My old boss told me to stop trimming silverskin on pork shoulders, and 200 butts later I owe him an apology

Sarah Jenkins · 2026-10-16T13:30:04.677787+00:00

When I started at a shop in Grand Rapids about 6 years back, I was fresh out of a grocery store meat counter and thought I knew everything. My boss Ray, who had been cutting for 30 years, watched me spend 10 minutes on a single pork butt trimming every bit of silverskin off the money muscle and told me plain, "You are costing us money, leave most of it." I argued with him for weeks. In my head, clean meat was the whole job. So I kept trimming tight, and I kept watching my case time eat into everything else. Then we got a 200 butt order for a festival and I finally just did it his way, only pulling the thick stuff and leaving the thin stuff on. The cook time barely changed, the yield went up almost 4 pounds per case, and nobody at the festival said a word about the texture. Now I am the guy telling new hires the same thing and they look at me the same way I looked at Ray. How do you all draw the line on silverskin for pulled pork, do you take it all or just the heavy stuff?

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My old boss told me to stop trimming silverskin on pork shoulders, and 200 butts later I owe him an apology | Butchers - Pinecone Attack