Yes, this is lame, but dammit - I’m from Texas, and was forcibly relocated to Kansas City by my company a little over a year ago. In that time, I have been unable to locate skirt steak for sale in Kansas City. Ergo, I cannot make fajitas on my grill. I used to do this every Super Bowl Sunday.
Now, I also have a gripe about beef prices here, period. A $1.99/lb. flank steak in Texas is $6.99 here!! And, you can hardly find an untrimmed cryo-pack brisket, and when you do, it’s close to $3.00/lb. and was just a little over half that in Texas. And this is supposed to be a beef and BBQ town!
Not to mention - store-brand H.E.B. bread “back home” was $0.69/loaf. Here? You have to buy it from a bread outlet store if you want it for under a buck.
Flank steak is from a different part of the critter than skirt steak. In fact, we asked the meat market guy about skirt steak, and he said they tried to carry it at one time, but ended up throwing most of it out since they couldn’t sell it. Now it’s a special-order item, and expen$ive.
I feel your pain. When I moved to Arkansas flank steak and skirt steak became nigh impossible to find and when found it cost upwards of $5-7.00 per pound. The local market was having a sale this weekend and I bought a giant brisket for my smoker and it only cost about $1.70 a pound. I was thrilled. I can’t empathize with your bread problem though. Even in Texas I can’t remember the last time I spent less than a buck on a loaf of bread.
I’m not going to comment on skirt steak availability, as I really never even looked for it here in KC, but you really need to shop around for meat if you’re paying that much. Price Chopper stores in Overland Park will have sales where you can get Angus ribeye for $5.99 a pound, T-bone for $7.99 a pound…they even had boneless skinless chicken breasts for sale at $1.99 a pound last month, and I bought 10 pounds. But you go on the wrong day of the week, and everything is double or triple the price.
Hey, Marc…
HEB is a regional store chain in Texas that does very, very well. They stretch from the Rio Grande Valley east to Houston, then north to Austin and west to Junction, and of course, just about every town with 3,000 people in between. They actually pretty successfully drove out Kroger, and have kept Albertson’s at bay for many years. Amazingly, they started out in my home town of Kerrville, around 1909 or so. One of the reasons they make bread so cheaply is that they make it themselves and don’t outsource it to other bakeries - http://www.heb.com/yourHEBStore/SD-bakery-breadHoustonPlant.jsp
I believe they also have their own beef and poultry processing capability, too, not to mention any number of other enterprises that keep their costs highly competitive. Damn, I miss those stores…
I’ve also never seen a skirt steak. I shop in Price Chopper that has a butcher counter, but no skity steak at all. Damn it, I want proper fajitas! And their flank steak prices vary widely. Sometimes it’s like $5.00/pound, and othertimes I see it as $2.00/pound.
The meat counter at Sam’s Club sells a cut they label as “flap meat” for about $5.00 a pound which resembles skirt steak. Is “flap meat” the same as skirt steak?
I know there has to be a Mexican grocery store in KC. Try going there, you’ll find it.
Hell, I live in Dallas and I do HALF my shopping at Danal’s just because of the prices and they also have hard to find spices that I wouldn’t normaly find at Kroger.
