Pork Cuts: Where they come from and how to cook them
Different parts of the world use different terms for meat. It can be confusing when you go to the store, or read a Canadian grocery store advertisement or weekly flyer for a cut of meat, research it on the internet and find conflicting terms. Even more conflicting is when you go to the Chinese grocery store and find the Chinese name that may or may not correlate with the English name. You can see these terms in the weekly Chinese grocery ads. Such is life living in Toronto, Canada, in a large Chinese community.
Slightly more expensive, is pork butt, but it looks pretty similar to pork picnic roast. Shopping at Chinese stores does not make the topic clearer. What is the difference? After some research the pork butt is pork front shoulder at the top of the leg, while the pork picnic roast is the rest of the leg, below the butt.
Yes, I am not a butcher, not even close, but you need to know about meat in order to cook and feed your family properly. Butt, is an old German word for the widest part of an animal. In the case of a pig, the widest part is the front shoulders, and such the front shoulders are called pork butt. How picnic became the name for all the meat further down I don’t know.
