It could mean the difference between a good quality piece of meat or meat products and a contaminated one. A good and reliable butcher will also help you buy the right kind of meat, the right portion, and the right amount for the right recipe. Essentially, when you to meat shops, your interaction with butchers can make or break your planned meal.
Their competency and knowledge in their profession are characteristics that you, as a customer, should be able to rely on. When purchasing meats, it is essential to know that you are getting quality products. Here are some of the best practices of meat shops you can trust. Any food vendor — no matter what type of products they offer — must always practice complete cleanliness and good hygiene in all aspects of their business.
One of them trims chicken, one butterflies pork chops, another trims out a special order of tenderloins. One person to a block, one block per type of meat. The space is tight, but each station is ample. It's a world constantly decorated with signs of the process.
A stray thumbprint of blood, a blackening dust of sawed bones, smears of raw fat. Sometimes Dave stands in the middle of this, wide-legged, proprietary, appearing a little dizzy, and cooks a small piece of lamb or sirloin on a plug-in griddle. It helps with the smell, he says. There's a skinny kid they call Joe Mack.
Sturdy, tanned, sometimes wears a little rope necklace, who favors a golf shirt under his apron and keeps it tucked in. Barely two years in, he takes classes at night. His father is a meat supplier, and maybe for Joe Mack this is a kind of apprenticeship.
There is no part of the job he won't do, though he does nothing so well as work the counter, where the women poke into their own small line in front of him.
He speaks politely and slowly, he broadens his smile with every answer so it's broadest as he finishes, at which point he bags the meat and offers to carry it to the car.
James is thicker, just slightly older, arms dotted with tattoos, all business at the counter, working the front of the store, mostly preparing the expensive cuts. I ask him about the tattoos. I was in a pretty solid band, and this was my part-time job. But this was something I knew I could get better at. Behind the counter is a thirty-foot-long walk-in, with two doors that swing open so slowly that anyone darting in with a tray of chops has to stop and wait. Shawn calls it the million-dollar walk-in, the irreplaceable fridge.
It was built in the first Kincaid's family store across town eighty-seven years ago, moved here one cork-lined wall at a time when the store relocated in The temperature is a rock-steady 35 degrees. The humidity is 70 percent, always. This produces a dry cold, and what I came to think of as a bloody air, ideal for the aging of beef.
Meat can hang in this freezer for up to ninety days in the aging process. It blackens on the outside, but it does not rot. Temperature and time break down the fibers in the meat as it dries.
At Kincaid's they laugh at the phenomenon of "wet aging," in which meat is vacuum-sealed for days or weeks. That's why the walk-in is so valuable to us. We have a term here for wet aging. On Tuesdays, they break beef. On Wednesdays, they break lamb. A quartered cow, or half a lamb, pulled clean of hide, flat on the metal tables in back, sawed into sections, then worked into cuts from there.
On Thursdays, they concentrate on the specialty cuts. Fridays mostly they get ready for Saturday, because on Saturdays, well, they try to sell everything, so nothing sits until Monday, when they break everything down and start over again. Each of these days requires a different set of implements -- the saw, the fillet knife, the cleaver, the sponge, mop, and towel. I thought I would get sick of it, or disgusted. I'd sort of held my breath when I went in, expecting large pools of blood, tubs of kidneys, brains lying on a table.
But there is nothing grim about working in a butcher shop. Even the sinkful of tongues made sense to me that day. People were using this stuff.
And when meat has a use, a purpose, a destination, it doesn't seem like a wasteful cultural indulgence. To a butcher, a filet does not look like a cylinder of dark, wine-red flesh that runs beneath the spine of a cow; it looks like product to be cared for and tended. It looks like someone's dinner. And of course, it looks like money. There is no waste. Lifting, toting, trimming, tying -- remarkable economy in every step.
Lamb trim gets cut for stew meat. Pork trim made into five different types of sausage. Beef trim: hamburger.
The chicken bones are sold for soup stock, the beef bones packed for dogs. Ham and pork scraps are mixed with pineapple juice in tubs of mayonnaise for ham loaf. The basic compact: Weight is money. Even the fat goes to a rendering house for grease and soap, though "there's not even any profit in that part," Dave's wife, Vicki, the store's bookkeeper, told me.
You just can't throw old meat away. You just--" she turned her head at the thought; no one likes to think about rot. Everything I touched in the butcher shop was either cold, sharp, or both. Every surface in the freezer, the Cryo-packs, the meat itself: icy cold. My fingers ached, and I labored through some scut work, mashing gelid tubs of ground ham with my hands, making sausage in an ancient steel tub, vacuum-wrapping the frozen homemade meatballs.
I stayed away from the counter. The prospect of those rapid-fire orders pretty much terrified me, and one thing I knew was you couldn't show uncertainty. No one likes a butcher who balks. It shakes the gut-level confidence in stewardship. I spent my spare time standing in front of the counter, on the customer side, trying to memorize cuts and prices, preparing for a time when I could flex some muscle. Mark taught the lessons of the grinder.
Twenty-six years in the business, arms like water mains, he was a former pastor who had lived in Alaska for more than a decade. The grinder is a four-foot-long tray, tilted toward a hole in one end. You push the day's trimmings into the hole, where it feeds into a sixteen-inch corkscrew blade. Out the other end: hamburger or sausage. One morning, tossing trim onto the tray, he turned on the grinder and said: "Look, the rule is, if you feel anything tug, anything at all, you hit the button and run.
We stood in the walk-in, the compressors humming like a train. I'm serious as a sock. This stuff will humble you. Get away from it. You always run away from trouble in a butcher shop.
I liked the knife work, learning to work the heart of the blade -- that section where the knife curves, just where it begins to flatten out -- rather than the tip. I learned not to saw the meat but to cut with a consistent pressure, a single change of direction. Sawing the blade left ragged edges, little pointy stubs of meat, ugly and prone to burning.
I figured I would get cut, and I figured it would be nasty. The knives, marvelously sharp at the start of the day, were sharpened by Lori during the lulls. One morning, while trimming chicken, I asked her if there was a pool on when I would get cut.
She looked at me like I had just pissed myself. She just wouldn't talk, not about cuts. None of the butchers would, not while they worked, and especially not while holding knives. Catch them on a smoke break and they might begrudgingly tell you about the time they watched a guy clip off the top third of his ring finger on the meat saw, or about hunting for the tip of a thumb in a pile of pork fat in order to ice it down so it might be reattached.
If you want to put something in your slow cooker, then a filet is the worst cut. If you want to cook a steak cook well done, a filet or a ribeye or a New York is not the best cut of meat.
Again, to get real value out of the butcher, you need to listen to their advice. Sometimes this means straying from a written recipe. For instance, if your recipe calls for lean pork chops, but you like the look of the fattier, thicker cuts, the butcher can tell you how to cook them on the grill to get crispy skin. But the butcher can often save you money and improve the results if you let them help you.
People come in wanting to making Philly Cheese steaks, and they know it usually calls for shaved ribeye. And it has just as much if not more flavor. One of the big misconceptions in the butchery world is that sausage is just made from the leftover junk swept off the butcher shop floor—the unwanted odds and ends. The truth is, a good butcher is going to use as high a quality ingredient as possible in order to make the best product possible. And often, just by virtue of starting with whole animals, the quality is improved.
One of the most unusual trends in the meat world is what bacon has become in recent years. People wear bacon hats, bacon band-aids, bacon t-shirts.
In most retail establishments, a butcher is responsible for receiving and storing meat products in accordance with sanitary and health regulations to maintain meat quality. They package and price meat items after cutting, and prepare meat displays. A retail environment includes customer service, negotiation with suppliers, special order cuts, record-keeping, and inventory. Butchers roll and tie roasts, prepare sausages, and cure meat. They are also very knowledgable on how to cook each cut of meat for maximum flavour, and can give helpful tips to their customers.
A butcher in a processing plant has a more comprehensive set of tasks. Special equipment is used to slaughter, break, cut, bone, and trim meats into cuts that will then be processed and sold in both domestic and international markets.
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