Anyone know a website which details and explains the art of meat cutting? Like, how to slice up beef to get certain cuts of meat? I know from a friend that used to work in a butcher shop that one chunk of meat could be cut to produce two types of steaks, one more expensive than the other.
I’m thinking of ordering half a cow, semi-butchered and hung, and I want to slice it up myself to save money. I’ve done it with a 50 pound chuck roll, and saved a bundle. (Just remember if you try that, have the butcher hang it for a day or it might be gassy and stink.) Out of it I got a pile of chuck steaks, stew meat and enough fat and scrap to make pounds of hamburger – along with a bunch of fat that kept my neighbors dogs happy.
I’d like to know what muscles to section out for eye of the round, for T-bone, roasts, short ribs, southern ribs and other cuts.
I’ve not been able to find any.
BTW, you often can buy bulk beef and other meat uncut, from your butcher at far below grocery store prices. That T-bone in the meat case might cost $4.98 a pound, but the farmer sells the cow at 50 cents a pound. The butcher buys it at 75 cents a bound, cleaned and sectioned (the slaughter house keeps the scrap to resell to other businesses) and sells it to you at $1.98 to $5.00 a pound.
So long as the butcher doesn’t have to cut it up, you can buy it from him at about $1.00 a pound, including those prime sections the guy will sell as prime cuts for $4.00 and up. Plus, you get all of those great soup bones! Not those crappy, tasteless sliced up hooves they sell in the store now instead of good soup bones.
If you know a farmer, you can get it even cheaper, and he’ll usually direct you to a guy who will butcher it into the basic chunks for a small fee and waste parts like the head, tail, legs, hide and internal organs. You can wind up with a couple of hundred pounds of beef costing you as little as 50 cents a pound.