Primal cuts of beef

[aaronatthedoublef]

Found this article online about the primal cuts of beef. It's pretty good although I think I need to print out the poster and study it. The restaurant store has beef in primal cuts and it is a third of the price of a grocery store and half the price of Costco but I need to learn how to butcher it and have a place to store it.

I have not checked Walmart for meat but our Walmarts are pretty dirty so I am not certain I would trust their butcheries.

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[skeptic7]

Do you eat enough beef to make it worthwhile? I find it handy to cut up my own chicken but beef is expensive enough I only buy one cut at a time. I think the most I bought was a whole eye of round roast. I've bought chuck roasts on sale and put them in the freezer too but thats already cut up.

[BakerAunt]

Skeptic--Aaron is hoping to open a deli.

[aaronatthedoublef]

I am hoping to start a deli. I can buy a 14 pound brisket for under $50 and use the point half for corned beef and pastrami and the other half for brisket like my mom used to make because, smoked brisket is not traditional for delis, it is everywhere, and usually it is over-smoked here.

Add pastrami, roast beef, roast turkey, pickles, and rye bread (maybe corn bread) and I have the basics of a deli.

But, even if I weren't, these prices are low enough that I might buy in bulk and then use it as I need it. We probably eat about 24 ounces of red meat a month between my two sons and me. I usually buy a teres major cut unless I am making chili or stew because it's tasty and in relatively inexpensive. If I could buy ribeye for less I would buy ribeye.

[Mike Nolan]

Buying primal cuts and doing your own butchering is one way to save money, some high end restaurants go all the way and buy/kill/butcher their own animals.

If your goal is to be a kosher deli, that will impact how you source your meat.

The University of Nebraska (among others) has a number of web pages on meat identification. Texas A&M also has a very good meat program, I'd love to take their one-week course on meat butchering.

Here are a few pages I have bookmarked:

beef loin primal (There are several similar pages for other cuts of meat, but I don't seem to have the overall index bookmarked.)

Meat Cuts Training Information

Meat Cuts book I don't have this book but it is on my wish list.

Some of the best information out there appears to be part of the meat identification contests.

For example: Meat Grading Contests

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks Mike. I deciding whether or not to take a butchery class.

I may make it kosher style but I won't make it kosher. The place I was looking at meats has both kosher and halal so I can source it there. But being kosher in my town is more complex than normal and more complex than it should be. We're a town of about 60,000 people with a larger number of Jews and two grocery stores that are kosher. And we argue about which one is "really" kosher because of the different authorities that certify them. And that is just the start of it.

So I may buy kosher meats but that's as far as I'll go.

[Mike Nolan]

One of the vendors at the sunday farmers market used to teach meat butchery and sausagemaking during the winter, but he had a pacemaker installed and the battery pack was placed where doing repetitive arm motions (like grinding sausage) was bothering him, so he stopped. I think he still butchers some deer for hunters, though.

I'm at the age (70) where taking formal butchery lessons (like at a community college cooking program) is probably beyond my capabilities, especially right now. Even standing up for 2-3 hours to process 30 pounds of tomatoes is getting difficult. We didn't get a hard freeze last night but might get one tonight or tomorrow. My wife was out (in light rain) looking at tomatoes yesterday afternoon, she thinks most of the ripe ones are past the point where they are harvestable. Oh well, I did get about 50 pounds processed last month. Somehow the end of the season always seems to get messed up by weather, last week we had 2 solid weeks of rain in late September and a lot of tomatoes didn't get picked then, either.

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