This episode is brought to you by Just Egg. You can't have plant-based breakfast without a plant-based egg. You can get started with a free sample. Just head to J U. S T slash H R N.
This week on Meet and Three, we're jumping into a world filled with fizz, iridescence, and deliciousness. We are talking about bubbles. It came from the air gas truck. Yeah, no, I never thought about it before that. I think it's emerged as a bullbush tea shops, a site of Asian American youth uh identity building.
We're called the invisible industry because these products you don't really see, but they're around us in every way. Um, every day. Listen to Meet and Three wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from whenever to whenever.
I'm in the lower east side of Manhattan. We got uh Nastasia the Hammer Lopez uh joining us from Connecticut. How are you doing, Nastasi? Good. Yeah, we got Matt in the booth in Rhode Island.
How are you doing, Matt? Nastasia the flogger Lopez. Oh yeah. Well, so for those of you that don't know, before we come on, we have to like clap so that you know Matt can sync up our recordings later. And Nastasia has some sort of cricket bat that she's using to hit some sort of chained up enemy in her in her house right now.
At least that's what it sounded like. Is that fairly accurate? Yes. It's probably the anti is the anti-TP neighbor, isn't it? Right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, go back. Yeah, Nastassi, have you heard anything of in the like uh from like the anyone about the teepees? When do you when are you gonna erect it? Yeah, when are you planning on?
I would love if you could help me, but I know that you traveling is not possible, so. So you know what? You know what? You know what? Um That's a no.
We got uh John who's back in New York City. That's not a no. A no is no. Anyway, uh we got John in uh back in New York City. How you doing?
Doing well thanks. Yeah. You sound it you're like, yes. Yep. Yeah.
I mean, New York is not a bad place to be. Like it New York is not like bad right now. It's not like a terrible place to be. Things are happening in New York, kind of again, right? It's beginning to open up a little bit again.
Yeah. Once I get my second shot next week, I'm gonna feel a lot better about going out and doing things. Yeah, have you heard of the term uh vax hole? No. Yeah.
So it was like the urban dictionary, which I know whatever urban dictionary, but it has its moments. It was the word of the week a while ago, and it's uh someone who brags about being fully vaccinated when most of the people around them are not. I'm not saying that you're a vax hole. I'm not calling you a vax hole. I'm just saying it's an interesting word.
At this point, like 20% of the country is vaccinated already. Yeah. I think something in in there, at least one shot. Anyway, I I digress. We have today, and uh for anyone in the chat room, get your questions ready.
And John, can you monitor the Twitter in case anything comes in during the uh because I have a feeling that if people were paying attention, like these are the kind of questions that they have that I can't readily answer because I'm not an expert. Uh but we have today uh with us Heather Merrill Thomason, the founder uh and proprietor, proprietor, is that right? Proprietor, owner, what runner? What do you what do you what do you go by? All of those things?
Anything. Yeah. Of primal supply meets in uh in the great city of Philadelphia. How are you doing? Hi, I'm doing great.
Yeah. So, like if you have any uh if you're in the chat room and you have any questions on uh you know any meat or butchery related uh questions, uh send them on in. Now in the meantime, let's let's get people uh why don't you why don't you talk a little bit about primal supply meats uh to just to get us started. Oh sure. Okay.
Uh primal supply meats. So we are a whole animal butchery based in Philadelphia. Um basically what I've been doing for um five five years or so, uh the business is about to be five, uh, is building up a local supply chain. So I work directly with local farmers in our region that I've built relationships with, and I source and buy everything as whole animals based at this point. The animals are being grown for primal.
Um I work with some local slaughterhouses, uh, manage processing, and then bring it all into our butchery in Philadelphia, where we then um you know cut cut all of these primals and subprimals as we receive the animals from our slaughterhouses into cuts for uh our three retail butcher shops. So we have like three kind of you know, classic brick and mortar walk in, chat with the butcher over the counter shops. We have a CSA style subscription program where people can sign up for a weekly box of meat, and then we also work with some restaurants around the city. Um so so yeah, so I'm like this kind of middle middle woman, if you will, uh managing sourcing and then kind of building up a market for local meat in Philly. Cool.
Now, how did you get into this? Because I feel like you know, like uh butcher is kind of like uh evenly divide between people whose like whole family has been butchers. Like my my stepfather is the first person in his family for like seven generations who wasn't a butcher. Whoa. You know what I mean?
He he broke the line. So it's like there's butcher families and then there's people that come to butchery. And you come to butchery, right? I do, I do. I uh I think I'm just like I'm an inherent problem solver.
Uh so I'm a career changer. I was a graph designer. I studied and practiced graphic design for about a decade. And uh, but I've forever been a you know lover of food, cooker and eater of food. I've never I was never, I don't have a professional culinary background before butchery.
But um yeah, I I just uh you know got involved with local food, befriended farmers, started to learn about how just kind of busted and broken the uh supply chain is for small producers and people looking to buy meat locally. Um so I did a crazy thing and decided I should learn the craft of butchery and jump off a career cliff and pursue new things to try to solve these problems. So uh yeah, so I did that. Yeah, well you you uh yeah, I mean you chose something that was real easy, huh? It was super easy.
Uh yeah, it's like not uh not physically demanding, nor is it uh you know it's in instantly economically rewarding. Yes, for sure. Yes. I mean, my uh yeah, I used to hear stories about uh, you know, my my stepfather's dad, just like I mean, punishing work. I mean, butchery is just punishing work, like carrying big sides of beef around and like you know, cutting stuff up and moving stuff around constantly.
I mean, uh were you expecting that when you got into it or no? No, uh definitely not. Um, you know, I'm like a physical person. I uh, you know, I I danced all through my childhood. I I've never been like inactive or afraid of doing work.
So I think I I came into it in my early 30s and I was sort of like bright-eyed and ambitious, and I was out to solve all these problems, so it was like, let me get in there and do it. And I'm like 41 now, and I will admit that there's many uh things where I'm just like, oh yeah, 10 years ago my back was up for that, and right now it is not. Yeah, I mean, yeah, and then people want meat all the time, so it's not the kind of thing that you can you know, anyway. Yeah, it's just I mean, the hours. I remember, you know, until the the day that uh my stepfather's dad retired, the hours were just like they were nuts.
He was always he was always being a butcher, no matter what. And when he got home, he was way tired because he had been doing stuff all day. So yeah, that I mean that's kind of the story of being a business owner, you know, it's like it never sleeps. And honestly, in building primal, because I was doing butchery, you know, I learned butchery, I was running other butcher shops before I started this business. And I did try really hard to design this business to make it a little bit more, I guess like smart and efficient labor wise.
Like I did carry, you know, quarters of beef and sides of hogs on my shoulder at this last butcher shop because that seemed romantic and what you were supposed to do. And then I was just like, hell no, this is gonna break backs. Uh I pay workers' comp, all these things. So that's why I work with my slaughterhouse, and they have a lot more, you know, they have like hoists and all of these things that make it be possible to like work smarter, not harder. Uh so we have them break our beef off the rails down into primals that are now like 30-pound pieces that you can carry around.
Uh, and that that makes a lot of sense. And you know, I'm sure that there's people that work for me or think about working for me, they're like, oh, but I you know, I want to like know how to cut it down off the rail. And it's like, that's not really the hard part. Like all the nuance and the the interesting things come later, and just trust me, I'm saving your back. Well, so let's talk, let's let's talk about this.
Like um, because I feel like there was there was the kind of butcher shop that my you know, my stepfather's family ran for years and years out of Boston, you know what I mean, that doesn't ex really exist anymore because that's back when a butcher could do their own slaughter, really. You know what I mean? Like he would go pick out the lambs. He was a lamb specialist, right? He did everything, but he was a lamb specialist.
So he would go, he would know the farmer like you do. He would pick out the lambs, slaughter them, you know, do the whole whole nine, you know, try to rip rip rip off the other suppliers. And I want to talk about like value added and what happens with I mean, like the crazy stories. I'll tell you one later if we have time if you're interested in crazy old, crazy old butcher stories. I'll try to pick one that we haven't said on the air before.
And uh, and then kind of like the butchers that I grew up with, where everything was coming pre-cut in cases, and you know, it was just a whole bunch of you know, the the cuts that everybody wanted, and you know what I mean? So, like, and then but what you're doing is a kind of a newish, newer model. Like we want to talk about this kind of resurgence of this type of butchery and how it's different from what happened in the way past versus what happened in the recent past. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it is definitely um so the uh a resurgence of craft butchery happened, that is a thing, because there was a time where you know everything got industrialized and centralized, and next thing you know, you know, the the corner butcher shop kind of went by the wayside to the grocery store, which started to have the in-house butcher, and before you know it, they're just ordering cases of cuts from you know these factory industrial, you know, meat factories.
And it's like, you know, your customers want a lot of skirt steaks, you just order boxes of skirt sticks. Customers want tender lines, you order the tender lines. So um, so yeah, all of that, it got to a point where the people in grocery stores or at the even the remaining butcher shops were just kind of meat cutters, not butchers. I guess that's like kind of a loaded thing, but that's maybe the difference there, where they would know how to get cuts and apportion them, but they didn't have a relationship to the farms, they didn't have a relationship to whole animals. They wouldn't know what to do with the side of beef if they were looking at it.
And uh, you know, I think it's been, I'm trying to think like time timeline-wise, maybe like 15 years now, since the first, you know, couple of people tried to sort of bring back the craft and open whole animal butcher shops, and definitely like Josh Applestone, you know, formerly a Fleischer's now Babblestone Meat Company, um, you know, is and should be credited as kind of the one of the leaders in that resurgence. Um, but so I I kind of came up seeing these problems in the the you know, small food system that like the the big all the rules and USDA regulations being applied to them wasn't working and it was breaking it. And the model that was new but was visible to me was this, you know, new this the new age craft butcher shop, people who were trying to bring back the old way, and that's what I sought out to learn and do. But as I've eventually worked my way up to running a butcher shop in that model, I was like, oh, this doesn't really work. Like there's a reason why people move towards box meat because there's a lot of inefficiencies in labor and time and and all these things.
So, you know, I honestly did build primal as sort of this funny problem solution new hybrid model of the old and the new, you know, where um, you know, unfortunately, we can't harvest our own animals. There's a lot more USDA restriction and regulation about that, so I have to partner with uh local slaughterhouses to do that. But I mean that's one of the reasons my uh my stepfather's dad retired by the way. Really? He's like, yeah, he's like crap on this.
Like in like 1983. Yeah. He was like, he's like, to hell with this. Good on him, yeah. Yeah, because the craft was gone, right?
Like everybody was just kind of looking for cheaper, easier ways to do things. And uh, so yeah, so we, you know, technically, all of those principles and sort of the way that that works is what we do. But I've kind of like shifted the labor around in the supply chain to try to just make it like effective and efficient for us. And uh, and yeah, and that's that's what we do now. So, our meat does come to like I have the slaughterhouse break it per my instructions into kind of the first cuts.
Like when you take whole animals and you break them down into large format parts and pieces, first they're quarters and halves, but then they become primals. That's where primal supply came from. Uh so I can have the slaughterhouse break my beef into these big primal cuts, and then it does fit on boxes and it does fit on pallets, and it's easier for us to move in the trucks, and it's easy for us to move around in the facility. But when my butcher's bringing into the room and they want to cut it, they still have like a lot of options and space for like how they cut and portion and utilize those things. So, you know, there's there's a lot of creative merchandising for lack of a better term, that happens where you know, after everybody buys the two flank stakes or four skirt stakes that we get off a single beef, what's next, you know, and introducing them to new cuts, things that are obvious to us but aren't obvious obvious to the to the you know primary consumer, or even like starting to experiment with I wonder if this could be any good.
And there's a lot of things that aren't, you know, there's a reason why there's a lot of things that look like steaks aren't steaks because people have been doing this for a long time and they'll be and chewy or they won't cook well. Um but sometimes we're able to you know take take one cut and change it with the season or give someone something new. Um I don't know, we do a lot of like a good example of that is that uh we sell a ton of copa steaks or people call them pork neck, so it's like that barrel muscle that's in the pork butt or shoulder, and you know, typically people think a whole pork show shoulder you gotta roast it or braise it, and it's this like you know, inconvenient, long time, large format project to pursue. And we can take that muscle out, we can portion it into stakes, and if you cook it the right way, like a boneless pork shop, you have something that's awesome, and I get like three or four different one-pound portions to serve to my customers, which just made it go farther and gives them more quick cooking options. So yeah, it's kind of it's kind of cool.
It's like think about what people want and try to see if you can give it to them. I mean, I noticed in your in your voice on one of the videos I saw of you that uh you're like it's not that it's not that you were implying that you didn't like ribs and strips. It's just you were like you were kind of like, come on, dudes. You know what I mean? Like uh, and so you, you know, like you threw out some steaks, honestly, that I've never even tried, like baseball steak.
You wanna like uh I've I mean I'm probably behind the times, but like what which which like what are these kind of like uh alternative steaks that you'd like people to try? Now, and specifically, like I am not me personally, maybe the people listening are, but I'm not interested in a substitute for a rib steak. I want something that is different and like delicious in it in its own right. You know what I mean? Yeah, you know, for a while we were all everyone was about the tri-tip for a while, but of course that has problems because some of them are livery, some aren't.
You gotta cut that little weird little thing out of it, and then I used to like to meat glue them back together because people don't want to cut through that thing and then chew it, la la la la la la. But anyway, so go go ahead and give me some, you know what I'm talking about. I don't. I'm actually, I'm like, what are you cutting out of a tri-tip? Uh wasn't it the tri-tip we were cutting out of?
Isn't the tri-tip the one that's got that line running down the middle, or is that a different one? What's the colour? No, the trip. No, the tri-chip's like a it's shaped like a bicycle seat, it's like a triangle. Right.
It is a whole muscle. Maybe you were having so the culott or picania, it's like the cap on the top sirloin. I'll look it up. It was mid many years. We gotta like Google Google and Yeah, I gotta look, I gotta look up.
I gotta go, I've gotta go. It's been so many years. I gotta go look up. We used to do a meat glue class, and there was a there was, it wasn't an it was one of these stakes, it was shaped like a tri-tip, and then we would cut out there was a line that ran through it in the middle. Like it wasn't like between like a muscle junction.
It was like through the middle of the steak. And we would cut it out and glue it back together. In the same way that in a rib steak, we would we used to cut the walnut out because people would get pissed, and we would cut, and we would cut out that line of you know that you know that line of connective tissue between the cap and the main part of the meat, and then that that line sometimes is nasty and sometimes isn't. And someone actually has a question about that, so we gotta get to that later. But we would cut we would we would we would kind of like lift the flap off, like you lift the car engine, rip that thing off, and then glue the flap back down.
Wow, I'm fascinated by this. I like that we're like we're kind of coming to this from opposite sides. You're like the science guy, and I'm kind of like a touch and feel gal, you know. And uh meat glue might meat glue is like a fascinating thing to me. I was so like I don't sous bead, I'll be honest.
I just don't. I'm like a cast iron salt and pepper. I talk a lot, I read a lot about sous videos so I can like educate and support my customers, but it's just kind of not my thing. And a chef years ago was encouraging me to use meat glue for like a pork, uh like a roulade roast. And I was like, dude, I don't I don't go there.
Like that's not my style. He's like, no, no, it's made from plant matter, it's it's organic, you can do it. And I tried meat glue for the first time, and like my head exploded, and I was like, Oh, I never want to go back. This is so perfect. But it's a slippery slope there, you know.
Well, it it you know what? Uh uh uh my memory just came back. It was blade stakes that we were doing. Aha, yes, yes, yes. Flat iron like flat irons, they're yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's what we were doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then uh taking that center thing. Yeah. Well, okay, so I'll give you my thing on meat glue, right?
I'll give you my pitch on meat glue. I'll give you my pitch in general, and we'll see whether you buy this argument. I'm not saying that it's for you, right? I'm ready to be sold. I'm like very ripe right now, so let's see what you got.
If meat glue got a really bad um rep, I think for uh bad reasons. People were using it to take like hacked up pieces of meat, glue them into a faux steak, and it's like a patchwork quilt. And you know, as you know, uh, you know, as a as a meat person, like that just doesn't work. Like that like it just does it doesn't imitate what a real muscle does. It's not it's not a good idea.
It's terrible idea, right? Things shrink at different rates depending on what muscle it comes from. And it's just it's just a freaking nightmare. And also it's dishonest, right? So like trying to, and and I've never been like I I never liked an argument where someone's like, Oh, well, I could pretend like I bought good meat and I can buy crappy meat.
No, I mean if you can get less expensive meat and make it delicious, that that's a good idea, but if you're trying to rip someone off or pass something off, that's always a terrible idea, right? So that's just as as a as as a starting point. So now there are certain cuts of meat where I think they are delicious, but they have inherent problems from a customer perspective. So for instance, like the blade steaks got that line running down the middle. Great steak, if you take out that line.
Or like, or like I was saying, like, you know, everyone lo everyone loves a rib steak, except for if you're gonna do the if you're gonna do the big rib steak on a plate and you're gonna slice it and serve it, like that that line that runs through that sometimes is you know cartilaginous and doesn't break down not as not as pleasant and a someone who isn't necessarily like someone who loves all of those textures isn't gonna enjoy it as much right same with the walnut you know and I mean what I call the walnut I don't know what you call it but you know um you know what I mean that I don't have a name for it but as soon as you said walnut I knew exactly what you're talking about so let's adapt that. Yeah so anyways so like like if if you're just taking something like that and um and and you're doing it like kind of up front and you're saying this is what I'm doing then and you tell people that you've done it because of course as soon as your knife goes into that piece of meat it's now contaminated right so you have to let people know you've done it because you know you've done it. Anyway so I think that like this is also like a setting situation where you're talking about doing this in a restaurant context right where you're trying to cook meat and then serve someone and have them have a perfect eating experience. Right. Whereas like I do so I do work with chefs and I love working with chefs but I kind of try to I try to learn about their cooking style and what their menu is and then appropriately sell the right cuts into it.
Like if they if they have a concept in mind and something that they would want to use maybe there's not enough of them on an animal like it's like you know if you're gonna ask me about hangar steak we can't do it. But maybe I might talk to you about using a bavette or even like a Denver steak or something that's gonna have that loose grain texture that we would get a higher yield off the animal. So that's that's kind of like as far as I go with chefs and then I kind of put it in their hands and let them do their magic and it's pretty fun for me to then go and sit at the table on the other side and see what they did. But I spend a ton of time really cutting meat and selling meat to home cooks. And I my safest assumption is to just kind of like assume that everyone is just a mediocre cook at best and try to do everything to set them up for success.
Because even things like, you know, it might seem like there's some obvious way to cut or portion a steak, but the way in which we cut it and present it to them is gonna guide how they then you know cut it and slice it when they cook it. So, you know, so it is actually really important that you're you're you know, like you're slicing and portioning a steak so that the grain, when they look at it and have a natural instinct about how to deal with it, that they're gonna like follow and cut across the grain. Or like the way that we tie things or even portion them, and kind of the importance of how you know, I when people, when butchers are learning and training and they can't, it's not that easy to cut a flat steak to be honest. Like it takes a lot of practice to not wedge them and have them be exactly, especially as they're bigger, uh, you know, an inch and a half thick from end to end. Because even like a tiny little slip-up where it's an eighth of an inch or a quarter of an inch thicker on one end to the other, is gonna set somebody up so one side overcooks and one side undercooks.
So there's just like a lot of that that we go into thinking. So this I'm so fascinated by the blade stake thing. So the flat iron is one of the coolest muscles in the beef because it is um it's attached to the scapula. Like the shoulder blade, you so like one of you if you've listened to things from me before, which it sounds like you have, like, you know, I love to talk about what muscles do in live animals because that's what affects the flavor, the texture, the way they cook, like all the things that we experience as cooks and eaters. And so, you know, the more active muscles are, the more they taste amazing.
But all that activity, you know, builds up things that are probably not pleasant in your mouth, like connective tissue and sinew and all that. So the shoulder, obviously, you know, these animals walking on all fours, leading with the front of their body, active part of the animal. That's a chuck and the beef, it's where all the flavor is. So the flat iron is the shoulder blade is deep within the shoulder and it moves with every step, but the flat iron is like attached to it, like it's bone skin, we call it, like you peel it off. So that muscle does not move independently, it's just kind of stuck to the shoulder blade, and as the shoulder blade moves, the muscle moves, but it doesn't have to expand and contract to do that.
So it's one of the most tender muscles in the beef. Like after tenderloin or fillet, flat iron is like go for it. It's so incredibly flavorful because of that activity surrounding it, but it doesn't do a lot of work itself, so it's gonna be melting your mouth tender. But it's like this thick muscle, and there's this terrible, inedible seam that runs through it that's so tough. And what we do is we like you're filleting a fish, you know, like you're filleting uh, you know, the skin or like muscle off of off of one side of a fish.
Uh, you fillet the that muscle off of that sinew, so you end up with two long thin stakes. Any butcher can tell you that no matter how long you've been butchering for, and no matter how much you practice, this is not that easy to do because the that sinewy seam is like it's not perfectly flat, it kind of like bends and changes and following it with your knife and not leaving meat behind is not easy to do. And it also doesn't separate easily like a silver skin or something. No, no, no, not at all. Like it doesn't, yeah, it doesn't peel easily, it's not that easy to follow with your knife.
So it's like it takes some real practice to perfectly like fillet off those two muscles off of that center seam and not leave a ton of trim and like you know, yield. Can I say that? Family show fair. Sorry. Ruin your yield.
Yeah, there you go. Um, so so yeah, so it takes a ton of practice to get a clean steak that you haven't hacked into that you haven't left trim behind, and it's just not awesome. And I remember the first time that I was like in charge of a butcher shop or thinking, like maybe we'll maybe we'll sell them and cut them this way instead of this way. And I learned about the blade stakes as you call them. I call them feather stakes because that's kind of what they look like when they're portioned with that seam running down the middle.
And I was like, ah, I've cracked the nut. This is so much faster, it's so much easier. We don't lose trim, they look pretty. We're never selling flat irons again, like blade stakes, feather stakes won the war. So I was selling them out of my case, and then I had a customer come back to me and say, Hey, so I brought one of those feather steaks, and it was the worst steak I've ever had.
It's just being so like this was a cook that was really talking to me, like he wasn't complaining, you know, in in just sort of like an unhappy customer way. And he's like, There was these incredibly delicious tender bites, but that stuff in the middle was just there's so much of it, and I left it all behind on my plate, and it felt terrible. And I just like I could just empathize with this experience and be like, Oh, that sucked. That sucked. I'm never doing this again.
So now I've come full circle and I'm all pro flat iron, and we do that every time. But I watch my butchers do it, I do it, like it's just terrible. It's it's not so I don't know, I'm thinking about your meat glue to bring this back in this context. And that's not just for giggles. Like you said, it's like corrective surgery, and you still got this beautiful tender cut that you've just taken out that little offender in the middle.
I can tell you that it's delicious. Yeah, I I used to do it as part, that was one of the in when we taught meat glue classes. Now this was in 20, I don't know, 11 or something. Um, yeah, back when we were teaching meat glue classes, like that's one of the ones that we did because those steaks were also, I don't know how what they cost now, but they were not that expensive back then. And um, yeah, because what I you know, look like from a I you know, butcher's perspective is different necessarily from like a cook's versus a customer's perspective, right?
So, like I know from watching my family eat things that I've made, um, and you know, the students back when we were teaching them, that once you sear off a steak, it's real hard to necessarily see where those tough lines are. So you can't even, it's hard to do the surgery at your plate sometimes if you're not paying attention. And most people are talking and like drinking their wine or whatever, and so they just cross-cut, they're using a sharp knife because everyone hands you a sharp knife when you're so it's not like you know you can tell based on your knife. They'll cross-cut and they'll just put the whole dang thing in their mouth, and people aren't like used to having to like people aren't used to having to follow muscle lines on their own plate. You know what I mean?
So uh, you know, and and like if you were doing it for yourself, you would know that, and you wouldn't just slice across that thing and eat it, but it's a very hard education problem, anyways. Yeah, I mean, even like selling someone, so I love to sell bones in meat. I mean, it's just like there's there's multiple reasons for it. Like from a yield and profit standpoint, it makes a whole lot of sense for me to, you know, it's like sell the bone with the meat, not have it be something that I separate out and give the customer all the muscle and keep the bone for me to deal with, and then you know, there goes the weight, and I I buy whole animals. Um, and in a lot of contexts, you know, bones sort of in proof give it like some structural integrity, or in a long cooking situation, adds flavor and all the rest.
So I like to sell bone in New York strips. Why not? You know, uh the like shell steaks essentially. I think they're cool, they present well, they they cook kind of nice, they cook nicely, and uh, but I can't tell you how many times I've had a conversation with someone over the counter where I'm visibly holding up the steak and and trying to show them. So when you finish cooking this, you know, you're gonna take your knife and you're gonna slice along here to take the whole muscle off of the bone, and then you can cross-cut and slice this thing on your plate.
And to anybody who cooks regularly, that doesn't seem like a very hard thing to do, but you'd be surprised how many home cooks out there have never just cut the ribeye off the bone or the New York strip off the bone before they then slice it and serve it. And they're they're up for it, but it's like you know, you really gotta like I said, you gotta do some coaching, you gotta cut it, set them up for success. And it's a funny conversation where someone's like, Well, do you have any boneless New York strips? And I'm like, Well, I can make anything boneless. I'll do it for you, but you want to pay.
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. We make them more expensive. So the question in the chat that's sort of about like how you counsel novice share your, I don't know, sure, yeah. Um Chef Joanna asks, is there an easy quote-unquote trick to tell home cooks how to choose the right cut when the thing listed in the recipe is unavailable?
Oh, um, I mean, that's a great question. I don't know that there's necessarily like a trick for that. It really just is being knowledgeable. I mean, that's kind of my job as a butcher, to be honest. Uh, to be knowledgeable about how different muscles will cook and behave, and then to make the appropriate substitute.
So, like mainly I I have kind of my series of questions that I will ask people to try to hone in. You know, if they if they give me a recipe, I could just tell them what the answer is. But it's like, okay, are you looking, are you brazing, are you smoking, you know, are you cooking slow or fast? And then let's say that we're just talking about a steak. So, what were they after?
Like, um, if they're asking me for a flank steak, for example, it's like, well, was it the long grain and the quick cooking, you know, thin thinness about it, or was it that's an incredibly lean muscle? Um, you know, because I could recommend something else that would cook the same, but it might be fattier. So it's really just kind of like the cooking technique, and then I think more if like I said, if the the fat or the sort of muscle grain, because there's kind of these like smooth, dense steaks, you know, like top sirloins, New York strips, things like that. And then there's those ones that have kind of a like looser, longer grain, like uh like a flank or a skirt or a glavette. And to me, those are apples and oranges.
So, you know, that's that's kind of the the thing. I guess like what's the end goal and what are what are they trying to get out of it? Right. But if you were matching, if you were matching someone's recipe, like would you would you match more on flavor, more on texture, or would you match, like where would you, where would you match first? Yeah, I guess I guess for a recipe, I would be looking for like the cook process.
So I'd probably say that you know, like how like how long or what temperature is it telling you to cook this so that we could sub it in and they would have the same result. Right? Because if it's saying three to four minutes aside and and this is gonna happen, then I want to I want to sub something in that's gonna behave the same way in process. If someone doesn't have a recipe and they're just kind of chatting about like this is what I'm in the mood for for dinner, um, then I think I could go a little bit more with like a flavor texture match because I could chat with them about adjusting the cook the cook time or process. Well, because then and I think the reason this is important is because uh like a lot a lot, especially people you know that that I deal with, like on on this show and like in life, are really interested in in things that they read from all over the world.
They can't necessarily get them, right? And some of them are becoming more popular. So for instance, like, you know, a couple of months ago, everyone was asking uh picana, picana, picana, picana, picana, picana, and like they couldn't get it. So, like, you know, I'm I'm sure now, like this, you know, the butcher shops like yours, you could deliver that, but what should they get if they if that particular one, what should they get if they want it? Or things like that.
Yeah, but like, is it cut like can you get it cut the same because it's got that like they leave the does it cut exactly the same way with the fat fat cap left on it and everything? Or yeah, I mean, well, that's that's one of those examples where there is actually like a comparable muscle, and it's kind of nice to say, have you had this? Well, then you could try this. And I do that with the cool outer picania, which is like the same muscle, or the tri-tip. To me, those are kind of interchangeable because they're both on the outside of the animal.
Um, like they kind of come from the hip. They're on the outside, so they're both gonna have that exterior fat cap. Um, they're sort of a similar size and thickness. So if you're following a recipe and it's giving you like a cook time, it's gonna behave pretty similarly. And I actually think like fat and and texture, muscle fiber-wise, they're pretty similar.
So that's that's kind of an easy one. But it's like, you know, the obvious example is like we just went through your Passover, and everybody wants brisket. And even though I at this point buy a decent amount of beef, there's still only so much brisket to go around. So then you have people coming in looking to utilize those recipes or do those same processes. So then you can kind of go through the down these steps of like, okay, so well, obviously, you're looking to do you're looking into your your grandma's brisket recipe, so you're looking to slowly braise some beef.
Um, so how much do you care that it's boneless? Because if it is, then I'm probably gonna recommend that maybe you use a chuck roast or possibly even like boneless short ribs, which we cut from the chuck flap. Um, if you're not so tied to that, then personally I would sort of jump ship and go to like, why don't you do some sh some actual bone-end short ribs or maybe try some like cross-cut beef shanks or something like that? Um, so it's kind of like you know, what's the most important to them? Like, do they want just one big boneless piece of meat that they can like slice and serve?
Because then we can't go to something that's gonna have to be an individual portion, like a bone-end short rib. So yeah, there's just like there's so many questions. It's like end goal process. I guess really the best thing is to figure out to that person like what thing do they know how to do, and what thing do you are they are they gonna like? If they're an intuitive cook and they're cool with like improving on a recipe where you could I could give them some pointers about this is just gonna take 30 minutes longer, or you're gonna do this to it, uh, you know, that then I can like substitute a little bit more freely.
If they seem like they're really gonna need to lean on that recipe, then I'm gonna really need to think about something that's gonna behave the same. And steaks are like a little, like I think the larger format stuff is a little easier to sub around. The steaks are a little bit more nuanced, and you only have a couple minutes of cooking time, so you really gotta get it right. Right. So going back to something you just mentioned, the chuck the chuck roast, chuck is so freaking complicated.
And I can never wrap my head around the chuckro, especially because I tend to do a lot of tests on like low temperature sous-vide work, and like all the muscles in that son of a gun are so different from each other that when you're actually trying to focus, it's just it's just too complicated for me. And that's why I I guess I never I never almost never use it, just because I'm like, uh, like I'll use it cubed up as stew meat, or I'll do it in like standard braises, but like actually using those muscles to me is because I just can't remember. Like, I can't remember like what is so what percentage of your things like chuck do you leave as that big complicated mess? And what percentage do you break down into like individual things that you know the in or that I can learn the individual properties of? Yeah, so that's this is a perfect question.
Okay. This is like one of these things where I would love to set you up for success. Because when I was training butchery, and I was I worked at this butcher shop in in Berkeley, and the way that we sold chucks was that we took a whole chuck, which is basically like the top half of the shoulder. It's it's a subprimal of the shoulder. It's the equivalent of like the Boston butt in a beef.
And there's a lot going on there. You're talking all the way from the neck to like the fifth rib, um, and from the top of the back kind of down to the arm. So much activity, so many, so many muscles. And the way that we used to sell them is that we would um take the bones out and then roll that whole thing up into this big boneless roast that then we would slice into like big round four-pound chuck roast portions. And the only thing that you could do with that was really like slow and low braise it to till it was fall apart tender.
Um, because some of the tough muscles were incorporated in there, so you really couldn't do like a gentle roast with it. And yeah, like you said, there's just there's too many different muscles that behave different ways that if you wanted to kind of cook them to more specific, I don't know, like process or end result, you're not gonna have it. So for us, um, I have my processor uh break my big beef shoulder into the chuck and the clods. That's like the kind of the top half and the lower half, it would be the butt or the picnic in a pork. I feel like a lot of people have some pork whole animal knowledge, so sometimes that's an easier thing to equate it to.
So we get back these whole boneless chucks, which is all those muscles, and we actually intentionally break them into um three, and this is after there's there's a couple of external muscles that are involved in it, and you take those all off, but you're looking at that like giant boneless chuck roll. Um, we separate it into three different things. So the chuck underblade is this nice thick flat muscle that's technically, I guess. Sorry, my brain is trying to follow this in my in my eyes. Um the chuck underblade is kind of like that outer muscle, and it's big and thick and flat.
And we can separate that off. And then you have the actual chuck eye, right? That's the that would be the copa in the pork shoulder, or it's really a continuation of that ribeye muscle kind of moving forward into the shoulder. And that is what we tie into a chuck roast because that eye muscle is actually a little bit more specific, a little bit more tender, and you could braise it, but you could actually just like slow roast it and slice it and have like beautiful tender chuck roast. Um, and then we separate off the neck because the neck is the hardest working part of the shoulder.
Like if you think about the fact that these animals work walk around on all fours and they spend all day every day holding their head up, that is so hard working. And that we cube into like a fatty, you know, bourguignon stew cube, or we will sometimes um tie them into roast, but they are very specifically like chuck roast for you tell me that you want to do like a pot roast pulled beef situation. Like, there's no way that you're gonna roast and slice that. I would never sell you that for roasting, if that makes sense. And so so, even just those those three things make a pretty big difference.
So the underblade, the first one I mentioned, um, that is often used for boneless short ribs. They're not really short ribs, they just kind of get made to look the same. Um, but that's also something that if we uh can completely like denude it of all the sinew on the outside and get down to the just the whole muscle, and it's maybe um, I don't know, it's like a it's shaped like a rectangle. It's depending on the the size of the beef itself, it's maybe like two inches thick, and it's uh, you know, let's call it like eight by twelve, it's like the size of a sheet of paper. And you can across the grain slice that into steaks, which is that's what we call Denver steaks, and it doesn't make any sense in your mind why something that comes from that hardworking shoulder would be something that you could quick sear a couple minutes aside and have a nice eating experience, but you do, and we love them, and like our customers love them.
They they kind of eat a little bit like maybe a hanger or something like that, where you kind of have like that that interesting like texture and chew, and you've got shoulder flavor. So that's like I said, this is one of these situations where you take a big big complicated like muscle group, like a chuck roll, and separate it into three different pieces, and now I can really customize and give my customers like really specific things that have uh if you if you use them in a certain way, you're gonna have a really predictable result. Just uh that's awesome. What's the what's the name of the whole thing that you take off again? So starting with a chuck roll, you would separate the chuck flap or underblade.
Under underblade, that's a great word. Underblade's a great word. It is. You know what's you know, it's not a great word? Claude.
Claude. There's so many bad words. There really are. That's what Nastasia calls me when we're not on the air. Yes.
My my favorite, like poorly named thing is I'm I'm guessing you're familiar with bavette, uh totally other side of the animal, right? Comes from the like belly flap animal part of the animal. And it's sometimes it's just called flap meat. Like who wants flap meat? And it's this beautiful steak.
It's so it's sometimes called the sirline flap, but we we refer to it as bavette. And yes, that takes an explanation because it's a French word, but it's as beautiful as the steak is. John, does that mean flap in French? It means drool, actually. Oh, see, this is really interesting.
Someone on my staff who speaks some French uh said that it translated to bib, and it's kind of like the shape of a baby bib, but that would maybe make sense about drool. Yeah. That's pretty hardcore. So I like something that is delicious that sounds like garbage in every language. Yes.
That's great. Like head cheese? Yeah, head cheese doesn't sound good because head cheese sounds like toe cheese, but coming out of your head. Yeah. Who wants to cheese coming out of your head?
It sounds like earwax or something. It's awful. Anyway, uh we have the same feelings about that. Right. So uh just a a no tipene, since you said that you're not into sous vide low temp.
One of the problems I think people don't necessarily wrap their head around when they're doing um low temp sous vide, is that if you take a multi-muscle cut where some of the muscles are so if you take if you take something like a short rib, which is rel I know it's like but relatively uniform in the amount of connective tissue like throughout the pieces that you're cooking, and you low temp it, what happens is is that it gets tender, but the uh the the collagen turns to gelatin, but it doesn't render out and become it doesn't permeate the meat. It stays in right. But here's the downside. So, like uh I'll I'll move it to a different one and I'll ask you the question on this. So when you're doing like uh a pork belly, right?
I have never pinpointed it, but there's one muscle in the pork belly that doesn't have a lot of connective tissue in it. And so when you low temp it, it's always drier and stringier than the rest of the of uh of the pork belly. Yeah. When you low temp it. And so I don't know what that muscle is or how to avoid it.
If I know I'm gonna do low temp, maybe maybe you can tell me. But that's the that's the problem with doing low temp on something like uh someone's like, I'm gonna take a I'm gonna take a chuck, you know, a chuck roast like the sliced in thing, I'm gonna low temp it for like three days and come on. First of all, it's gonna turn to mush most of it anyway, because that's too long. But even so, some of those muscles are really nasty than eating on their own because there's no crosstalk of the gelatin after it renders, just as a little yeah. This is so interesting.
Okay, so I I will say, like, I just I'm not a so-view cook because it's just I don't plan ahead. It's one of my in cooking. I'm like that person that can't start the project a day ahead of time, uh, just won't ever happen for me. And uh I don't know. I I really I'm fascinated by it.
I love to learn about it. I love to talk to people about it because I I get it conceptually. Um, I'm just not that practice at it. And and I'm just I'm really a home cook, and I think it's cool and fun to do it at home, but I really understand how it can be helpful in like you know, larger format sort of restaurant capacity. But anyway, so the it's really funny that you just made that comparison because you know that the short ribs are essentially the same thing as pork belly, we just have the spare ribs, we've taken them off the belly.
Um, that we've separated those into two things. But really, the plate ribs, which is the what we call the beef short, the more traditional beef short ribs, is really the front half of the belly if the spare ribs are still on on a pig, which is why you like that forward part of the pork belly. I'm guessing that the part that you're saying is kind of dry and not that good, is as the rear part of the belly kind of tapers into the sirloin. On a beef, that would be where we call where we pull the flank steak and the bavette and stuff out of, but we don't do that on pork, we just use the whole pork belly. Really, the front two-thirds are still gonna have that kind of like striation of muscle and fat and behave more like a short rib.
And then that rear third is starting to transition into lean muscles. Like a flank is a completely lean muscle. And you that fat is sort of starting to go away and it behaves very differently. So I think if you're gonna sue the pork belly, you need to tell your butcher that you really want the piece, the portion to come from like the front rib end of the belly and not from the rear sirloin end of the belly. These are good tips.
And what about those cartilage fingers that run through it? Oh, yeah, the like little rib tip. Those shouldn't be on there. I mean, that should that should come off real, you know, the the belly primal, all it is is like we break the belly off of the top loin section and it's got ribs laying on it. So you remove those all with your knife.
I I like to do St. Louis style spare ribs, so that means that we take all the ribs off the belly, and then at the point where the actual bones themselves have the joint into that soft little cartilage rib tip piece, you just cut across and your your spare ribs themselves only have bone, and then those rib tips become something separate. Some people like to cook those, that's like a thing. I definitely I don't mind the eating experience, but I think the average person gets a little thrown off by these weird soft things that you can maybe chew or not. And I to us we just separate those off, we trim off all the meat, the the little rib tips go in the stock pot, and we just we keep them out of the customer experience.
All right. Now let me let me get because I had some people that ask questions, I want to make sure they tweeted them in. I promised I would ask you these questions. Okay, ready? From uh Ryan Briggs via Twitter.
Uh was very glad that you're gonna be on, considers this lucky. For Easter, uh, they did two to uh they did two three rib roasts, which actually I think are a nice, it's a nice size for home. Anyway, so if you're gonna, but you're gonna do two of them, why not just do a whatever, whatever. Uh to my untrained eye, they looked very similar. When we cut them, one was shot through with cartilage.
I guess we we talked about this a little bit earlier, uh, I think, and the other was all muscle. Both tasted good, but the former was harder to cut when on the plate, and the texture slash mouthfeel was worse. What's going on? Is there some way to discern which cuts are likely to be like this when examining meat at the grocery store? Alternatively, is there a good way to avoid this if I talk to a butcher?
Appreciate any advice. Thanks, Ryan from Toronto, by the way. Ooh, okay. So yeah, I think this actually probably goes back to your conversation, your your point about the ribsteaks and uh meat glue earlier. I'm going to so my number one advice is go talk to a butcher.
Uh because things like this are the difference between shopping from a butcher who's going to be more knowledgeable about the cuts and hopefully be able to customize a little bit towards your needs rather than shopping off of a grocery store shelf. Where everything is just pre-cut, and you know, to the untrained eye, you might not notice something like that. I'm gonna guess. So, okay, the rib section, which we you know break out of that center loin of the beef, is at most seven bones long. So we cut the rib, you break you break the shoulder from the rib loin between the four fifth and sixth rib.
Is that right? Yeah. Um, there's 13 ribs, right? So you the five ribs stay on the shoulder, the next seven become the rib loin. And that so seven bones is the most you can have.
If they bought two three bone rib roasts, it is very possible. I'm gonna say this took me a minute to I didn't process this earlier, but I think our conversation helped. Maybe the butcher started with a seven-bone rib roast, and they more or less cut it in half to create two three-bone rib roasts, and that's what that person bought. So that would mean that the the section that was the front part of the rib, as it's transitioning into the shoulder and starts to have other muscles grow up around it, like the walnut and the rib cap and other, like a little bit more connective, you know, slightly sinewy things. Um, you know, those those real shouldery rib eyes, as I like to call them, is very different than the rear half of the rib loin, where it's starting to transition into like the center amoin or strip loin, and the loin eye is getting bigger, and some of those connective support muscles are starting to fall away.
So I'm gonna guess that they really prefer the eating experience of the strip loin, where you have that one sort of more tender, larger, consistent muscle and not all those support things against uh around it, and they're not really huge fans of the you know, sort of chuck end of the rib. I'm I should just tell you that I know we're talking with our voices. I'm making so many expressions with my hands to try to explain this. But a quick Google would would show you, you know, um, the sort of one of those cut marks in a cow, and that rib section you can see how it's you know starts closer to the shoulder or the head and it continues to the middle. So when I'm looking at stakes uh at you know, at a hopefully at a butcher, but most of us, you know, don't aren't necessarily that lucky at it at a supermarket, like you know, you'll notice you notice when you're looking between what I call it the cap, I don't know what you call it on a ribeye and the thing.
Some have much more of that, you can see it, that gray, that gray kind of cartilagey connective tissue that you know is not gonna render or or go away. And some doesn't. Is that just based on its position, or is that also cow to cow? A little bit of both, but it's gonna be more the anatomy for sure. Um, because the rib is the rib is actually like a very transitional section of the beef.
Because that that short line, which is where the New York strip comes out of, and that the tender one is in it, is like the center middle of the back. If you think about the idea, if we crawled around on all fours all day, you know, our backs would not work. That's like the muscle that holds, you know, we stand up tall, right? So that the muscles running down our back support us from end to end all day. I mean, not me, my posture.
Mine too. I actually have a really bad hunter. Um but if if we crawled around all day, they wouldn't work very hard, right? So the that center of the back is one of the less active, more tender parts of the beef. But as you move forward on its back towards its shoulders, which it leads to walk with, you know, every single step that works, that rib is really connected to that.
So just a lot of, you know, other hardworking muscles and that sort of like said, that kind of sinew connective things grow up in there to support all that activity, and that's what ends up in in your roast. Um, I mean, the real thing is like my cooking tips to to rib roast is that you really gotta cook those things low and slow. Like a hot fast roast, you could do it on a strip loin, but on a rib-eye, if you want all that fat and stuff to melt and actually taste good, you gotta take your time. Yeah, I uh again, if you have the meat glue. If you have the if you have the meat glue and you have the whole section of like, you know, however many ribs you buy, you can you can with a knife carefully peel back that cap, like all the way all the way down to where it joins what would have been that bone that you normally take off.
You know what I'm talking about? And then take like you can see that the stuff that's nasty, then. You can rip that off, and then if you want, you can also peel in and like take out the fat walnut area, render that out, use it to make Yorkshire pudding, definitely don't throw it away. Then roll that whole sucker back together, let it sit for four hours before you do anything, and you're good to go. Um again, I that's I'm not saying to do it at the shop, but I'm just saying that like I have done this and people they love it.
You know what I mean? Like they love it. I get that. It's it's super interesting. Like um the rib section, so we only really get I like to cut my ribeyes an inch and a half thick.
Uh that's just kind of like I think that's a nice successful thickness. It's not too thin that they're gonna quit cook too fast on you, not too thick that it's gonna be challenging to consistently cook them through in a pan. Um, and you get about give or take about eight ribs off of the beef, the size of beef that I'm raising, I get about eight ribis. That's not that many. And from end to end, the first one that you cut from the rib that's closer to the chuck section looks like a chuck steak.
I mean, it's crazy. There's all these, you know, strip strips of fat and other muscles and things wrapping all around it. And then the eighth ribeye, that's the last one before you get into the short loin, looks like a New York strip on a rib bone. They're they are just they are so different. And it's the same thing on pigs, the pork chops.
Um, so that's it's kind of fun at you know, at a counter if you if you have a relationship with a butcher, they might actually say to you, you know, I would say to someone, well, what's your what's your style? Like, you know, do you like them? Do you do you like something a little more fatty? Are you interested in kind of chewing for flavor? Do you want a nice, tender, consistent end to end eating experience?
So you mind, in other words, do you mind by the way? John wasn't saying no to you. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, but uh stop that. Stop that.
Stop selling customers what they want. Uh like, so in other words, like, do you feel that there is a customer who wants each part, or do you feel a little bit guilty selling like the good part to this person and the other? No, I totally I totally think I mean in this context, I think there's definitely the person who wants both parts. I mean, I like the chuck the chuck ribs, but I um the the chuck rib steaks, but I will really um I tend to cook them a little low and slow and just kind of get a good brown at the end so that all that fat melts. And then you asked me about it being animal to animal.
That's another thing, like genetics and diet will really play into these things. Um, certain certain breeds are predisposed to have um for the muscles are different, uh, like texturally, whether they even uh a muscle that should be tender, the the level of tenderness and sort of the the tightness of that muscle fiber and the way that it grows and develops between different breeds will be different. Some yeah, some breeds are like predisposed to uh you know, for it to intermuscular marble, uh intermuscular fat, which we call marbling. So those things really do make a difference. Um, and you know, but that's not something hopefully your butcher or whoever's sourcing that meat has some knowledge about that and is you know kind of working with farmers that are that are giving you, you know, well-marbled tender beef.
But right, but some of it's complicated. I mean, some of it's I mean, like I've read studies where you know, industrial studies where it you know it's difficult for them to determine, you know, e even in an industrial level from cow to cow, some things are just gonna be different. Like, you know, uh for a long time, because in low temperature cooking, when you're cooking for a long time, some some cuts, I'm looking at you, any cut from the round will like some will go intensely kind of livery, that metallic livery taste, and some won't. And so it's like this off-flavor that even industrially they haven't been able to figure out how to pinpoint exactly when it's gonna happen and when it isn't. But that's one of the reasons that for like low temp work, I stay away from the round entire.
In fact, I try to stay like what's that stuff. What's a round good for besides besides beef jerky? B beef jerky is delicious. Yeah, I mean, rounds are just like, let me tell you, as a whole animal butcher, it is such a high yield part of the animal. Like their legs are big and heavy, and all these muscles, they're all the same.
They're these lean muscles that don't have a ton of intermuscular fat. They're active, you know, so they're they're kind of tough, but they don't really render tender because there isn't anything to melt in between them. It's like it's it's hard. It's hard for us to use them because I don't want them to just all end up in trim and ground beef that's too much. And people, you know, you can only get people to eat so many London broils.
I mean, I do think that a top round makes a really beautiful roast beef, uh, if you're doing it in a setting where you have the ability to like use a slicer and slice it thin. Right. Because you can you can cook that through to a pretty beautiful rare, mid-rare. There isn't a lot of like you know, there's nothing like sinewy or or you know, unpleasant in it. And then if you can slice it thin enough that you don't really mind that it's not that tender, it makes an awesome roast beef.
But for home cooks, that's not that easy to do. And yeah, it's like those those steaks are just not that interesting. We make in in colder seasons. I do like lean stew beef personally for my customers. Um, if you're not trying to make a bourguignon or something like that, where you're going for fatty stew, I think the average person doesn't want to cook a stew and then have to let it cool and skim like inches of fat off the top.
So, you know, if you're really gentle and you you kind of give it the time to um to kind of cook and break down and become tender, I do think that lean stew beef is is a thing that can be successful. But yeah, rounds are rounds are so hard. Um but back that to your thing about like the industry, even in an industrial setting where they can control a lot of things, you know, like they have a ton of control over the breeding and feeding of these animals. You still have to remember that they're beings. You know, they it's just like people.
Like you and your sibling could genetically, you know, be so similar in your DNA, and you could be so physically different. Like, you know, one of you builds muscle really easily and is kind of like you know, athletically inclined, and the other person does not, or your everything from your temperament to like your appetite or how physical you like to be, or how you respond to stress or extern external things. Those are all really individual from person to person or animal to animal, and they will all affect meat. All right, I got this from Barb, uh I got I gotta from Barbara Benson via Twitter. My new organic butcher is a good old boy who I'd like to turn on to Chinese cuts of meats.
The cuts in my Asian market are so interesting, but his meat is better. What's a good resource to help these two people, the the butcher and Barbara come together on this? Ooh, this is such a good question. Um, I wish I had an obvious answer for the resource. I wish this person was my customer and they wanted to walk into my shop and tell me what their cuts were.
Um I mean, if if the good old boy is a whole animal butcher, uh, he should really be able to cut anything. So I think it's just a question of you know, finding some recipe, like going online and finding some recipes or looking for what those cuts are. And I always just tell people, like, bring me your recipes. So it sounds like this person is having a dialogue with someone at a counter. Um, if you were to bring me a recipe and show it to me, it they might be calling something by a different name, but I could probably Google it, or I could, you know, look at what the process is and make a recommendation.
Um, I do have some customers, I've had customers over the years that are doing more like traditional Chinese dishes and asking me for things that I wouldn't normally cut, and I love it. Um start a dialogue, bring your bring your smartphone. Yeah, yeah, bring bring your smartphone, exactly. Like just kind of look at it over the counter. But yeah, that's I've done the I've done the reverse.
I've gone to um butcher shore uh Asian butcher stores uh in Chinatown where I live and tried to get like weird things from them and had them actually laugh me out of the store when I finally got the translation right. Yeah. What do you try to get out of curiosity? Uh so remember like years and years ago uh on um the original Japanese iron chef, there someone was using uh uh I think it was pig bladder as a non-papillot kind of a situation, and I was trying to find any source. So like I was going to stores that I knew were illegally selling pig blood, and I was like, these people are catering to their customers regardless of the law.
So I was like, psyched. You know what I mean? I was like, maybe I can get the same way that my old Italian butcher uh when I used to live uh in um in the garment district, like he could get me lungs to make like soufreet, like the like my like my uh father-in-law used to have when he was a kid, hearts and lungs. And um, and you know, he knew me, so he would, you know, he could get it. You know what I'm saying?
But um anyway, so yeah, they were like, when I finally got the right translations for pig bladders, they just laughed at me and kicked me out of the store. So yeah, the USDA won't let us have any of that stuff. You gotta like know someone who has, you know, the inside tip to get it, or you need to know people who are farming and harvesting animals where they can just save them on farm. So speaking of that, like awful stuff, like you only get like six beef hearts a week. What do you do with that?
Uh I like it when people want to cook them. Uh I definitely try to encourage that happening because I love heart. I think it's so good, raw or rare. Um, you know, there's like a lot of traditional dishes from around the world that are like you know, marinate quick sear heart. I love heart tartare.
Yeah. Uh because I like to use I like to use more active muscles for tartar. Like I don't like it to be mush in my mouth. I like it to have a bit of chew. So I think that's really nice.
But um, if we don't sell the hearts whole or portion to people, we make a beef and beef heart grind, which is really cool. Um, like a 50-50 blend of our our trim plus beef heart. So it's like a really iron forward, it's like eating a ground-up hanger steak. Um it's got kind of a that's the Detroit chili base, right? That's Detroit Chili Base.
Yeah, they have beef heart chili. See, you learn something every day. Uh I I had customers, when I was in Berkeley, I had customers coming to me all the time trying to figure out how to sneak organ meats into like their kids' diet, and they were doing disgusting stuff. Like one somebody once asked me to grind liver into a sippy cup. Oh, oh.
And I was just like, please don't do that to your children. Oh, God. Well, that's remember old school, old, old school, like old, like my grandma's generation. Like you push liver into kids' mouths because they're like, it's good. Eat the liver.
You know what I mean? Like, yeah. There's some people who are still trying to do it. I'm like, you were gonna ruin them for life for something that could be good. So so I started recommending this like 50-50 beef heart grind as a palatable and I think delicious alternative to getting more like organ meats and iron dense stuff in a grinds.
Now we we do that all the time. Um and we also make a pet food, like a raw pet food grind where we'll use like fresh beef plus opal meats and grind it uh for people on with dogs on raw diets, which is cool, but it's kind of sucks too because that's really just because enough people aren't eating the ovals that we're like, well, maybe they'll feed them to their pets. Well, so do you take all of your like I know you have trim, which is useful, and then you have quote unquote waste. Is the waste go to like dog food? So our waste, um, if my processors have cut relationship with we all work with rendering companies that are able to take our meat waste and turn it into like you know, upcycled second use products.
In the pro in the slaughterhouse setting where they're breaking our beef initially, most of them have relationship with rendering companies where they're producing enough, you know, quote unquote waste um that it can be picked up fresh every day and used for like pet food and secondary edible products. For me, we don't quite produce enough waste, and I actually pay the rendering company to take my stuff away, like they don't pay me for it. Um I just kind of do it to be responsible and keep it out of, you know, like not just throw it into landfills and make sure we're using it in some way. So I pay for rendering and it comes weekly. Um so what we do is we uh we say that it is refrigerated and we keep it nice-ish.
Um, but ours all goes to like secondary use. I've actually looked up where it what it goes to, and it's kind of interesting. The list is is fascinating. Like you think like makeup, but it's really like explosives and like glue products and other things, but rendering rendering external trim beef fat is so nasty. Yeah.
The smell of it is just so nasty to me. I mean, I don't know, like by the way, if you want tallow, real render good stuff, you guys sell it, which is awesome. I only ever see lard in my neighborhood. I never see the tallow in in uh in pints. Awesome.
Yeah, I will tell I will say that the difference between so my my main thing at Primal 2, it's important to note that like we I only work with farmers that are raising fully pasture raised, and in the instance of like beef, lamb goat that are ruminants that they're fully grass fed. Um so all of our beef is 100% grass fed. And I think that fat is the most telling thing in the diet of an animal. If you are not really that accustomed to grass-fed versus like, you know, kind of more commodity or grain finished beef, and you want to taste the difference, you really want to taste fat. The meat will taste different, but the like I think that the fat from corn fed, sort of, you know, traditional industrial beef to me tastes like cardboard.
It's just like so flat. There's really, there's no nuance to the diet of that animal, so you're not gonna taste it in the fat itself. It's just gonna be kind of flat, kind of waxy. It's not gonna be, it's not gonna melt even that nice. The grass the grass-fed beef or like the pasture's pork fat is really complex and flavorful.
It tastes like grass and the variety of that diet, and it tends to have a softer, um, just I think more palatable texture when it's rendered and it melts. And I don't know. I think that like the to us the smell of rendering beef fat into tallow is just like just smells like burgers all day. Yeah, yeah, no, yeah. Well, it's because you don't render the nasty stuff.
Yeah, no, no, no, we send that to the rendering plant. Just egg is now the fastest growing egg brand in the United States. Bring more plant-based consumers in your doors with easy to use just egg. You can get started with a free sample. Just head to J U.S.
H R N. That's J U dot S T slash H R N. Made from plants, just egg is a better egg for you and for the planet. It's healthier with no cholesterol and less saturated fat. And it's more sustainable.
Just egg uses less water and generates fewer carbon emissions. Most importantly, it's delicious. For our listeners who operate a food service establishment, you can get a sample for free. Head to J U.S. slash H R N.
That's J U.S T slash H R N. Just Egg makes a delicious plant-based addition to any menu. It's available as a liquid scramble. Great for omelets, frittata, stir-fries, and French toast. There's also a frozen pre-baked folded version that's ideal for filling breakfast sandwiches or topping salads.
Chef Jose Andres calls Just Egg mind-blowing and bon appetite says, it's so good I feel guilty eating it. Put the fastest growing egg brand on your menu. Get a free sample of Just Egg for your restaurant at J U.S. H R N. We have to go in like five minutes, but I have another question from chat that I feel compelled to ask you.
Uh Van Groff asks, at various times over the years, the price of certain cuts of meat have gone from inexpensive to not so inexpensive. In some cases, pricing out the communities that once enjoyed them. I'm thinking oxtail, lambshank, skirt stick, and even chicken wings. Since you butcher whole animals, you sell everything. What what cuts are currently on the upswing and which ones, if any, are dropping in price?
Um, yeah, this is the market demand is just so fascinating, to be honest. Um, and that's really what drives pricing. And even as much as I'm able to, in some instances, equalize the price of our meat because we buy whole animals, I still need to, at the end of the day, it's like people will still pay more for ribeyes and they'll pay less for London broils. And I, you know, we need to sort of we need to kind of get back like a blended profit off the whole animal. So I still sort of follow market demand even in our whole animal pricing.
And the reason why a lot of those things were cut were were cheap in the past was because people didn't know what to do with them and they were hard to use and inconvenient. You know, it's like Americans really value convenience, right? We want quick cooking tender stuff. We don't want to take all day and and use the cheap off cuts that are delicious if you're willing to like you know take the time to make them that way. And it's like the the upside is that people have gotten more educated about the idea that some of those things are delicious.
We have a lot of tools at our disposal like sous beat and instant pots that make it more approachable to do those things. So really as you know there's just there's more demand overall in the market uh people want more options more cuts those things are the the demand is just really just increasing the market value of them and and pricing people out. And I mean it's a you know price is always kind of a loaded topic too because ultimately like all meat should cost more. Really it's like if people at the end if if people really would eat oxtails and all those things all the time at the end of the day what would happen is not that they would get they would be get cheap again. It's that the cost of like ribeyes and strips and stuff would get less expensive.
Yeah. I don't know if that's really a great idea. Oxtails are so expensive now right they've been expensive for like 20 years off almost, I feel compared to what they used to be. And even just like hangar stakes is like a false thing. It's like the only reason why they were ever cheap is because when when butchers like you know, uh like you're talking about in your family, that they had whole animals to cut, there's only one hanger steak, so they just didn't even really bother trying to sell it because there's one of them.
They like put it in their pocket and took it home. So the, you know, the the butcher's family ate it and it was kind of considered butcher's cut. Or you know, they had these things that there was only a couple over there were cheap, and they kind of tucked them aside and gave them to their best customers. And now it's like we are all there's so much demand for everything. You know, you asked me at the beginning of this whole conversation about these off-cuts, like baseball steaks or ranch steaks and what you know what those are and why we sell them, is because everybody wants a steak.
Like everybody walks in, is like, I'm looking for a steak to cook. And sure, I want to sell all my ribeys and strips, and you know if it's not Valentine's Day or Christmas, I probably have plenty of those to spare, but not everybody wants to walk in and spend $25 a pound. So we have a lot of customers to satisfy that want quick cooking, you know, palatable, somewhat tender, convenient steaks that aren't going to break the bank. And there's just only so many of those on the animal, so we're always looking for more. So, like the clod, that that wonderful sounding part that you mentioned earlier, the clod heart is a muscle in it.
It's kind of like the tricep of the beef. And uh, you know, while that is a really active part, again, that single muscle, it's kind of shaped like a football. If we unearth it, we take all the sinew and external things off of it and we portion it into steaks. Uh, we call them ranch steaks. They're kind of surprising, they're lean but surprisingly tender for coming from the shoulder and a nice affordable, quick cooking steak.
We sell a ton of them. Hopefully the cow doesn't do too many dips, huh? Right, yeah. I mean, thankfully they walk forward, not backwards. And like the sirloin tip, which is part of the round, as you asked me, like one of the harder to use, kind of leaner parts of the beef.
So the sirloin tip, it's also sometimes called the knuckle. Um, it's one of those muscles in the leg. I was always trained to cut sirloin tipstakes out of it, and one half of those are really chewy, and I don't think they're great. Um, but that muscle is actually like if you look at it, there's a clear seam and you can separate into one half. Well, there's a couple things you take off of it, but the the thing we would stake.
So one side is kind of flat and lean, and it makes great tartare, maybe like stir-fry or something like that. But it is a steak, it's a little too chewy. The other side, if you seam it off, it's a perfectly round cylindrical muscle with a seam that runs down the middle. And we portion those into steaks, and they look like little flat baseballs, like a cross section of a baseball. That's why we call them that.
And that muscle, when separated from the other one that is kind of tougher and more active, is actually again surprisingly um you know, on the tender spectrum and quick cooking and lean and convenient, and we sell it for like $12 a pound or something. And every week when I'm trying to figure out how to fill the shop, how to make everybody happy, there's just not enough quick, convenient steaks to go around. So it's really important that we just kind of like educate people in a new ones to try. Alright, cool. Here's the last question.
Matt, last question, all right? So uh he heard you from from Martin Martin Schwab. Uh now, uh Heather, are you familiar with uh Ikijime fish killing techniques? I am, yeah. Okay.
So uh for those who are listening who aren't, uh techniques of fish killing that preserve the texture of the fish, brain kill and then spinal ablation, and it's a real thing and it really helps. So you can go if you care a lot, go read my old cooking issues uh posts on it. There's like thousands of words you can read. Anyway, is there uh are there any serious thoughts on using uh the Ikijima method on mammals or birds? And I'm gonna say, let's open this up to have you heard of anyone doing interesting uh do thinking about using alternative slaughtering techniques to try to increase the quality and or the um uh welfare of animals.
Yeah. So I mean, we're always thinking about this, but we can't have this conversation without talking about the USDA. Because unfortunately, in America at least, um, in order for us to harvest and sell meat to other people, so this is if you're someone who's like, you know, boldly raising animals and harvesting them for yourself, you can do whatever you want. But if you are working with a farmer, they're raising animals, you want to harvest them and sell them to other people, they have to be slaughtered under USDA inspection. And the USDA is very strict about steps that need to be taken, you know, for both humane handling but also uh you know preventing issues that that they foresee.
So so our hands are a little bit tied there, but I guess you this is kind of interesting because you put know more about um this than I think I do. Uh but my my understanding of the goal of that process is that um that like needle, the needle into the spine or brain um is just like deadening brain function, right? Uh well, so even after the brain is dead, the the sp the spinal cord is still sending uh can you know can like signals, contraction signals to the muscles, depleting the ATP faster, and so the fish is gonna go into a harder rigor. So whereas a hard rigor in an animal, you know, a land animal might not be bad because when it comes out of rigor, it'll be more tender. Yeah.
Um in a fish, it's gonna lead to to uh you know, gapes in the fillets and all sorts of problems. And so like it's it's kind of weird. In a fish, we're always trying to preserve firmness, you know, not dryness, but we're trying to preserve firmness as opposed to it being kind of flat, flabby and mushy. Whereas in an in an animal, we're almost always shooting for for tenderness, right? So it's kind of an there, they're actually kind of cross-purposes, but of course fish, yeah.
This is fascinating. Because I mean, yes, so um, so in slaughter of all the like mammals and quadrupeds, there is always a step in slaughter where they have to be stunned or something has to happen to that's that's our idea of humane harvest. So they have to be stunned so that we deaden the brain function so they don't, you know, feel or understand anything that's happening, and then we can um, you know, bleed them out and finish the harvest. So like that that's that's a necessary step that we always take in inspected slaughter. Um, but then it does have to go through all the steps of rigor and kind of come out on the, you know, you have to wait for that whole process to finish.
But I'm always seeking, you know, carcass confirmation and firmness, and we don't always achieve that on the other side. You know, sometimes what from other factors, whether it could be stress and harvest or chill time or other things like that, um, you'll actually end up with something like tenderness and confirmation are not the same thing. You know, like that sort of like soft floppiness is not a good is not tenderness. Um so I'd be kind of curious. I mean, I have no idea.
I don't I don't know of anybody who does this, and I'd be so interested to see what the effect of this would be. Um I will say that poultry slaughter, um not on a large scale, but uh you know, on a large-ish scale of what we do, most poultry farmers are working under state inspection and they're harvesting on their farms, and there is not as much um oversight of about how those animals are harvested, and we want to just be humane about them. And most people are just like slitting or beheading the chickens, so it's kind of happening all in one step. So I think that would be something where people could honestly consider that process because I I would I have no problem with it because it it does take that humane step, you know, like as long as there's something that you're doing to deaden the nerve uh or the brain function, um that's sort of the best we can do to guarantee humane harvest. And if you could do that, uh you might end up with incredibly again, although I guess in poultry firmness is really not a good thing.
Again, it totally, yeah, it it totally depend like all the cooking techniques are different and what you're shooting for is different, which is why, but I I'd be interested in trying. I was trying to work on this with a doctor friend of mine and I wanted to actually anesthetize anesthetize an animal and then um you know remove its blood under anesthesia and perfuse it with uh you know something else. So you're bleeding it, it's anesthetized and that bleeds and kills it in one step so it's fully bled and to see what would happen. And people's reaction when I brought it up were like I was literally compared with Dr. Mengela.
And I was like this is an animal I'm gonna eat and it's actually I don't know what it says about me but I'm so interested and I'm like can we do this? Yeah I mean look I mean I'll I can put you in touch with him and we can run the test he's in Boston but I can you know we he's willing to run the test. He'd rather run it on a smaller animal first like a rabbit or something like this. But I mean again I think anything that leads to something more humane like I know people were interested in doing um uh uh anesthesia like n like nitro like straight nitrogen environment anesthesia on stuff like pigs but old school old school uh slaughterhouses I mean everyone's worried that it's that the heart's gonna stop and they're not gonna bleed out right exactly uh so and and but people are using like captive bolt guns. And I mean it's a it's a second and it does have that same effect of you know deadening the the brain function.
Um but yeah, there's I mean the US it's like the USDA is restrictive and yet to your point, it's like they are really just making sure that it is humane, that that the timing of the the end of the function of the animal, you know, appropriately coincides with it actually you know bleeding out but not experiencing pain or stress and all this stuff. So when my uh when my stepfather was a very small boy, this would be in the 50s, uh he maybe this is why he didn't become a butcher. He was at the slaughterhouse. It wasn't one of his dad's uh cows because they did he didn't have his own slaughterhouse. And he he really only really did his own slaughter on the on the lambs.
He would have other people do the slaughter on the cows. And uh they had uh the the person at the time they were using sledges and uh the someone stunned the cow wrong, the cow got off the the somehow got off the the gamble hook and went after my stepfather apparently uh he he still he still eats meat, but he uh maybe that's why he decided not to become a butcher and become a psychiatrist. It's kind of tragic. I mean, I've seen like this, it does happen. It's like sometimes there are just misses and it's and that's a moment that's incredibly stressful for the animal and the people are involved, and it's really unfortunate.
And there's so much work and control that goes into avoiding that. Um but okay, so sorry, my brain is now spinning about this. So have you ever like you know that when you harvest chickens, and it's not it's not often that we would eat beef without it going through the full rigor process and kind of coming out on the other side of it. Although I'm always fascinated that I know that there are many cultures, not American, that typically harvest and immediately cook meat. Now, I've always been taught that if you don't wait out that rigor process and kind of let all of those those things happen, um, that the quality of the of the meat would suffer.
And if you've ever harvested chickens and tried to eat them the same day, it's terrible. Nightmare. Well, some people love it though, that's the thing. It's just what we what we're accustomed to or like we want tender chicken. Yeah.
I think like, you know, if you're if you're doing soups or or stews and you like a chewy chicken, I think because like there are cultures also where chicken is eaten the same day that it's uh, you know, I have some nightmare chicken slaughter stories from some friends of mine that I won't go into, different places where you know it's like the closest the chicken is to a live before you eat it, the better. You know, uh and the same actually frankly also goes some people like pre-rigger fish, you know, like really crunchy pre-rigger fish. Um I always kind of wondered if there was something where like and this is like crackpot, not at all scientific, but it's like if you if it happens fast enough, can you be ahead of that whole process? I mean, I've only done it in f in fish, and like when you kill a fish right away and you you know cut its muscles off, it's it's kind of crunchy. I don't think anyone most people don't like it's hard as hell to slice.
Yeah, and like the chicken, you know, if you were to uh harvest chickens and then try to eat them just like for lunch that day, you know, the the meat would would not pull off the bone and everything is really chewy and kind of hard to eat, and it's very it's it's not a good experience. Yeah, it's also one of the reasons why I think uh like low temp like sous-view like whole bird cooking is kind of sometimes people don't get it right because it's not gonna render out like the stuff where the muscle connects to the bones doesn't render as well as when you're doing a high temp, and so it tends to pull off the bone in a way that people find unpleasant. And that's I think half of the problem of work doing um low temp on things like birds is people don't r re-jigger their expectations of what the meat texture is gonna be like when it comes out. Right. Um on the other side.
I didn't even get to talk to you about like how much does being a graphic designer help when you look at a at an animal and you're like tracing it with a knife? Uh you're not allowed to answer that question right now. We have to come back on for a future show. Clearly we need a meet hotline. I don't know.
Yeah, yeah. Oh man, I forget. I was gonna give you one good uh old school butcher story. Are we allowed? All right, from the 40s.
It's from the forties. It's from the forties. All right, well. All right, right. So my stepfather's my stepfather's father was uh he was in the military, so you know, like like a lot of people who were of fighting age were during World War II, he was off in the Pacific.
Uh he was a quartermaster, actually. Uh, and um, so his dad was who had you know come over from Italy in like 1908, had uh was running the shop. Now meat was very strictly rationed at that time, but because like you know, the the family butcher shop had relationships with the farmers and would do all their own slaughter, they would slaughter extra animals that they weren't allowed to under the meat ration. This is terrible, this is terrible, I know, but whatever. So, like, but they would have all this extra meat.
Everyone involved is dead, so I can talk about this. Uh, and so uh, and you know, this is the one time when like you know, hardcore racism helps you out. So, like, someone complained he gets brought into court because he all this extra meat that he was selling to people kind of under the table, aside from the ration cards. And uh you know, so Dra's grandfather, you know, so my my great-great grandfather on that side spoke, you know, perfect English. But uh when he was brought into court, they were asking him about all this meat and all this stuff.
He goes, eh, no speaking English, no speaking English and and and the judge was like, he called him a wop, said, Get the hell out of my court, and threw him out. Meanwhile, like literally, they were packing money into barrels because they were the only people in the s in the in the south of uh south end of uh sorry in the north end of Boston that had meat to sell. Anyway, butchery. Uh Heather, thanks for coming on. I hope you had a good time.
I did. Uh yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh uh come back sometime. We'll talk more meat. Cooking issues.
Cooking issues is powered by Simplecast. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network. Food radio supported by you. For our freshest content, subscribe to our newsletter. Enter your email at the bottom of our website, Heritage Radio Network.org.
Connect with us on Instagram and Twitter at Heritage Underscore Radio. You can also find us at Facebook.com slash Heritage Radio Network. Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization driving conversations to make the world a better, fairer, more delicious place. And we couldn't do it without support from listeners like you. Want to be a part of the food world's most innovative community?
Subscribe to the shows you like, tell your friends, and please join the HRN family by becoming a member. Just click on the beating heart at the top right of our homepage. Thanks for listening. Listen up, hunters and anglers. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife just made the upcoming season a lot easier.
The new My WDFW mobile app is here, and it's your all-in-one tool for the 2026-27 license year. Buy your licenses, see your hunting and fishing licenses, tag your elk, deer, turkey, even black bear. All on your phone. Harvest reporting and catch record cards have never been easier with the offline mode. No more lost tags, waiting for mail.
It's all on your phone. Just tap tag and enjoy the great outdoors. Download the My WDFW app today. Available in the Apple App Store or Google Play. Washington's Wild just got a lot easier to enjoy.
Whether you're a homeowner creating your dream space or a pro managing multiple projects, discover a new way to shop at Ferguson Home where great ideas become stunning spaces. Visit FergusonHome.com to explore the best selection of bath, kitchen, and lighting products. Or book an appointment at one of our showrooms where you can experience products firsthand and get personalized expert support every step of the way. Bring your vision to Ferguson Home, where it all comes together. Shop top brands like La Cornew or find your local showroom at FergusonHome.com.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.