Pork Butt = Pork Shoulder?


 
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Albert Sanchez

TVWBB Super Fan
My Smoking Brethren,

A question on semantics...

The butcher at Costco told me that their "Pork Shoulder" is "Pork Butt"

Why would a shoulder also be a butt?

What gives?

-Albert
 
The pork butt is the "butt" end of a whole shoulder. The picnic (roast) is the forearm portion of the whole shoulder. You can also find butts labelled as pork shoulder blade roasts and many other fun names.

HTH,
Rich
 
***edit, Rich beat me to it***

"Pork Butt" is indeed a cut of the pig's shoulder. A whole Pork Shoulder consists of two sections, the Boston Roast (butt) and the Picnic Roast. You can cook either section or the whole shoulder for pulled pork, but most people prefer the Boston Butt portion.

If a picnic roast is all you can find, those work fine too, but I've not personally done one of those.

Good luck!
 
Well he's right, sorta . . . Click here for a diagram of what comes from where on a pig. The sholder contains both the butt and the picnic. The hind quarter is actually the ham. Hey, I'm just the messenger /infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif
 
Albert
Right..a 'butt' is not THE butt. I read once that the term butt originally came from the way the pork was stored during transport. I forget the details though.

Peter
 
Peter,

Well gosh this changes everything....

My prissy 9 year-old daughter had been abstaining from eating pulled pork because she thought that the "Pork Butt" was literally the pig's rear-end.

Further, she didn't want "anything to do with a pig's butt".

Don't know who is sillier - me for not knowing, or my daughter for being so prissy :-\

-Albert
 
Albert,
What I love to do with the prissy ones is ask them if the like Ham? Then explain that ham is the real Butt /infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif
 
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