What Can I Make With Salt Pork
This may seem like a pretty unusual question, but I actually do have some salt pork in my refrigerator. A friend of mine loves collard greens and uses salt pork when she fixes her family’s favorite recipe. She ran out of collard greens before she ran out of salt pork and asked me if I wanted to use up her extra salt pork. Well, never one to turn down a challenge, or free food, I said “Sure!”
Now I have a nice package of salt pork and would like to make something really good with it. I would also like to stick to a more traditional recipe, one that the settlers might have made with salt pork, since it is sort of an “historic” ingredient.
I’ve been looking at old cookbooks and it looks like salt pork was used a lot in bean or potato soups and chowders. Comparing those recipes with more modern ones, it seems at some time a switch to using ham occurred. I’m wondering if I could take a more modern chowder recipe and just replace the ham with salt pork? What would be the difference?
I would really love to hear from anyone who has an old soup or chowder recipe that was passed down through generations. That would be the best… a real tried-and-true recipe! Looking forward to your input!
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March 20th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
We just had an contest at church this week where the kids were asked to spice up Top Ramen with some random ingredients and Salt Pork was one of the ingredients that was brought.
Now, I’m not suggesting you try salt pork with Top Ramen because I was one of the “lucky” ones chosen to judge the entries and the one made with salt pork wasn’t any better than the rest
March 21st, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Salt pork is very salty and is usually the fatty part of the hog. It is very high in sodium and cholesterol. If these are not problematic in your family’s health profile you might wish to experiment with it. I’d use it first to season a small amount of food so if you don’t take to the texture or the flavor you don’t have to throw much food away. Some of the old timers used to eat it but most people discard it once it has seasoned their greens or beans. We were very poor when we were first married almost 50 years ago and used it because we could not afford cured ham hocks, and certainly not ham. We made the switch as soon as we had enough income. Good luck!
March 23rd, 2009 at 3:26 am
Salt pork varies in degree of saltiness and often must be blanched to remove the excess salt before use. It is similar to bacon, but much fattier and unsmoked.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:40 am
I love covering pork medallions in breadcrumbs – it’s really good for the kids as well!
March 29th, 2009 at 6:12 am
All your information about salt pork has been incredibly useful. Thanks for all the comments!