our hard fat.
12:30The desired fat ratio is about 70-30.
12:34The fat is frozen, so it's about 10 degrees right now.
12:39Instead of smashing it or smearing it into the protein, we're able to create little balls of fat that are nice and will blend in and give a good separate speckled visual.
12:55We want texture to be kind of loose, and then it all tightens up when it ferments and dries.
13:01Everybody in the boat.
13:02As I'm just trying to distribute, I use this, like, raking motion with my fingers to try to help pull all the seasoning through and make sure that culture gets penetrated into every corner.
13:18Raw meat spoils fast, so salami makers add a friendly bacteria culture which eats the sugar and turns the mix acidic.
13:24This tangy acidity is hostile to dangerous microbes.
13:27This ground mixture is referred to as a farce.
13:31We're going to be casing it inside of a 90-millimeter collagen casing.
13:36It's going to allow us to dehydrate the product, and the casing will shrink with the product, constantly allowing moisture to pass through it.
13:44We're going to allow this little hand crank to force all the sausage into this collagen casing.
13:50I want to try to mitigate any air gaps or spaces between the proteins, and that'll allow a really solid bind, and once it's dried, a really good sliceability.
14:07Since we inoculated this with bacteria, it needs to go directly into a fermentation chamber.
14:14Off to the side, we have a little small package of the farce.
14:21We use that so we can monitor and test the pH.
14:24I'm going to hang out at 75 degrees with a 95% humidity for 48 to 72 hours until we get our pH below 5.3.
14:36These have been on fermentation for 48 hours.
14:41They're ready to come out.
14:42The product is going through many stages in this room.
14:47At the beginning, we have a very wet, fermented product.
14:51Now what we really want to do is let it hang out in this room, let the moisture extract to the surface and dissipate into the environment.
15:01We have a batch two weeks into its life cycle, and you can see a beautiful mold start to form on the exterior.
15:07A decent amount of moisture lost, and the protein itself is starting to tighten up.
15:13This has been aging for about three months.
15:16The mold kind of chills out as there's less and less moisture being pulled to the surface.
15:22There's less for the mold to feed on.
15:25At this point, we're going to pull the casing off, and this product is either going out to restaurants or going to our butcher shop, and we're slicing it for customers.
15:37We've worked through many of the small cuts and even the scraps, but one of the biggest muscles is still waiting.
15:44We're looking at a ham right now with the H-bone attached, the tailbone, and the top sirloin.
15:51Smoky, salty ham wins us over with a texture perfectly balanced between tender and chewy.
15:58Ham-a-lam-a.
15:59So we're going to make our brine and smoked ham.
16:03The brine is salt, sugar, coriander, black peppercorn, fennel seed, and nitrite.
16:09Dissolve that in water, submerge our ham, and allow it to brine for 10 days.
16:16Curing and brining are similar, but different.
16:19Brine adds moisture as it seasons, while a dry cure leaves the ham denser and drier.
16:24The mussels in the ham are very lean.
16:27Once they're smoked for a period of time, it can get very dry.
16:31So we try to mitigate that a little bit by submerging them in liquid, and they absorb some of that brine, and it maintains a juicy moisture.
16:40I'm doing this in a bag.
16:42I have better control over our brine ratio.
16:45And then we'll put this in our vacuum sealer to close the top.
16:50This has been in a brine for 10 days.
16:52We did use chunky spices in our brine, but I like the spice profile a little more pronounced.
16:58We use the same spices to rub those on the exterior.
17:02After brining, the ham heads to the smoker where the surface darkens and firms up, and the inside picks up a mellow, smoky depth.
17:10We killed the smoking cycle about an hour ago, and we're going to carry it over to our blast chiller.
17:17All right, this ham is nice and cool.
17:21Put it on the meat slicer.
17:23Shave it very thin for sandwiches.
17:26This also goes out to various restaurants.
17:29That's ham-a-lam-a.
17:31Heavy lifters are done.
17:32Now we turn to a rare, more refined muscle.
17:35One that calls for a gentler touch.
17:38We're going to be cutting the pork jowl off to make our guanciale.
17:43Guanciale.
17:44The pig's cheek.
17:46Fatter and richer than bacon.
17:48There's just two per animal, so the stakes are high.
17:51Jowls are comprised of very soft, luscious fat.
17:56Very fatty.
17:57One slender strip of meat down the middle.
18:01Like the copa, guanciale is cured to remove water and add flavor.
18:05Unlike the copa, which is more lean, guanciale is rich in fat.
18:09While copa is typically sliced, guanciale is usually diced and cooked to render its fat,
18:14or pasta sauces like carbonara.
18:16I'm applying cure to this salt, turbinado sugar, telicherry black peppercorn.
18:22It allows the fat to get really dense.
18:24After it's dried for two months, it'll have a really nice sliceability to it.
18:29I'm predominantly going to rub them into my exposed side.
18:33They don't penetrate the skin side as much.
18:36The prolonged aging and exposed to oxygen can cause that to turn rancid.
18:42So the skin helps prevent that.
18:45All right, so we just took our pork jowl out of a 14-day cure.
18:50Over the 14 days, the sodium and sucrose has pulled out a lot of moisture
18:55and making that much more dense.
18:58And now we're going into our fermentation chamber.
19:01We're taking our guanciales out of fermentation.
19:04They've spent about 48 hours in here, getting all funky and delicious.
19:09These bad boys are going to hang for about eight weeks.
19:16We'll see about 25-30% water loss on these.
19:20These jowls are about a month in.
19:23Still a little soft.
19:25Not a ton of mold development.
19:27Now we're getting to about two months.
19:30Nice and firm and dense.
19:31We're going to peel this fat off, exposing the beautiful white flesh underneath.
19:37It's probably one of the best sellers out of our butcher shop.
19:40We've watched most of this pig become a series of elegant products and dishes,
19:44but the most creative one is still ahead.
19:47All day as John worked his way through this pig,
19:50he was constantly setting aside trim and scrap.
19:53Trim, terrine meat, terrine meat.
19:56Small bits from the pig, amazingly delicious.
20:00They're just not big enough in their own right to become their own product.
20:04Knowing it would be great for the terrine.
20:08A terrine combines scraps of meat, fat, and seasoning into a delicious sliceable loaf.
20:15We want to add enough fat so that you get richness to kind of counterbalance organ meat
20:20that is extremely lean.
20:23Flavor-wise, we're looking at salt, cinnamon, a little allspice, turbinado, mace,
20:28and a little nitrite.
20:30Texture, we're looking at blanched pistachios,
20:33currants that have been cooked in the brandy that we're going to fold into it.
20:37And we utilize the cream and the eggs to help bring everything together
20:41and give us a nice sliceability at the end.
20:44We're just going to grind our liver and our fatty protein together.
20:48We really rely on products like this to help us utilize the whole carcass.
20:55Odds and ends have to get utilized to process an animal successfully.
21:00Liver is like, it has this crazy creaminess.
21:03It's very high in protein, but it's also very high in water.
21:08The liver really kind of fills in the gaps between the protein and the fat
21:12and helps kind of make it this unctuous flavor profile.
21:15Everybody in, we got those ground salami bits,
21:19our spices, our nuts, brandy that we hydrated the currants in,
21:24cream, and our eggs.
21:25We want to allow the salt to start extracting a protein called myosin.
21:32Myosin is essentially meat glue.
21:34Salt and mixing pull it out, cooking makes it lock up.
21:37That's what keeps a terrine from crumbling.
21:39As I grab a little ball, we let it go for 10 seconds.
21:44If it doesn't hold for 10 seconds, then we keep mixing.
21:48And I didn't count, so I'm thinking by the end of this episode,
21:53we'll have finished this product.
21:56It was long enough.
21:58It's ready to be molded, which gives it the terrine shape.
22:02So this is the sexiest meatloaf you've ever had.
22:05Stomach lining, cull fat, is used as the exterior
22:10to help retain some of the moisture.
22:12What I'm using now is just standard plastic wrap.
22:16Another layer that helps retain moisture,
22:19but more importantly, remove the terrine from the terrine mold.
22:25All right, I love this stuff.
22:27I'm going to try to fill this in so that I press out any air gaps.
22:33This is going to cook, and as the protein coagulates,
22:36it's going to get a little taller and shrink in from the edges.
22:39As we cool it with a weight on it,
22:42it's all going to redistribute back into the terrine.
22:44So now this terrine is on its way to its steam bath.
22:48We put it in a steam bath in the oven,
22:51set it on a sheet tray with another sheet tray on top and some weight.
22:56The tin of olives is the chosen weight in this situation.
23:01We let this warm up just a little bit so that we can peel the edges away
23:07and hopefully it tamps out.
23:13If I did my job well.
23:18There we go.
23:20This guy is going to get cut into half inch to three quarter inch slices
23:26and enjoyed with a nice glass of wine.
23:31Very delicious treat.
23:33And there you have it.
23:34Every possible pork product in existence.
23:37Well, actually, there are countless other products
23:39that are made spanning different cultures, countries, and centuries.
23:42In fact, there are over 40 more pork products
23:45made just from this butcher shop.
23:47This is only a small sample of just how much
23:49a single animal can be transformed.
23:51This is only a small sample of just how much a single animal can be transformed.
23:56This is only a small sample of just how much a single animal can be transformed.
23:57This is only a small sample of just how much a single animal can be transformed.
23:58This is only a small sample of just how much a single animal can be transformed.
23:59This is only a small sample of just how much a single animal can be transformed.
24:00This is only a small sample of just how much a single animal can be transformed.
24:01This is only a small sample of just how much a single animal can be transformed.
24:02This is only a small sample of just how much a single animal can be transformed.
24:03This is only a small sample of just how much a single animal can be transformed.
24:04This is only a small sample of just how much a single animal can be transformed.
24:05This is only a small sample of just how much a single animal can be transformed.
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