3 Shoulders = 9lbs of PP?

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I was asked to cook some pulled pork for a friends kids Birthday party. I pulled out 3 Pork shoulders, they looked like they weighed around 8-10lbs each. I was aiming for around 10-15lbs of cooked PP. All said and done I only ended up with around 9lbs of PP. I know that the shoulder has more useless weight like the skin, and the joint but i was still a bit dismayed that I only got 9lbs of cooked pork from nearly 30lbs of un-cooked shoulder. Does this seem to be an average amount or are the shoulders i got below par?


I got the shoulders from BJ's at case price, but I think next time I'll spend a $1 more per pound for the bonless picnics. Sucks to throw away $1.29 or whatever per pound when it's like 20lbs of loss.
 
General rule of thumb for bone in butt is 40% loss. 27 lbs raw - 10.8 lbs = 16.2 lbs
ish. Never have cooked shoulder so no thoughts on % loss for it.
Ed
 
I recently did 25 butts from Sam's Club and had 50% shrinkage.
 
I counted on about 50% loss, but this is more like a 75% loss.
 
WOW. Interesting.

I have never weight it out.
 
Something doesn't sound right.
Those look like whole shoulders.
A whole shoulder is both the butt and the picnic together.
A whole butt is usually around 8 lb average, picnics a little smaller I think.
You'll get more waste from the picnic section than the butt part, but I'd still say a whole shoulder would probably weigh more than 12 lbs to begin with.

Perhaps these were smaller shoulders?
Did you buy them cryopackaged?
From a store or butcher? Or were they from a farm?


Still, I've never seen more than 50% loss on pulled pork from a butt or picnic.
I always end up right at 40% loss.
 
Did you trust someone else to pull the pork? If so, you was robbed! I'm with others, I average between 55-60%
 
I ALWAYS estimate 4 lbs finished per butt, or 50%. Since Its very rare to find a butt smaller that 8lbs(i wouldnt buy it).. That always yielded me a good estimate without coming up short.

that one on the far right in your photo looks like a picnic.. a pretty big one at that.

If you only got 9 lbs out of those butts, you either had really huge bones in them, they were less than 8 lbs each or you snacked heavily while pulling it.. NTTAWWT. :)
 
They were cryopacked and bought at bj's as a case. They didn't have any individual stickers/weights. I guestimated that they averaged around 8-10lbs each. There was 9 of them in the case and the case weight was 89.75lbs. I cooked and pulled them myself. I cooked them with skin on.

All of them are shoulders, skin on and bone in. I'll try to find the other pics. Far right was the biggest, the other 2 were similar in size.
 
That 1 is definitely a picnic, can not tell if the other 2 are but if it was a case then i guess so, they will yield less than the 50% i get from boston butts.

If it was me i would have weighed them raw, then you know what you started with.

Sometimes its just less...
 
For Shoulders I have always had a higher loss ratio (60%) than I have for Pork Butts (50%). Sounds a little shy for 30 pounds, but you did say that the shoulders were only about 8 - 10 pounds each. If they were average of 9 pound each you would have 27 pounds of raw meat or maybe less. Calculate a 60% loss and you are at 10.5 pounds of cooked meat if it were the 27 pounds, if less than 27 pounds of raw meat the result would be even less, and poor trimming of the skin which I have sometimes seen, would result in an even grater ratio of loss. Sounds like maybe you didn't have an accurate total of the weight to start.

The Pork Shoulder is a Picnic with the butt of the shoulder cut off, with a large bone from end to end, so you are left with a lot less meat. You have a greater skin and bone ratio to the amount of total amount of meat than you would have with a whole picnic or a butt.

Think of the picnic in terms of a ham: you have 2 parts to a whole ham, the butt end and the shank end. The butt end contains much more meat because of the girth of the piece of meat, whereas the shank has considerably less meat.

While a whole picnic is good, because it contains both the pork butt and the pork cushion, it still contains skin and bone which is not found on a pork butt. Pork butt or Boston butt comes from higher on the hog, just above the shoulder blade. It has lots of juicy, marbled white and dark meat. This is what I buy, I have less waste and it pulls very easy with just one small bone to pull out.

Everyone has their favorite cut of meat for pulled pork, mine is the pork butt.

.
 
Mad man, thanks for the explanation, i figured it had less meat than the other cuts, but figured i would get the same ratio from un-cooked to cooked.
 
IamMadMan said:
For Shoulders I have always had a higher loss ratio (60%) than I have for Pork Butts (50%). Sounds a little shy for 30 pounds, but you did say that the shoulders were only about 8 - 10 pounds each. If they were average of 9 pound each you would have 27 pounds of raw meat or maybe less. Calculate a 60% loss and you are at 10.5 pounds of cooked meat if it were the 27 pounds, if less than 27 pounds of raw meat the result would be even less, and poor trimming of the skin which I have sometimes seen, would result in an even grater ratio of loss. Sounds like maybe you didn't have an accurate total of the weight to start.

The Pork Shoulder is a Picnic with the butt of the shoulder cut off, with a large bone from end to end, so you are left with a lot less meat. You have a greater skin and bone ratio to the amount of total amount of meat than you would have with a whole picnic or a butt.

Think of the picnic in terms of a ham: you have 2 parts to a whole ham, the butt end and the shank end. The butt end contains much more meat because of the girth of the piece of meat, whereas the shank has considerably less meat.

While a whole picnic is good, because it contains both the pork butt and the pork cushion, it still contains skin and bone which is not found on a pork butt. Pork butt or Boston butt comes from higher on the hog, just above the shoulder blade. It has lots of juicy, marbled white and dark meat. This is what I buy, I have less waste and it pulls very easy with just one small bone to pull out.

Everyone has their favorite cut of meat for pulled pork, mine is the pork butt.

.
Click to expand...

Now I've always understood the shoulder to be BOTH the BUTT and PICNIC. Is that not true?

As I understand it, the butt is the upper portion (like the butt portion of a ham) and the picnic is the lower portion (like the shank portion of a ham).

I got it wrong?






Still......to the OP's dilema......Id say your scale is off or something.
If you got a case that had 9 units and the whole case weighed 89.75 lb, then I'd say that they were a 10 lb average, no matter what cuts they were.

For sure the one on the right looks like a picnic due to the skin and the shank bone. It LOOKS like a whole shoulder with the picnic part facing the camera. The other two look like the cut on a butt. I'm guessing the shank bone was facing into the smoker on those?

Regardless......there's just no way I'd expect to cook 3 pieces of ANY part of the shoulder that each averaged 10 lbs and end up with only 9 lbs pulled. No way.

What kind of scale do you have? Digital or analog? I have both and I'm always double checking my older analog one with the needle. Can't imagine it being that far off though.


Weird.
 
I weighed a 1lb bag of beans on my digital scale. It measured, .98lbs. So it is a bit off, but that would really only account for about .20lbs difference.

As far as the cuts, i think this shoulder cut includes more of the upper leg, and less of the body. Either way I don't think i will be buying them again.
 
Wampus said:
Now I've always understood the shoulder to be BOTH the BUTT and PICNIC. Is that not true?

As I understand it, the butt is the upper portion (like the butt portion of a ham) and the picnic is the lower portion (like the shank portion of a ham).

I got it wrong?
Click to expand...

The problem here is terminology of the butcher, store, and the end user. In the store they referred to cuts as roasts, but simply labeled as pork shoulder, a shoulder roast is not a whole shoulder.

A whole ham comes from the rear quarter, whereas a picnic ham come from the front quarter. They are whole cuts of meat. They are also referred to as "Whole Shoulders"

A whole shoulder cut with the shank -- or hock -- attached is called a "picnic", or "whole picnic" in the slaughterhouse. This cut is cheaper than most because it requires less cutting and butchering because it has more bone in it. Picnic hams usually come straight from the abattoir in a clean, cryovac'd package, all ready to go. It contains both the butt and the shoulder roasts.

Boston butt, or pork butt, comes from higher on the carcass above the shoulder blade and has lots of juicy, marbled fat. This is probably what most people buy when they purchase pork for making pulled pork. It's a versatile piece of meat that you can just as easily smoke, roast, or braise for home cooking.

Below the butt is the pork shoulder (roast), once the butt end is cut from the picnic you have a shoulder or shoulder roast. This cut includes most of the hog's front leg quarter, minus the butt end. Because the leg muscles work a lot more than the back, the meat is a little tougher, thus requiring a bit more time to coax out tenderness.

It can be confusing if you work with multiple sources. The slaughter house I use tells me the whole shoulder is a picnic, and that what I get when I order a case of picnics.
 
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