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That is something that would certainly sell in the U.S., albeit in a high-income demographic that would support that type of butcher shop. It would a 'Beef Sommelier' if you will-someone who can choose beef at its peak of flavor from properly fed cattle and cut the meat to draw the greatest flavor out of each cut. They don't do much actual cutting of meat.įor those of us serious cooks and anyone serious about the beef we eat, I think we have to be resigned to taking a bit more time, effort and maybe drive a bit further to seek out a reliable butcher or good meat counter within the supermarket.īut you do have an interesting point and one that I think would be quite profitable-a traditional butcher who markets their shop much like a fine wine shop. At best, many of the people employed at the mass markets in the US-aka WalMart, unpack cases of meat in the back room, repack it, price it and put it in a case out on the floor of the store. I don't think we can ever break the economic reality of today's supermarket meat cases-it is cheaper to hire someone to unpack boxes of beef and put them in a meat case. But I doubt that will ever happen in America. I would like to think that in a perfect world that your suggestion of recruiting and training butchers in the traditional meat cutting trade would be ideal. Inconsistency is not a problem in itself, only the lack of reliability – plain grilling a steak and finding that the taste is not good is too late buying a steak and grilling it with split pepper because the flavour is not at its peak is OK. If the butcher tells us that because of the season, beef is not at it’s best, first, that should be reflected in the price and, second, I can make an informed choice about buying it (or deciding how best to cook it). We rely on the wine merchant to select/propose the estate and year from within a region, we rely on the cheese seller to tell us when a particular cheese is going to be at its peak, we rely on food critics to tell us which restaurants are good (or is it to help us avoid the bad ones?) and we should expect to rely on our butcher to select our meat.
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And I want choice of butcher and competition to encourage standards. I also want a butcher who has the technical skill to cut meat to bring out the best eating quality, not someone who cuts everything with a band saw.
#Ye olde butcher shoppe how to
I want a butcher that is consistent – if he/she tells me that the meat is ‘good’, I don’t care if that means average or spectacular provided I know how to interpret it (just like a critic, you don’t believe what they say, but you know where you stand on a relative scale). So I would suggest that recruiting and training butchers in traditional skills has higher priority than education for consumers (except to create demand). Identifying provenance helps, but is no better than a minimum standard (like USDA grading) and it still won’t help in the shop to spot a good steak from an average one. Something tells me that many consumers just don't want to put in that level of effort in order to pick a steak - or a lot of other foods, for that matter.ĭon’t we want to rely on someone who has expertise and experience? The USDA grading system has proven itself to be a fairly good marker for the quality of a carcass, but as pointed out, the breed makes a big difference to taste and quality, as does the way the cattle have been raised and the food they have eaten. Not to mention that the consumers would then need a bunch of information at the store to make their choice (the labels would have to display where the beef was raised, how long the cattle were fed where, and what they ate). I think it would require a major educational effort to get millions of consumers to expect inconsistency when buying meat in order to get better tasting steaks. The Slate article noted that some producers of strictly grass-fed beef refused to provide steaks for their taste test because they could not guarantee consistency. The winter variety is noticeably different from the summer variety (it's sweeter).
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I found the cheese analogy apt in the Slate article, for I have become quite familiar with the variations in flavor you get when you produce foods according to the dictates of nature rather than industry via a Cheddar-style cheese produced in Lancaster County (which, if you haven't figured this out yet, is the fount of all that is right and good about Pennsylvania agriculture) from milk from grass-fed cows. A fascinating piece, and after reading it, it seems that beef is like so many other foodstuffs we buy: In order to achieve consistency, we have bred flavor out of the product.