Meat Monger

meat monger mēt mon·ger (noun)

1. A dealer in or trader of meats.

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. I was blessed to have my mother and brother fly up to visit me for the holidays. We did a little bit of everything. I tagged along on some of Mom’s business meetings, we toured Central Park in a rickshaw, saw School of Rock on Broadway, and ate some amazing food. If you are visiting New York City anytime soon, be sure to check out my Eats page where I list some awesome places to “break bread.”

I am now down to my last two weeks in the Fleishers Butcher Apprenticeship. For the past week, I have been stationed in one of their retail shops in Park Slope, a section of Brooklyn. It is a charming, old-school, neighborhood butcher shop. There, I am shadowing the head butcher, Josh Meehan, and assisting with setting and maintaining the meat cases. The shop is a much more fast-tempo environment with customers rushing to procure their meats for the holidays. I’ve had to set aside my cut glove, which I had grown accustomed to. Now, sans glove, I really need to be on my game everyday and careful not to chop a digit or two!

Josh is teaching me how to take the sub primal cuts coming from the Red Hook production facility and transform them into a more refined case cut. This entails cleaning the meat of any fats, silver skin, and other inedible while forming the meat with our blades into our own kind of carnivorous art.

I head back to Texas the end of next week. I’m excited to see the family and be home for the holidays, but I’m going to miss Fleishers. It’s been a great experience.

Jerky Game Strong

Most people work five days a week just to get to the two-day reprieve called the weekend. On those two anticipated days, you couldn’t drag the average person back to the office - especially in New York. New Yorkers would rather be shopping, or hanging at a new “slice shop” (Brooklyn slang for pizza shop), or even tripping roller bladers in Central Park. Not this guy. Fleishers holds butchery and cooking introductory classes at their locations a few Saturdays a week.  As an apprentice, I’m allowed to go, free of charge. So anytime there is a class in Red Hook and it doesn’t interfere with the TCU Football game (Go Frogs), I’m there.

A couple of Saturdays back happened to be the Beef Jerky 101 class taught by Fleishers’ own Jerky Master, Chris W. Before joining Fleishers, Chris had his own craft jerky business. His jerky was so good that Fleisher’s decided,

If you can’t beat him, hire him!

So they did.

The Jerky Master

I arrived an hour early before class to check on the two massive 100% grass-fed briskets that we had been smoking for the past 18 hours. One would be served at the end of the class along with my new favorite craft beer, Six Point Sweet Action.

Six Point Sweet Action

After an intro into Fleisher’s and a short company history by Sophie, Chris began to educate us on jerky basics:

• the meat to use
• the marinades
• and the various ways to dehydrate it

Meanwhile, Sophie passed around semi-frozen blocks of eye round for students to began slicing into paper-thin strips. (Tip: Semi-frozen meat is much easier to handle because thawed meat flops around too much and is difficult to cut consistently into thin strips for jerky.) Once everyone had his or her jerky meat sliced, Chris explained how to properly marinate the meat and the differences of wet and dry marinades.

The spices

Seasonings at the ready

My jerky, ready for the dehydrator

Next, we were encouraged to concoct our own marinade mixture and then zip-zam, with the help of the cryo-vaccum machine, we sealed our marinated meat in a bag to take home for dehydrating.

Fleishers classes are chock full of information and you always come home with some sweet gear.   For this class, Sophie handed out goodie bags with a Fleishers Craft Jerky kit. These kits are great for DIY jerky projects at home and include two different spice blends, non-stick drying screens, and recipe guide. If you can’t make a class, you can grab a kit here online.

Oh yeah, and maybe the best part, remember those massive briskets I mentioned earlier? I got to slice those bad boys up for the class to enjoy with some "damn fine" Brooklyn Brine pickles and we washed it all down with some Six Point Sweet Action.

Sweet Action

Final Note: Since the jerky class, I’ve begun doing my own jerky experiments in the kitchen when I’m not in the cutting room. With the help of the head chef, I’ve been mixing up some pretty interesting flavors. I’ve got one ready, but the jury is still out. It’s called Christmas Coffee and I’ll keep you posted.

Jerky test: Christmas Coffee

Breaking Lamb

In case you didn’t know, for the past two months I’ve been apprenticing at Fleishers Craft Butchery in Red Hook, Brooklyn.  Fleishers is the best when it comes to craft butchery and locally sourced, sustainable meats. Over the course of my training, I have learned to break down whole carcass' of pigs, lambs, cattle, and poultry into their primal cuts.

Definition: A primal cut is a piece of meat, usually a muscle group, that is initially separated from the carcass in the butchery process.

There is obviously more division taking place after this initial cut, but primals are the building blocks for butchers. I'd like to share a bit of what goes into breaking down a lamb to a primal cut.

There are four main primal cuts to a lamb. Yeah, I’m sure you can find a chart on Google illustrating 15 different primals and 30 different sub-primals, but let's keep it simple with these basics:

1. shoulder primal
2. rib primal
3. loin primal
4. leg primal

The lamb shoulder primal

Lamb Rib primal

Lamb loin primal

Lamb leg primal

After I’m done with a lamb, it looks a little like this...

A full lamb broken down

Oh, you see that handsaw?

Yeah, we learn the craft by doing everything old school and that includes a handsaw and muscle. As you can see in the above photo, I’ve broken this lamb carcass down into the four primals plus some extra cuts. I've also taken off the neck, fore-shanks (front legs), hind-shanks (back legs), and the spareribs.

Hopefully, you are still reading this and your head isn’t buried in a trashcan. If it is, have fun eating broccoli and carrots forever. However, if you’re dying to know more… I strapped a GoPro to my cap so you can get a bird's eye view in my Breaking Lamb video.

Check it out here.

Fleishers Craft Butchery: Day 1

That morning when I stepped off the bus in Red Hook and looked down towards the end of the pier, it hit me. This was my future. This is what I’ve been planning and waiting for and now, here I am. Standing in front of a weathered, wharf warehouse, waiting for my life to kickstart. At the end of the pier there was a small sign hanging on a fabricated metal door. It read “Fleishers Craft Butchery.”

Let’s do this.

As I entered the building I was immediately embraced by my new coworkers: Timmy, a fellow apprentice from Chicago who was tired of trading stocks and my instructor, Jason, who left the DA’s office in New York to become a craft butcher. I could tell I was really going to like these guys.

Straightaway, I felt like a kid on the first day of school. New teacher. New friends. New supplies. I was given my equipment that included chain-mail and knives. The chain-mail apron runs from the top of the chest to just above the kneecaps. Its purpose is to protect important things like femoral arteries. The chain-mail glove, which I’ve come to greatly appreciate, lets me be free with my non-cutting hand and I don’t have to constantly worry about nicking myself. Of the three knives I was given, one was a 5-inch boning knife, another was a 6-inch boning knife, and lastly an 8-inch “breaker.”

My scabbard of knives and my chain-mail glove

Jason started us off slow and had us de-bone a lamb’s neck. He gave us step-by-step instructions on how to break down a lamb, all the while educating us on its anatomy. After a quick “warm-up” break (because it’s 37 degrees in the processing room) he pointed to the rack and told us rookies to give it a shot.

Timmy and I were slow and we asked a lot of questions. But practice makes perfect and by the end of the morning and six lambs later, we had become faster on the full carcass break down as well as savvier on the lamb anatomy.

Carrying lamb carcasses from cooler to cooler.

Of course I came to Fleishers to learn, but I was starting to see I would be gaining so much more than butcher skills. I could immediately sense the tight community these craft butchers have. They really believe in the idea of slow food, locally sourced food, and conscientious food. While Timmy and I were hacking away in the walk-in cooler, the Fleishers chef was busy preparing us lunch. I couldn’t believe it. Everyday these folks stop, sit down, and share a beautiful meal together. Family style. What a nice surprise and delicious blessing.

2015-09-23 12.28.08

After lunch we were back to the cutting block for a lesson in pork. Jason gave us a demo and then prompted us to do the same with our own sides of pork.

Again, I was slow and loaded with lots of questions, but Jason was patient and his clear step-by-step method simplified everything for me.

Introduction to pork

The beginnings of a pork breakdown

Pork breakdown

At 4:15 Jason instructed us to start cleaning our equipment and prepare to wrap up the day. Here’s the problem,

I didn’t want to leave.

My first day of apprenticeship rocked and I didn’t want to go back to my apartment and stare at the hairless cat. Gratefully, Sophie, Fleishers' social media guru, asked me if we wanted to tag along on a company outing.

Are you kidding me,

Hell yeah, I’m going.

(to be continued)

A view from the wharf upon "Lady Liberty."