I once read that the use of fibrous casing in meat processing dates back to the American Civil War where coarse ground meat was stuffed in cotton bags for cooking. Today’s fibrous casing are still made out of cellulose, plus possess several good attributes for low temperature cookery: -Strong walled -Expand when product is stuffed… Read More »
Pictured is about 50 pounds of premium Goetta made using 18 3/4 pounds, combined weight, of boneless enhanced pork shoulder butts and Choice chuck roast. Heavy fat was trimmed prior to determining the batch meat weight. Pork and beef were ground once through a 1/2 inch hole size plate so that the meat in finished Goetta appears as being finely shredded…. Read More »
Year after year cook books are the most common type of new book published. I prefer cooking knowledge books, like the one pictured here, over exclusively buying someone else’s recipes. After a meat plant’s New Product Development department small-batches an item, that they are ready to put into production, the next step is to adjust… Read More »
Food grade sodium phosphate ain’t on the above list. There is nothing that can make someone give up artisan meat processing more quickly than discovering that upon reheating, their previously good tasting pre-cooked products have picked up a stale flavor i.e. Warmed Over Flavor (WOF). Equally disheartening, this flavor deterioration can literally take place overnight. … Read More »
A whopping 45 to 50% of all beef consumed in the US is in the form of ground products, mainly burgers. Before the advent of fast burgers just about everyone had a hand-crank meat grinder stowed somewhere in their kitchen. America’s first fast-food hamburger chain constructed its restaurants entirely out of concrete, and later out… Read More »