Continuing efforts to develop new ways of fabricating retail beef cuts are interesting, but may no longer be worthwhile. As with classic rock & roll music, where there are only so many ear-pleasing rhythmic progressions to be discovered, the vast majority of economically worthwhile beef carcass fabrication techniques have been in common practice for a long time now. To be fair, there have been a few semi-recent beef cut fabrication success stories; which makes it just that much harder to come up with something else worthwhile.
I once blamed beef’s fall from # 1 in per-capita U.S. meat consumption on a combination of bad press and the inability of lean cattle carcasses (lean beef is cheaper to produce) and larger carcasses (big cattle don’t yield desired portion control cuts when cut to conventional thicknesses so big retail cuts both weigh & cost more) to retain past repeat customer numbers. However, as time passes it’s becoming increasingly clear that beef’s U.S.market share decline is at least partly to blame on a failure to reach its full potential in the convenience food market sector. The current widespread high regard of the once lowly brisket is wake up call screaming to the beef industry to more fully join the party by providing other high quality, ready to eat products. As end carcass cuts become more highly utilized and profitable, fresh beef middle meats can be profitably sold at a lower markup because higher total sales volume equates to more profit.
My regular readers know that I have often lamented the once cherished practice of “eating high on the hog” was being lost to history, except for specialty fresh pork buyers. But, on the other hand big pork must be doing something right to be able to routinely sell water and salt enhanced whole boneless pork loins at around half the price per pound as baby back ribs. And, now somewhere close to 1/4 inch of easy to overcook loin meat is often intentionally left on the higher priced back ribs to increase weight. A large portion of a typical market hog carcass has always been further processed into value-added convenience items, thus helping around 75% of each carcass align with modern customer convenience demands. In the poultry sector the simple, in-store masterful cooking of whole chickens has become a best practice to increase both sales volume and profit.
Most modern meat shoppers love a cooked chuck roast that “eats like butter,” but would also be turned off to see the well marbled raw chuck roast used to make that enjoyable entrée. If we were to show USDA marbling degree photographs to the average person on the street most of them would select (pun intended) the Slight -0 picture as the marbling requirement for the Prime grade. Further, increasingly few consumers know how to, or have the patience to masterfully home cook a chuck roast. As with brisket, smoking and long low heat processing greatly increases the desirability of chuck cuts. Chuck or arm cuts are not as tough as brisket; so they cook tender in less time and the starting raw chuck is currently less expensive per pound than brisket. The highly palatable preparation of beef round cuts requires even greater expertise than does chuck, and perhaps even more than brisket. Therefore, fresh retail round cuts can sometimes be a detriment to repeat beef customer sales. To the untrained eye beef eye of round steaks look good and can even conger up thoughts of tenderloin. But, since all that glitters is not gold, such disappointment of beef customers provides another reason for them to opt for either the other white meat or fowl meat.
Recently during the U.S.’s current beef shortage, I was sometimes disappointed to see Select grain-finished gooseneck rounds being ground whole as 85’s in the formulation of various types of precooked beef patties. Ground beef further processing should only be using domestic culled beef breeding stock and imported grass-finished boneless 60 pound beef blocks. Frozen beef blocks come from countries containing a high amount of marginal grass lands.
The locally produced and/or processed food trend appears to be here for the long-term. This is an ideal time to learn and teach the economically worthwhile further processing of retail quality wholesale beef cuts. Several other countries around the world are better situated than the U.S. is for low quality grass-finished beef production. End cuts from our hard to come by young, fat beef should be manipulated to realize their full market potential by employment of prudent artisanal processing practices.
The majority of my 1000 BBQ buds on Facebook laughed upon seeing the Wolfer Smoke-Cooker. Over the past few years I have come to realize that this cooker’s best potential is to use it as a step in the small-scale further processing of value-added beef products. Using large fibrous casings for smoked pulled-pork production makes for excellent finished product and greatly increase the number of meat pounds that can be smoked at a time in this inexpensive unit. But, most pit-masters would prefer to pull out a cooked blade bone rather than try and use a bulky chef’s knife for fresh meat boning. Also, some of them will say that those uneven heat conducting bones somehow make for better tasting pulled-pork. The Wolfer Smoke-Cooker works best for the smoking phase of thermal processing; with meat being transferred to the high humidity environment of a covered roasting pan for finish cooking. A rack is placed in the bottom of the roasting pan to prevent the formation of washed-out/water-cooked finished product characteristics. The pan cooking phase takes place in a conventional oven at relatively low heat. Larger supermarkets or restaurants that can afford climate controlled smokehouses and so can do worthwhile beef processing without having to transfer product between phases. The best thing about the Wolfer Smoke-Cooker is that It opens the worth-doing further processing door to small artisan meat shops and restaurants.
The two further processing techniques that I will be submit in two separate blog post are quite different from each other but, both processes are non-labor intensive, have low product shrinkage, add good value and yield great tasting convenient meat items.
The technique using Choice gooseneck rounds somewhat copies; then improves upon successful fast-food restaurant roast beef. Said improvements are obtained by using higher quality starting raw product, smoking chunked & formed beef in ham casings and an optimal level of meat smoke.
The technique for chuck rolls produces great pastrami from the muscle that Denver steaks are cut from, plus yields a lot of versatile large fibrous casing smoked shredded beef.
Both of these processes will be linked here upon being posted to the P&B Express.