Cluck, Oink, Baa, Moo E-Book

Miranda Ballard

• Herausgeber: Ryland Peters & Small
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

A comprehensive guide to buying and cooking beef, lamb, pork, chicken, turkey and game featuring 90 delicious recipes to enjoy – from flash-fried steaks to slow-cooked pulled pork and everything in-between.

Leseprobe

CLUCK OINK BAA MOO

CLUCK OINK BAA MOO

How to choose, prepare and cook meat and poultry

MIRANDA BALLARD

PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEVE PAINTER

DEDICATION

To my parents, Edward and Jude.

DESIGN, PROP STYLING & PHOTOGRAPHY Steve Painter

EDITOR Kate Reeves-Brown

PRODUCTION MANAGER Gordana Simakovic

ART DIRECTOR Leslie Harrington

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Julia Charles

PUBLISHER Cindy Richards

FOOD STYLIST Lucy McKelvie

US CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Toponia Miller

INDEXER Vanessa Bird

First published in 2015 as The Modern Meat Kitchen. This revised edition published in 2021

by Ryland Peters & Small

20–21 Jockey’s Fields

London WC1R 4BW

and

341 E 116th St

New York NY 10029

www.rylandpeters.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Text copyright © Miranda Ballard 2015, 2021

Design and photographs copyright © Ryland Peters & Small 2015, 2021

Front and back cover illustrations © Urazovsky Design via Creative Market

Printed in China

The author’s moral rights have been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-78879-353-7

E-ISBN: 978-1-78879-395-7

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

US Library of Congress CIP data has been applied for.

RECIPE NOTES

• Eggs are medium (UK) or large (US), unless otherwise specified. Uncooked or partially cooked eggs should not be served to the very old, frail, young children, pregnant women or those with compromised immune systems.

• Ovens should be preheated to the specified temperatures. We recommend using an oven thermometer. If using a fan-assisted oven, adjust temperatures according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

FOOD SAFETY

• Cover all meats and store them in a refrigerator.

• Use the freshest meats possible for home-curing.

• Keep raw meat and poultry, and their juices, away from other foods. After cutting raw meats, wash cutting boards, utensils and countertops with hot, soapy water. Cutting boards, utensils and countertops can be sanitized by using a solution of 1 tbsp of unscented, liquid chlorine bleach in 4.5 litres/1 gallon of water.

• Uncooked or partially cooked meats should not be served to the very old, frail, young children, pregnant women or those with compromised immune systems.

DISCLAIMER

The information in this book is based on the author’s experience. Guidelines for safety are given within the recipes and should be followed. Neither the author nor the publisher can be held responsible for any harm or injury that arises from the application of the ideas in this book.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

MODERN MEAT PRINCIPLES

BEEF

LAMB AND MUTTON

PORK

CHICKEN AND POULTRY

GAME

THE RECIPES

WEEKNIGHT SUPPERS

ENTERTAINING

LONG AND SLOW

ROASTS

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Writing this book was an absolute treat for me. I have owned a meat company; I am a lover of great farming; I’m a meat eater; I’m an enthusiastic cook; I don’t have an unlimited budget for food shopping; and I always seem to be really (really) busy! So I am perfectly placed to put together a great collection of recipes that work within the demands of a modern family lifestyle (mine included).

Of course the recipes in my book (and every other meat recipe ever written) actually start with the farming: the life and origin of the meat and our relationship with it. We don’t have to spend a lot of time making a recipe, but we do have an obligation to understand the origins of our meat, and you can do this simply by asking questions of the person selling it to you. In this book I exclusively endorse well-farmed meat, both for the ethics of animal husbandry and for the eating experience. I do this confidently due to the work that I had the pleasure of doing with some of the UK’s finest farmers during my time working as a meat retailer.

I also feel confident proposing that a modern meat cook does not need to be detached from the handling of meat. Some recipes here use cuts of meat that I show you how to butcher yourself from larger pieces of meat. I’ve been delighted to discover a demand for simple home butchery, or ‘cooktchery’ as I like to call it: the simple cutting of meat at home for cooking, rather than for retail presentation or commercial efficiency. This is exciting, really satisfying and surprisingly easy to do.

I also mention my own limited budget, because as a consumer and a former business owner, I’m not naive about the difficult balance between ethical ideals and a realistic commercial viability. However I do believe I can prove that there is a balance; there is a point where the contract of animal husbandry works and we can still afford it. You’ll see that nearly all my recipes have value in mind, from how to utilize a more affordable cut to how to buy a larger piece of meat, which is cheaper per kg/lb., and portion it yourself by freezing batches and chilling leftovers for other recipes.

The average cooking time for the evening meal in the UK has reduced from 55 minutes in the 1970s to just 18 minutes today. Of 2,000 people asked at 4 pm, 1,500 hadn’t yet planned what they were going to have for dinner that night. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – we have to embrace these significant changes in our lifestyles and routines, and meat recipes can be some of the easiest, quickest and most nutritious you can choose. Even the recipes with longer cooking times, such as large roasts and braises, are designed with leftovers for later in the week in mind.

This book is about how to get the absolute best and most out of every cut of meat you buy and every recipe you choose to make in your own kitchen at home.

MODERN MEAT PRINCIPLES

Meat has been a fundamental part of our ancestral history and human evolution. Now, in modern society, our relationship with meat has completely evolved too. Though it is still absolutely intrinsic to our lives, we no longer actually need to eat it to survive.

So, here we are, in a new era of meat consumption, a modern collaboration with farming and a modern definition of animal husbandry. Although there are failings, there is also sincerity, commitment and a celebration of good flavour.

The most positive thing that those in the meat industry can do is ask you, the consumer, what you want to know. More than that, they should see if they can help you find the questions you want to ask in the first place. We should never make you feel that, just because you eat meat, you should understand how, for example, it gets to you, why it was priced as it is, how it was farmed, and so on. I’m typing these words on a computer, but I don’t understand how the processor is working, nor how it just auto-saved to a ‘cloud’ thing, and I would be offended if an IT expert made me feel stupid for asking. So, transparency in the meat industry and a true willingness by suppliers to have an open conversation about our meat will empower you with enough knowledge to make the right choices.

So I’m going start this book with by asking four questions – the four questions most often asked by consumers in butchers shops. I hope that one or more of them will appeal to your priorities, too.

1 How do I tell the difference between ‘good’ meat and ‘cheap’ meat?

2 What price should I be paying?

3 Where is the meat from?

4 What do I do with it?

These are the four questions you should ask your butcher and feel confident about asking them. To give you a bit of a head start, I’m going to start with the first one – I think it’s the most important question for me to try to answer before we begin a collection of recipes that very confidently advocates the use of good meat. On the following pages, we will take a look at the differences between the production of ‘cheap’ meat and ‘good’ meat.

Now this is a rather coarse approach to defining farming practices and I don’t mean to ignore the complexities and subjectivity of farming, nor do I suggest there isn’t a middle ground between these extremes. However I intend for this to be a general case study to compare a chronology of the two ends of the market. I haven’t simplified this because I think you need it this way and I do this because it is how I first came to learn about farming myself. It’s how I started to become more confident to ask the questions I needed to ask to be able to find where the balance lay between commercial viability and ethics in our former meat business.

I’ve chosen beef because I come from a beef farming background and I’ve worked with beef more than any other meat in the last seven years, but the chart is similar for other commercially farmed animals and, indeed, for the breeding of dairy cattle, too. So, on pages 10–11 we start right from the beginning, at conception, and trace the meat through to the retailer.

TASTE

The taste of meat is a fascinating study because it is entirely due to our ancestral history that a sequence of sensory reactions occur at the sight, smell and taste of meat. If you flip the idea from ‘I eat this because it’s tasty’ to ‘This is tasty because I eat it and because our ancestors ate it’, it gets really interesting.

The ultimate fuel

Like all living things, we need fuel. We ingest food and convert it to fuel. About 2 million years ago, at the Homo erectus stage in our evolution, our bodies became bipeds. We were moving, we were evolving, we were making tools, we were hunting and we were eating meat. There is even evidence that we were starting to cook, too.

The energy from the calories in meat did wonders for us – we could hunt, gather, fight and flee better than we ever could before, and we had the strength to survive adverse weather, harsh climates, attacks and other threats to our continued evolution. And as we converted this new fuel, we also absorbed the protein in it, which made our muscles stronger and bigger, and our brains grow and advance. We started to develop social skills, very early communication and a sense of self.

Irresistible taste

Meat is fundamental to our history and we are still hardwired, instinctively, to recognize foods with high fats, sugars, proteins and salts as fuel and, significantly, ‘fast fuel’. We love vitamins, minerals and the things that make us feel healthy and alert, but our most basic animal instinct is to survive and if there’s something that will make the muscles in our bodies stronger, then we’re going to crave it. Indeed, this is why cured meat is often described as ‘tasty’ and ‘flavourful’ when our body actually senses ‘usable’ and ‘valuable’.

One of the most common confessions of vegetarians is a yearning for bacon when it is being cooked near them. This is no coincidence at all: the smell triggers the alerts in our heads for salts, fats and proteins mixed together, a super-fuel signal to our caveman ancestors and to us now, too. The tricky part is that we’re still tuned to follow this thirst for fats and proteins when we no longer live in a world where we need to run from a wild animal or kill with handheld tools. Today, we think we have control over whether a food tastes good to us, but it’s still the food that dictates to us whether we want to eat it – our body’s response to a food is what manifests as ‘tasty’ and our instincts haven’t caught up with modern life yet.

Meat in modern diets

One could argue that we don’t need meat at all these days, as it has done its job of getting us this far. Though we’re not fighting and fleeing so much any more, without the nutritional content of ‘good’ meat our bodies still lack strength and ability. We must have a well-designed, careful diet of substitutes, inspired by the effects of meat on our bodies, to survive. We have the luxury of the kind of global food chain and food technology that our ancestors – even recent ancestors – could have never imagined, so we can easily choose to follow a vegetarian diet. A lot of how we look and behave and a lot of what we’re capable of doing is thanks to eating meat, and good meat is vital to our modern meat-eating diet. I can’t stress enough that the difference between ‘good’ meat and ‘cheap’ meat is everything. I’ll try to explain why over the following pages.

‘GOOD’ MEAT VERSUS ‘CHEAP’ MEAT

So let’s tackle the question – how do we tell the difference between ‘good’ meat and ‘cheap’ meat? And why should we care? Well, we should care for two simple reasons: taste and principles.

‘GOOD’ MEAT

‘CHEAP’ MEAT

The pedigree and/or registered bull is rotated through the herd to impregnate the cows.

The cows are artificially inseminated with a stock semen developed from a number of breeds for optimum growth and weight.

The pregnant cow is outdoors (except during extreme temperatures) for the 9-month gestation and fed pasture food: grass, silage, barley, peas.

The pregnant cow is kept indoors, with the rest of the herd, and fed a mixture of pasture, grain, soya, genetically modified (GM) feed, cereals and antibiotics.

The cow will come indoors for labour and be monitored. The calf is born with any assistance necessary. Cow and calf stay indoors for a day or two before returning to the field together.

The cows are scheduled for assisted birthing. The calf may stay for colostrum (first milk) but will be removed from the mother’s stall soon after birth to begin its own developed feeding regime of formula milk.

The calf weans for six to eight months, as it naturally moves from the teat to eating grass. A bull calf may be castrated to make a ‘steer’ for beef, or be assigned for bull breeding in the herd. A female will be assigned to beef or breeding.

The calf has been growing away from the mother the whole time and the mother is being prepared for another insemination or for slaughter.

If assigned to beef, the cow continues to feed itself grass and silage. Some beetroot/beets in the winter, too, perhaps.

The cow is fed growth hormones and high-fat cereals and grain for optimum growth, weight and fats (marbling) in the meat.

The cow might be moved (in a minimum of pairs) from a breeding farm to a finishing farm, depending on the size of the farms involved.

The cow may be moved from a breeding lot to a finishing/feed lot (both indoors). A foreign born calf may be moved to the UK for rearing and finishing.

The cow is scheduled for slaughter between the age of 24 and 30 months old, at an average weight of 400 kg/900 lbs.

The cow is scheduled for slaughter from 18 months old, as soon as it reaches target weight. It may be moved to a third farm for fattening/finishing.

The cow is taken (in a pair to avoid stress and the release of adrenalin) to the slaughterhouse, often the day before, to settle in ‘layerage’ overnight to calm.

The cow is packed into a cattle lorry/truck with the other cows and taken to the slaughterhouse for immediate slaughter.

The cow walks between two high, winding walls – cattle and sheep will inquisitively walk around a corner and this means the cow walks to slaughter without being handled.

The cow is packed into the slaughter space along with the other cows. They are then taken one at a time to the crush and bolt gun.

The soundproof wall goes up. The cow takes its place on the slaughter platform. The soundproof wall goes down. The head is raised up by a slow mechanical arm and the bolt gun moves to the precision-programmed location on the front of the head. The bolt completely implodes the brain. There is no consciousness or brain activity. There is minimized stress for the animal, preventing the release of adrenalin, which toughens the meat.

The wall goes up. The cattle is crushed to be held in position. There are humans around, so the animal is aware of danger and may instinctively release the stress hormone, adrenalin, into the blood (this strengthens the muscles in order to run away). The precision-programmed bolt gun is moved into place and the brain is completely imploded. There is no consciousness or brain activity.

The animal is strung by a rear ankle and the neck is sliced to drain all the blood. The stomach and all fecal matter is drawn. The capacity and pace per bolt-gun line per day is approximately 250 cattle.

The animal is strung by a rear ankle and the neck is sliced to drain all the blood. The capacity and pace per bolt-gun line per day is a minimum of 400 cattle.

An independent vet adjudicates the process, grades the animal and authorizes the traceability tag to be attached to both halves of the carcass, which has been split and the spinal cord removed – the main risk of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or ‘mad cow disease’) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) contamination to the meat.

The carcass is skinned, offal removed and the body moved to a refrigerator to cool.

The carcass is skinned, offal and stomachs removed, and the body moved to a refrigerator to cool.

The meat is butchered: each traceability marking kept with each quarter; offal trimmed for pet and human food; fats rendered for oils; bones used for marrow and stock; collagen, bone, hooves, hide, etc., removed for by-products (‘fifth quarter’ refers to the utilization of the entire animal).

The meat is butchered: all commercial meat and products are removed; anything else is refuse. Often intensive slaughterhouses do not have the budget for long-term investment in low-margin by-products and ‘fifth quarter’. Sometimes these parts will be shipped for outsourced handling.

The meat is butchered for wholesale or retail. It is marked with the slaughterhouse’s hygiene and traceability code and any accreditations and certifications. Prime cuts may be dry-aged or matured in a humidity-controlled refrigerator.

The meat is (often mechanically) butchered, processed for wholesale or retail and coded with the legal requirements. Prime cuts may be wet-aged in vac-pack bags. Small pieces of meat are mechanically separated from the carcass, minced and processed (often called ‘pink slime’).

It is sold packaged to the consumer through reputable retailers (including supermarkets).

It is packaged and sold to the consumer through national retailers (in particular supermarkets).

PRINCIPLES

So, to the principles of ‘good’ meat and their origin. If our history is where I argue taste comes from, where and when was the source of our principles? And what do they look like in a modern world?

I have a dream that we could reclassify the term ‘meat’. Like how an Aston Martin is a ‘car’, and a Fiat is a ‘car’… but they are not compared as ‘cars’, in neither price nor product. In fact, you would laugh if a Fiat was suggested as a direct alternative for less money. So when you look down the comparable chronologies in farming practice on pages 10–11, the end product should not equally be called ‘meat’ because we can prove that the products have been produced in very different ways. That in the same way that one can measure the engineering, design, metalwork, performance, and so on of an Aston Martin, so too can you define and value the end product from the good farming chronology. And, incidentally, the ‘cheap’ meat column is still the regulated lower end of the market: it does not come near to the criminal activity that occurs in the meat industry.

Maybe the word ‘cheap’ is too flippant and ambiguous, but could we call the two grades, ‘good’ meat and ‘fast’ meat perhaps? That doesn’t seem unfair or misleading, as the process to produce cheaper meat is much faster. Then if someone says they are totally happy with ‘fast’ meat, its flavour and its processes, then that is fine – we accept that they have made an informed decision and are totally aware that they’re buying a different product.

I realize, at the same time, that this is the real world and we cannot start a campaign with the scale of meat retail. But just think what a difference it makes, every time a customer asks, ‘Excuse me, is this “good” meat?’ it sends a ripple through the meat industry, all the way to the farm, and one more animal is reared a little better. That we can individually have such an effect on something as unimaginably immense as the global meat industry is what I love the most – these measurable effects and our fantastically exciting role in supply and demand.

So why are there principles in the first place and what are they? Christien Meindertsma completed an incredible three-year study called ‘Pig 05049’, in which she tracked the journey of one pig and its by-products to 184 counts of different uses from one pig’s body, so unbelievably far beyond pork chops and sausages. She followed the parts to their use in concrete, bread manufacturing, paint, pharmaceuticals, military armament and it is wonderful and fascinating – I recommend the book or ‘How Pig Parts Make The World Turn’ (2010) introduction on TED online.

And this is where I also have some fun when talking to vegans and vegetarians. To define our principles, one first has to accept the role that meat plays in our modern world, beyond the steak on our plate and the recipes in this book.

The principles of veganism

I would go so far as to say that one can never cut animal products out of one’s life completely. I should say that I love debating this point with vegans; I do so with respect and a cheeky smile, because I admire anyone making a positive and rational commitment to their beliefs. That said, here are some things to consider before deciding to go vegan:

1 Evolution, as we’ve already covered, is where meat had a massive impact on what we look like and are capable of doing today.

2 Good vegetables, which are fertilized by livestock waste, would need science and pesticides to grow without it. If we all stopped eating meat, there would be no meat farms. In the short term, the animals would all be killed and burnt, and in the long term, there would be no organic or natural fertilizer for the farming and production of crops.

3 Arable farming in general, ploughing/plowing a field of crop kills far more living beings than even a mass intensive livestock farm could kill in a year. It’s just that they’re little insects, ground-feeding birds and rodents… and it’s harder to imagine that they have feelings.

4 Soil is made up of carbon from millions and millions of years of the corroded bodies of these small animals and every size animal.

5 Indeed, it is compressed carbon that is fueling our electricity, our houses, our cars…

6 Meat by-products are used in all kinds of manufacturing and production. There is no meat in your can of green beans, but the production of the mould to make the aluminium can they come in will have likely used pig by-product to make the shape.

7 Of course, there’s leather, gelatine in cakes, etc. – the consumer items that are easier to avoid as a vegan, which more directly relate to the animal as we can picture them – but there are animal by-products in soap, toothpaste, shampoo and medicine.

I’m not just trying to antagonize; I mean it from a good place and I’m still very early on in my own journey to understand meat and our relationship with animals. But I feel strongly that to study veganism, vegetarianism and our principles, we must stop looking at meat only in the context of eating meat. For example, there are many uses of animal products, such as the commercial bread raising-agent that includes an ingredient from pig hair. We can live without meat products, we can buy bread that isn’t mass produced, we can buy sweets that don’t contain gelatine… it’s just that our relationship with living beings, and indeed their relationship with each other, goes far beyond purely the rearing and slaughter of livestock. We are blessed with the mental capacity to challenge and question this larger context where we’re a significantly smaller aspect of the symbiosis of all living things, and we should absolutely do that. This earth, this ecology and this biology existed before we were able to question it and so we shouldn’t dismiss the wider picture and its limitless impact on our lives and evolution. Examine, challenge… have the conversations.

Once again, it comes back to the practice of ‘good’ meat versus ‘fast’ meat, and on the journey of trying to imagine the bigger picture, I become ever more confident to denounce ‘fast’ meat, as the practices can in no way be described as ‘natural’. For example, the process of force-feeding geese to produce foie gras from their liver is not ‘natural’. Eating a goose – if we compare our practices to wild carnivores – is ‘natural’. Hounds killing a fox is ‘natural’; they will do this without human training and assistance; but humans following on a horse and not eating the fox at the end isn’t necessarily ‘natural’. Maybe the discipline, ‘WWWAD?’, could be introduced: What Would Wild Animals Do? It’s not as simple as this, I do understand that, but to question a few smaller parts of an impossibly large overall question, can surely do no harm. The chronology for ‘fast’ meat on page 10 is an achievement for modern science but it is so different to our own history and to any other carnivorous animal today. It has gone so far.

If a vegan tells me they would still choose for the animal never to be born, I’m listening. If they say that to die to be eaten is not worth the life they have before slaughter, even if it is the life that the animal would lead if there were no farmers, no human intervention and absolutely no conscious awareness of the lead-up to nor moment of slaughter, I’m listening. I’ll obviously ask them how we will redesign not just agriculture but our society, economy and human survival, but I am listening. Vegetarians who are vegetarian for reasons relating to animal welfare, on the other hand, have it all upside down.

I’D RATHER BE A BEEF COW

In the chronology of ‘good’ meat versus ‘cheap’ meat on pages 10–11, there was a period of up to 30 months when the animal (either bred outdoors or indoors) is largely left alone to, on a good farm, eat what they want to eat and do what they want to do. If we do a quick chronology for that section for the life for a dairy cow, it offers another view of the role of meat beyond steaks and burgers.

It may surprise you to learn that dairy cows are slaughtered, too. They cannot stay on a farm to die a natural death; it just doesn’t happen. To consume dairy without taking responsibility for the end of the life of that dairy-producing animal is irresponsible and infinitely more detached from its life than eating meat. I would choose not to eat dairy if I were to make a stand against the treatment of animals, and I would certainly choose to be a beef cow over a dairy cow.

Again, I’m not trying to be antagonistic about this, but it’s part of the wider argument about animal husbandry, to find a meat and dairy supply that we trust.

Below you’ll find a table detailing the differences between what I consider to be ‘good’ dairies versus ‘cheap’ dairies.

‘GOOD’ DAIRY (EXTENSIVE FARMING)

‘CHEAP’ DAIRY (INTENSIVE FARMING)

The calf is born. If it’s a female it will stay with the mother for a few weeks. If the breed, or cross-breed, has a market demand for its beef as well as milk, a bull calf may stay with its mother for milk-fed and/or rosé veal for a few weeks. Usually, though, the bull calf is killed straight away as it will never produce milk for the dairy farm.

The calf is born. If it’s a pure dairy herd, the bull calf is killed immediately. If there is a market for the beef, it is taken from the mother after the first day, reared on formula, castrated to become a steer and slaughtered for beef. A female calf may stay with the mother for a short time, but the milk from the mother is the product, so the calf is kept indoors and fed formula.

After weaning, the female calf is fed formula until she becomes a dairy cow and twice a day, she will be herded into the milking parlour, have the pumps attached to her udders and be milked. She will then be herded back to the field.

The female cow becomes a dairy cow. She is kept indoors all day, the pumps are attached to her udders twice a day and she is milked.

The cow may be used for breeding. The most common challenge is mastitis, when the teat ducts contract a bacterial infection, either from the pump (cleanliness and hygiene), the water, or another aspect of the milking parlour.

The udders need to be ‘dipped’ to fend off infection. Infection needs to be treated with antibiotics.

The cow is either slaughtered for beef if it’s within the legal killing age or slaughtered for by-products once it stops producing milk or can’t be used for breeding.

WHAT ABOUT PRICE?

It’s weird that we buy meat from big national chains of supermarkets. We don’t have to comprehend how the system works, but we should try to picture it.

Picture the nearest supermarket to your home, and then picture the meat counter: the ground meat, sausages, burgers, steaks, roasting joints, chicken, ham, bacon, ready-to-eat meals, salamis… Then picture the lorry/truck coming to the back of the store every day to restock the aisle. Now picture the next nearest 10 stores all having a delivery of their own. Then imagine the next 100 nearest, then the next 1,000… and, for the UK, about 5,500 stores of the six main national supermarket chains. In America, over 14,500 supermarket outlets for just the national chains. Then there are regional companies, convenience stores, online retailers, wholesalers and so on. Walmart and Tesco, for example, own more than 3,000 stores each – 3,000 of those meat sections running simultaneously, the whole time, all across the country, with fresh meat.

I don’t find it as strange to imagine pallets of ketchup or, for example, breakfast cereals or toilet paper or long-life/shelf-stable products. But meat? How many cows, pigs, lambs, chickens? Fish, how many fish? And all the dairy: milk, cheese, yogurt, ice cream, butter…? The scale is unbelievable.

This brings us to the question of price, by far the biggest factor in our modern meat industry and our modern lives. If meat is considered too expensive, shoppers won’t buy it, there will be no profit and the company will go bust. If the meat is priced too cheaply, there may be no money left after the farm, slaughterhouse, chilled delivery company, butchers, electricity and water bills have been paid, as well as the ingredients, packaging, regulations, etc. So there has to be a price point where it can be produced in budget and people will buy it.

And what is ‘too expensive’? Factors like income, geography and economy all have to be taken into account but, simply put, if a shopper wants it, they will pay for it. Or maybe the better way to phrase it is: if the customer doesn’t want it, they simply won’t pay for it.

Be confident asking about pricing – why is one pack of chicken breasts so much cheaper than another? Be polite (it’s a sensitive subject), but you should feel comfortable asking a retailer about price.

Mass production

Going back to the thousands upon thousands of meat aisles, the competitive price ‘wars’ have brought the average price of meat right down, so much so that a lot of our meat in the UK, as well as in the USA, costs less than it did in the 1970s, despite inflation and above-inflation increases in costs of production and transport (such as fuel). This is because:

1 The quality of farming, production, slaughter, butchery, processing, packaging, retailing, etc. has had to come down.

2 The scale of production (to supply those 3,000 stores owned by one company) has had to go up to produce efficiencies.

Put simply, and I know I’m telling you what you already know, the cost of making two beef burgers isn’t double the cost to make one; you already had to put the meat through the grinder and weigh out the ingredients and pack it – it’s not double the work for the second burger since you were already making one. Similarly, the lorry/truck going to the back of one of the stores was going there anyway, another pack of burgers doesn’t double the cost of the fuel. Mass production means the cost of every unit comes down, which is fantastic and where I am least anti-supermarket because they can achieve, through taking on huge risks and liabilities, the economies of scale that small companies can’t achieve. These savings are passed onto customers who undoubtedly benefit.

Mass production versus premium quality

Is large-scale mass production really a good thing in meat, given that we haven’t yet worked out a way to farm ‘good’ meat any faster than we do? Or have we found a secret formula to find the balance between the quality of farming and the commercial viability and sustainability of the product any cheaper?

My question to the meat industry is: if we accept mass, how can we make mass better? If supermarket meat cost 10 per cent more, would it be so bad if we bought and ate 10 per cent less? Especially if 10 per cent more on the price meant it was 10 per cent better tasting and better farmed? I know it’s not as simple as this, but I’m not going to stop thinking of pricing and principles in simplified questions like this. I’ll also accept just as much that if I find something ‘too expensive’ then maybe I just don’t want or need it right now. ‘Too expensive’ is often used in the place of ‘it’s just not something I’m looking for at the moment’. If you don’t want something then the price will always be expensive. To you.

The economist Richard Thaler used the term ‘mental accounting’ to describe the sequence of valuations that happens separately in each of our minds when we process the cost of a transaction within the context of the things on which we spend our money, i.e. our priorities, our interests, our restraints, and so on. Things can be expensive to some people and very good value to others. Each customer does some quick mental accounting of their values whilst they decide whether to buy specific products or not.

The average family’s grocery bill has dropped 5 per cent in the last 10 years, which may not seem like much, but the significance is that there are still the same number of items in the average shopping trolley/cart. The same groceries just cost 5 per cent less. For this to be the case, all the suppliers of those groceries need to either reduce their prices or reduce the cost of making their product. The majority of meat companies and retailers I’ve been in the fortunate position to be able to meet are not crooks, they do not think that the consumer is stupid and they are not making enormous profits by exploiting the unquantifiable, unregulated price of your food products. In chilled food, particularly, with the very high additional costs of something as simple as refrigerated storage and transport, the margins are very small. For the ‘good guys’, taking 5 per cent off their price just isn’t realistic for the survival of the company; it has to come out of the product and, for meat, it always comes back to where and how it was farmed.

Very often with meat, it is what falls in and out of favour. I’m at peace with media coverage of meat, even the sensationalized coverage. It exists, it taints and it can mislead, but it generally only targets or appeals to those who probably wouldn’t go and ask questions anyway, nor would they welcome the chance to have a conversation with those in the meat industry about meat and farming. ‘Good’ meat just isn’t important to everyone. I’m not being a defeatist, I just always preferred to do a really, really good job for those to whom it is important. In the long term, the positive movement of these people, who have access to good meat and the ripples they make through a national, even global, meat industry is more powerful than I could ever be by howling at the moon about how we need a revolution. Little changes and little improvements to the system will be what regains the grace and respectability of our meat industry. So to our next question…

WHERE IS MY MEAT FROM?

This is a great question to encapsulate all the major factors of farming and producing meat. Don’t ever feel like you need to understand the whole process of producing meat. You are responsible for the meat that you purchase and for finding a source that suits your principles, tastes and budget.

There are three important points here: traceability, practice and accountability.

There are a lot of national certifications and accreditations for meat in different countries. I admire them as they are founded on a base of honest beliefs and integrity. They are brilliant at defining where lines can be drawn in practices and helping to communicate these to a consumer who may have very little time (or interest) to carry out the studies themselves. However, they are also brilliant at allowing a consumer to believe that they are the ‘right way’ and that foods without these accreditations are inferior. They are, however, just accreditations; they’re still an optional subscription for the farm to undertake and a cost for them to absorb.

Let’s take the ‘Organic’ certificate (Soil Association in the UK, AOM in Australia, the NOP in conjunction with the USDA in America, ECOCERT in Europe, and so on…). We are better for these regulating bodies, undeniably so. They filter and define practices and have a symbol that is easily recognisable. They reassure you that meat production follows certain principles without you needing to understand the details.

However, I believe they stifle the questions that I’m so desperate for the industry to be asked and answer. They go too far to market meat and stop us from just asking one of the four simple questions I’m trying to answer now. I don’t think that’s as positive as the initial objective started out to be because all farms are not owned by one organisation and certainly I have never been to even two farms that practise farming the same way. Carrots, for example, are more easily defined – organic vegetables and arable farming are far from an easy science and rely on massive amounts of skill and experience (and instinct), but the same acreage that can produce 10 tonnes of carrots will produce perhaps 40 beef cattle a year. That’s 40 different animals, with different genetics, health and feeding needs, unknowns and variables. Classifying and certifying the farming of animals (pastoral farming) is harder to centralize than for grains, vegetables, etc (arable farming).

What’s the answer? The language and labelling at retail level. All those thousands of meat categories in stores – the labelling on the packaging should go beyond a small symbol on the back. If those in the industry put their names/company names/a picture of the founders (or all three) on the packaging, then that company is accountable for the entire process, from birth to plate, including the farming, slaughter, butchery, recipe, packaging and regulations. Shouldn’t it be that the producers are the ones who should be putting their name on it? Not a governing body for one part of it. And, importantly, shouldn’t retail, as the final stage in the meat chain, take responsibility for their customers and their customers’ questions by representing their own standards? It’s no less responsibility for the farm and the slaughterhouse, as there is a vital trust between them and the retailer, and the retailer will not choose to work with them if they don’t trust them (or will cease trading with them immediately if the trust is broken). It is not okay for the retailer to say, ‘Not my fault’ as happened in the UK with the 2013 horsemeat scandal. Any regulation or certification paperwork that means that the retailer can avoid taking responsibility for their customers themselves is massively detrimental.

What’s really strange is that, in supermarkets’ defence, they do put their name on it. The dominance of ‘own label’ branded lines on supermarket shelves is massive now and it suggests they should have the greatest accountability and liability of all, but these supermarket brands have become so completely dominated by the message of ‘price’ that any attempt to prioritize taste and principles in this branding is lost. These ‘own label’ products are produced by contract to third parties, who in turn source through third parties (does that make a ninth party?) and we’re back to ‘Not my fault,’ and ‘There’s no way we could have known’… This is not good enough. Rather than national certificates for the rearing of the animals, let’s put the accountability back on the retailers for selling it. It’s a lot of pressure on them, but it’s a more practical definition of who is the final gatekeeper for this control and the retailer is the only person to whom most consumers have access to be able to ask these questions.

If the retailer can simply say ‘we know them and we trust them’, this nicely sums up this agreement. If the retailer is going to put their name on the pack and take full accountability, they must meet the farmers, shake their hands and ask them the same questions that consumers will ask them.

Maybe it’s impossible immediately and they can use a blueprint and a contract to get started with a farm, but I think retailers should meet every farmer from whom they buy meat. That’s why mass-produced meat just isn’t good enough – how is it possible to stock 3,000 shelves every single day and still know where the animals are from?

What if marketing was in charge of procurement and sourcing? Too often now, the marketing department is there for damage control, when the pressures of a price-driven modern food market make the brand and the message fall apart. What if the people who are responsible for the message and the brand, plus the sales team on the shop floor who need to answer their questions, what if they were in charge of where the contents of those packs are from? Wouldn’t that be a better way around than the financial department delivering annual targets for increasing margin, volume and market share? We could put the responsibility back on the marketing departments, and then we’d see how hard it is to sell something you know isn’t good enough.

The traceability question is also important to understand. If a retailer can say they source meat from ‘farms across the country’ (for me, this means the UK, but the same applies wherever the retailer is). With further interest, they should be able to explain (and prove) that the animal was born, reared, slaughtered and processed in the UK. That’s what I would call British meat. It’s not just patriotism or investing in my own economy; it stands for another set of checks and regulations to help the retailer tell the customer that they trust the sourcing and they know where the meat is from. It’s not to say that meat from other countries isn’t just as good, or as well farmed, it is simply to demonstrate that the retailer knows the farms and knows how they get the meat to us. The same applies for American retailers or Australian or French and so on. If you can trace the meat to a number of farms in the same country, you can show that you know where it came from. Of course there are extreme examples: for example, a pig’s carcass can be exported whole, but once a distribution wholesaler in the receving country removes the trotters, they are then permitted to say that the whole animal is the product of their country. This is an extreme, and there are mass suppliers that run checks and audits and strict sourcing regimes to import meat and who are not crooks, but it is being detached from the actual product that puts traceability at risk. Is it the marketing and sales team who are auditing the supply, ready to answer the questions properly? Almost certainly not unfortunately.

I’m not entirely naive, just an idealist and an optimist. Let’s not move animals around so much while they’re alive. Let’s not move carcasses around so much when they’re dead. A national meat supply is brilliant. It’s challenging, expensive and (given the ticking clock of shelf life constantly chipping away at your sanity) completely exhausting, but it can be a beautiful, admirable thing when it’s done properly. In a small country like Britain, ‘local’ is a bonus but ‘national’ isn’t usually more than about 300 miles away on average. In larger countries like Australia and America, using a similar geography to the one that humans use for their own sense of identity (regions or states, for example) is a pretty good start for working out how far your chilled/fresh food should travel. Again, I’m an idealist; it’s not that I don’t accept that the global food chain is out there, I just want to question those little parts of it that I could understand if I just try.

And now on to the last of my four questions, and the one that leads (seamlessly!) into the collection of cuts and recipes for this book…

WHAT DO I DO WITH IT?

This is my favourite question because it really covers all the other questions. When someone asks what to do with a piece of a meat, they’re showing an interest in the taste, where it’s from, what the price is, and whether it’s ‘good meat’. People asking this question are looking for more than a microwave lasagne or a pack of deli ham. To come to a meat shop and ask for cooking ideas is the start of a celebration of the taste of meat and nothing makes me happier than seeing that.

First and foremost, I like to eat meat. Which is why so far we’ve looked at what makes up our ‘taste’ response and hopefully have some ideas to help find our principles and priorities. However, more than this, I like to cook with meat as well as simply eat it. I like what a plate of different food becomes when one of the components is good meat, and I love the endless ideas and possibilities for cooking with it. That the same pig can be used to make anything from sausages needing 5 minutes to cook to a bone-in pulled pork shoulder (page 164) taking 4 hours to cook is amazing.

So to the question, ‘What do I do with it?’, I would respond with, ‘How much time do you have to cook it?’, because the possibilities and ideas are endless. And that’s the idea with the recipe collection here – a lot of classic recipes and my takes on classic recipes, which are put into an order to hopefully suit how much time you have to cook them.

Our modern meat kitchens are busy places, with ovens, microwaves, food processors, freezers… Not to mention tablets, televisions and mobile/cell phones… We cook and eat in a totally different environment from 40 years ago and, literally, millennia removed from when we started to eat meat in the first place. Though the wonderful thing is that the practice is still essentially the same. We do, fundamentally, follow the same cycle of sleeping and eating to fuel ourselves.

Look how the methods of Western medical science have transformed because of inventions and discoveries in recent history; how feats of engineering and design have revolutionized the way we can travel in cars, planes and trains; how the invention of the phone completely flipped how we communicate, let alone the way we shop and pay for food, with the development of credit cards, the internet, and so on.

But we still, 1.9 million years later, cook and eat meat. There is no reason for any of us, even a cooking novice or someone who has never eaten meat before, not to have the confidence to handle meat as part of this history. When it comes to cooking meat, all this practice has made us really, really good at it, and when it comes to cutting and preparing meat for cooking, we already have all the basic instincts and capabilities that we need to be able to do it (I will show this later).

More than anything I’ve ever been taught, confidence has been the most valuable. I’m pretty sure that confidence means you can do about 90 per cent of anything in the world and 100 per cent with a lot of training and practice on top. The same goes for cooking, especially for cooking meat. So I’m going to start with a quick list of some general and practical dos and don’ts – the don’ts have been learned from my own valuable mistakes – to start our celebration of cooking and eating good meat and building our confidence to know what to do with it.