Mo-Dave
Quintessential Chatty Farker
Shush please don't tell my wife I have not been removing this glad all these years, or else she will never eat pork butt again.
Dave
Dave
Uh oh - making sausage and can't find the gland in my pork butt!!
- Thread starter theTastyCat
- Start date
Wornslick
is one Smokin' Farker
Well, I guess it hasn't killed me yet.
You will find it here
http://www.meatbasics101.com/sausage_03.htm
http://www.meatbasics101.com/sausage_03.htm
Harbormaster
somebody shut me the fark up.
I cooked 16 butts for a wedding at the end of March.
While pulling I came across something a little larger than a Pinto bean. Reckon it was a gland.
Found 2 or 3 glands in the 16 butts. First time I have ever seen them, and I'm pretty persnickety when it comes to pulling butts. Not much gets past me.
While pulling I came across something a little larger than a Pinto bean. Reckon it was a gland.
Found 2 or 3 glands in the 16 butts. First time I have ever seen them, and I'm pretty persnickety when it comes to pulling butts. Not much gets past me.
BenRias
Got Wood.
I work in a charcuterie kitchen and cube about 200 lbs. of pork each week for sausage. Here's my two cents on finding them in boneless butts...we use butts that have the paddle bone removed but still have the flap attached, so YMMV depending on the cut you buy:
1) if you are standing at your cutting table, turn the butt so that the money meat muscle is facing left (9 o'clock position.)
2) if you then cut the butt into 1.5 inch steaks (i.e. you cut the butts from 12 to 6 o'clock), you will find MOST of the glands lurking in the fat at the tip of the steaks--the tip furthest from you. Usually, the 1.5 inch cut will expose enough of the fat to allow you to simply lay each steak on its side and see a gray mass or see where you've sliced right through a gland.
3) Simply trim away and you're all set.
OK, now that said, you can also often just flip the butt fat side down and find a few of the larger glands just hanging out. They will look like pink chicken kidneys or light gray masses.
Sometimes you will find smaller darker glands that look like dark gray warts with some bloodiness around them.
And sometimes you won't find any glands at all! I think a big part of it depends on the specific pig and where the slaughterhouse makes their cuts. We've had plenty of butts with zero glands and others with a dozen.
I try to trim them out when I find them, but despite my boss's opinion, I can't help but feel that 5 grams of gland in a 25 lb. batch of sausage really won't make a difference. I'm sure if you are coarse grinding, and someone gets a big bite of gland, they may notice the armpit flavor, but in everyday grinding, I think you are fine. Just remove the big obvious glands as best practice and don't worry about removing all of them IMO.
Best of luck!
1) if you are standing at your cutting table, turn the butt so that the money meat muscle is facing left (9 o'clock position.)
2) if you then cut the butt into 1.5 inch steaks (i.e. you cut the butts from 12 to 6 o'clock), you will find MOST of the glands lurking in the fat at the tip of the steaks--the tip furthest from you. Usually, the 1.5 inch cut will expose enough of the fat to allow you to simply lay each steak on its side and see a gray mass or see where you've sliced right through a gland.
3) Simply trim away and you're all set.
OK, now that said, you can also often just flip the butt fat side down and find a few of the larger glands just hanging out. They will look like pink chicken kidneys or light gray masses.
Sometimes you will find smaller darker glands that look like dark gray warts with some bloodiness around them.
And sometimes you won't find any glands at all! I think a big part of it depends on the specific pig and where the slaughterhouse makes their cuts. We've had plenty of butts with zero glands and others with a dozen.
I try to trim them out when I find them, but despite my boss's opinion, I can't help but feel that 5 grams of gland in a 25 lb. batch of sausage really won't make a difference. I'm sure if you are coarse grinding, and someone gets a big bite of gland, they may notice the armpit flavor, but in everyday grinding, I think you are fine. Just remove the big obvious glands as best practice and don't worry about removing all of them IMO.
Best of luck!
Ive been cookin bbq since 1989... and competing since 2003.
Ive found the gland a few times.. out of the hundreds of butts ive cooked, i would say ive found this elusive stinkbit maybe 6-8 times. I started lookign out for it after the ONE TIME it did get missed and was left in the pulled pork prior to being sauced. I will say it was the nastiest most disgusting thing to cross the taste buds.
uke:
The level of paranoia after that moment lasted a long time. After that trauma, and several inquiry to the experts, they actually felt it may have been some kind of cyst and not 'the gland', based on the level of disgusting i described.uke:
so based on the infrequency of this little pig nuke, i think its usually either usually removed, or so small its easily missed.
Ive found the gland a few times.. out of the hundreds of butts ive cooked, i would say ive found this elusive stinkbit maybe 6-8 times. I started lookign out for it after the ONE TIME it did get missed and was left in the pulled pork prior to being sauced. I will say it was the nastiest most disgusting thing to cross the taste buds.
uke:The level of paranoia after that moment lasted a long time. After that trauma, and several inquiry to the experts, they actually felt it may have been some kind of cyst and not 'the gland', based on the level of disgusting i described.
uke:so based on the infrequency of this little pig nuke, i think its usually either usually removed, or so small its easily missed.
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theTastyCat
Full Fledged Farker
Hey all - sorry for dropping off the face of the earth! Been a wild 24 hours. As for my ninja-stealth-gland Greek sausage, I was up finishing it until 1 this morning, and it was an *utter* bust. Waay to salty and oregano-y. Throwing all 10 lb. out. I was trying to make a 5.5x recipe and I think I must have screwed the pooch while converting teaspoons to kilometers per fluid ounce. And I cut the crap out of my hand while boning the butt, and it kept opening up all night, so it really was an utter catastrophe.
BUTT GLANDS: as many others have shared, it's not a concern smoking because it is typically easily found and discarded when pulling. You may well have thought it was fat. However in my sausage book, as well as several internet sources, it says grinding up the gland would give the sausage a bitter flavor. I now have two sausagefests under my belt with a 50% failure rate, so don't take my word for it!
As always, thanks for the contributions! I love this place.
BUTT GLANDS: as many others have shared, it's not a concern smoking because it is typically easily found and discarded when pulling. You may well have thought it was fat. However in my sausage book, as well as several internet sources, it says grinding up the gland would give the sausage a bitter flavor. I now have two sausagefests under my belt with a 50% failure rate, so don't take my word for it!
As always, thanks for the contributions! I love this place.
Really? What'd ja come up with? :loco:
theTastyCat
Full Fledged Farker
It ended up being in yards per degree Kevin, so I think I got it figgered out!
99% of the time I use bone-in butts for sausage and for smoking, and I might find a single gland or a little cluster of them in one butt out of ten or twelve, and they are sort of intermingled with a glob of fatty tissue. Sometimes there is a little blood around them too. I believe the Rytek Kutas book has some good photo's of the gland, I'll check it out later today.
