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Cynthetiq · 04-29-2009, 10:28 AM

one of the butchers I try to visit in the neighborhood. He's really nice man, gives away a ton of advice and food, if you buy $25 he gives you a pound or two of chicken leg quarters...he gives some advice on cheaper cuts of meat.

YouTube - Jeffrey the Butcher's Money Saving Tips

seems to be that it also conincided with NYTimes article on cheaper cuts of meat.

Quote:

View: It May Be Cheap, but It’s Also Tasty
Source: Nytimes
posted with the TFP thread generator

It May Be Cheap, but It’s Also Tasty
April 29, 2009
It May Be Cheap, but It’s Also Tasty
By JANE SIGAL

MOST people don’t look for adventure in supermarket meat bins. But those cuts with baffling names and alluring prices fascinate me.

Beef chuck deckle, $1.99 a pound! Beef chuck seven-bone steak, $2.69!

The mystery of these cuts’ labels, I learned, was what kept down their price. With the right techniques, a lot of unfamiliar meats in the supermarket can be more delicious than more expensive cuts.

So who needs lamb rib chops for $11.99 a pound when loin chops are more tender and only $8.99?

Beef chuck deckle — not to be confused with the grillable deckle of the rib-eye — is one term for the meat that lies on top of the ribs. It looks like a cross between flank steak and skirt steak, a flattened millefeuille of muscle and fat. I had no idea what to do with it, so I braised it.

I seared the meat and spread the top with sharp mustard and thyme leaves. I poured red wine around it, set it on the lowest heat and waited.

After four hours, two hours past when a normal pot roast would be fork-tender, the deckle yielded. When thinly sliced and soaked in pan juices, it was tender and succulent. The mustard had melted into the meat, offering a pungent contrast. I will never look at brisket again.

For $3.99 a pound at a supermarket near my home on Long Island, boneless pork top loin, cut from the shoulder end of the loin, was much quicker. After barely an hour of pot-roasting it was as juicy as shoulder, but it sliced neatly and was as delicate-tasting as veal.

What other glorious, inexpensive discoveries were there?

Sal Miranda, who owned two butcher shops for 20 years before becoming a meat manager at my local King Kullen supermarket, introduced me to top blade steak, taken from below the shoulder of the cow. It has a line of gristle running through the middle, he said, but it’s a juicy grilling steak and for $4.49 a pound, a bargain.

But while he could tell me what to buy, he might not be able to tell me what to do with it.

“I’m not much of a cook,” he said.

Many professional cooks, though, have been using these cuts even if they rarely step into a supermarket.

“The low cut’s the belle of the ball,” said Gabrielle Hamilton, the chef and owner at Prune in the East Village.

But the new popularity of some off-cuts like pork belly, oxtail and lamb shank has jacked up their prices, and chefs are now seeking other value meats, including pork blade steak, beef neck and lamb shoulder steak.

Ms. Hamilton’s menu has lamb blade chops, a cut she got to know before she owned her own restaurant, when she didn’t have much money. It was an economic choice, not an aesthetic one. Lamb blade chops, cut across the shoulder blade, sell for $4.49 a pound at the supermarket. They offer big flavor and a satisfying chew. Ms. Hamilton especially loves the little marrow bone in the center, and the button of meat that pops out when it’s cooked.

Isn’t it cheeky to serve a tough cut at a restaurant?

“It is a little unfriendly,” Ms. Hamilton said. “We’re not the friendliest restaurant, are we? Sometimes I buy one back because a customer says, ‘I can’t eat this,’ and that’s fine.”

A blade chop is supermarket fare, she said, so it doesn’t make sense to etherealize it. She grills the chop until almost medium — you can’t serve lamb blade rare. Then she serves it with green rice beans, very small dried beans that look like plump grains of pale green rice, or orzo, mixed with a tangy, eggy avgolemono sauce. A crisp, briny fried grape leaf is the final garnish.

At A16 and SPQR in San Francisco, Nate Appleman, the chef and an owner, uses beef tri-tip, taken from the sirloin, which goes for $5.99 a pound at the supermarket. For a staff meal, Mr. Appleman marinates thin slices in a blend of yogurt and fiery harissa paste — he uses a whole tube of it. The tender skewers of charred meat have a complex, mysterious heat.

Mike Price, the chef and owner of Market Table in the West Village, buys meat from Pat LaFrieda Wholesale Meat Purveyors, but often gets the more affordable cuts that could be found in the supermarket, like lamb loin chops. They cost less because a blade of bone cuts through them, but he gives them the pricey-sounding name “lamb T-bone.”

“It’s more like a real porterhouse with a filet mignon on one side and loin on the other,” he said. “I sell a ton of these things.”

In Seattle, Maria Hines, the chef and owner of Tilth, grills lamb T-bone after slathering it with mustard and mustard seeds. Operating an organic neighborhood restaurant, Ms. Hines tries to use bargain cuts creatively.

“I also want cooks who don’t have a bunch of money to come in and try some dishes,” she said.

Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson, the chef and an owner of Frasca Food and Wine in Boulder, Colo., orders whole pork sirloins, from the top of the leg, from a local farmer. He roasts them, then lets them rest in a bath of olive oil simmered with crushed garlic, herbs, lemon slices and roasted chicken wings, which adds fresh flavor to the meat and keeps it moist. While home cooks might not get a whole pork sirloin, they could use Mr. Mackinnon-Patterson’s technique with pork sirloin chops from the supermarket for $3.49 a pound.

Some chefs are discovering modest cuts by breaking down whole animals and using all the parts.

One of the leftover cuts from the in-house butchering at Roberta’s in Bushwick, Brooklyn, is beef eye round. Carlo Mirarchi, the chef and an owner, uses it to make his own bresaola, cured beef, which he serves with arugula and parmigiano. For home cooks, Mr. Mirarchi suggested searing the $3.99-a-pound supermarket eye round and marinating it overnight in red wine, rosemary, sage and black pepper. Then it can be roasted rare and sliced, cold, as thin as possible for sandwiches.

Like these chefs, shoppers can work with whole sections of beef or pork to save money. Jim Zola, meat coordinator for the Northeast region at Whole Foods, said that when there’s a meat sale, shoppers can buy a whole pork loin, for example, and have the butcher cut it into a pork loin for roasting and pork chops and country-style ribs for grilling. Most supermarkets offer these “custom cuts.” (You can freeze what you don’t use immediately.)

The meat cooler at Western Beef, a warehouse chain with 26 stores in New York and New Jersey, has an enormous variety of packaged meats stacked on aisles of shelves. The chain is offering 18-to-22-pound whole boneless shoulders of beef for $2.49 a pound. The butcher there will cut it for free into shoulder steaks, London broil and boneless top chuck steak for grilling or broiling, cross rib roast for roasting, and beef stew and ground beef.

Even more conventional supermarkets let you special order certain cuts. I could order a whole pork sirloin like the one Mr. Mackinnon-Patterson roasts and confits in Boulder.

Many supermarket meat cutters can be extremely helpful. Steve Cole, a butcher in Wickford, R.I., at the small supermarket chain Dave’s Marketplace, sometimes walks customers through the meat case and writes them recipes. Mr. Cole used to work as a line cook at Twin Oaks restaurant in Cranston, a Rhode Island institution.

“And if I don’t know something, there are 10 chefs 20 feet away who can help me,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of people here who got burnt out in restaurants.”