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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Wednesday, August 08, 2012
Is it the David Wright of steak sandwiches, or the Fernando Martinez of steak sandwiches? Scouts are undecided.
New York City celebrity butcher Pat LaFrieda has taken his talents to Citi Field. Last night the meat master debuted a filet mignon steak sandwich stand at a game between the New York Mets and Miami Marlins. The sandwich features hand-cut 100% black angus seared filet mignon, Monterey jack cheese, sweet caramelized onions, and is served with a secret au jus on a custom-made and toasted French baguette….
Last night, I visited the stand behind the centerfield wall to check out the sandwich’s opening night reception. The buzz was evident, as there was a slow-moving line of roughly 70 fans waiting for the moist and perfectly seasoned sandwich. Fearful that I might miss a Mets milestone performance (yeah, right), I decided not to brave the nearly three-inning line and returned to my seat hungry and unsatisfied.
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1. Matt Clement of Alexandria Posted: August 08, 2012 at 05:58 PM (#4203721)A great piece of advice in Michael Symon's cookbook is to ditch the expensive flavorless cuts of meat (filet, pork tenderloin) in favor of actually tasty cuts, or cuts you can do much more interesting things with.
yea, I spent 6 months on an expense account in Vegas this year. It took me nearly a month and a half just to find decent beer, but after that I was rolling, and know about 10 bartenders at the various casinos.
Well, pork is generally pretty darn cheap and it is extremely easy to add flavor to pork. Whereas with beef people generally just don't do much to it. There is about 1,00 different things you can do to a pork tenderloin so I'm not really sure why you would want to skip it since it is easy to buy/prepare/cook compared to a ton of other pork cuts.
1. Where is it?
Where in the Bay is or was the shop you worked?
As for vegas expense account, I was very careful to order just really expensive small items (quality over quantity), and lots of beer. I gained about 10 pounds, which I'm just starting to lose. I worked from 7am till 8 to 9pm, so my time to gorge was small enough to save me I think, and I always came home on the weekend. The hours were brutal, and I hardly ever saw my wife, but there are worse places to have an expense account... like Bakerfield, where the three days I traveled there last year, were three days too many.
Dammit! That was my fault.
It's not Ver Brugge although I know that place, and it's pretty good.
Ok! What would you say is the best value cut for the money? (note: I am poor)
Conversely, what should I avoid?
How much fraud do you think goes on in terms of meat "really" being organic or local or sustainable or grass-fed or whatever?
I'm eating at One Market restaurant in about one hour on someone else's account, I won't be getting a filet (and I do like filets and ribeyes, and pork tenderloin and other cuts of pork, but yeah, other cuts (aside from chops, do take some time).
I think flat iron or skirt steak (from a real butcher) is the best cheap red meat move you can make.
I still think the best cheap meat purchase is the pork shoulder, but do allow for proper cooking time, whether it is slow cooker, smoker, etc.
surprisingly, I think the public is coming around to buying chicken thighs and legs, as well as whole chickens, prices are getting above 'cheap.'
avoid, yeah, avoid filet, cuz if you want an actual good filet, you're talking $17-$28 a pound depending on your market and whether you can get 'prime' from a butcher.
avoid round steak unless you have a meat tenderizer. It is cheap but hard to work with w/o proper care. not good w/o a gravy or sauce of sorts.
The thing I would take home most often was what's usually called a "chuck eye steak." Basically it's a continuation of the ribeye. It's the same group of muscles. The closer you get to the neck, the less tender meat there is, the more fat and sinew and chewy stuff. But on most cows you can get 2-3 really good chuck steaks that, if you're lucky, the butcher will be selling for a third the price as the ribeye that came from centimeters away. But if it's from too far up the neck, it's more of a braising cut, so you have to specify. Hanger and flatiron are also good ones.
Those are all for steaks. Braising cuts are usually very cheap and if you know what to do with them, terrific.
I dunno. I don't think filet mignon is usually worth the cost. Sirloin steaks (and other cuts from the legs like london broil or top round) are cheap but they usually aren't very good. It's better to splurge on one of the loin cuts (Ribeye, NY, T-Bone, Porterhouse).
Oh, probably a decent amount. I visited this farm in Marin recently, and the farmer spilled the beans on a trendy new term: "pastured" beef. Pastured basically means that it's standing on grass but it's still eating corn.
That guy's beef is 100% grass fed. As a result, it's not very good in the winter and spring, because his cows are not fat enough. But it's exceptional in late summer, when they're at the peak of fattiness.
You can cube a pork shoulder, season the chunks, and roast them at...400?...and have them be fall-apart tender in about an hour. You'll want to stir/flip/agitate them every 15 minutes or so.
A bone-in skin-on chicken thigh, seasoned with only salt and pepper, then put under the broiler is a fabulous thing. Don't skimp on the salt, cook it for about 10 minutes skin-side down, then skin-side up until it comes to 165 degrees. Meat + salt + pepper + fire is all you need.
Also, it's expensive to get certified organic. Here in Northern California there is no organic slaughterhouse anywhere close by. So very little of the Bay Area's best local meat is certified organic.
"Sustainable" of course isn't a real certification, it's a claim that anyone can make, and I'm sure that many of those claims are false.
That's a weird way to do that cut. Cross rib is usually used for pot roast and such. I would just cube them up and braise them.
Know your meat supplier. The above frustrates me a lot.
This is the only thing I found that actually seems to call for what it is I have. Everything else wants a thicker cut.
Beef Shoulder Steaks with Red Wine-Mushroom Sauce
I loathe mushrooms and don't tend to have red wine handy.
ah, waiting 3 innings.
went to my first and only game at Dodger Stadium, mid-1980s.
just after the All-Star break, iirc, and a matchup of studs Hershiser and Andujar.
went to get a Dodger dog in the top of the 4th, line had about 10 people ahead of me, but ok I'm hungry.
3 full innings later, I got my dog.
#customerservice
#inanLAminute
I'll give you a reason - that Ross 708 broiler bird you're buying goes from egg to carcass in 42 days on the button. That's nowhere near enough time for that bird to develop any flavor in those hypertrophied breasts. You give that broiler another 6-8 weeks and it's like the difference between a vine-ripe summer tomato and one of those reddish racquetballs you get in your supermarket the rest of the year.
In the Lounge, Harvey once told me I'm not a man because I've never had a porterhouse. That stung.
Right now my favorite cheap cut is the pork porterhouse. Get them at Eastern Market. Two of them are like 8 bucks total.
The truth is what makes it hurt so much. But yeah...bones are flavor.
bottom line, pork doesn't get the love it deserves, lots of ways to drew it up.
#32 thanks for the info. the main problem I have with cheap chicken, and cheap meat in general, is that you have to cook the hell out of it to make sure you dont get some alien bacteria or something. i like rare to medium rare with steaks and medium rare with pork and lamb, and juicy with chicken. its why i almost never order chicken out unless I know where they got their chicken... My wife insists on chickens (and eggs for that matter) from Petaluma. At the price of the cheap chicken in the market i assume it will either not be worth eating or kill me.
There are no fly by night meat companies looking to make a quick buck and then skedaddle.
WE've been marketed to the point of brain washed on price equaling safety or lack of it. It's how companies increase their profit margins.
I've got a nice rub that I use for boneless porkchops to make them a little sweeter, since the boneless cuts are a little bland on their own. What would you recommend for the pot porterhouse?
A pipe made out of a beef bone?
If you ever run out of your rub, I recommend olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper and a grill. Quick, easy, cheap and the pork comes out very juicy. Toss it all in a zip-loc bag with the chops and they are a nice add to any bbq.
How much more expensive is it to buy meat at a butcher, vs. a supermarket?
You should go to the butcher and get a good cut freshly ground if you're having tartare, though I have to admit that I'm not always careful with the raw beef I'm eating. OK, I'm very rarely careful.
The $26 "Boomstick" at Rangers Ballpark laughs at Turner Field's $18 steak sandwich.
And I'll laugh at the people buying that too.
And if you want to double down you can then make a maple syrup demi. Grill the porterhouses off, place in a pan, with the demi a 1/4 to a third of the way covering and finish in the oven to desired doneness. The grilled porterhouse will add a smokey flavor to the maple demi.
Outside that favorite one of mine there are a zillion brine recipes that are available.
Alright you primitive screwheads. Listen up! See this? This is my boomstick!
Food options are limited in our mothers' basements.
Egullet is a good community. I'm not active in it, but the members are a mix of amateurs and pros, and the amateurs are the type of weirdos that cook every single night and document everything with notes and photos.
Every movie and music thread devolves to a point where it's mostly just people talking to themselves. "No love for The Lion in Winter?" "I can't believe nobody's mentioned The Buzzcocks!" Food threads don't take off in the same way. Also because we're not consuming exactly the same thing (except, I suppose, with chain restaurants) you can't approach the same level of detailed argument.
I don't have a very good answer for this. I would assume that supermarkets are usually cheaper, if only because they have more negotiating power. The place I worked sold fancy local meat that was very expensive.
KITFO or GTFO.
thus the reason it is hard to do a direct comparison. Most butcher shops nowadays operate in the high end high margin are of meats. They simply can't make money or survive operating at the low to medium end of the business because the supermarkets have them beat. Consequently you can't compare a filet at Safeway to a filet at Lobel's or any other butcher shop because it isn't the same kind of filet. If a grocery store carried the high end stuff it would likely be cheaper than a butcher shop's price but the difference wouldn't be as great as we see nowadays when comparing meats while ignoring grade and such. I'd guess maybe 10 to 20% cheaper than a butcher if using the same high end products.
My local gourmet/organic/sustainable butcher shop is named (of course) Bill the Butcher.
We also have a butcher shop called Bill the Butcher, which had a bit of controversy over whether their organic labeling was accurate.
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