Pork & Bacon

This sometimes causes confusion with people. So just to explain:
Pig is the animal that Pork comes from. Bacon is the meat that you get when you salt the Pork. This is done to preserve it so that it will stay fresh for longer – very necessary in the old days before refrigeration. Ham or Gammon is the term used for the back leg when it has been cured. This is the ham that you have at Christmas or the sliced cooked ham that you buy in a good Delicatessen or your local butcher.

This can be salted and sold as Collar Bacon. When left unsalted it is used for Diced Pork or it can be slow roasted for many hours and makes a tender and flavoursome sandwich filler called Pulled Pork.

Used mostly for bacon as Streaky Rashers, Pork Belly has also become popular in restaurants as a slow cooked dish where the layers of fat melt away with the long hours of cooking and give a succulent dish.
It is the equivalent of the Brisket with a Beef carcass.

In the butcher shop the Loin is cut as chops. In the bacon factory it is cured and cut as back rashers. In our shop we dry-cure some loins of pork by rubbing a salt cure into them and packing them in salt. No water is injected so it takes 20 days for the salt to penetrate into the middle of the meat. They make a beautiful Dry-Cured Rasher and they don’t shrink on the pan.

It is a large piece of meat (7-9kg) and is usually cut into 2-3 smaller roasting joints called The Fillet of Pork and The Shank of Pork. Alternatively the leg is salted giving you a Gammon or Ham. Bacon is always boiled slowly and goes down well with cabbage!