
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.