Trotters

These are cooked pigs feet that I just took out of the stock. Until I started working the meat station I never understood the importance of trotters. I would have to separate the meat from the bone from the skin. I would have a huge pile of bone a medium pile of skin and a small pile of meat. I never knew what the use was. 

Trotters are very important to use when preparing pulled pork. Once the meat is pulled and being seasoned with stock/jus or sauce, the small diced trotter skin is added in and it basically melts away and gives the pulled pork a beautiful moisture and texture that heightens the final product to some next level type shit. Chow has a lot of pulled pork because we get the whole pig and butcher it in house. We make roasts out of the best part of the shoulder and we use the shoulder trim for sausages. But sometimes we slow roast the shoulder overnight for pulled pork.

So basically trotters are used for the quality and the gelatin of the skin. I was always asking the Quebecois cooks that I work with why we waste our time with the trotters when there is hardly any meat on there, they would just look at me and laugh. We also de-bone them and stuff them and serve them to VIP’s. They are also great to put into stocks to add body to a thin stock for sauce.