Why buy whole animals and practice meat cutting at home?
It’s the cheapest way to get the highest quality, local meat into your kitchen.
It’s also a rewarding hobby, and if you’re sincerely interested in food and cooking, it’s the best way to learn the different cuts of meat, where they come from, and how they’re best prepared.
Buying whole animals is easy: find a producer that you trust, call them up, and they’ll most likely deliver the animal to your door. This post is about how to process that animal once it’s at your house. It covers basic safety principles, the equipment you’ll need, and some tips on managing time and space.
If you spend enough time with culinary types, eventually you’re going to hear some douchebag call a duck breast a magret.
Magret is a term from Gascony, a Basque region of southwestern France. This is the spiritual home of modern foie gras: the liver of ducks and geese that have been forcibly fattened by a process called gavage. The many products and byproducts of these fattened birds form the pillars of the remarkable cuisine of Gascony. For instance, the rendered subcutaneous fat is the main cooking fat in the region, and is used to make confit.
Traditionally, magret refers to the lean portion of a bird that has been fattened for foie and confit, namely … Continue reading.
While the most famous incarnation of this cut of pork is bacon, fresh pork belly has become very popular over the last few years. In the butcher shop it is also called pork side, or side meat. Before I started buying pigs by the side, I ordered slabs of belly from Irvings Farm Fresh, a 5 lb slab costing somewhere around $25.
A Quick Tour of the Pork Belly
Below is a slab of pork belly. You’re looking at the inside of the pig; the opposite side is covered with skin. The right side of this slab would have connected to the front shoulder of the hog. The left side would have connected to the hind leg. The top … Continue reading.
Michael Ruhlman is one of my favourite food writers, and a handful of his books have changed the way I think about food and cooking. I’m convinced that his book Ratio is the single most powerful and pragmatic cookbook ever written. He had a hand in The French Laundry Cookbook, one of the most influential cookbooks of the last twenty years. In his narrative Soul of a Chef he describes the discipline and dedication required to work in kitchens like that of The French Laundry. And of course there is the seminal book Charcuterie, a collaboration between Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn that almost single-handedly started a cured meat revival in restaurants and home kitchens and backyards across … Continue reading.
For me, the most shocking part of buying a side of beef was how much liver we got.
A lot. I like liver more than most, and I thought it was too much.
If you have to get through a lot of liver, there’s no better way than to just sear it in a pan and tuck in. When the distinct, glandular texture of liver wearies the palate, there are liver dumplings.
This was a staple when I was in Austria. Lunch always consisted of soup, meat, and dessert, and the soup often contained some manner of offal. Most notable were the soft, bready liver dumplings the size of a toddler’s fist, floating in beef broth.
Air-dried beef goes by many different names in many different places. The most famous, I think is bresaola, from northern Italy. In adjacent Switzerland air-dried beef is pressed into a unique block shape and called Bündnerfleisch, after the Swiss canton of Graubünden. Nearby in eastern France it is often lightly smoked, and called brési. In all of these alpine regions it is a common accompaniment for fondue.
Eye of round is one of the best cuts to use for air-dried beef. It is a single muscle, with very little internal fat, easily trimmed to a convenient size. First remove any silverskin and fat.
This was my first time cooking beef heart. My logic was this: “Heart, while offal, is a muscle, not a gland. A hard working muscle, at that. I guess I’ll braise it.”
In hindsight, probably not the best way to cook beef heart. The final dish was okay: it was tender, but a bit dry. This makes sense, as heart has no intramuscular fat, and I trimmed away what little fat there was on the outside.
The heart’s texture really surprised me. Raw heart has no visible grain, almost as if it were a very firm, nebulous liver. A few people had told me that heart is not a very “organy” meat. Michael Ruhlman goes so far as to say … Continue reading.
Crisp, delicate, golden skin. Moist, tender, well-seasoned flesh. A whole bird, brought to the table and broken into pieces, distributed amongst the diners according to their personal preferences. This is the beauty and simplicity of the ideal roast chicken dinner.
You can go to ridiculous lengths to roast the perfect chicken – (see the In Search of Perfection episode on roast chicken, which involves brining, soaking in water, scalding three times, cooking in the oven for five hours, then searing on the stove top…) – but with a fraction of the effort you can have mostly the same results as the most complicated procedures.
The following process results in by far the highest ratio of eating quality to effort. All … Continue reading.
The tongue is one of those cuts that sounds way, way weirder than it really is.
The tongue has two sections. There’s the part that we usually think of when we consider an animal’s tongue: the part at the front that can move freely around the mouth. Then there’s the base, at the back of the mouth. The meat from these two sections is different.
The tip meat has a very close, dense texture, and is lean. The base meat has a coarser texture, and is a bit fatty.
The meat from both sections is very tough in its raw state. As you can imagine, the tongue is a highly exercised muscle, and requires extensive cooking at low temperatures, usually … Continue reading.
There are two types of brine: seasoning and curing. Each will be discussed in turn.
Part One: Seasoning Brine
Seasoning brine typically contains three ingredients: water, salt, and sugar. But why do we season-brine meat to begin with? There are at least three reasons:
Flavour. The first reason we season-brine meat is to evenly distribute flavour-enhancing salt throughout its mass, instead of simply on the outer surface. We can also impart the flavour of herbs and spices to the meat.
Increased Tenderness. As Harold McGee writes in On Food and Cooking, “salt disrupts the structure of the muscle filaments [and] dissolves parts of the the protein structure that supports the contracting filaments.” A strong enough brine … Continue reading.
The personal website of Edmonton chef Allan Suddaby
Why buy whole animals and practice meat cutting at home?
The tongue is one of those cuts that sounds way, way weirder than it really is.