Last night we had ribeyes for dinner. It was nice. The streaks were well-marbled with hunks of fat and what I suppose you would call gristle. I put all this stuff on the patter and threw it away.
That got me thinking, there is a lot of caloric value in that stuff. In theory, what might a wise and frugal person with such scrapes?
I have the same problem. I mix small amounts with his dry food, and my dog eats it. Fat can give him diarrhea, so I must be careful, but he loves it when we occasionally have steak. If I didn’t have a dog, it would go down the garbage disposal since it’s an inedible waste.
AAAAARGHHH! That is great stuff. Soup. Gravy. Or cook with mushrooms to give them steak taste (I then filter out the worst bit and feed that to the ravens). Or add to top of dry dog food.
Really do try the scraps mushroom dish. Take your scraps, put in fry pan, heat until fat starts to melt, add some real butter if not enough fat. Then add sliced mushrooms, season with salt & pepper (and maybe some Worcestershire sauce) , brown, then serve, perhaps over rice or noodles. Maybe pull out the worst bits of gristle after cooking, or just before adding the 'shrooms.
The mushroom dish sounds delicious. I am still chasing a Portobello mushroom Caesar salad I had years ago. The mushroom was so beefy and meaty that it must have been cooked on the grill along with burgers.
Yep. I keep a plastic ice cream tub in the freezer - if I have any meal that contains bones (even KFC or ribs from the Chinese takeaway) or will yield trimmings of meat etc - I add that to the box until such time as I want to make stock, then I take it out and dump it in the slow cooker with some water and simmer for a few hours. I sometimes do the same with vegetable trimmings, particularly onion roots/tops and the bases of celery.
I’m with @DrDeth - if I’m cooking a fatty cut of beef in a cast iron skillet, I use rendered fat (plus a bit of the butter used to bring out the browning when cooking the steak) to cook my mushrooms while the steak rests.
A little splash of a dark soy and some chives and they’re done with just the seasoning of salt, garlic and black pepper that was on the steak.
And any gristly bits, bones, or excess fat after eating the steak goes into the stock bag for future rendering. A homemade (strained) beef stock can add a heck of a lot to a winter batch of french onion soup.
If there is enough of it you could use it to cook with sliced potato or vegetables. If little add it to butter or whatever for anything you would cook in a wok. Though it might be wasted in some soups, it would go well with pho or stew.