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.
Both cuts of meat are dark and muscular and need a couple hours of stewing before tender. I think that both are as fatty, but some internet posts say that the picnic roast is fattier. The butt comes with less bone and fat, and might be a little more expensive. This is Ok, because it takes less time to cube, there is less bone to throw out, and there is less fat to cut off and discard.
Cooking for us, in the past involved stewing for 1-2 hours in a dutch oven. We then started using a crock pot overnight, which also works well. Now we marinate overnight, then pressure cook it for 20 minutes. The pressure cooking method is more efficient and the results are not only better but faster than the dutch oven and crock pot.
Here’s my general recipe:
- Cut off excess fat and cube the pork. Keep some fat as this will enhance the flavour. Keep the bone separately.
- Marinate pork cubes in your desired marinade sauce, overnight. You can use jerk sauce, a Mexican chipotle pepper sauce, Malay curry sauce, whatever you like. There’s no need to marinade the bone.
- The next day, finely cube onion and garlic.
- In the pressure cooker, medium heat, fry the onion until transparent, then the garlic. Don’t burn the garlic.
- Add the cubed pork and bone to the pressure cooker.
- Add chicken stock when the mixture gets too thick, and top up to your desired liquid level. Stir well.
- Put top on pressure cooker, raise heat to medium-high, pressure cook for 20 minutes. The rocking of the pressure cooker top should be constant but not violent. Time 20 minutes. Longer cooking times will pulverize the meat to shards, so keep track of your time. I found out that pressure cooking only uses 30 lb/in2, very similar to a car tire. It’s pretty low pressure, really, so don’t be too afraid.
- I cool down my pressure cooker by first raising the rocker in order to reduce the pressure. Once you can fully remove the rocker the lid locking mechanism will automatically unlock
- Remove the lid and taste the meat. After you remove any meat, discard your bone
- Throw in your vegetables and other spices, and with the top off, cook in your pressure cooker pot.
Enjoy.
