Yesterday I went to the store to buy a ham hock for a slow cooker dish I’ll be making on Sunday. I didn’t see any ham hocks but the store did have ham shanks. I consulted the butcher and he said that ham shanks are meatier than ham hocks. They’re perfect for cooking with beans he stated. I bought the ham shanks.
When I got home I looked the definition up in Wikipedia.
A ham hock is the end of a smoked ham where the foot was attached to the hog’s leg.
There wasn’t a definition for ham shank though. I looked on the Internet and in the Joy of Cooking
Hmmm. Even though I live in the South, those strange gnarled ham pieces still scare me a little!
I always assumed that the ham hock is from the meatier end of the ham while the shank was the bonier side.
Check a site I found called askthemeatman.com —- according to that site, the hock and shank are one in the same. Having grown up in the south (E. Tenn. & Western N.C.) — I actually thought they were a little different. Hocks are always unique — I cooked a pot of beans tonight with a lovely, huge smoked hock and it yielded hardly any of that yummy meat. Other times, I’ll buy them and they are loaded! Either way, they season very well.
Please, please tell us where in Seattle you found ham shanks!!! I have been looking for them for a long, long time to make Scweinshaxe”, a German dish.
Mark – It’s been awhile, but I think that I got them at the Bellevue Top. Good luck with your search!
Mark – I found them, frozen, at the Safeway in the Factoria Mall area.
They have them at the Whole Foods in Ravenna (in Seattle). I just got one the other day to use in an African sweet potato soup, and it was excellent.
Anatomically, the hock is roughly equivalent to the ankle and foot, whereas the shank is the pig’s calf, so it’s meatier. The shank I got at Whole Foods was smoked as well, so it made the whole house smell like delicious.
To us there is a huge flavor difference between “smoked ham hocks” and “smoked pork hocks”. The pork hock is much more bland and does not flavor soup like the ham hock. They are very hard to find here in South Texas. Time was they were in all the stores, now just pork hocks and most by Tyson?
Good luck
Thank you for these contributions.
I was looking around on this subject since yesterday, at Derby (UK) Market Hall, I picked up a ‘Gammon Shank’ which looked for all the world the exact same thing as what we usually know as a ‘Hock’. I note that it was packed in Greater Manchester and that elsewhere on the Web I have seen that somebody from the North-East of England also knows a ‘Hock’ as a ‘Shank’, so it may be a case of regional taste in vocabulary over here as well as on your side of the Atlantic. We’re on more or less the borderline between the English Midlands and the North of England here so we may be at the very northern edge of the area where the word ‘Hock’ is used.
Being something of a Soul Music fan I of course am aware that Ham Hock is a staple thereof.