What’s the difference between the local butcher shop and the butcher dept. at the local grocery store?
Does the butcher generally get higher-quality meats, or is it essentially the same stuff as the shrinkwrapped cuts I’d find at the supermarket?
A local butcher generally has local produce in his store. He’s also very knowledgeable about meats, and will be able to recommend meats and cuts for you. He’ll also be able to cut meats in anyway you want them.
More and more supermarkets are setting up their own butchers shops in store now, mooting some of these advantages.
A good butcher is an invaluable source of knowledge. They will be able to tell you exactly how to cook things, which meats to use, and how best to cut them for a particular purpose. There’s other advantages, too, such as being able to obtain something unusual should you require it. And I’ve never had meat from a supermarket that compares in quality to that from a respectable butcher.
I miss the butcher we used to use - if you wanted to make pepper steak, he’d cut it that way. If you wanted cubed stew meat, he’d cut it that way. He made onion sausage that was just to die for. (In fact he’d grind your hamburger for you and if you wanted anything ground into it he’d do that too.) I don’t know where to look for a butcher nowadays.
Better grades, like prime and choice. I’ve been noticing lately that many, many big name grocery stores in Michigan have been offering select and standard as their, uh, standard fare of meats (mostly select).
I didn’t even know you could get standard retail, it’s generally used in prepared foods only.
A butcher can:
- Cut meat to custom specifications
- butterfly, debone or otherwise do tricky tasks which are impractical at home
- give you advice about what’s good today and what you should probably avoid
- Lets you pick the better parts of a cut (ie: the rib end of a sirloin is basically ribeye for 1/2 the price, the other end is basically top round for double the price. You can save quite a bit by doing this).
- Give you occasional freebies like bones for stock or leaf lard for baking.
- Can order in exotic ingredients like intestines for sausage casing or offal
- Get a better quality of meat and a wider range of meat.
- Provide advice about preparing meat.
Very interesting. Unfortunately, our local guy keeps old-school hours, so it’s tough to get down there and my refrigerator surprises me with how often it ruins meat overnight, but I’ll give it a shot.
Now that I think about it, even though the local grocery store has their own on-staff butchers, the quality is fairly low (that is, steaks turn into leather rather quickly). I generally can’t tell the difference in quality of foods, but I’ll give it a shot and see how it works out.
This may not be universally the case, but certainly in the UK, the ‘butcher counters’ in supermarkets are generally not much more than a cosmetic exercise to recreate the feel of visiting a traditional butcher’s shop, while making negligible effort to reproduce the actual expertise of service and various product attributes and choices you’d have experienced there; the staff may be wearing striped butchers aprons, but they will not be particularly intimately involved in the selection, buying, preparation etc of the meat - indeed, in most cases, it is delivered to the store already butchered and the site staff just unpack it and sell it.
Here in SW michigan, most of the large chain supermarkets don’t have an onsite butcher. They have their meat butchered off site, then shipped into the stores. They can usually get any cut of meat you want, but it takes a day or two to get it becuase they have to order it out.
I feel sorry for you people without real butcher counters at your super-market. While maybe not as good as a real butcher, the counter at my local supermarket does all I need it to do. They have the large cuts of meat that I ca nrequest a cut from, they people working there look like real butchers, have answered all my questions just fine, and all in all have been quite helpful. I often have them grind me fresh beef for burgers rather thn get trhe prepackaged ones, especially since I often need just one pound, and i soemtimes find it hard to get the small size for the leanness I want (which, BTW, is 85%.)
Hell, the only place I’ve lived that had a real butcher shop was when I was in college. There was the “Troy Pork Store” downtown. They even had awesome shirts with a picture of a pig, and the slogan,
“I got mine, at the Troy Pork Store.” 
In addition to odd cuts, you can order “odd” quantities. If you happen to need, say 8 pounds of lamb rib chops, your grocery store probably ain’t gonna have than much on hand.
Also, the butcher shop will generally have packages of a bunch of pre-selected cuts, or you can order a whole hog/side of beef with a number of standard cuts.
I’m with bouv, until recently around here in northern GA, all the supermarkets had their own butchers, or a very close approximation of a butcher. Only when the really big chains came into the area did you start seeing butcher-less stores.
-rainy
Around here (in Springfield, IL), all the butchers keep banker’s hours. 9-5, Monday-Friday. Makes it hard for us working people to patronize them, no?
A butcher shop starts with a beast, rather than vac-packed boxes of meat. The butcher can tell you if the animal was raised without hormone shots, and thus has less gristle.
When you buy ground beef at a chain grocery, it was ground at a big packing house, and it may contain “mechanically deboned meat” which could contain spinal tissue. If you buy it at a small grocery or butcher shop, they grind their own, with none of that android meat.
I have found that the situation is extremely varied. When I lived in the western Chicago burbs, Wheaton meats had the worst looking beef and the dumbest clerks I have ever encountered whereas at City Meats in Naperville, the clerks knew how to cut meat and had what I suspect was better quality meat. For reference, I paid around $25.00 per pound for trimmed beef tenderloin (filets).
Now I am out west and the area that I live in (around 150,000 people) has an Albertson’s (the company that owns Jewel/Osco in Chicago) staffed with a butcher until 8:00+ PM every night. For example, when I wanted bone-in loin pork chops 1.5 inches thick I had to wait only 5-10 minutes to get them cut to the thickness and overall weight I wanted.
The local “meat store” out here, by comparison, takes the meat in the back, cuts it and then wraps it in paper before they give it to you. They acted insulted when I asked to look at the meat and wouldn’t open the package so I walked out. They charge anywhere from $2 to $6 a pound more for their meat than the Albertson’s.
BTW, I pay on average between $13 to $15 per pound for trimmed beef tenderloin.