Hog leg ideas?

[grogger27]

Hello all,
A friend of mine recently aquired a farm fresh hog leg, what you would usually use for a ham. But I'm not sure he wants to cure it. Would any of you have any good ideas?
Is there enough fat content usually to achieve a pulled pork like product? My only suggestion to him was to rub it down and smoke it low.
Thanks,
Greg

 

[pops6927]

It would be pretty dry to try and pull it, but you could do it as a pork roast and slice it, or bone it out and cut into several roasts.

Here's the hog leg I put down in a brine a couple weeks ago:



Below is a different view that I've drawn on.




In the big circle is the aitch, or pelvic, bone. Remove this first. The femur bone is the line with a circle on each end; cut just to the right of it and remove that along with the attached shank bone at the upper end. The clod of meat on the bottom, to the right of the femur, is the sirloin tip. You can remove that as a separate roast. The balance can be split in half thickness-wise, separating the top round from the bottom/eye and can be roasted as two separate pieces. If you look at this ham steak, which is a cross section of the ham leg, you can see the parts:



To the left of the center femur bone is the sirloin tip, to the right on the upper part is the bottom round with eye of the round to it's right, the lower part is the top round.

As you can see, in a hog leg there's little intersperced fat, just between major muscle groups which makes it a less-than-desirable cut for pulling. But as whole muscle roasts go, it's excellent!