A Word on Using Weird Cuts of Meat
Every year–even ones stuffed with weddings and vacations and other events–we spend the money to buy an entire cow and two whole pigs from a local farmer, to be shared with my larger family, Brad and I consuming one of the pigs and only half the cow. Each fall, the animals get slaughtered, hung to exsanguinate and age, and then they get butchered, packaged, and frozen, after which we pick it up from the farmer or the butcher, or some weird combo of both. It’s a beautiful ritual in many ways, and a pain in the ass in many others–taking time and energy and creativity to keep our freezers full and our winter stomach fuller. We’ll likely never go back to grocery store meat.
And each year, as the ritual begins, or comes to the close, I get a flurry of questions that all surround one primary concern: how do we use all of those weird cuts of meat? I hear from people who know of steak cuts and ground beef, and have no idea that there are other parts of cows, let alone what they might be used for. They’re in shock and awe that I would be so bold to cook an oxtail, let alone a heart or a kidney. On the other side of that spectrum, I hear from people who have done the whole cow-pig thing and who found themselves, at the end of the season, with a freezer full of all of the leftover cuts that they didn’t know how to use. Many of them talk a lot about waste, giving those cuts away, or re-configuring them, if you will, into more ground beef. They became detractors to the whole process, deciding that the cost wasn’t worth the waste.
Which I can at least appreciate, if I don’t quite agree with it. I generally detest all food waste.
BUT - what if instead of pulling away from the process, we challenged ourselves to use the cuts as they are? What if we dig in, and experiment and test, and force ourselves to learn more about these new cuts? That’s how I learned to eat cow heart (in chili!) and how I figured out that 8 hours in a crockpot will make short ribs fall off the bone. It’s how I figured out how to make restaurant-style tacos out of the fattiest cuts, and how I realized that straining beef’s cooking liquid with a gravy separator could give me the most flavorful broths.
I know we think that eating the cow is the best part–and we look for the cuts that will make that the best experience possible–but I think it’s the experience of it all that’s the real joy here.