Tim Hayward

A Cut Above

Can a masterclass turn an enthusiastic foodie into an expert butcher in just one evening? Tim Hayward joins some fellow meat nerds to find out

I don't know what is happening to food shops in this country. Not content with merely supplying produce, some are now branching out into education. All sorts of specialist stores are offering one-off classes for around the same price as an evening out. In the past few months, the places I shop at have offered to teach me baking, sausage making, cheese appreciation and the dark arts of the barista.

I can see the commercial logic behind it. Most of the people who patronise high-end food shops have plenty of cash, and a course is the perfect gift for a foodie partner. But how much can you learn in such a short time?

butchers

We arrived at the shop just after closing time to find butchers Chris Bragg and Karl Smith lurking outside - a pair of rugby playing Kiwis with vast hands. Our two fellow trainees weren't quite the trendy young novices I'd been expecting. There was a suave New Yorker and an intellectual Texan, and when the small-talk centred on the "dry-aged porterhouse at Peter Luger Steak House" and the "marbling in grass-fed Texas longhorn", I knew we were in the presence of committed meat nerds.

We spent the first hour watching the disassembly of a side of beef. These days, you don't often get to see a whole side outside of an art gallery so it is easy to forget what a staggering great hunk of meat it is: nearly two metres long, heavy enough to need two men to carry it and strangely beautiful.

Like many keen cooks, I've studied drawings purporting to explain the cuts of meat, but I've never understood them. I imagine they are about as much use in trying to find your way around a carcass as one of those ceramic phrenology heads would be to a brain surgeon. However, watching the side transformed into neat piles of recognisable cuts suddenly made everything drop into place.

The display was accompanied by an empassioned riff on the parlous state of butchery. Training used to take three or four years; both Bragg and Smith served long apprenticeships. But supermarkets have no need for a skilled individual who can butcher several kinds of animal in their entirety. Industrial butchery is handled on a production-line system where each operative spends his or her day repeating the same cut. This requires hours of training rather than years. Supermarkets don't need to put their butchers through apprenticeships, and small independent shops are increasingly unable to afford to.

Should this worry us? A traditionally trained butcher looks at the animal as a whole and, driven by the economics of the small shop, will sell high-quality meat but minimise waste. Good butchers offer a selection of carefully prepared cheaper cuts and may even turn some of the remainder into sausages. Supermarkets increasingly sell only prime cuts, which means that more is wasted or repurposed into processed products. If your idea of meat is a cling-filmed steak, perhaps it doesn't matter, but if you care whether a carcass is used economically then the loss of traditional skills is a problem.

Now came the messy bit. We were given knives, steels and a big lump of meat involving three fore-ribs. The process should have been simple. The fat is removed in a piece, the meat is "frenched" (trimmed down around the cut rib-ends), the joint is "chined" (the remaining portion of the spine sawn out), then re-wrapped in the beaten-out fat, and the whole neatly tied with string.

What takes the professionals around 12 minutes took us nearly an hour. My "neat roll" comprised three bones sticking out at irregular angles from an ineptly lashed bolster of meat, resembling an upturned and poorly upholstered beef footstool. On the other hand, I had just spent more time with my hands in meat than most civilians will in a year and it's that physical experience that makes these courses so useful. It is all very well, for example, to talk about hanging and ageing but until Chris dropped two pieces of 36-day hung fillet on the table and invited us to compare the smells I had no idea how complex an issue it was. The rich odours of the identically aged joints were subtly but clearly different, reflecting, as Karl explained, the unique mould cultures in the company's two ageing-fridges (one from each of their two shops). It was a bit like comparing a stilton with a roquefort.

A three-hour class was never going to transform me into a master butcher, but I did learn plenty about meat and even more about butchers - how skilled their job is, how passionate they are about it and how to ask for the best from them. The retail price of my three-rib roast I took home with me was around £30, which makes the £60 course seem well worth every penny. If bread-making, fishmongery and chocolate making are this good, I'm signing up now .



		A Cut Above Can a masterclass turn an enthusiastic foodie into an expert butcher in just one evening? Tim Hayward joins some fellow meat nerds to find out I don't know what is happening to food shops in this country. Not content with merely supplying produce, some are now branching out into education. All sorts of specialist stores are offering one-off classes for around the same price as an evening out. In the past few months, the places I shop at have offered to teach me baking, sausage making, cheese appreciation and the dark arts of the barista. I can see the commercial logic behind it. Most of the people who patronise high-end food shops have plenty of cash, and a course is the perfect gift for a foodie partner. But how much can you learn in such a short time? I decided to give one a go. I recruited a friend for support and booked a three-hour evening course in beef butchery at the Ginger Pig, an esteemed meat temple just off London's Marylebone High Street. We arrived at the shop just after closing time to find butchers Chris Bragg and Karl Smith lurking outside - a pair of rugby playing Kiwis with vast hands. Our two fellow trainees weren't quite the trendy young novices I'd been expecting. There was a suave New Yorker and an intellectual Texan, and when the small-talk centred on the "dry-aged porterhouse at Peter Luger Steak House" and the "marbling in grass-fed Texas longhorn", I knew we were in the presence of committed meat nerds. We spent the first hour watching the disassembly of a side of beef. These days, you don't often get to see a whole side outside of an art gallery so it is easy to forget what a staggering great hunk of meat it is: nearly two metres long, heavy enough to need two men to carry it and strangely beautiful. Like many keen cooks, I've studied drawings purporting to explain the cuts of meat, but I've never understood them. I imagine they are about as much use in trying to find your way around a carcass as one of those ceramic phrenology heads would be to a brain surgeon. However, watching the side transformed into neat piles of recognisable cuts suddenly made everything drop into place. The display was accompanied by an empassioned riff on the parlous state of butchery. Training used to take three or four years; both Bragg and Smith served long apprenticeships. But supermarkets have no need for a skilled individual who can butcher several kinds of animal in their entirety. Industrial butchery is handled on a production-line system where each operative spends his or her day repeating the same cut. This requires hours of training rather than years. Supermarkets don't need to put their butchers through apprenticeships, and small independent shops are increasingly unable to afford to. Should this worry us? A traditionally trained butcher looks at the animal as a whole and, driven by the economics of the small shop, will sell high-quality meat but minimise waste. Good butchers offer a selection of carefully prepared cheaper cuts and may even turn some of the remainder into sausages. Supermarkets increasingly sell only prime cuts, which means that more is wasted or repurposed into processed products. If your idea of meat is a cling-filmed steak, perhaps it doesn't matter, but if you care whether a carcass is used economically then the loss of traditional skills is a problem. Now came the messy bit. We were given knives, steels and a big lump of meat involving three fore-ribs. The process should have been simple. The fat is removed in a piece, the meat is "frenched" (trimmed down around the cut rib-ends), the joint is "chined" (the remaining portion of the spine sawn out), then re-wrapped in the beaten-out fat, and the whole neatly tied with string. What takes the professionals around 12 minutes took us nearly an hour. My "neat roll" comprised three bones sticking out at irregular angles from an ineptly lashed bolster of meat, resembling an upturned and poorly upholstered beef footstool. On the other hand, I had just spent more time with my hands in meat than most civilians will in a year and it's that physical experience that makes these courses so useful. It is all very well, for example, to talk about hanging and ageing but until Chris dropped two pieces of 36-day hung fillet on the table and invited us to compare the smells I had no idea how complex an issue it was. The rich odours of the identically aged joints were subtly but clearly different, reflecting, as Karl explained, the unique mould cultures in the company's two ageing-fridges (one from each of their two shops). It was a bit like comparing a stilton with a roquefort. A three-hour class was never going to transform me into a master butcher, but I did learn plenty about meat and even more about butchers - how skilled their job is, how passionate they are about it and how to ask for the best from them. The retail price of my three-rib roast I took home with me was around £30, which makes the £60 course seem well worth every penny. If bread-making, fishmongery and chocolate making are this good, I'm signing up now .

		© Tim Hayward 2005 - 2007