Part I
Time to Meet Your Meat!
In this part . . .
In this part, you discover vital background information and nerdy meat facts that will set you on the right path to butchering your meat at home. As with any skill, you need to start with the basics, and quite often the basics are information about the history and inner workings of the trade.
This part also includes a lot of must-know info, too, like where to source your meat, what kind of equipment you need, and how to butcher efficiently and safely.
Chapter 1
The Butchery Room
In This Chapter
Looking at the butcherâs role
Identifying the benefits of butchering your own meat
Delving into the joys of sausage-making and other preservation techniques
What do butchers do? The obvious answer is that they cut meat, prepare it to be sold, and sell it. The less obvious answer requires thinking beyond the meat counter. Butchers are a powerful fulcrum in a healthy food system. Throughout recorded history, butchers have fed their communities, maintained a pivotal position in the marketplace, and even played a key role in local politics.
As a home cook whoâs interested in butchery, you are in a unique position to do the same as professional butchers, just on a smaller scale. Where professional butchers prepare meat for sale, you prepare meat to serve. Where professionals feed their communities, you feed your family. Where the pros hold pivotal positions in the market and key roles in local politics, you have significant influence not only in what your family buys, but also what kind of value your family places on having a reliable, healthy, local food supply. And if all politics is local and personal, you canât get more local â or personal â than what you prepare in your own kitchen or serve at your own dinner table.
In this chapter, I introduce you to butchers and the basics of butchery. I also explain why learning to butcher meat for your own family can produce benefits that stretch from your own dinner table to your community and beyond.
Understanding the Importance of Ye Olâ Butcher Shoppe
When you get right down to it, a butcherâs work is to prepare meat for sale. But that doesnât mean that butchersâ responsibilities are limited to wrapping meat in cellophane and sticking a price tag on it. In fact, professional butchers perform a variety of tasks. Butchers, like other professionals, may also specialize in a particular area of butchery. I give you the details in the following sections.
Local butchers that work with whole animals are experts in meat cuts, meat sales, and the preparation of everything from steaks to sausages. The difference between butchers and meat cutters is that meat cutters are restricted by their environments to making only final cuts; they work in large grocery chains cutting prefabricated boxes of primal and subprimal cuts into steaks, roasts, and grinds. Everyone in this industry plays an important role, but in this chapter, I focus on the expert butcher.
Identifying what butchers do
Butchery is hard, laborious work. Lifting a carcass or sawing through thick bones takes a lot of body strength, but the final product â and the impact that butchers can have in both big (supporting local, sustainable food sources) and small (helping you choose the best cut for your family dinner) ways â is worth the hard work.
Selecting and preparing meat for sale
Here are the tasks that butchers perform to get meat ready for sale:
Selecting the carcass: Industrialization and strict standardization of carcass condition have made selection irrelevant for the modern meat-cutter; but historically, it was always the role and responsibility of the butcher to know his stuff when it came to the overall quality of the animal. As local food systems are being re-created, this selection and exchange with the grower is regaining relevance.
Quartering or halving the carcass and then breaking it down into primary, or primal, cuts: Primal cuts are the wholesale cuts into which an animal is first divided. How many primal cuts you have varies according to type of animal and the country you are in (different countries, and sometimes even regions within a country, often break a carcass down differently, according to local food traditions).
Deboning, trimming, or breaking primal cuts down further into steaks and roasts: These are known as the
retail cuts. Theyâre what you see in the meat counter or wrapped in trays in the refrigerated section at your grocery store. Some common retail cuts include New York steak, flank steak, and short ribs. You can read more about the basics cuts in
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