Cut and Dried: A Primer
The Central Texas meat market roundup
By Mick Vann, Fri., Jan. 30, 2004
Since man first began to domesticate meat (cattle, sheep, pigs, and goats) around 7500BC, there has always been a demand for trained craftsmen to skillfully break down animal carcasses into pieces suitable for the home kitchen. In the recent past, this was the job of the butcher, a trade that required years of apprenticeship to master. Today, the butcher is quickly being replaced by assembly-line meat cutters, working in huge processing plants, who would become rapidly befuddled if they had to make more than a few specific cuts on a carcass.
Most of the meat in the U.S. used to be slaughtered and processed by small, family-run operations and sold through the local butcher shop. You bought your meat from someone you knew, someone that you had developed a relationship with, and it came wrapped in butcher paper. The consumer might have even personally known the local rancher that raised the animal and how it was nurtured, which was for the most part grazing contentedly on grass. The decline in butcher shops really began with the birth of the supermarket in the late Forties and early Fifties. Twenty years ago there were about 15,000 locally owned butcher shops across America; today, that number has shrunk to 5,000 nationwide. Now, 90% of all meat purchases are made in supermarkets.
These days 80% of the cattle (and 60% of the hogs) in the U.S. are processed by four single megacompanies, mostly in the Midwest. Where small operators used to break down whole carcasses, sides, halves, or quarters into usable cuts, we now see these same huge processors shipping what are called "primal" or "subprimal" cuts that are sealed in Cryovac (aka "box cuts," because they arrive in relatively small cardboard cartons).
Gone are the days of dry-aging beef, where natural enzymes break down the connective tissue to make the meat tenderer with time. Pencil pushers protest that dry-aging ties up capital in product that doesn't move, cold storage of hanging sides uses too much space and electricity, and weight is lost through evaporation and the necessary trimming of the exterior. Now our meat is "wet-aged," soaking in its own blood in an envelope of plastic, for the least amount of time possible.
Breeders have come up with leaner, faster-maturing strains of animals, effectively engineering a large percentage of the fat (meaning the flavor) out of the animals. Vanished is the marbling (those luscious ivory flakes of intramuscular fat) that produced a juicy, tender, flavorful steak. Animals are now finished in massive lots, eating hormone- and antibiotic-laced feeds. Meat grades have been dumbed down over the years: What used to be "choice" is now "prime" (now accounting for only an alarming 4% of all processed beef), "good" is now "choice," etc. All of this combines to leave us, the meat consumers of today, with a tasteless, tough product, sold in sterile supermarkets, by people that wouldn't know the business end of a cow from the other.
Of course, the Mad Cow (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) scare of the late Eighties to early Nineties in Europe, where millions of cattle were infected (and recent worries in Washington state, where a single cow was infected) created a hoopla over the safety of beef, and made ranchers think about their husbandry and harvesting methods. Frankly, from the controls imposed by the USDA (exclusion of any components of the central nervous system, small intestine, and tonsils; exclusion of "downer" cattle from the abattoir; ban on importation of live ruminants; exclusion of any mammalian proteins from cattle feed; newer testing methods; etc.) and cultural influence (Americans eat almost exclusively the muscles of cattle), there is very little chance that BSE could ever get established here in the States. Worry about those beef sweetbreads or brains you ate four to five years ago (since the disease can take that long to reveal itself in humans). Worry not about the beef you eat today. But the scare, to its credit, inadvertently aided the natural beef producers, allowing them to better gain a foothold in market share. It also helped the small, local butcher. Generally, if you are a member of the beef BSE paranoia patrol, the best defense (other than swearing off beef, of course) is to use fresh, locally nurtured and butchered beef that has been grown in an all-natural manner.
Thankfully, in the Austin area there are still meat markets of old, where actual butchering still takes place, and meats are cut to order while you wait. There is even a new trend toward reverting to raising the old-time flavorful breeds (Wagyu cattle and Berkshire hogs, for example), feeding the animals naturally, resurrecting the prime grade of yesteryear: a return to the real flavor of meat as it used to be. Listed below are markets that take great pride in the quality of the meats they offer, and cut meat to order. Also listed are markets that specialize in sausages.
It is also worth mentioning that most of Austin's ethnic food markets, including the Asian stores and the Mexican carnecerías, have meat counters that will cut to order, although the majority of them do not generally stock the higher grades of meat, and they tend to sell some of the lesser-known (to white-bread America, anyway) cuts of meats. Almost all of the Indo-Paki-Bangladeshi markets, for example, have their own meat counters, where the meats are butchered according to halal standards (the Muslim equivalent to kosher). Besides, one never knows when one might have a need for a nice, meaty halal goat head. For a complete listing, go to "Around the World ... ".
Grocery Stores
Central Market
Whole Foods Market
Sun Harvest Farms
Fresh Plus Grocery
Independent Meat Markets
The Meat Shop
Johnny G's Butcher Block
Cooper's Meat Market
Long Horn Meat Co.
Lone Star Meat Co.
Henry's Butcher Block (Round Rock)
Cedar Park Meat Market (Cedar Park)
Taylor Meat Co. (Taylor)
Sausage Makers
Hudson's Meat Market
Texas Sausage Co.
Smokey Denmark Sausage Co.
Southside Market & BBQ (Elgin)
Meyer's Elgin Sausage (Elgin)
Smitty's Market (Lockhart)
