By VESNA VUYNOVICH KOVACH
Photo: ERIC TADSEN When I peeked inside the walk-in refrigerator at Jenifer Street Market’s butcher shop, I expected to see sides of beef swinging from hooks. Instead there were just hunks of meat sealed in heavy-duty transparent Cryovac plastic, neatly laid on stainless steel shelves. These "subprimal cuts," as they’re called, weigh anywhere from 2 1/2 to seventy pounds each and come “knife ready” to be carved into steaks, roasts, ribs and other cuts. Some are already deboned. The day of the old-time butcher--someone who slaughtered or prepared a full animal for market--is pretty much over, I learned. Country butchers who process deer for hunters are one exception, but as far as commercial meats go, not even neighborhood shops like Jenifer Street get in whole hogs or sides of beef. Until a few decades ago, trucks equipped with steel hooks and rails delivered “swinging beef” to retail markets. Butchers there would cut these carcass sides into saleable bits, and then try to find uses for whatever was left: oxtails, soup bones. Sawdust on the floor caught the blood and fat spurting out from these messy doings. Today, the separation of product from byproduct takes place at the plant, where workers in “disassembly lines” break down whole animals into parts for shipping to retail stores. Rosemary Mucklow, executive director of the National Meat Association, describes the process as “the exact reverse of how the motor industry puts cars together.” That is, each worker carves off a piece of an object that starts out complete--in this case the body of a steer--instead of gradually assembling a completed object. One advantage to the new system is that no part of the animal goes to waste. The neighborhood butcher used to cast about for a use for bones, for example. Some might sell for soup, and neighborhood dogs might pick up a few. The rest were thrown out. Today, the plant sells the bones for processing into dog food, gelatin or organic fertilizer. Meantime, the retail market can order whatever parts it wants, in whatever proportions it desires. In the past, markets got in one of everything that came on an animal; now, a store can order, say, twenty shoulder sections and only one flank. The new system is extremely efficient, but there’s a tradeoff: the old-time butcher’s art has pretty much died out. In the modern meat industry, there’s simply no occasion to dress out an entire animal single-handedly-- a skill that once took years of apprenticeship to learn. “Not many people today would know how to tackle a six hundred pound carcass,” says Mucklow. Where do the neighborhood meat markets fit into the modern scenario? In an era when everything comes pre-prepped from the packer, can they offer a product any different from what you’ll find shrink-wrapped in the chilly aisles of the megamarket? Actually, they can, and more so than ever before. New breeds and advances in meat science means there are more products for these markets to choose from. Although there’s more cheaply-raised mediocre meat out there than ever before, there’s more meat of especially high-quality, too--and in Madison, it’s the smaller markets, competing with supermarkets by offering superior quality, that stock it. And because they deal in smaller quantities overall, the smaller shops can be fussier about how they prep their meats, too. “We do all our own cutting by hand with a knife, not with an electric saw. It looks nicer--the bone edge is cleaner, so it doesn’t bloom. We cut up all our own chickens, on the joint. That way, you don’t lose the flavor from the marrow,” says Ken Kopp of Ken Kopp’s Fine Foods on Monroe Street. And along with Jacobson Brothers Meats and Deli, a growing local chain that’s recently added a seventh location, Ken Kopp’s boasts special trimming that cuts away waste fat. “You use all the meat you buy,” says Kopp. Thanks to expert carving, the Atwood area’s Jenifer Street Market has “a waiting list on baby back ribs in the summer,” says co-owner Steve McKenzie, “We leave the cap meat on top--that’s the same meat as the loin, like a steak. Packers, they slice them tight to the bone.” Jon Stefonek, the store’s meat manager, says, “They’ll cut 14 ribs to weigh only 1 3/4 pounds. I’m cutting ten ribs to weigh 2 pounds.” Stefonek says he uses only the ten center ribs to make his baby back ribs--he finds other uses for the remaining four ribs. “The center section is the best,” he says. Jenifer Street also says it exerts more quality control over its ground meat product. Supermarkets buy sacks of "slaughterhouse trim"--meat scraps with a known overall ratio of lean to fat, like 80-20 or 50-50-- from packers to make ground beef. These stores add the amount of lean meat needed to achieve a desired ratio, then grind, package, and sell. But McKenzie scorns the mixed bag method: Jenifer Street makes its ground beef from whole muscle, using subprimal cuts like the ones in the walk-in. “As a store operator I will never trust something that comes in a gas flush bag or a barrel,” says McKenzie, “That’s just too much trust to put into another’s hand. We know exactly what’s in our ground beef.” NEXT PAGE |
