Popping the Cherry of a Pork Steak Virgin

Pork steaks are quintessentially a Midwest phenomenon, which for some reason the rest of the country hasn’t caught on to. They come from pork butt, which is actually the pig’s shoulder, and where pulled pork comes from.  For non-natives, it can be a confusing concept.  Why?  Why they ask. 

            The only way to answer that is through demonstration.  And if you’re going to introduce someone to pork steaks, there is no better way than to get the ones we smoke at the shop. 

            “Hey Max, can we smoke some pork steaks today?”

            “What do I look like I want to work?”

            “You don’t have to, I’ll do all the work.”

            “‘I’ll do all the work.’  Yeah right.  I’ve heard that from a woman before.”

            “Oh yeah?  Well I’ve never heard that from a man before.”

            It’s only 9:30; he just needs some time to perk up.

            In a quarter of an hour, Max is out back recapping how to use the propane flamethrower we light the big smoker with.  I’ve only done this once before, so I don’t object to a refresher course. 
      

           The first time I did this with Burt, he lugged the propane tank outside; the tank has a rubber hose hooked up to it, and attached to the hose is a long wand-like device with a cylindrical apparatus on the end.  When I realized what this was, my eyes widened and Burt asked, “Do you want to do this?”

            “Fuck yeah I do! . . . I mean, yes please.”

       
           So Max and I fire up the flamethrower and I start to light one side of the smoker, the wind occasionally kicking ash and cinder up into my face.  After about three minutes, the flame starts to die.  Little by little, it diminishes until there is nothing left.  I go inside and tell Max, and he freaks out.

“Did you get it lit?!”

“Only one side.”

He grabs a twenty out of the register.  “Shit!  Get over to Schnucks and get another tank fast!  Tommy fuckin’ took off so now I gotta do everybody’s job.”

Getting a new tank is a simple task; then I reassemble the flamethrower and start lighting the second pile of charcoal, just as Tommy returns from his mysterious trip.

“What’re you doing?” he asks me.

“Getting ready to smoke some pork steaks.”

“They let you use that thing?”

I confirm this.

“In three years, they’ve never let me near the smoker.”

“Well Tommy . . . do you want to use the smoker?”

“Hell no.”

“That’s what I thought.”

I ask Max if having the two fires at different stages will affect the cooking times, but he says it will be fine.  We toss the pork steaks in the house pork/poultry rub and throw them on the rotating racks within the smoker and wait for them to reach an internal temperature of 150 degrees.  He points to two steaks on the end, “Those two are yours; I cut them special for you.”  Pork steaks cut with extra love just means extra deliciousness.

The steaks smoke for probably an hour and forty-five minutes, giving us plenty of time for other projects.  Max and I smoke chicken wings and ribs in one of the inside smokers, and beef jerky in the other.  I’m still learning how to “feel” when the jerky is done; it has to be stiff, but still a bit pliable.  (So many innuendoes. . . .) 

Then I remember what Tommy said last week, about wanting to have me all to himself for a day.  Well, Burt is out of town, so now’s his chance.  He’s not kept his word so far.

I don’t think that Tommy is aware that I’m his apprentice.  Sure, I belong to the whole shop pretty much—helping out wherever I can—but he’s the one with the skill set that I’m after.  So I decide that I’m going to have to take my education into my own hands. 

Currently Tommy is trimming tenderloin for the case.  I stand on the other side of the 3 foot by 4 foot cutting board where he’s working and say, “When are you gonna teach me how to do that?”

“When I’m not so busy.”

There are currently two customers in the shop, one of whom is already being rung out by Max, the other is being helped by Grace. 

I remain where I am for about three minutes.  The customers clear out.

“Hey Tommy . . . there’s no more customers.”

He goes to the cooler, grabs a tenderloin, slaps it on the table in front of me (in an existing pile of blood, which splashes up on my apron) and says, “Here you go.  You’ve seen me do it enough.  Go ahead.” 

I stare down at the two foot piece of dark red meat before me.  I know the silver skin has to come off first, but can’t seem to remember how to get it started.

“I have seen you do this a lot, but perhaps some instruction might help.”

He grabs a fresh loin, starts at the larger end and stabs his knife under the silver skin, pulling away from the length of the meat.  Then the knife goes back in the other way, separating the silver skin all the way down.  “You angle your knife up, so you’re not cutting into the meat.” 

I take a stab at it (har har); I’m not as quick or as clean as Tommy—it takes me a couple tries to completely remove, and I take off too much of the good flesh along with the skin.  When I’m done, I look up and Tommy is already halfway done cleaning his.  “Hey, you have to slow down so I can keep up with you!”  I flip the meat over and over, unsure what to do next.

“You’re fine, just scrape all the shit off the back side of it; nobody wants all that junk on a $30 piece of meat.”

Tommy’s “scrape” is smooth and well-practiced; I run my knife down the back of the loin and nothing happens.  Perhaps more pressure is required.  This yields about the same results (or lack thereof).  I settle for digging my knife into the meat a bit, then slowly sawing underneath the “gunk” to get rid of it, essentially the same way I did the silver skin.  Once I do that, scraping is a bit easier. 

Max walks by and without stopping comments, “Look at you, you doin’ tender-lion?!” One day Tommy was giving Max his usual spelling quiz, and the word was “tenderloin”; Max spelled it “tenderlion,” so now that’s what he calls it.  I suppose if he didn’t laugh at himself the alternative would be Tommy railing on him about it indefinitely.

The larger end of the loin has an alien-head shaped piece of meat coming off of it (well, it looks like the alien from Alien to me), and then a smaller piece—probably two inches by six inches—coming off the other end.  Tommy points to the smaller part:  “That’s the strap; you just take that off.” 

“The whole thing?” 

He nods.

I do as he says, and hold the strap up at eye level.  “That’s a lot of meat.”  I hate throwing large pieces of what appears to be good meat into the grinder.

Tommy grabs it, shakes it at me when he says, “That’s why our chuck tastes so good.”  He tosses it in the bucket for grinding. 

The rest of the trimming is fairly intuitive:  shaping the meat so it’s one long smooth piece, squaring off the pointy “tail” at the narrow end, cleaning off any lingering bits of fat or silver skin.  Tommy says it looks fine, but I continue refining my piece until I’m satisfied, then look at him. 

“You just did your first tenderloin.  Wanna do another one?”

I do; when he places it before me, I notice that the “alien head” is on the other side now.  “Wait . . . why’s this one opposite?” 

“You have two.  One on each side.” 

Duh.  Sometimes I’m so absentminded I wonder if I’m not actually a natural blonde. 

Armed with my new tenderloin knowledge, when I go back to my day job at the office on Monday, I can’t help but show the admin where her backstrap/tenderloin is.  She says she will never go camping or hiking with me ever.  I appeal to a foodie friend, Sam, who replies, “I agree . . . I don’t want to go camping with you either.  Pointing out the human cuts is disturbing . . . LOL.”  Nobody wants to go camping with the butcher, I don’t understand! 

Then I post this on Facebook (courtesy of Run for Your Lives):

 

 
and get into a fairly drawn-out discussion about the taste of people meat, which does not disturb me nearly as much as it probably should.  Would we taste bitter due to the amount of toxins we regularly put into our bodies?  Cows don’t taste like what they eat, they taste like cow.  Would we be “gamey” like venison?  I think that grass-fed beef tastes far better than the wheat/corn-fed varieties; would that apply for human vegetarians?  I was under the impression that we taste like pork, which is why we’re termed “Long Pig,” but that could just be because we anatomically resemble pigs without our heads, hands, and feet.  Skin us and stick us on a spit and we’re fundamentally the same.  (Refer to the scene in Gangs of New York when Bill the Butcher demonstrates how to kill or wound a person on pig carcasses.)  

But anyways, back to the pork steaks:  the way we make them at the shop—with rub, and not sauce—causes all the brown sugar in the rub to caramelize on the fat, basically turning it into meat candy.  They are pink almost all the way through.  When I serve this to someone who has never had it before, it gives me indescribable joy to see wide-eyed excitement and shock.  How is it so juicy without putting any sauce on it?!  Pork has a natural lubricant inside of it called fat that can do amazing things when treated with gentle heat and rendered slowly.  You don’t want to rush these things; the best things in life, after all, are worth waiting for.  But the very best things in life, aren’t things at all.  I got to pop someone’s pork steak cherry with something I made . . . and that, to me, is a priceless gift.