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Found a 40% yield difference on pork shoulders last month
Was breaking down a case of shoulders for sausage and noticed one batch had way more fat cap than another. Weighed the trim and it came out to about 40% yield difference between suppliers. Has anyone else tracked this kind of variation?
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sageburns15d ago
40% yield difference" sounds like the kind of lie a bad butcher tells when he messes up the trim. I've seen that swing on pork shoulders but never that big. The fat cap on one batch was basically a sweater, the other was a t-shirt. I'd bet one supplier was just shipping us the scraps from the fancy boneless loins.
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That line about "scraps from the fancy boneless loins" makes a lot of sense. I started weighing trim from every case after noticing a similar inconsistency a few years back. Turned out one supplier was giving us shoulders that had already been trimmed for the loin market, so the fat cap was thin and even. The other supplier was just hacking off whole primals with the collar left on. I switched to specifying a maximum fat cap thickness in my orders, and it kept the yield swing down to under 10% after that.
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