When I was ten years old, my mother used to have me skate down to the butchers’ on Flatbush Avenue and, for 39 cents, get half a pound of ground round steak and “watch him grind it.”
Then time passed. We got all the advantages of modern technology as they came along. By now, the butchers’ was in the local supermarket and the “ground round” was in pre-measured and plastic-wrapped packages, the healthiest-looking, reddest already ground meat you ever saw, and apart from the odd case of staph or Escherichia coli now and then, everything was just as modern and as sanitary as it could be, and of course it wasn’t 39 cents any more, either.
The other thing we knew, in a vague, generalized sort of way, was that it really wasn’t exactly round steak any more, either. That supermarket stuff is prepared in vast quantities in ground meat factories. Not all of it begins as any kind of steak; it is lips, or tripe, or stomachs, or hearts, or it is little bits and pieces of meat left over from preparing steaks and chops, and these little pieces are “bonded” together (we don’t say “glued”) with things called “meat emulsions” and “extracted myofibril proteins” to make bigger pieces which can be sliced and diced like what we know as “roasts.”
All of this, of course, sounds unpleasant, but when you buy a half-pound package of it, it fries up like any other hamburger and tastes just about the same.
However.
What you don’t know is how much of this beef (or this pork) is produced in the so-called concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, with the addition of antibiotics as a regular part of their diet. This you really don’t want. It’s bad for your health. More significant (to me, anyway) is that it’s also bad for mine, because if you eat that sort of thing you help to evolve antibiotic-resistant microorganisms and other nuisances which wind up in other people’s bodies, including mine.
Bearing all this in mind, we decided we really wanted to know what we were eating, and so we elected to grind our own meat. We first bought the good old-fashioned kind of grinder that you attach to something really solid and power with the muscles of your strong right arm. However, that was harder work than we effete moderns were used to, so we gave that one away and invested in an electric model. That does the job quickly and comfortably and we expect to stay with it.
Another advantage to grinding our own chopped steak is that it allows us to control just how much fat we want to grind in with the lean meat. You want a decent amount of fat (”The fat’s where the flavor is,” remember), and the best way to get the proportions right is trial and error. The true gourmets among us actually might want different proportions for different dishes, but if you are one such, for that you are on your own.
So grind in good health, dear friends, and next time you’re making meatloaf, you can invite us over.
Stefan Jones says:
Even creepier than trays of ground meat:
“Chubs”
A fat sausage shaped plug of ground meat, contained in a plastic shell.
You can just imagine these being filled with the bovine equivalent of Chicken Little.
You can still have a meat-department butcher make ground beef for you, from selected cuts, but you have to take the time to do it. When you are heading for a friend’s BBQ it is so much easier to get the preformed patties. And the resulting hamburgers are . . .
. . . man, I shouldn’t think about this kind of thing on a Monday morning.
April 12, 2010, 10:53 amJohn H says:
And if you really feel adventurous, you should try cow-pooling: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1902835,00.html
April 12, 2010, 1:23 pmJohn Murphy says:
Oh, those are a lot of fun! Depending on the model you got, there might be an attachment for making your own sausages, which is also well worth trying.
April 12, 2010, 2:42 pmAce Lightning says:
Fat in meat does contribute somewhat to the flavor, but more important is the fact that fat is what keeps the meat juicy, tender, and moist when cooked, especially if you like your meat medium-well or well done. I love hamburgers, and I wish I could afford a meat grinder - I have been known to fire up the charcoal grill even in the middle of winter. (One memorable New Year’s Eve party was a full-scale barbecue, with the grill just outside the kitchen door so the food could be rushed inside and served before it got cold. I wish I still had the picture of me grilling burgers as snow fell all around…)
April 13, 2010, 4:07 amStefan Jones says:
@Ace: If you are patient, pretty much every kitchen gadget appears at Goodwill thrift stores sooner or later.
April 13, 2010, 5:52 pmAl Bogdan says:
My grandfather was a burly Polish butcher in New York city. He always brought home the best kielbasa. Solid pieces if meat without any unidentifiable ground parts. Now the guy also loved his jellied pigs feet, so when he warned us against eating hot dogs, and some other sausages, you know they must contain some nasty stuff.
I actually started reacting badly to ground beef about five years ago. Only the ground stuff, not steaks. I remembered that my grandfather always ground his own hamburger instead of buying pre-ground, so we started tossing steaks in the Cuisinart. It solved the problem.
We also try to stick to antibiotic free meats whenever possible.
April 15, 2010, 6:46 amNeil in Chicago says:
Kosher remains a contender for those intense enough about this stuff.
@John H - I don’t know if they’re still there, but at least until recently, small towns had refrigerator/freezer lockers, so when you bought, say, half a steer and had it cut up, you had somewhere to store it while you gradually used the pieces.
April 17, 2010, 7:53 pmAce Lightning says:
@Stefan Jones:
April 19, 2010, 2:36 amI thought I had one of the hand-cranked kind that clamps onto the edge of a table, “Grandmother’s” meat grinder, but it appears that my grown son (who is a serious foodie himself) took it. I want a powered one anyway… but it occurs to me that I already own a venerable KitchenAid mixer with the power takeoff, and there’s a meat-grinder attachment for that. Now I just have to be able to *afford* it…