MEAT: Favorite Butchering, Grilling & Smoking Techniques

[Darb]

Whole leg of lamb is on sale this week. Price for semi-boneless (hip-bone removed) leg is like $1.99 US right now. Asparagus is on sale too.

Anyway, I boned out 2 medium legs yesturday. I froze one for stewing meat, and I butterflied, marinated and grilled the other. I took a few photos, before, during and after, and I'll post em when the roll of film gets developed.

Yesturday was a gorgeous day for grilling ... and our magnolia tree is right in the middle of it's annual 5-day early spring bloom too.

[StefanY]

Perfect grilling weather here as well. Didn't do anything too exciting, just some burgers, but it sure did hit the spot!

[Darb]

After a little trial and error, I recently succeeded in creating a fairly easy recipe for making decent burgers out of canned salmon:

[quote]GRILLED SALMON BURGERS
Yeild: Batch 1x yeilds 8 med-lg patties (sandwich sized), or 10-12 med-sm patties (bun-sized).
Time: 15-20 to prep, 10-15 to grill.

Batch 1x Ingredient
2 cans Pink Salmon, canned (14.75 oz each, drained, picked over, pressed dry & flaked)
2/3 cup Yellow Onion, minced fine
2 med Jalepeno Peppers, deseeded and minced fine
¼ cup Italian Parsley (leaves & fine stems), minced fine
1â€

[Kvetch]

My hall held a barbeque the day before yesterday (I didn't go - they don't cater particularly well for veggies, and it was a whole 6 flights of stairs). Still, it is really good weather for it (although the guy who lives opposite me got a room full of smoke, since the shape of the building had a chimney effect).

[Darb]

For Memorial Day yesturday, I did 3 racks of pork spare ribs, which got an overnight dry rub, a 2.5 hour braise, and then I finished them on the grill with a glaze-reduction. The glaze was a reduction of all the meat juices & rub spices the ribs shed during braising, plus some extra honey and orange juice and brown sugar, plus some chipotle. Very tasty. Anyway, 15 lbs of ribs was more than enough to feed 12 people, and still have plenty of leftovers.

One of my friends taught me how to do blue claw crabs in tequila on the grill. They were tasty, but there wasn't very much meat in them. I'll probably adapt that recipe for use with snow-crab clusters.

[mccormack44]

Since I've been away so long, I've decided not to try to catch up — just to wait til topics turn up again.

So I opened this last page and found the recipe for Salmon Burgers. Sounds sumptious. I copied it into my IBDoF recipe folder and will try it very, very soon now.

Thank you, Brad, for another interesting idea.!

Sue

[Darb]

I briefly stopped in at an Indo-Pak meat store on my way to work today, and I was struck by how much different cuts of lamb are prized, or not prized, by people in different countries. For instance, here in America, Rack & Loin of Lamb (for grilling) reign supreme, followed by leg of lamb (for roasting). In Indian cuisine, you dont see much Rack of Lamb ... they eschew it (pardon the phonetic pun on chewing) for tougher bony cuts that make rich slow-simmered curries.

This was pressed home for me when I spotted an untrimmed rack of lamb in the case, and asked how much ... instead of $15/lb+, he said $4.99. Not only that, there was no heavy layer of fat {aka deckle or 'fell'} on there, doubling it's weight - it was fully peeled lean meat.

Needless to say, I'll be going back there for several full racks of lamb, and hosting a BBQ. Imagine doing rosemary crusted rack of lamb for 15 people, 4-6 ribs each, for under $5 per person, cost of meat !!

p.s. This was a little no-frills meat market, run by a pair of brothers, with a meat locker and a band saw, right behind the counter, in full view. Nothing elegant or fancy ... definitely a blue collar modest income immigrant kinda place.

[tollbaby]

hehe I'm very envious now, Brad.. if I only knew how to cook this kind of stuff (or, you know, had a KITCHEN)....

[Darb]

Rack of lamb cooks fast enough you can practically thread it onto a skewer and use a blow torch outside.

I'm sure hungry hunters have done worse, and eaten well, in a pinch.

[mccormack44]

Oh, that makes me hungry! But I mainly cook for two — and even if I had the whole family here, I would STILL be the only one who likes lamb.

/me goes off to the corner to

Sue

[Darb]

Yeah, isn't it sad how few people seem to like lamb ?

Lamb dishes are one of my specialties, and everyone in my family wants beef or chicken instead.

However, I have enough foodie & chef friends to make a rack of lamb BBQ doable.

[Echus Cthulhu Mythos]

Roast lamb is like my favourite meal of all time... closely followed by the Indian curry lamb Sagwalla.

[Darb]

Mmmmm ... lamb in curried spinach. And dont spare the black cardamom.

[tollbaby]

Yeah, isn't it sad how few people seem to like lamb ?

Lamb dishes are one of my specialties, and everyone in my family wants beef or chicken instead.

However, I have enough foodie & chef friends to make a rack of lamb BBQ doable.

ooooh invite me!!!!!

Although, I have to admit, ever since Costco started selling herbed lamb chops in family-size packs, they're featured at every family bbq Lynne + lamb chops = spoiled

[Darb]

Well, I went back to that indo-pak meat market on the way home, and grabbed 2 racks. The butcher asked if I wanted them to cut them ... and I politely interrupted him and said nah, I'd do it at home. He was surprised and asked how. I said I'd just use a chef knife and a heavy rubber mallet. He grinned and obviously thought I was a pro. I paid, smiled and headed home.

It was when I got home that I went to 'french' and cut the racks into 2-riblet portions that I noticed they'd left a large ridge of the chine bone on the back ... I grimaced, because that made it impossible to 'french it' & serve (after grilling) properly. Also, the meat was far leaner than I was used to, and they'd taken off too much of the 'fell' that makes rack of lamb so juicy. They'd basically reduced a noble cut of lamb to stewing meat.

I had to improvise a bit ... using the knife and mallet, I chopped both racks into 2 rib sections (chine and all), then hacked off the end halves of the ribs (rather than frenching them), and then rubbed them with crushed rosemary, salt, and oil, and grilled them like loin chops. The meat was a bit over-lean and tough, but still tasty.

Next time, I'll get the butcher to cut them to order - removing the chine, and leaving on more of the fell. If that works, and if the quality is good, then I'll build a BBQ around it. Trial and error.

[violetblue]

Richard Johnson says if you can't face the slaughter, don't eat the meat

It must have been one hell of a pitch to the BBC: 'OK. We kill a pig, then we eat it. Next night, we kill a chicken, then we eat it. Every night of the week, we kill a different animal, then we eat it. With an omnibus on the Friday. What do you say?' The BBC said yes, and asked me to present it. I agreed, but when I talked to friends about the programme (working title, Kill It, Cook It, Eat It) they just laughed, and said, 'It's a spoof, right?' They were lucky I didn't eat them. Maybe series two.

Kill It, Cook It, Eat It couldn't be more serious. In a world where meat comes pre-packed, in plastic, the programme was designed to reconnect us with what we're eating. It was filmed in an abattoir, but an abattoir with a difference - there was a restaurant built onto the end. It had windows installed, so that the diners could see what was going on, but the abattoir's day-to-day workings weren't interrupted. The diners witnessed the slaughter - and then ate the meat.

Mettricks, an abattoir near Manchester, is an exemplary place. If it smells of anything, it smells of bleach. It is a 'best practice' abattoir, and animal welfare is a top priority. It's small, so the slaughtermen don't rush the animals through as if they're on a production line, and the process is overseen by a vet from the Meat Hygiene Service. If you can't cope with Mettricks, you shouldn't be eating meat. Mettricks is as good as it gets.

Steve Mettrick is a slaughterman with compassion - he can't kill calves, for instance, because he gets upset by the way they lick his hands. He makes sure to minimise the stress. He has installed non-slip floors in the abattoir and blocked off the animals' view of an escape route. Not just for welfare reasons - a relaxed animal tastes better. Meat from a tense animal is discoloured or soft, and spoils quicker because of the hormones secreted at the time of the killing.

John Mettrick is in charge of the butchery side of the business. He wants to change Britain's buying habits. He can sell all the fillet steak he can get hold of. But not the skirt. Or the oxtail. And he says we need educating. When the Gascons presented Tony Blair with a pony called Justin, Blair got confused. 'I didn't know whether to ride it or eat it,' he said. Eat it. In Gascony, you won't offend anyone by eating anything. And these days, we need to learn from the French.

I used to be a vegetarian. Admittedly, I was more of a health vegetarian than a pain-and-suffering vegetarian, but I didn't eat meat for 16 years. Then I got bored. I had never worked out how to make vegetables sing on the plate. And, increasingly, they seemed to lack a real sense of purpose unless they were accompanied by meat. So, one day, I became a carnivore again.

But the guilt never left me. And when I filmed the slaughter of a bull-ock, for BBC 2's Full on Food, I cried. It felt like a biblical experience - something was dying so that I might live - and it changed the way I thought about meat. I decided that if I was going to eat meat again, I would need to know how the animal had lived, and how it had died. The programme director just tutted. He looked straight at me and said, 'For God's sake, it's only a bloody cow.' His reaction is pretty typical. But there are others out there who want to know more about where their food comes from. It's all about 'transparency'. I've been banging on about 'menu transparency' for years, but most restaurants still haven't got the faintest idea what they're serving. And if it means training the staff to answer queries about the provenance of their meat, I don't hold out much hope. Most of them don't even know what the soup of the day is.

While making Kill It, Cook It, Eat It, we stayed in a hotel whose waitress had no idea where the bacon was from. She thought, maybe, it was British. I thought, maybe, that it wasn't. Two-thirds of the bacon Britain imports would be illegal to produce here. The conditions would be too cruel. And Danish farmers, for instance, routinely feed pig fat to their own pigs. They're cannibalising their animals. It feels like BSE never happened.

There are farmers out there who feed their cattle genetically modified maize. I don't want to eat genetically modified anything. Not until I'm sure it won't end up genetically modifying me. But it's difficult to find out what's what. Buying British is a good, basic guarantee when it comes to meat, but buying British and organic is even better. Only then can you guarantee that animals have been fed on a diet that is GM free, and raised with a high standard of welfare.

Kill It, Cook It, Eat It is a difficult series to get right - especially in the shift from abattoir to restaurant. The series producer said, 'Can you smile a bit more?' down my earpiece. But smiling never seemed the right thing to do. I didn't even smile in the BBC publicity shots. I just thought that, if the Radio Times asked for a picture, and ran a caption that read something like 'an in-depth look at the slaughtering process', and I was there, grinning away, it just wouldn't look good.

In India, a mother dips her finger in honey and writes the Om symbol on the tongue of her new-born baby. Om means 'I am' - it's a nice image to illustrate that, in a metaphysical and a physical sense, we are what we eat. In Britain, if we really are what we eat, we're in deep trouble. After all, we have lurched from food scare to food scare - from Sudan 1 to BSE. We should start by understanding our meat a bit better. That's what Kill It, Cook It, Eat It is all about. Something to smile about, I suppose.

'Kill It, Cook It, Eat It' starts tomorrow, BBC3 10.30pm

I am all for anything that gets us back to our food sources. As he says in the article, we are what we eat. If people could see what goes into the pre-packaged food they eat, they would probably pass.

This remind me of Gordon Ramsey's "F" Word, which is what we can get on BBC over here in America. He raised turkeys, and is raising pigs, to slaughter and cook for his restaurant. He shows meeting with a local "farmer and animal expert" to discuss how to feed them, and takes his kids out to the yard and points out the parts of the animals by their butcher name ("this is the hock, kids"). The kids seem fine with it, and enjoyed their dinner. Ramsey also showed the animals being killed, by the way. For the turkeys, a local guy showed up with a truck and put an electrode in the turkeys mouths to shock them. It was all over in about 2 seconds, no suffering.

[Darb]

Merged 2 related threads.

[haelwen1]

Brad:

Please help. I have 2 cuts of meat I need to cook while my son is here. I know, I shouldn't have frozen them, but they came from a local organic cow around here and I froze that 1/4 side of beef I purchased. One is a 3-4 lb. rump roast and the other says it is a rolled roast (?). I never like any meat I cook, so please help. Haelwen

[tollbaby]

hah! boy did YOU come to the right place. Unfortunately.... I think Brad is incommunicado for the weekend....

The basics of cooking the rump roast cut can be found here... A slightly more complete recipe can be found here.

There's a nice recipe for grilled rolled roast here. (my brother has made this one - he's a cook in a restaurant - and it's TASTY).

[Hunter B]

Ok, so, I just helped my friend move, and he pointed to an electric smoker in the corner and asked if I wanted it. At first I thought no, after all the thing looked like half its weight was rust and dirt. However, I agreed to take it off his hands, cleaned it up, and now it looks to be a fully respectable smoker. The only problem now is, I have no idea how to use a smoker. It's something I've never had the opportunity to do. It looks as if I have all the necessary equipment, but again, I have no clue about the process. So, a little insight would be much appreciated. Thanks!

[Darb]

There are many different types of smokers, of different shapes, sizes, and types of fuel, and (as you'd expect) they all cook and operate a bit differently.

What's the make and model of the smoker ?

[Hunter B]

http://www.acehardwareoutlet.com/(qykc1 ... ?SKU=84435

This is the model. I have all kinds of chips and such, but I thought I heard somewhere that sawdust works better than chips in an electric...



EDIT: Sorry, for the lack of link, this particular address doesn't seem to like the whole linkage thing.

[Darb]

http://www.acehardwareoutlet.com/(qykc1 ... ?SKU=84435

This is the model. I have all kinds of chips and such, but I thought I heard somewhere that sawdust works better than chips in an electric...



EDIT: Sorry, for the lack of link, this particular address doesn't seem to like the whole linkage thing.

The link is partially broken, and doesnt take me directly to the product, so I'm still in the dark.

[Darb]

Can you post the make and model number, so I can search it down ?

[tollbaby]

Brad, if you copy paste the entire line of text that starts with the link into your browser's location bar, you can easily get to it.

Ugly little thing, isn't it Hunter?