Two things. First, Aaron:

The Apple Market on the corner of Mission and 47th *always* has slabs, packaged rather nicely: the two solid tail chunks are folded over into the slab. We just finished gorging a couple of those suckers down, about half an hour ago.

Second, OCT27:

The Price Choppers in KC are different from the Price Choppers in Upstate NY. Here, they're locally-owned and don't exist outside of the metro area. The NY chain is in a bunch of Adirondac cities, including Plattsburgh, which is where I shop every couple of weeks. It's a good chain, a bit higher-end than the KC group. The P'burgh store has a dynamite bakery and an absurdly kick-butt seafood section. I bought a bag o' Maine steamers there last week for $4.99. Yee-hah!

Don't know nuthin' bout no R-squared lady. : )

Geo

Are you shopping in NY State and importing the food into Canada? If so, are you encountering any problems with Customs Canada or US Customs?

When I used to buy stuff at Windsor Public Market to take back to Cleveland, US Customs hassled me as to why buy food there.

The only thing Canada ever hassles us (me and my buddy Jean) about is the amount of money we spent. If we claim c. U$ 50 or so, they don't complain. But we absolutely can't bring in any booze--that gets taxed enormously. After 48 hrs we get 2 bottles of wine, duty free. : )

A huge number of Canadians shop for stuff in Plattsburgh. Gas, especially! There's a BP station about half a mile south of the border and there's always more Quebec license plates there than Yank plates. It's about half price compared to Canada.

I'm never hassled coming south--but I don't ever try to bring meat or fruit. The US Border Guards grab that instantly.

Geo

Geo wrote:The Apple Market on the corner of Mission and 47th *always* has slabs, packaged rather nicely: the two solid tail chunks are folded over into the slab. We just finished gorging a couple of those suckers down, about half an hour ago.

Good to know...I'll have to check that out. Threw some Scimeca Italian sausage on the smoker, and I was quite favorably impressed.

Mike G wrote:Yeah, I was about to say, I sure miss having a butcher to cut my Select beef...

Hell, ten years ago I tried to get Jewel to give me a package of hamburger in something other than 1-lb. increments (I wanted about 1-1/3 lbs.) Couldn't be done. (I also asked once at Dominick's for 6/10ths of a pound of ham, and the girl standing next to the digital scale stared at me and said "How am I supposed to figure that?")

Same thing happened to me at "our" Whole Foods (Ashland and School) once. I wanted two-thirds of a pound of something. (A half-pound seemed too little, a pound seemed too much.) The girl behind the take-out counter didn't seem like a functional idiot, but she could not understand that two-thirds of a pound means .67 on the scale--surely as easy a target to shoot for as .50, 1.00, or any other. My conviction that people who work behind counters with digital scales should understand how to turn simple fractions into decimal-point numbers resulted in a verbal struggle between us (i.e., I was not willing to get a pound just because she was a functional idiot or because our public schools are not doing the job we pay them to do, and she wasn't willing to weigh me an amount she couldn't understand and was resistant to seeking help from another clerk).

She's not there anymore, and I have no reason to think the other folks behind the counter are as arithmetically challenged as she was, but this experience chastened me into changing how I ask for amounts, just because I never want to go through that nightmare again. Instead of asking for a third-pound or two-thirds, I'll say "a little under a half-pound," or "a little under a pound," or whatever. It's better than staring into the abyss.

Aaron, speaking of butchers and sausage: the Sun Fresh in Westport makes their own bratwurst and it's very very good. It's not Wisconsin, but it's extremely tasty. Give it a try sometime.

I gave a couple of pounds of Costco bratwurst--which is good meat, but no other taste so far as I can perceive--8 hours of cold [with the outside temp at 12°F, it couldn't have been anything OTHER than cold] smoke on Saturday. Boy, that really did something for it. Yummmm.

Geo

The mention of an Apple Market at 47th and Mission (which must be in Kansas City, because I've never heard of a north-south street called Mission here) reminds me that the Apple Market which actually is here, on Clark between Belden and Fullerton, is a full-service grocery store with a real (and absolutely excellent) butcher counter. All the meat is prime, and so are the butchers who work there. There are free-standing butcher shops around, but I guess not many true grocery stores that have real butcher counters anymore--and certainly not butcher counters with meat and butchers as good as this one has. I hope it withstands whatever winds of economic change are surely trying to blow it down at this very moment.

I think that you need to define butchering. Certainly all the chain stores, and I would guess many of the local butcher shops, get their meat pre-cut, in the sense that the sides have been seperated into various long cuts and then cryovaced (or as they like to call it, wet-aged). Most stores then cut the longer cuts into roasts and steaks in house. I know that the Dominicks in Bannockburn does. The butcher shops will have more unusual things that they cut themselves, which leaves them with the extra bones, etc, but I bet even paulina mkt doesnt get in whole carcasses or even sides. As one of the few people here on LTH that buys meat at Dominicks, I am happy to defend them. You do have to be very selective with their ranchers reserve, but their sale prices cant be beat. When they have bone in ribeye on sale for 4.99/lb, I may have to look through 50 steaks to find 5 that I like, but those 5 will be fine steaks. If I dont see any that I like, the "butcher" will cut me some others. Certainly not prime quality, but they will stand up to most of the choice grade sold at more expensive places.

-Will

I was wondering that myself, WillG. On the one hand, you can find a lot of variety stuff at Paulina-- they must get whole hogs in since they have leaf lard, caul fat, all these things you just don't see anywhere else (and leaf lard is hard to find because it's usually sold off at the packer level to commercial bakers, at least according to that Saveur piece I read long ago, so they pretty much have to have gotten the whole hog). But I suspect you're right that they get primals of beef because there's not nearly as much diversity in the beef on offer; the superior offering there is the selection (Paulina choice is as marbled as a lot of the prime you see) and that things are trimmed and cleaned up so beautifully (as I learned when I compared the tri-tips I bought at Costco, with all their silver and fat, to the immaculate one I'd previously bought at Paulina).

To answer my and WillG's question-- I asked one of the butchers at Paulina yesterday if they got in whole hogs. He said no, they get-- are they called hog primals, or is that only beef? I don't know. Anyway, they get smaller pieces than a whole hog, but also get a lot of things (such as fatback and leaf lard) other places don't get any more because they still have the old German clientele, and the occasional new yuppie like me, who want these things.

(I was looking for pork liver, which he said they get in but use up themselves usually making liverwurst and the like. He referred me to Halsted Packing House, which you'll probably know better as the place you see driving up Halsted from downtown with "Fresh KILLED Lambs" painted on the side. I went in there and they were very helpful, very cheap... and very creepy, scarlet-colored rib cages stacked in an ancient case under diseased-yellow lighting, more indistinct forms hanging like Francis Bacon portraits in the dim darkness of the refrigerator case behind. I highly recommend a visit for the absolute antithesis of the meat-grows-in-yellow-styrofoam-packages school of modern meat marketing.)

Halsted Packing House
445 N Halsted St
Chicago, IL 60622
(312) 421-5147

Mike G wrote:To answer my and WillG's question-- I asked one of the butchers at Paulina yesterday if they got in whole hogs. He said no, they get-- are they called hog primals, or is that only beef?

Mike,

Yes, pork primal cuts do, in fact exist. I'm looking at pork primal cuts in The Meat Buyer's Guide right now. Under shoulder, there are nine different variations listed.