Bedford – For its second year, the Delaware Beef Council (DBC), through the Northeast Beef Promotion Initiative (NEBPI) will be supporting grants for fresh beef product through the Beef in the Classroom program during the 2020-2021 school year.
Each year, 30 Family and Consumer Science classrooms are selected to participate in the Beef & Veal in the Classroom program. Educators are either offered reimbursement for beef purchases for in-classroom lessons. Educators are also provided with beef resources to ensure that their in-classroom lessons include information on beef selection, storage, preparation, and nutrition, to name a few. This program is offered on behalf of Delaware cattle producers through their $1-per-head Beef Checkoff program. For more information about the 2020-2021 grant program, please visit the Delaware Beef in the Classroom website.
The Beef Checkoff Program was established as part of the 1985 Farm Bill. The checkoff assesses $1 per head on the sale of live domestic and imported cattle, in addition to a comparable assessment on imported beef and beef products. States may retain up to 50 cents on the dollar and forward the other 50 cents per head to the Cattlemen’s Beef Promotion and Research Board, which administers the national checkoff program, subject to USDA approval. Internal links within this document are funded and maintained by the Beef Checkoff. All other outgoing links are to websites maintained by third parties.
Today's 2020 Fried Chicken Challenge taste testing features Connie's Fried Chicken in Tupelo.
STAY TUNED! We will post a video revealing our winner on Tuesday, September 8th.
Scoring model - each finalist will be graded on a 10-point scale. The perfect fried chicken would be a 10, and highly unsatisfactory bird would a 1. However, our score will be weighted this way: 60% flavor, 20% appearance & 20% texture. Judges' scores for each finalist will be revealed following the final taste testing.
For weeks, I had hyped a North Carolina-style barbecue dinner I planned to cook for friends. In the Tar Heel State, pigs are traditionally cooked whole, but I chose a bone-in pork shoulder because that’s all my friend’s outdoor grill could fit. I set the shoulder on a pan in the grill set at 250 degrees and left it to do its thing.
I returned four hours later and the shoulder looked glorious. After letting it rest for 30 minutes, I went to shred it with two forks. It barely budged, holding stiff like a rubber ball. As everyone sat at the table, awkwardly staring at the fried hush puppies, creamy coleslaw and baked beans that rounded out the meal, I was sweating in the kitchen, slicing the meat as thin as possible in a vain attempt to salvage it. After I brought it to the table, my congenial friends quietly ate the meat and offered up well-meaning praise, while I contemplated what they were actually thinking. My pulled pork nightmare had become reality.
The begrudgingly served pork shoulder for my much-hyped North Carolina-style barbecue dinner with friends.
(Ben Mims / Los Angeles Times)
As someone adept at developing recipes for quick-cooking weeknight meals or party food for smaller groups using basic kitchen equipment, I had only ever cooked pork shoulders in the moist environment of a relatively fast oven braise. But leaving that same cut in the dry heat of a grill was another matter altogether. My experience had unwittingly given me a false sense of security around how long pork shoulders actually take to cook. Being raised around barbecue in the South, where pitmasters spend full nights tending to slowly smoked roasts, the unending hours seemed a part of barbecue folklore, not a necessity. My, how I was wrong.
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I’m not a pitmaster, but I knew I wanted to get pitmaster-level tenderness from my home oven. I also wanted to understand why, throughout my years of cooking whole pork shoulders, some have been spoon-tender throughout, while some are stubbornly tough in parts. To get to that question, I first had to find answers to others from pork experts.
How do pigs’ breeds and diets affect the meat?
Farmer Oliver Woolley, who runs Peads & Barnetts Farm in northern San Diego County, explained how different breeds, and their diets, offer up surprisingly different cuts of pork.
“We raise Berkshires, so they have relatively more marbling in their meat than most other breeds,” says Woolley. “You have to treat it differently than supermarket pork shoulder because Berkshires have more collagen and fat. All that equals more flavor, but it means there’s also more that has to break down. It also makes a huge difference what the pig eats. Ours eat a wheat and seaweed diet, so the fat is waxy as opposed to soft, like in grocery store-types, where the feed might be soy or corn.”
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Armed with that knowledge, it made sense that pork shoulders of unknown provenance purchased at your local grocery store most likely come from pigs bred to have softer meat. Olin Schneider, head butcher and general manager at McCall’s Meat & Fish Co. in Los Feliz, confirmed my theory.
“You have to realize that animals are not consistent,” says Schneider. “Sometimes we get shoulders [in the shop] with loose muscles, sometimes it’s tight and perfect. You have to ask yourself, ‘What did that muscle look like raw?’ If you have a pig that moves around a lot, you will have a tougher animal versus one that lays around all day.”
This explains why shoulders can yield inconsistent results.
So what are the keys to cooking consistently tender pork shoulder no matter the breed?
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It turns out time and temperature reign. Daniel Castillo, pitmaster and co-owner of Heritage Barbecue in San Juan Capistrano, explains, “There’s no fast way to cook a pork shoulder. Two hundred degrees is the temp that connective tissue and intermuscular fat begin to change: Collagen turns into gelatin, and fat transforms from really rubbery to sticky. It’s the liquid gold that gives the meat that sticky mouthfeel you want, and you only get that with time.”
All those nights I witnessed barbecue cooks tending meat over hours that ran into the teens wasn’t for show after all. But now that I had uncovered the key to cooking pork shoulder, it was time to tackle how to pick the right cut for it.
What exactly is “pork shoulder” and what makes it unique?
The name “pork shoulder” glosses over the fact that there are actually two very different cuts using that appellation, and they require different approaches for success.
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“When people come in asking for a ‘pork shoulder,’ typically they mean a ‘Boston butt,’ which is the upper portion that incorporates the shoulder blade,” says Schneider. “It has the fat and marbling that break down well in low-and-slow cooking and gives you something to shred. Whereas the ‘picnic,’ on the other hand, is most of the front arm, so you get more sinew. The muscles aren’t consistently sized like the ‘butt.’”
However, the “picnic” cut does offer one advantage that the “butt” does not.
“A lot of Puerto Rican families I know swear by ‘picnic’ for roast pork because if you want lots of crispy skin, it’s covered in it,” says Schneider. “But the meat itself is not as fatty as the ‘butt,’ so while there’s a lot of fat on the outside to protect it, there’s still a higher chance it can get overcooked and become dry.”
A slow-roasted “Boston butt,” or simply “butt,” cut of pork shoulder yields the best people-pleasing pulled pork.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
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The “butt” or “Boston butt” — so named after the barrels, called butts, that used to store the cheap cut for transport in pre-Revolutionary War New England — offers that shredability that is the holy grail of cooking pork shoulder and something that barbecue pitmasters have long sought out to win competitions and loyal customers alike. Everyone I spoke to assured me that this is the people-pleasing cut you want for consistently tender pulled pork.
And while Castillo applies a carnitas method to the process of cooking pork shoulder at Heritage — “It’s hard to put ‘carnitas’ on the menu because that’s a specific thing, but that’s exactly what we’re making, a smoked carnitas” — he offers up the best way to get foolproof pulled pork in your home oven.
“Start with a good piece of meat and cook it at higher temp, like 400 degrees, to color both sides,” says Castillo. “Then drop the temp down to 250. Once the pork reaches an internal temperature of 200 degrees, you want to wrap it in foil — you want it to continue to roast, not steam — then let it rest in a cooler to retain heat for a minimum of two hours. Basically, don’t touch the meat until you can do it without the meat burning you. That’s when you know it’s perfect.”
Pork shoulder is a cheap cut that feeds a lot of people and that’s why it’s often chosen for some of the best pork dishes around the world. I certainly learned my lesson with my nightmare pulled pork, and I’m making up for it now.
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I now know that regardless of the breed, cut or cooking method, pork shoulder can become evenly tender with enough time at the right temperature. My rubbery pork wasn’t caused by waiting too long, but by not waiting long enough. From now on, I’ll get the pork going before heading to bed, knowing that the longer I sleep, the better the pork will be when I wake up.
At Heritage Barbecue in San Juan Capistrano, pitmaster and co-owner Daniel Castillo, who owns the restaurant with his wife Brenda, applies a carnitas method to the process of cooking his pork shoulder. “It’s hard to put ‘carnitas’ on the menu because that’s a specific thing,” says Castillo, “but that’s exactly what we’re making, a smoked carnitas.”
But for home cooks, he offers up the best way to get the spoon-tender pulled pork in your oven.
“Start with a good piece of meat and cook it at higher temp, like 400 degrees, to color both sides,” says Castillo. “Then drop the temp down to 250. Once the pork reaches an internal temperature of 200 degrees, you want to wrap it in foil — you want it to continue to roast, not steam — then let it rest in a cooler to retain heat for a minimum of two hours. You won’t get a smoky flavor but will get a really well-cooked piece of meat.”
Castillo stresses the resting period almost as much as the cook time, saying that is the real secret to success.
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“Basically, don’t touch the meat until you can do so without the meat burning you,” he says. “That’s when you know it’s perfect.”
This is my take on the “fried pork sandwich” served at Tina’s Cuban Cuisine in New York. It’s one of the best ways to utilize leftover roasted pork shoulder. Chunks of leftover meat are pan-fried and then topped with Peruvian pickled onions known as salsa criolla and maduros, which are fried sweet plantains. For the bread, use the standard 7- to 8-inch-long rolls for Cuban sandwiches: tubular like a French baguette, but without pointed ends. They are of the soft white-bread texture, so no artisanal sourdoughs here, please. In a pinch you could use a Kaiser roll, banh mi roll or other feathery white bread bun.
Starting the pork in cold oil may seem strange, but take it from my experience: Adding pieces of cold pork with cold fat to hot oil will cause violent pops from the meat’s moisture releasing. No sandwich is worth burning your arm in hot oil splatters. Heating the pork with the oil allows it to fry and become crisp with no need for protective gear.
(Bloomberg) -- Smithfield Foods Inc., the world’s biggest pork producer, has pledged to cut emissions from its own operations to zero, but fell short of making more ambitious targets for its supply chain.
While the Smithfield, Virginia-based company is the first in its industry to publicly announce such a goal for its own operations, the pledge is less ambitious than what’s been seen in other industries, such as Unilever NV’s plan to zero out its own and its supplier emissions and Microsoft Corp.’s plan to go carbon negative.
The meat industry has come under pressure from investors and retailers to reduce emissions, but many have struggled in part because they buy animals from third-party ranchers. Smithfield’s target will likely have a bigger impact because it controls about 50% of its hog production.
“We want to lead the industry in this regard; there’s no one doing it at this size and scale,” Ken Sullivan, Smithfield’s president and chief executive officer, said in an interview.
In 2019, the pork producer’s carbon footprint stood at about 1.6 million metric tons for its own operations in the U.S. and abroad, so-called Scope 1 and 2, which includes fuels burned to run its vehicles and generate electricity in power plants. That figure doesn’t include the vast majority of its total emissions, so-called Scope 3, which include manure management, production of feed and customer use outside Smithfield-owned farms.
New Goal
The company’s new goal, announced Thursday, targets zeroing out only about 16% of its total emissions, according to Stewart Leeth, Smithfield’s chief sustainability officer. It comes on top of a promise to cut total emissions, including Scope 3, by 25% by 2025.
To reach its goal, the company will use techniques such as reducing miles driven, capturing methane emitted from hog farms and optimizing fertilizer use in fields that grow feed for the animals.
Smithfield, majority-owned by Hong Kong-listed WH Group, has come under fire this year after thousands of workers at its plants and other rival meat producers caught the coronavirus. Some plants shut down, before President Donald Trump issued an executive order for meat plants to continue operating.
Meat producers are also facing increased competition from the rise of plant-based alternatives, which some consumers are drawn to for their greener image. By some measures, agriculture accounts for more global greenhouse gas emissions than transport, thanks in part to livestock production.
Rivals Tyson Foods Inc. and Cargill Inc. have pledged to cut 30% of their emissions, including those in Scope 3, by 2030.
Smithfield and Dominion Energy will each invest $250 million through 2028 in building projects that will inject captured methane from hog farms into the grid at a premium cost for its “green” credentials.
The technology to produce biogas from pig manure has been developed and perfected over many decades. Although Smithfield began working on biogas projects in the 2000s, it faced a hurdle in ensuring that the biogas could be injected into the grid and thus recoup investments. It has overcome those limitations with the new projects.
“To be sustainable, by definition, something has to be economically viable, or it doesn’t attract capital,” Sullivan said.
Learning from its own work to lower emissions, Smithfield has begun working with contractors that provide about 50% of the company’s pigs and enrolling them to participate in biogas projects, said Leeth.
(Updates with pledges from rivals in 10th paragraph.)
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Daniel Castillo, chef and owner of Heritage Barbecue in San Juan Capistrano, shares his method for cooking fall-off-the-bone pork shoulder in a home oven, which is easily adapted to an outdoor smoker or grill (see Variations). Most “butt” pork shoulders come with the skin already removed and the fat trimmed. If you can, ask your butcher to remove the skin but leave all the fat intact so that it can render around the meat while it roasts, keeping it tender and adding more flavor.
This pork takes at least 14 hours to cook, so plan accordingly. I’ve found the best approach is to put the pork in the oven right before you go to bed, so it is finished cooking around lunchtime the next day; otherwise, you will have to wake up before sunrise the day of to get it started so it’s ready by dinnertime. Either way, check on the pork every hour after 7 or 8 hours because, if your oven is like mine, it might shut itself off after so many hours at such a low temperature. Trust me, you don’t want to find this out the hard way.
