Expert Advice - Breaking Down a Cut of Meat

No doubt a lot of you grilled on the 4th of July. And with some sunny weather, maybe you want to do a little more of that.

Or maybe you have some food still laying around from your cookout. KOLR10's Daniel Shedd caught up with a local chef to show you how to fully utilize a cut of meat.

Chef Brad Leiningher joined Daniel Shedd on Daybreak Friday morning to discuss how to utilize different portions of a pork butt for your summer barbecue.

"(A pork butt) is from the shoulder of the animal, and you actually have a bit of a shoulder bone in there," Brad explained. "And what we'll do is look, because this is made from a series of different muscles, and a lot of people just throw it all on the smoker. But the thing is, these muscles all cook at different temperatures."

Brad continued, "One of the things I'm looking for is marbling inside the meat. A lot of times you can see it, and that's lean, that's internal. So the first thing we'll do is find the piece of meat that's an extension of the loin. It's actually running back through the animal, and really tender. We slice that up in competitions and serve that. If you can pull that off in your backyard, you'll blow people's minds. So just shape it out just a little bit by taking off some of the meat. Don't throw anything you take off away, because you can still make sausage, or cook that separately. Just try and define the muscle more. You can see striations of fat, and a bone on the opposite end. That gives us our first piece of meat. Then underneath that you have what we call the tubes, because that what it's shaped like. So we're going to carve out some of that, and you'll be able to see how some of these things are running."

"Now personally, I like to take the bone off, because then it cooks faster. But that bone - save it for stock, save it for a pot of beans, use it for whatever. So cut along the bone, flip it out, and then you can run (your knife) back underneath, and get all that meat under there. So we have three sections of meat. Those will all cook at a similar rate of speed when you get it on the smoker. Season it up, throw it on there, you're good to go. It's cool, because each of these muscles have different textures, they cook at different temperatures, and they're good for different things. You can slice some of them, you can pull some of them, and it just makes for a fun presentation."

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