Pig Trotters for Breakfast | Offcuts Kitchen

It was the beginning of the July heat wave and there was no way that the oven was going to further cook us all. We had prepared a rack of ribs for our Weber kettle earlier in the day and were just lighting the charcoal when I remembered the pigs feet in the back of the refrigerator. My dad was making sourdough English muffins in the morning and we were discussing how we didn't have any bacon in the house. Sounded like a perfect time to do grilled trotter breakfast sandwiches.

If you've never cooked a trotter: it's skin, tendon, and collagen wrapped around a handful of small bones. There's barely any meat on it, which is exactly why most of the supply chain won't touch them, and exactly why they're worth your time. All that connective tissue is the same collagen that sets our demi-glace into a gloss. Cook a trotter low and slow and it turns into something sticky, rich, and completely unlike any other cut on the animal.

I was working vaguely off Chichi Wang's grilled pigs' feet recipe at Serious Eats, and her formula is amazing for sandwiches or tacos: braise until tender, then grill until crispy. Her version splits the feet and braises them in kecap manis in a Dutch oven, indoors. You can go either way.

The all-outdoor version

I sauced the trotters whole with soy sauce and sriracha, wrapped each one in a foil packet, and parked them on the grill next to the ribs, lid down, around 275-300°F. The foil packet recreates the braise. They rode along for about 3 hours while the ribs continued and as we ate, then came off wobbly and tender and rested overnight.

Breakfast starts at the grill

First thing the next morning, the gas grill went on, hot this time. The trotters came out of their foil and went straight onto the grates, and that stretch over open heat is how the sauce lacquers and the skin blisters and chars at the edges. They came off looking like something between barbecue and burnished mahogany.

My dad had baked sourdough English muffins. We picked the trotters down, every scrap of skin and meat, and built sandwiches: muffin, fried egg, cheese, a pile of warm trotter meat, and a hit of hot sauce over the top.

A trotter does something bacon can't. The picked meat is sticky and deeply savory, and the collagen carries all that soy and sriracha from the braise, so every piece is coated instead of sauced. Against a fried egg and a sourdough muffin with real chew, it eats like the breakfast sandwich you'd invent if nobody had told you what breakfast sandwiches are supposed to be.

Two pig feet, one foil packet, and a grill. The parts most people skip keep turning out to be the ones we talk about for weeks. That's the whole idea behind everything we make.