When you have a hankering for pork and need a quick and easy weeknight dinner, odds are you head to the grocery store and pick up a pack of pork chops or a pork tenderloin. These popular cuts of pork are affordable and cook quickly, making them an easy go-to. But they tend to lack one thing: flavor. That’s where the pork steak comes in.
While this cut is massively popular in the St. Louis region, pork steak is just starting to get the nationwide attention it deserves. Here’s everything you need to know about pork steak and why it’s more than worthy of a place on the butcher block and the dinner table.
What Is Pork Steak?
Also known as pork collar, pork collar steak or pork blade steak, pork steaks have the price point of pork but eat more like a beef ribeye.
Although where the pork steak comes from can vary by butcher and by region, it most frequently comes from the top shoulder and neck of the pig, also known as the Boston butt and the coppa, respectively. These parts of meat have a lot of gorgeous fat marbling, which means they are juicy, tender and have a lot of porky flavor.
“While we’ve been trained to look for no fat, the fat is what you want for flavor. And it’s not as bad for us as we’ve been told,” says Camas Davis, butcher and founder of the Good Meat Project. “To me, the chops that we typically eat are the least interesting because they don’t have intermuscular fat.”
