Lowly shank takes flight as Pig Wings

ST. CLOUD, Minn. — Trisha Roberts set aside her knowledge of animal anatomy and bit into a deep-fried Pig Wing. One recent evening, at a bar near here, she dunked that crisp, juicy knob of pork in sweet chili sauce, then reached for another.

But Roberts, a college student and part-time bartender, frowned when she learned that these wings were actually 2-ounce bits of pork cut from the fibula of a ham shank.

“My relatives, my old uncles, they eat foods like shanks,” she said. “They eat brains and other stuff, too. I like these, but shanks sound like those kind of old-fashioned foods.”

Hearing Roberts’ critique, Bob File took a swig from his beer. File, a former pig farmer and the president of Pioneer Meats, which contracts with a local processing company to make the wings, understands that nomenclature can be as important as cooking.

“Let’s face it,” File said. “Shank is not a pretty word.”

Like butchers, cooks and restaurateurs before him, File believes in the power of euphemisms to popularize culinary oddballs. Mountain oysters sound more appetizing than calf testicles. Picnic hams sell better than pork shoulder roasts. And would Applebee’s be selling millions of riblets if they were more accurately identified as the transverse processes of lumbar vertebrae left over from the boning of pork loins?

File first glimpsed the possibilities of the pig’s lower back leg in 2003, while selling pork to concessionaires at a NASCAR race. “They were calling them pork hammers back then,” he said. (A similar product, known as sluggers, also came to market in the early 2000s.) “They were packaging them with marinara sauce in an Italian format. That wasn’t going to work.”

Barbecue flavor might do the trick, he thought. Leveraging previous experience making and marketing pork jerky, he began searching for shank sources and developing his own product. He also trademarked the name Pig Wings.

Today, File, whose business has been increasing more than 10 percent a year for the last four years, sells more than 1 million of the approximately 2.5 million pounds of the processed shanks sold in the nation each year.

Under various noms de porc, the shanks are being served at restaurants and bars across the country. Farmland Foods, a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, has begun selling KC Wild Wings to wholesale restaurant accounts.

Smithfield recently sold Paula Deen-brand shanks on QVC, the television shopping channel. File has pitched but not yet sold his Pig Wings to national fast-casual chains like Buffalo Wild Wings and Famous Dave’s.

Preparation techniques vary across the country.

A bartender at Mac’s Speed Shop in Charlotte, N.C., said that its beer-braised and hickory-smoked Pig Wings turn out sweet, like “Eskimo Pies of pork on a stick.”

The Old German Beer Hall in Milwaukee serves barbecue-mustard sauce-swabbed Pig Wings. On the menu, the proprietors helpfully translate the dish into German as schweinefluegel.

Bad Wolf Bar BQ in Roanoke, Va., marinates, smokes and deep-fries its Pig Wings.

And Memphis Mae’s in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., smokes wings and serves them with a cherry-apple dipping sauce.

Bridge House Tavern in Chicago, serves wings with blue cheese and celery-root slaw and a buttermilk-ranch dipping sauce.

Inevitably, stunt food purveyors at state fairs have gotten in the game. At this year’s Wisconsin State Fair, Leadfoot’s Bar and Grill included Pig Wings in its repertory, along with double-wiener hot dogs with cheese.

The shank did not always require such inventive promotion.

“It was once a valued part of a cooked ham,” said Bruce Aidells, a cookbook author who once owned a sausage company. The shank could be used as a handle when ham was carved on the bone. The shreds of meat that clung to it after carving could then be used to season soups and stews.

But over the last few decades, as convenience foods like boneless hams and spiral-sliced whole hams gained in popularity, meat processors began to remove the shank before processing, said Stephen Gerike, director of food service marketing for the National Pork Board. Packers processed meat from shanks into cold cuts and other ham products.

Such protein reclamation efforts have driven up the price of shanks, said Tom Jones, ham business director for Farmland. Processors had to find more profitable ways to use them. But as pork marketers zeroed in on ham shanks, they didn’t settle on a name.

Even among restaurants near Appert’s Foodservice, the company in St. Cloud that produces and co-packs about 40 percent of the cut and processed shanks sold in the United States, there is little agreement on what to call the little pork morsels.

The Great Waters Brewing Company, in St. Paul, calls the two-ounce versions squealers, and serves them at banquets with a beer mustard sauce. Jack & Jim’s Food and Liquor in Duelm, Minn., labels them Duelm Country Ribs. Toasty Beaver’s Sports Bar and Grill in Bemidji, Minn., gives shanks a thematic makeover as beaver tails.

Appert’s gets the fibulas from a plant in Sioux City, Iowa, that separates them from the rest of the shank and cuts some of them into two-ounce portions, using a saw developed by File. Appert’s workers tumble 2,000-pound batches in a paddle mixer that helps force a marinade of water, salt and “natural pork flavorings” into the meat.

File calls this process “the plump.”

“Pig Wings are really lean,” he said. “If we didn’t give them a plump, you wouldn’t be happy with the product.”

From there, workers roll the wings into convection ovens. After six to eight hours at 180 degrees, they emerge plump and brown, ready for restaurant cooks’ interpretation. During that long berth, the meat retracts to form a mass at one end and, at the other, a virtual bone handle: the so-called stick that defines Mac’s Eskimo pie.

That bone-as-handle notion is integral to the appeal of Pig Wings. It recalls the drumette portion of a chicken wing. It plays off the popularity of stick-mounted foods, from old-school fried corn dogs to new-school fried chicken gizzards. With that top-of-mind some restaurants have begun selling deep-fried ham shanks as carnitas-on-sticks or carnitas lollipops.

The cultural adaptability of Pig Wings is part of File’s pitch. (After initially coating his with a dry barbecue rub, he now sells what he calls a “neutral product.”)

Tasting a version flavored with rosemary and smothered with mushrooms at Appert’s, he told the corporate chef, “Call that one a French pork confit, and you might get $20 for it.”

At the Great Waters Brewing Co., he told the chef, Ernest Figuera: “You can do anything you can imagine with them. You can make them Asian, you can make them Mexican. I really don’t care what people call it, so long as they buy it.”