Pork Ground

There is no 80/20 convention here. Beef grinds are sold to a fat ratio; pork almost never is, so the fat content of a package depends on what the grinder had that day — usually shoulder and trim, which is roughly where you want to be anyway, but you are trusting rather than reading. If the ratio matters to the recipe, buy a shoulder and grind it yourself.

Pork fat is soft, and that changes the mechanics. It melts at a lower temperature than beef fat. Work it warm and it smears instead of cutting, coating the lean in a film that makes the finished texture pasty rather than open. Everyone who grinds their own puts the meat, the blades and the bowl in the freezer first for exactly this reason — the fat has to be firm enough for the plate to cut it cleanly.

Sausage is this plus salt and mixing, and the mixing is the part people skip. Salt dissolves myosin, the protein that lets meat grains stick to each other. Salt a grind, then work it hard for a few minutes until it turns tacky and clings to your palm, and you get the springy, sliceable bite of a real sausage. Skip that step and identical ingredients crumble. Most sausage recipes land somewhere between a quarter and a third fat by weight; below that it dries out no matter how well you mix.

Which means you should not salt it in advance for everything. For meatballs, dumplings and sausage patties the bind is the point. For a ragù, a taco filling or anything that should stay in loose crumbs, salt it in the pan instead — salting early there gives you a springy texture you did not ask for.

145°F does not apply here. The whole-muscle recommendation is 145°F because bacteria sit on the surface of an intact cut. Grinding takes that surface and mixes it through everything, so the USDA figure for ground pork is 160°F throughout. This is the most common confusion in pork cookery and it runs both directions: people who have learned about 145°F undercook the grind, and people who have not overcook the chop.

It is also the cheapest honest way into good pork. Where a lean chop hides the difference between one pig and another, this does not — the fat carrying the flavour is still attached.