🥩 Pork and Poultry Cutting

A pig is the most rewarding carcass a small butchery can handle. It gives back more of itself than any other common species, it carries a fat that customers actually want, and almost every part of it has a buyer. But that generosity hides a trap: because pork yields well, butchers stop counting, and stop counting is where money leaves.

Start with the arithmetic of what arrives. Dressing percentage is hot carcass weight as a share of live weight. Published figures put pork at 70 to 73 percent skin-on, and a general range of 70 to 75 percent. Compare that with grass-fed beef at 56 to 58 percent and goat at 45 to 50 percent, and you can see immediately why pork is attractive. A pig sold to you as a 100 kg live animal should give roughly 70 to 75 kg of hot carcass. If it gives 60 kg, you either bought a lighter pig than you were told or the dressing was poor, and you need to know which.

After the hot weight comes cooler shrink, the water the carcass loses hanging in the chiller. Published figures give 3 to 5 percent of hot carcass weight in the first 24 hours. On a 70 kg hot carcass at 4 percent, that is 2.8 kg gone before you make a single cut. It is real, it is unavoidable, and it must be in your costing.

Then comes cutting. Published carcass to retail yields for pork are 75 to 80 percent bone-in and 65 to 70 percent boneless. Bone accounts for 15 to 20 percent of the carcass; the rest of the loss is fat trim and cutting waste. A published worked example puts a 250 lb, that is 113 kg, pork carcass at about 133 lb, 60 kg, of bone-in chops and roasts at one eighth inch trim, or about 118 lb, 54 kg, of boneless cuts at the same trim. Notice that the boneless figure is smaller. Boning does not create meat. It removes bone that some markets are happy to pay for.

Now the anatomy. A pig carcass divides into four main primals:

• Shoulder, which splits into the Boston butt, the upper portion, and the picnic, the lower portion running toward the foreleg. This is worked muscle. It is well marbled, it is forgiving, and it is the best pork you can put into slow cooking, mince and sausage.
• Loin, running along the back. This is the least worked muscle on the animal and it carries the chops, the loin roasts and the tenderloin. Lean, tender, unforgiving if overcooked.
• Belly, also called the side. This is the bacon primal. Layered lean and fat, it is worth more cured than fresh in most markets.
• Ham, the hind leg. Large, lean, and together with the loin it carries the highest value on the carcass.

On top of those four you have the jowl, the hocks and the trotters, all of which sell in African markets and none of which should reach a bin.

One warning about names. Cut names are commercial conventions, not regulated facts, and they change from country to country. Learn where the muscle sits and what work it did in life, because that is what decides how it must be cooked. Percentage-of-carcass figures for individual primal cuts were not retrieved for any species in the source material for this course. If you need to know what share of a pig carcass the ham represents, obtain your national meat board's cut manual or national meat-cutting standard. Do not accept a number from anyone who cannot name the document it came from.

Finally, read the meat before you commit it. Pork is the species most prone to PSE, meaning pale, soft and exudative. Published figures give a desirable pH at 45 minutes after slaughter of about 6.7 to 6.3, with anything below 5.8 at that point flagging PSE. At 24 hours, normal pork sits at pH 5.5 to 6.1, desirable 5.7 to 6.1, while PSE pork falls below 5.5. PSE pork looks washed out, feels flabby and weeps on the tray. It will not hold water, so it is wrong for emulsion sausage, wrong for cured cooked ham and wrong for anything you want to keep. Sell it fresh and sell it fast. DFD pork, dark and firm and dry with a sticky surface, is the opposite fault: it binds too well but spoils early, so it is wrong for ageing, vacuum storage and curing, and right for a cooking sausage eaten the same day.

Bacon comes from the belly. Gammon and ham come from the hind leg. Both are the same operation underneath: you are putting salt and a curing agent into raw pork and changing the conditions inside the meat so that bacteria cannot grow. Get it right and you have the highest margin product in the shop. Get it wrong and you can poison somebody.

There are three barriers and you should know exactly what each one does.

Salt raises osmotic pressure and lowers water activity, which is the amount of water in the meat that bacteria can actually use. Published guidance says salt in cooked cured products should not exceed 2.5 to 3 percent, and in raw cured and dried products should not exceed 4.5 to 5 percent. A general curing target of 2 to 3 percent concentration in the product is described as about right. Brines in commercial use run at 8 to 22 percent salt in the water, but remember that is the strength of the liquid, not the strength of the finished meat.

Nitrite is the second barrier and it does a job salt cannot. It specifically inhibits Clostridium botulinum, which is the organism that makes cured meat a safety question rather than a flavour question. It also fixes the pink cured colour, contributes the cured flavour people expect, and slows rancidity. Nitrite is not optional decoration. In nitrite-cured products the presence of the nitrite is what gives compliance with the botulinum performance standard.

Drying is the third barrier, lowering water activity directly. Published thresholds: at 0.95 a certain number of organisms are inhibited, at 0.92 all bacteria groups are inhibited although moulds and yeasts can still grow, and at 0.80 even moulds stop. Raw cured ham sits at 0.96 to 0.80.

Now the part that matters most, and the part where this course will not give you a number to use. Nitrite limits are set by national law and they vary between countries. Nitrite is acutely toxic at modest overdose. Before you add nitrite to anything you intend to sell, you must obtain the current permitted maximum from your national food-safety authority, food control agency or standards bureau. That is not a suggestion, it is the condition on doing this work at all.

So that you can see how such a rule is written, here are two real jurisdictions. In the United States, combined ingoing nitrite plus nitrate for hams must not exceed 156 ppm, and for bellies, meaning bacon, must not exceed 120 ppm. Pumped or massaged bacon is limited to 120 ppm ingoing sodium nitrite, or 148 ppm potassium nitrite, with sodium ascorbate or erythorbate at 550 ppm. Immersion-cured bacon is also capped at 120 ppm sodium nitrite. Dry-cured bacon is allowed up to 200 ppm sodium nitrite, or 246 ppm potassium nitrite. Reduced-nitrite formulations run at 100 ppm sodium nitrite, or 40 to 80 ppm with added carbohydrate and lactic acid bacteria. Dry cure rates are given as 1.0 oz of nitrite per 100 lb of meat and 3.5 oz of nitrate per 100 lb.

In the European Union, Commission Regulation 2023/2108 applies from 9 October 2025 and sets general meat products at a maximum of 80 mg per kg expressed as nitrite ion, down from 120 mg per kg expressed as sodium nitrite, with sterilised meat products at 55 mg per kg, down from 82. Residual levels are set at 25, 45 or 50 mg per kg depending on product type. Watch the trap in that sentence: the EU changed the basis on which the limit is expressed, using a conversion factor of 0.67 for nitrites and 0.73 for nitrates, so a limit written as 120 and a limit written as 80 can describe the same amount of chemical. Always check which basis a limit uses before you weigh anything.

Two figures are missing and you must not fill them. The United States maximum residual nitrite in finished product, and the full 9 CFR 424.21(c) curing table for comminuted and immersion-cured products, were not retrieved; obtain 9 CFR 424.21(c) in full from the eCFR. The new EU maximum levels for nitrates were also not retrieved; obtain Commission Regulation 2023/2108 from EUR-Lex.

Four practical rules that hold everywhere. Never buy loose unlabelled curing salt; use a commercially formulated cure with a stated nitrite percentage and a stated usage rate. Never store nitrite in an unlabelled container and never beside ordinary salt. Weigh cure on a scale accurate to the gram, never by volume and never by eye. Keep the cure locked away from general staff access.

If you smoke the product, published smoking parameters start at about 43 to 55 degrees C, move through 65 degrees C, reach 70 to 75 degrees C for heavy smoking and 80 to 85 degrees C terminal, at about 80 percent relative humidity, with 1 to 2 hours tempering at room temperature first to dry the surface. Cold smoking, below those temperatures, adds smoke but provides no lethal step at all. It is a flavour process resting entirely on salt, nitrite and drying, and it must never be taught or sold as preservation in its own right.

A whole bird is one product. A portioned bird is six or seven products, each with a different customer and a different price. Portioning is the cheapest value you will ever add, because it costs you nothing but a sharp knife and ten minutes, and in most African markets the parts together sell for more than the whole.

Begin with what you are buying. Poultry dressing percentage is hot carcass weight divided by live weight, excluding the giblets, meaning heart, liver, gizzard and neck. Published figures:

• Broiler chicken, commercial strain: 70 to 72 percent, up to 75 percent
• Broiler chicken, slow-growing strain: 67 to 69 percent
• Turkey: 77 to 81 percent
• Duck, Pekin: 66 to 69 percent
• Duck, Muscovy: 69 to 75 percent
• Goose: 64 to 72 percent
• Quail: 58 to 62 percent
• Guinea fowl: 70 to 71 percent

Eviscerated weight including necks and giblets is generally about 10 percent higher than those figures.

Those numbers pay for themselves the first time you use them. If somebody offers you live birds at a price per bird, and a competitor offers dressed carcasses at a price per kilogram, you cannot compare the two without the dressing percentage. A 2.0 kg live commercial broiler at 71 percent gives about 1.42 kg of carcass. Whatever you paid for the bird, divide it by 1.42 to get the cost per kilogram of carcass, and only then compare. Note also the spread between strains. A slow-growing bird at 67 percent gives 1.34 kg from the same 2.0 kg live weight, which is 80 g less from every bird. Over a hundred birds that is 8 kg of product you were not told you were not getting.

The standard breakdown, in order, is this. Whole bird first. Then halves, splitting along the backbone and through the breastbone. Then quarters, giving a leg quarter and a breast quarter. Then the individual parts: breast fillet, thigh, drumstick, wing, and the back or frame.

Work in a fixed order every time and you will get faster and lose less. Remove the wings at the shoulder joint. Separate the leg from the body by cutting the skin, bending the leg back until the hip pops, and cutting through the exposed joint rather than through bone. Split the leg into thigh and drumstick by finding the fat line that runs across the joint and cutting along it. Then take the breast off the frame, working the knife down each side of the keel bone. What is left in your hand is the frame.

Do not throw the frame away. The frame and back are the stock and soup product, and they carry margin. In many markets so do the neck, the feet and the giblets. A butcher who bins the frame is paying for it, chilling it, and then paying again to dispose of it, which is three losses on one piece of the bird.

There is one number this course will not give you, and it is an important one. Chicken cut-up part yields, meaning breast, thigh, drumstick and wing as a percentage of the carcass, were not retrieved from an authoritative source. Do not quote part percentages to a customer or a buyer without one. Obtain a poultry-processing extension publication or a poultry-science yield study. Until you have it, do what costs you nothing: weigh your own. Portion ten birds, weigh every stream, divide by the carcass weight, and you will have your own figure for your own birds, which is better than a foreign average anyway.

A word on cold chain while you portion. As a worked example of how a regulator writes such a rule, EU legislation requires poultry meat to be held at not more than 4 degrees C, minced meat at not more than 2 degrees C, meat preparations at not more than 4 degrees C, and cutting-room ambient air not exceeding 12 degrees C. Those are EU figures reproduced as an example, not your law; your national meat regulation sets the numbers that bind you. But the principle behind them binds everywhere. Poultry portioning is slow, warm-handed work, and a bird that sits on the bench while you answer the phone is a bird climbing through the danger zone of about 4 to 60 degrees C. Portion in small batches. Get each batch back into the chiller before you start the next.

Finally, if you freeze portions, published quality storage times at minus 18 degrees C are 12 months for a whole chicken, 9 months for cut-up chicken and 4 to 6 months for cooked chicken. Those are quality limits, not safety limits, and freezing does not kill most microbes; it only stops them multiplying.

Deboning feels like an upgrade. Boneless meat looks smarter on the counter, it commands a higher price per kilogram, and every imported textbook assumes you want to do it. But boning is not automatically an improvement. It is a calculation, and the calculation has an answer that differs from market to market.

Here is the arithmetic in plain form. Published pork cutting yields are 75 to 80 percent bone-in and 65 to 70 percent boneless as a share of carcass weight. Take a 67 kg cold pork carcass. At the middle of the bone-in range, say 77 percent, you get 67 multiplied by 0.77, which is 51.6 kg of saleable product. At the middle of the boneless range, say 67 percent, you get 67 multiplied by 0.67, which is 44.9 kg. Boning cost you 6.7 kg of saleable weight.

Now put a price on it. Suppose your total cost for that carcass, including purchase, transport, slaughter and inspection, is a figure you have worked out yourself. Divide it by 51.6 and you get your bone-in cost per kilogram. Divide the same total by 44.9 and you get your boneless cost per kilogram, which will be higher, because the same money is now spread over less weight. Boning only pays if the extra price per kilogram your market gives you for boneless more than covers those 6.7 kg you just removed, plus the labour time you spent removing them.

In many African markets it does not pay, and you should not feel embarrassed about that. Bone-in stewing portions frequently carry better realised margin than an imitation of a European cutting pattern. Offal, feet, heads and frames often do the same. The highest-value fabrication in a textbook is regularly not the highest-value fabrication in your street. The only way to know is to run the numbers with your own prices.

A worked example from published beef figures shows the shape of it. The same 215 kg beef carcass gives 123 kg boneless at 57 percent, or 144 kg bone-in at 67 percent. On a total cost of 860 in the source example's illustrative and unverified currency, that is a cost of 6.99 per kg boneless against 5.97 per kg bone-in. Whether boneless is better depends entirely on whether the market pays enough more per kilogram to cover the 21 kg of bone that boning discards. Run the same test on your own pork.

If you do bone, then the discipline is that nothing leaves the bench unweighed and unnamed. Every stream is either a product with a price or a cost you are paying to remove:

• Bone, which is 15 to 20 percent of the carcass, is a soup and stock product in most markets and should be priced, not binned.
• Trim is not waste. It is mince, sausage meat and cooking sausage. Weigh it, cost it and sell it.
• Fat, particularly pork back fat, is a sausage ingredient and a rendering product. Pork fat is one of the reasons a pig is worth buying.
• Skin, hocks, trotters and jowl all have buyers.

Now match the primal to the product, because this is where the real added value sits. Shoulder, meaning the Boston butt and the picnic, is worked muscle with good marbling. It is the correct pork for slow cooking, for mince and for sausage, and it is the wrong pork to trim into expensive-looking lean cuts that nobody will grill successfully. Loin is the least worked muscle and it carries the chops, the loin roasts and the tenderloin, so it goes to your fast-cooking, premium-price customers. Belly is the bacon primal and in most markets earns more cured than fresh. Ham, the hind leg, is the other high-value primal and is the home of gammon and cured whole-muscle products.

When you are choosing what to make, check the raw material first. Pork that is PSE, with a 24 hour pH below 5.5, will not hold water and so must not go into emulsion sausage or cured cooked ham. Published commercial thresholds say drip loss above 5 percent and cooking loss above 25 percent indicate a pork quality problem, and whole-loin package purge should not exceed 3 percent. If your loins are purging more than that on the shelf, you have a raw material problem, not a packaging problem. DFD pork, dark and firm with a sticky surface, binds well but spoils early, so it belongs in a cooking sausage eaten the same day and never in a cured or vacuum-stored product.

One last piece of arithmetic that decides more businesses than any cutting skill. Every kilogram you throw away has to be paid for by the kilograms you sell. A 10 percent wastage rate raises your effective cost per kilogram by roughly 11 percent. Reducing waste is not tidiness. It is the cheapest price increase available to you.

Raw poultry is the most dangerous product in your shop, and it is dangerous in a way that surprises people. The danger is not that bacteria multiply on it in the chiller. The danger is that very small numbers of organisms travel from it onto everything else you touch.

Start with Campylobacter, because poultry is its dominant vehicle. It is widely distributed in warm-blooded animals, and it reaches people mainly through undercooked meat, raw milk and contaminated water. Look at what it needs to grow: a minimum temperature of 30 degrees C, a maximum of 45 degrees C, a water activity of at least 0.987, and it tolerates only 1.7 percent salt. Read that again. It cannot grow below 30 degrees C. It cannot grow on a chilled carcass and it cannot grow on a dry surface. Chilling does not control it, because there was never anything to chill down. What it does instead is survive and infect at very low numbers. Published figures put the minimum infective dose at about 10,000 cells, but in trials as few as 500 ingested cells led to disease.

Onset is 2 to 5 days, with a range of 1 to 10 days, so the customer who falls ill will not connect it to you and you will never find out. Symptoms are diarrhoea, frequently bloody, with abdominal pain, fever, headache, nausea and vomiting, typically for 3 to 6 days. Complications include reactive arthritis and Guillain-Barre syndrome, which is paralysis. This is not an upset stomach.

The published control statement is blunt: heating through cooking or pasteurisation is the only effective method of eliminating Campylobacter from contaminated foods. Since the organism cannot multiply on the meat, your entire commercial risk is cross-contamination from raw poultry, plus the cooking your customer does at home.

Salmonella rides alongside it. It comes from domestic and wild animals including poultry, pigs, cattle and pets, and it can pass through the entire food chain from animal feed to the household. Its infective dose is as low as one cell depending on the strain and the health of the person. Onset is 6 to 72 hours, usually 12 to 36 hours, and illness lasts 2 to 7 days with dehydration that can be severe in children and the elderly. It grows between 5.2 and 46.2 degrees C, from pH 3.7 to 9.5, needs water activity of at least 0.94, and tolerates up to 8 percent salt. It is hardy: it survives several weeks in a dry environment and several months in water. Drying does not kill it.

So what do you actually do?

1. Separate absolutely. Raw poultry gets its own boards, its own knives and its own surface. Separation of raw meat from ready-to-eat food, and of poultry from red meat, is the primary control for Campylobacter and a major control for Salmonella and E. coli O157:H7. Colour coding helps: the common industry convention is yellow for raw poultry, red for raw meat, blue for raw fish, green for salad and fruit, brown for cooked and root vegetables, white for bakery and dairy. Be honest about what that is, though. No authoritative regulator-published colour-coding standard was retrieved. Pick one scheme, write it on the wall, and never deviate. The colours are arbitrary; the separation is not.

2. Wash hands after handling poultry, every time, without exception. The unconditional list is: on entering the production area, after handling raw meat and before handling anything ready to eat, after handling poultry, after touching your face, hair, nose or a dressing, after using the toilet, after handling waste, after cleaning, and after handling money. Money and meat must never be handled by the same person without a wash between, or must be separated by a dedicated till operator. In a small butchery this is the most commonly broken rule and the easiest to fix.

3. Keep it cold anyway. Chilling does not stop Campylobacter, but it does stop Salmonella, which needs 5.2 degrees C to grow. As an example of how a regulator writes such a rule, EU legislation requires poultry meat at not more than 4 degrees C and minced meat at not more than 2 degrees C, with cutting-room air not exceeding 12 degrees C. Your national regulation sets your numbers.

4. Tell the customer the cooking temperature, and put it on the label. All poultry, whether ground, parts, whole birds or stuffing, needs a safe minimum internal temperature of 74 degrees C, that is 165 degrees F, measured with a thermometer in the thickest part. Compare that with 63 degrees C plus a 3 minute rest for whole-muscle red meat and 71 degrees C for mince. The reason poultry is highest is that it carries Salmonella and Campylobacter throughout, not just on the surface.

5. Thaw correctly. The safest method is in the refrigerator below 4 degrees C, where a 2.3 kg portion needs 24 hours and a whole turkey can take up to 4 days. Cold water thawing needs leak-proof packaging, water at 21 degrees C or cooler, changed every 30 minutes. Never thaw at room temperature, in hot water, in a slow cooker or in a dishwasher.

You do not sell what you buy. You buy a live animal or a carcass, and you sell cuts after dressing loss, chilling shrink, bone, fat trim and cutting waste. The cost per kilogram of saleable meat is always higher, usually far higher, than the price per kilogram you paid. Butchers who forget this price below cost for years and never understand why the money is tight.

The formula is simple and it works on every species:

Cost per kg of saleable meat equals total cost of the animal or carcass divided by the weight of saleable meat obtained.

And the weight of saleable meat equals live weight multiplied by dressing percentage, multiplied by one minus the chilling shrink percentage, multiplied by the cutting yield percentage.

Total cost must include everything: purchase price, transport, slaughter and abattoir fee, inspection fee, levies and the cost of chilling. A butcher who counts only the purchase price will price below cost.

Now look at the yields side by side, all published:

• Pork: dressing 70 to 75 percent; cutting yield 75 to 80 percent bone-in, 65 to 70 percent boneless
• Beef, grain-fed: dressing 60 to 63 percent; beef general 60 to 64 percent; grass-fed 56 to 58 percent; cutting yield 65 to 70 percent bone-in, 55 to 60 percent boneless
• Lamb: dressing 54 to 59 percent; sheep shorn 50 to 53 percent; cutting yield 70 to 75 percent bone-in
• Goat: dressing 45 to 50 percent; cutting yield not retrieved
• Broiler chicken: dressing 70 to 72 percent commercial strain, up to 75 percent

Chilling shrink is 3 to 5 percent of hot carcass weight in the first 24 hours, except goat, which shrinks significantly more, up to 10 percent.

Here is a worked pork example. The prices in it are indicative only and unverified; you must replace them with your own local figures. Take a 100 kg live pig. Say purchase at 2.50 per kg live, which is 250, plus 25 for transport and slaughter, giving a total cost of 275. Dressing at 70 percent gives 100 multiplied by 0.70, which is 70 kg hot carcass. Chilling shrink at 4 percent gives 70 multiplied by 0.96, which is 67.2 kg cold. Cutting bone-in at 77 percent gives 67.2 multiplied by 0.77, which is 51.7 kg saleable. Cost per kilogram is 275 divided by 51.7, which is 5.32. Cut boneless at 67 percent instead and you get 67.2 multiplied by 0.67, which is 45.0 kg, and 275 divided by 45.0 is 6.11 per kilogram.

Now compare with the published beef example, again in unverified indicative currency. A 400 kg grass-fed steer at 2.00 per kg live is 800, plus 60 for transport, slaughter and inspection, giving 860. Dressing at 56 percent gives 224 kg hot. Shrink at 4 percent gives 215 kg cold. Boneless cutting at 57 percent gives 123 kg, and 860 divided by 123 is 6.99 per kilogram. That is 3.5 times the live purchase price. The same carcass cut bone-in at 67 percent gives 144 kg and 5.97 per kilogram.

And goat, where the numbers bite hardest. A 30 kg goat at 3.00 per kg live is 90, plus 8 for slaughter and transport, giving 98. Dressing at 47 percent gives 14.1 kg hot. Shrink at 10 percent gives 12.7 kg cold. That is 98 divided by 12.7, which is 7.72 per kilogram of cold carcass, before any cutting loss at all. The published goat cutting yield was not retrieved, so that example deliberately stops at the cold carcass. Stop where the data stops rather than filling the gap with a guess.

The lesson that falls out of putting these next to each other is that purchase price per kilogram live tells you almost nothing. Goat bought at a higher price per live kilogram than beef is worse than that comparison suggests, because less than half the live weight ever reaches the cold room. Pork bought at a similar live price is better than it looks, because 70 to 75 percent of it survives dressing and 75 to 80 percent of that survives cutting. Poultry is different again: a bird is cheap per unit but portioning labour is high and the cold storage per kilogram of value is heavy.

One more comparison worth making is time and electricity. Cold storage is the dominant running cost in a small butchery, and a species that sits in your chiller for a week is charging you rent. A species that clears in two days is not.

Finally, remember what the cost per kilogram above is: the cost of the meat only. Your selling price must also carry labour, rent, electricity, water, packaging, cleaning chemicals, licences and inspection fees, equipment depreciation, wastage and unsold stock, and profit. Wastage is where small butcheries fail, because every kilogram thrown away must be recovered from the kilograms sold, and a 10 percent wastage rate raises your effective cost per kilogram by roughly 11 percent. Every price figure in this lesson is indicative and unverified. The yields are published. Use the method, bring your own numbers.