I normally do not purchase any of the numerous how-to paperback meat books offered for sale because for the most part they repeat information contained in long-running meat textbooks such as The Meat We Eat (14 edition came out in 2001; 15th is overdue), they often espouse niche meat or anti-meat agendas and/or contain a lot of recipes that serve primarily as page fillers. The Butcher’s Guide is 175 pages long with… Read More »
So, have people always cooked ground beef up to 160F in order to assure the destruction of Escherichia coli O157:H7? The answer is no; up until the late 1980’s you could get a medium-rare hamburger in a sit-down restaurant. E. coli outbreaks, stemming from meat products, appear to have coincided with increasing speeds on… Read More »
Today, most beef cuts are boneless. Such practice gathers trimmings for large scale sale and eliminates the packaging, storage and shipping of waste (fat & bone). Back in yesteryear ribs, leg bones, the shoulder blade, backbone cross-cuts and the hip bone could be used for determining the carcass region a cut came from. For the… Read More »
My wife recently brought home a 12 ounce package of naturally cured bacon that cost her $4.99. That works out to $6.65 per pound, and after cooking shrinkage the eaten portion will be more expensive. All meat qualifies to be labeled as “Natural,” but only a small amount of it is certified to be labeled “Organic.” Products labeled Natural must not contain any… Read More »
During the 1974-75 school year I attended a High School Vocational Meat Processing program where the curriculum consisted primarily of animal harvest, carcass cut fabrication and small retail meat market operational knowledge. At that time moderate sized meat plants were in most fairly large towns, neighborhood butcher shops were still widespread and both establishment types would… Read More »