welcome to the healthy bit podcast and with me hayley and my co-host henry herbert we are going
to be talking about how to buy good meat so you are in for some fantastic information from henry
because he used to be a butcher didn't you henry so tell us a little bit about this birth
yeah well good hey hayley how you doing yeah i guess one of those i sometimes feel a bit like
a swiss army knife i don't know whether it's a or jack of all trade master of none one or the other
but um yeah in a in a previous life i ran a butcher shop and um um i was working as a chef
and my where we have our bakery in chipping sodbury there's a beautiful butcher shop that's
been there for i think over 150 years it's got a real history and uh and i as a child used to go
in I actually used to go with my dad to market and buy the cows so I kind of grew up around this
butcher shop and there was a point maybe about 15 years ago though it's probably still happening now
where butcher shops were shutting faster than pubs so you know everyone you know everyone's
starting to buy all their meat from the supermarket and we're kind of losing that kind of high street
and the poor butcher shop was you know collateral damage in the in that moment and um and I always
kind of vowed that uh it'd be really sad if Chipping Sobri lost its butchers and so I was
working as a chef i'd recently married i have a great time and then we went traveling and whilst
i was away traveling my dad sent me a message saying um actually the butcher shop's up for sale
sadly the old butcher had died and uh and his son didn't want to take it on or wanted to have a
career change and no one wants to buy it so he said you know do you fancy putting him you said
that you always thought it'd be a shame of the butcher shop shut so hey can you come run it for
just for you know for a few months um whilst you're looking for a job and i was like well i haven't got
a job you know i'm traveling so you know it could be um could be a bit of fun and i actually just
thought it'd be really easy so i was like yeah fine i'll run a butcher shop you know why not i
like you know like animals like cooking cooking cooking meat etc how hard can it be turns out
really really hard um but my my goodness what an education yeah so me and my wife ran uh this uh
village bushery shop for uh three years and uh it's actually it's still running now so we we
managed to find another bush to take it on and it's still going so actually i kind of feel like i
I was a bit of a custodian of it for a brief period.
And then I kind of moved back into the bakery.
But yeah, I guess it was a real learning curve for me in terms of how to spot good quality meat.
And I'm personally quite a big meat eater.
I do like it.
My wife would probably be vegetarian.
She definitely loves her veggies.
And so there's always a little bit of conflict.
But I think, yeah, running a butcher shop, it gives you that kind of peek behind the curtain of like how the meat industry works.
and you know the good sides the bad sides and also you know how to spot good quality meat and then
also when you've got whole animals actually there's the kind of the expensive cuts the ones
that you've all heard of but then there's actually there's the more unusual stuff actually um you can
you know get get some you know they're cooked well you can have some really delicious meals
and actually get a bit more bang for your buck so so i guess today's just a bit of a actually it's
a request from a message that we had sent in so this does show that if you you know if you want
us to talk about something please do let us know um yeah so this is just a bit of a discussion about
all things meat how to spot it and how to you know get the most out of it because meat is expensive
and um and rightly so but but we don't want to be you know wasting our money so yeah so you've
mentioned a couple of times there henry that you've learned a lot about how to spot good meat
good quality meat yes so for novices and for non-butchers if you're going into your perhaps
your local butchery or if you've got one in your village something like that yeah you walk in they
look really attractive I always think in terms of they've got lovely meat counters you've got like
other bits in the shop how do you know what you're looking for and how do you know um that what you're
being served is is generally good meat unless you get to know the butcher as you because they might
tell you the background about where it's come from well well actually that's probably my first
point would be would be to get to know your butcher is actually you know it's probably a bit
like i would think a butcher is a bit like your hairdresser or your barber that you know it's quite
a personal service so when you go in and you want you know whether it's i want this i've seen a
recipe and i want this specific cut and i'm not quite sure what it is or you know i've got 10
people coming in for dinner or you know whether it's you know you're doing christmas and actually
you're trusting them to kind of make a fairly impactful decision a bit like when you get a
haircut you know if you don't trust the person who's got those scissors you might end up with a
you know a dodgy mullet or something you know we've probably all got a story where we've ended
up with a dodgy haircut and um and so actually getting to know your your butcher is i think it's
it's critical because you'll build up that relationship and you know it's a you know meat
is expensive and so you know you ask you know spending decent money so actually it's worth
putting that effort in um but of course you know if you just walk into a butcher shop and you don't
know who, you know, you're new in a town and you've, you know, you think, oh, that looks
attractive. Let's go in. How do you know that, you know, what you're buying is good quality?
Because there's always that allure that you can just go to the supermarket and you know that it's
probably going to be a bit cheaper and you're not going to have, you know, the friction of having to,
you know, talk to someone or, you know, quite often it's quite intimidating, isn't it? When
they're there with their steel and their knife and they're kind of doing that kind of sharpening
sound and feel a little intimidating. And so the supermarket feels kind of safe and it feels kind
of easy and you just pop it in your basket. And,
But actually, you know, the advantage of using a good butcher or a good farm shop is that you can actually ask some questions to kind of validate that what you're getting is good quality.
So a few things that I would always ask is when it comes to butchery, particularly when it comes to beef, and often beef is, you know, more expensive.
So you want to make sure that if you're buying a steak, you're getting a good steak, etc.
So there's something called carcass butchery.
now when you when you when you buy a cow at the abattoir it'll be chopped into four pieces so it'll
be the fore quarter and the hind quarter and this is just because carrying a whole cow unless you're
the world's strongest man it's very difficult but like a quarter of a cow weighs about 70 to 80 kilos
and that's just about manageable for someone to carry on their shoulder you know from the fridge
to the block so the cow comes in four quarters now uh in a in a good butcher they'll be buying
in a whole carcass so they'll get four quarters two fronts and two backs and um and they'll be
hanging it on the bone so they'll they'll buy it probably maybe 10 to two weeks old so it's already
aged a little bit of the abattoir and it'll come to them and then they will they'll age it for
probably another week and then on to two to three weeks more for your yeah you're kind of your prime
cuts so your ribeyes your sirloins your steaks where you want a bit more kind of a mature flavor
whereas you're kind of stewing steaks but you're the stuff that you'd be using for mints actually
you don't need to age it more than kind of three weeks is fine so if you're doing carcass butchery
that requires a skilled butcher because to take a whole cow that's probably costs well actually
these days a whole carcass is probably about two thousand pounds so you're buying an incredibly
expensive thing and now you're going to chop it up and sell it you need to make sure that you're
doing it properly so if you're if you're a supermarket it's much easier to buy it in what
they call them primals so at the abattoir they will quickly chop it down and then they will
vac pack them in the in the large joints so you'll have your sirloins your top sides your silver sides
your chuck you know your different cuts and they'll vac pack these downs and then you can buy them and
it's known as boxed meat so as a butcher you know if you're very busy and you don't have enough
skilled resource it's very tempting to buy boxed meat in because you just literally you get out the
box you'll have a sirloin off the bone you take it out the plastic you just pat off the the kind of
um the liquid that's been swimming around in the in the fat pack bag and then you can slice it up
put it out on the counter and you walk in as um you know a mrs megan's to come buy your uh joe
blocks to buy your your steak and you're you're you're trusting that they're that they've bought
or that they've done this properly and actually they're kind of doing what the supermarkets are
doing um uh and it's just it's easier so as a telltale sign if you can see large bits of meat
on the bone that's normally a good sign that they're um they're doing carcass butchery and
you'll see what large bits of meat look like it you know it's enormous you know 75 kilos of meat
it's like the size of a human if that's hanging somewhere or on the block then you know that
they're buying whole carcass cows and they're doing it properly if their prep is all out the
back and actually it's just a lovely display at the front the question i was asked is have you got
any bones i want to make some stock or i want to give my dog a bone because if you're doing carcass
butchery you end up with a lot of bones and as a butcher you have to pay to get the bones taken
away so that's just a really like low friction question you can just go and say hey i want to
make some stock for my bone broth because i want some good collagen because i want to have lovely
skin and nice hair as we've talked about um and if they go oh sorry we haven't got any bones
then that that for me that's a red flag of like why haven't you got any bones surely there's a
bone which is if you haven't got any bones that means that you're probably buying in box meat
which means if your prices are significantly higher than the supermarket what value am i
getting you know because i might as well just go to this now when it comes to you might be asking
well what's what's the big deal you know if you're just buying a sirloin steak why does it matter
whether it's come off the carcass and you know the butchers prepped it for you or whether they've
bought it in box if it's more convenient you know why why does that make a difference the main thing
is is that when when you have large pieces of meat if you eat it if you were to slaughter a cow and
then eat it straight away it'd be incredibly fresh and it would be tough and chewy and would have a
an insipid flavor and beef's one of these great proteins that it actually improves with aging now
you can take it too far and i believe there's a restaurant in um sweden that ages for like 200
and they like wrap the whole thing in tallow and whatever And apparently you need a very tiny slither because it so intense most people don need that like that that too far but actually kind of like uh you see it on
on labels you know 28 day aged or 30 day age or 45 day age and that aging process is um uh um the
the proteins are kind of breaking down and it's becoming more more tender now you can do that
dry aging or wet aging. And dry aging is essentially where you're doing it on the bone
and you're allowing moisture to come out of the beef. I would think of that as like,
say you've made a gravy and it's tasting a little insipid. One of the ways that you can make it more
flavorsome is you can reduce it. So you boil it away and you remove some of that liquid and you're
intensifying the flavor. And then you end up with a more aromatic, more intense flavor. It's the same
with the beef if you allow it to dry age moisture is coming out and so you end up with a more tender
piece of meat but also something that has more flavor now this is that the crux of it is that
moisture is money so if you're you know if you're a big if you're a big supermarket or a big you
know producer of meat and you know every gram that you're losing off the weight is profit off the
bottom line well you're not that keen on that you want to keep as much liquid inside the meat as
possible so they came up with this genius thing which is wet aging where they essentially they
vac pack it so you you take the meat off the bone you then vac pack it it's very hard to vac pack
with the bones in because the bones are pointy and they blow the bag and then you end up with
airflow and then that can spoil it so they take it off the bone as quickly as possible so within
you know probably four or five days it's butchered down done at the abattoir they'll then vac pack it
and now it can age in the bag.
Now, the great thing with that is that it's maturing.
So in theory, after 30 days, it'll be more tender,
but it hasn't lost much weight.
So when you sell it, you're buying a 200-gram steak,
a dry-aged one, a wet-aged one, they're way the same.
But when you come to cooking it, all that moisture has got to come out
and you don't get that kind of intense flavor.
And that's why the meat shrinks, I assume, is it?
Yeah.
yeah yeah and it's probably most visible with bacon bacon's where you get because you can
if you buy cheap bacon you put it in the pan the first thing happens is a load of white water comes
out and and then it has to like dry out and then it starts to caramelize whereas when you buy good
quality bacon no water comes out and it just caramelizes straight away and um and that's
because it's been the way that they've cured it one is dry one is wet and um water is money if you
can put more what if you can keep more water in your meat you're going to make more money and uh
and unfortunately our food industry is entirely or not entirely is the majority of it is profit
driven so i assume henry do do they sometimes inject these meats with extra water to basically
well i think i might have mentioned at christmas the um the con of the self-basting turkey that's
probably the most blatant one I've seen where they are advertising that they've added water.
But I guess, yeah, with like bacon, yeah, it's, you know, if you make it at home and you just rub
it with salt and a bit of sugar and a bit of black pepper, maybe a few bit of thyme, bit of rosemary,
et cetera, lots of liquid will come out of your bacon. And, you know, after seven days, you then
wash it off, leave it to dry, air dry for a few days in your fridge. Then you come to slice it and
cook it, you're going to get delicious bacon. But of course, if you submerge it into a brine,
it cures much quicker and also water goes in but actually on really cheap bacon they slice it and
cure it is in slices so they're not even curing as a whole thing which might take a week or so
they're curing it individually in slices which takes probably you know 20 minutes so they're
literally just sliding it through and it's incredibly quick because obviously time is money
and also the more surface area the more it can absorb that liquid so you know it's a cured product
but actually when you cook it it shrinks you know and you end up you know it's crap anyway and i
think it's it's a total false economy so you're getting a poor quality product and also a load of
water that you've paid for even if the price per kilo looks cheaper you've got to be careful and
it's other things added in as well has it to preserve the shelf life within the plastic that
it's in so there's other disadvantages to doing it that way and like like you say you could just
ask your book so going to the butcher you could two simple questions yeah have you got any bones
and also maybe how old is the or how many days has it matured and that would give you a bit of an
idea as to yeah and you could just ask the great thing with beef if they're buying if they're buying
it on the carcass all carcasses will have a tag saying which farm it comes from so you can ask
that question it's quite easy like so i guess it's probably a good thing of legislation is that i think
it was maybe i don't know exactly but after the whole horse meat scandal you know there was a bit
more kind of like rigorous traceability to make sure that people weren't being scammed you know
removing corruption from the from the industry so it's actually it's fairly easy as a customer just
to ask and actually a lot of butchers will you know if they're buying good quality meat they'll
write it up on the board being like this cow this week is from you know x farm 25 miles away because
it's like like when i was a butcher when i was buying you know animals from the abattoir i wouldn't
always know the farm personally but like it's not difficult to find that information out and then
just write it up because I was interested and I was passionate about the meat and I was buying
good quality animals and so I therefore wanted to share it with my customer and I kind of you know
and so why would I lie about that you know it's kind of but that's you know um and not all butchers
will do that I guess you know I was probably you know kind of young and enthusiastic and I guess
maybe some were a bit more kind of old school and stuck in their ways but but generally speaking you
know if you chat to someone who's passionate about it you can normally tell whether they're
going to tell me crap you know like if they're bsing you you know you normally know and um so
for me they would be some telltale signs like if if you know if there's no bones and you know
they're not they're not hanging and they don't know where it's come from you know chances are
it's coming from argentina or ireland or you know it's it's imported because it's cheaper and and
therefore you might as well just buy it from the supermarket because you know the quality is not
going to be a huge difference the one thing i would say and i don't want to completely beef about um
or bad mouth supermarket meat,
particularly when it comes to beef and lamb,
if it's British, okay, so there's,
particularly on the internet and, you know,
fancy restaurants, you'll hear a lot about grass fed.
Now, grass fed is, for me, ultimately the best,
you know, like a cow is a ruminant and it's,
you know, it was built to, you know, to eat grass
and that's its natural diet.
And so when you see all the kind of,
the horror stories of, you know,
big american farms where they're on basically in on standing on concrete and they're just eating
corn and soybeans and stuff and it's not their natural diet there there's no they're not moving
around they're not on grass you know they're on concrete that is a very different product we don't
have that in the uk most pretty much all beef in the from the uk will be grass-fed they may finish
it for the last kind of 10 to 20 percent of its life on grain just to bulk it up because they want
to get a bit more extra weight so they get more money but actually for 80 of its life it's been
on grass and we've got we're you know it's rained for 41 days straight in the uk we've got great
grass so like so actually if you're in the supermarket and you're buying beef and it's
british even if it's not the best it's still going to be better than what you you're buying
from like america so like though i think there's a lot of like freak out that like you know um
around supermarket meat that it's all awful actually it's not for things like chicken and
pork you know a lot of kind of budget chicken and pork probably is not great because it will be barn
reared or you know won't have had access to access to outdoor space it you know it's probably had
lots of antibiotics and you know all sorts of stuff um whereas sheep again you don't really
tend to get factory farm sheep they tend to you know they're pretty good at just eating scrub land
up in the hills and stuff and that's where most of them live so even cheap lamb from you know from
the supermarket um though actually no lambs are cheap it's all really expensive but it'll be pretty
good um but it's more around kind of like how it's been finished when when you're getting it
from the abattoir some of that might go to mcdonald's some of that might go to the supermarket
some of it might go to the butchers but then if the butcher is treating it differently they're
dry aging it they're you know they're um they're chopping it on site you're going to get a better
quality finish and then also the of course the much more premium cows and stuff tend to go to
the restaurants or um or the high-end super high-end um butchers because that's where they
attract the most value yeah yeah okay so so that's with the the kind of beefy products how about like
bacon sausages in terms of in in the supermarkets and i know you can buy them in supermarkets
obviously like say probably quite cheap meat and they're usually full of nitrates and i know
some supermarkets actually do have nitrate free bacon yes how and i think before when if you look
at sometimes when you buy it from the butchers if you turn it over occasionally it does say it's
still got nitrates in is that yes in every case or what role does so so i guess sausages are you
know i mean there's there's a saying i'm going to get it wrong but it's like you know don't don't
look don't look what's in the sausage because obviously you know it's it there's an assumption
that it's all the crap so i guess the thing the thing with sausages is that in in the uk we have
minimum meat content there's there's a there's a limit of how little meat you can put in which
you know you can look at that as kind of reassuring or not reassuring it's quite low i think it's like
66 or something you it doesn't so a sausage doesn't actually have to be it's not 100 meat
um it can be quite a lot of other stuff and that other stuff tends to be cheap filler so bread so
rusks uh which is what they're called it's basically it's a dried breadcrumb um it doesn't
have yeast in it so it doesn't ferment.
But it kind of adds cheap filler Whereas in the continent in France it illegal They not allowed to put cereals into sausages and that why their sausages tend to be meatier and a bit coarser so they they
they tend to you don't have like hot dogs you have more kind of like you know sausage with
cassoulet or like um you know that they tend to be kind of um like slow cooked because they're a
bit kind of coarser and chunkier and they tend to be a little drier because actually the bread
crumbs act as little sponges and it kind of absorbs the moisture so you end up with that
kind of squeaky kind of banger but of course uh you know a cheap a cheap budget sausage will put
the absolute minimum meat they can get away with because they're trying to keep it as cheap as
possible so when you're eating a cheap sausage it can quite often feel quite bready because it's
actually probably 40 percent bread so you're almost getting your your your your roll inside
the sausage whereas um when we used to make our sausages um i was quite snooty about it and it
started off by putting no rusk in,
but actually the British customers liked
that little squeaky, kind of slightly juicy sausage.
So we ended up doing about 10%.
So we were 90% meat, 10% rusk.
And for me, that felt like a good level,
like it was still premium.
It had a lot of meat in it,
but it was a little bit juicy,
but not, you know, it wasn't too bready.
So depending on the butchers, you know,
will depend on how they're doing.
I guess the temptation of adding preservatives
to sausages will be if you're a butcher and you're you know you've only got two staff say
you might only make sausages once a week so you need those sausages to last and look presentable
for you know five six days and then not go off in people's fridges so the temptation is that you
just put just a little bit of preservative and it just you know just keeps them keep some shiny
stops them from you know and i think that is always going to be the case and most butcher
shops that i've been to you ask them pretty much i would say all of them put some form of nitrate
in or you know some kind of preserving but just just to stop them looking sweaty and same with
bacon it's like you know British consumer is so dialed into pink bacon when they cook it that if
you don't have nitrates and it goes gray straight away they think it's gone off and um so it's
almost like an education piece like the nitrate particularly in dry cure bacon all it's doing is
meaning that when you cook it it stays pink and actually it's not doing a huge amount else maybe
in the kind of the cheaper wet cured stuff maybe there's another benefit that I I'm not an expert
but particularly when it comes to you know dry aging or try dry curing and then if you're then
smoking it as well the nitrate really is is not doing a huge amount apart from it stays pink
and having worked in it run a butcher shop for three years if you if your public won't buy it
because they think it's gone off it's it's a terrible business model so you're like you're
in this kind of rock and hard place of like well i might think that nitrates are irrelevant
but if my consumer won't buy them well now i've lost my business so like it's it's you know it's
it's hard i guess isn't it with the with the nitrate you say like it's a bit like um apricots
they shouldn't really be that orangey color they should be brown yeah you buy dried ones
so so actually everyone thinks when they buy a packet of dried apricots they should be still
that orangey color yes so in terms of the nitrate is it an organic product that they use what do they
actually like what is the nitrate bit well it's it's um the stuff that we used to use it came in
the bucket it was called saltpeter um and it was quite hard to get hold of because i think it's uh
it can be used to make explosives uh in the wrong hands i never made an explosive i don't know yet
um so much about a bag of fertilizer and some uh nitrates i believe i um i could do some i could do
some googling but or ask chat gpt but i think it comes from like cave walls or something i don't
know i think it's like it's a it's a mineral like it's it's essentially it's a salt it's a natural
salt but it's it's quite it's strong and like so you only need tiny tiny amounts so so if we were
curing bacon we would put say we put a kilo of salt on it'd probably have less than one percent
nitrate to that kilo of salt so it's a very small amount and uh but but i but i know that i remember
you mentioned when we did the ultra processed food episode that you said that nitrates was a
bit of a kind of red flag for you and i i've since been looking and obviously it's in quite a lot of
cured meats isn't it it's it's probably you know the amount i was putting in i don't know i you
know i haven't made bacon for a few years um and probably if i made it at home i wouldn't bother
because it's quite hard to buy it i just use um um it's the sulfate as well sulfites sulfate sulfites
It's that too, isn't it? It's those elements. So, yeah. So in terms of the bacon side, because, you know, the World Health Organization, since I think 2015, have said that bacon and sausages are a carcinogen, a grade one or the highest form.
But I guess, does that depend, do you think, on how that's actually being produced and how it's been stored and what's happened to that particular meat might have an impact on it?
I think like, so we, we, so we used to make our own ham. We used to, you know, we used to,
you know, I was a big believer in that we should make everything from scratch. And, um, and you,
you know, we, the, the, the, um, the, the, the kind of the sundries wholesalers that we would buy
spices from and pepper and salt and stuff, you know, you're getting your dry stores,
they would have these kinds of pre-mixes that would then, you know, so you could buy like
lincuture sausage flavor, you could buy salami mix, you know, you could buy these kinds of pre-mixed
things that were just convenient and they just said you know add 100 grams to a kilo of whatever
and it'll make a certain product and obviously lots of butchers aren't chefs you know then then
they they wouldn't trust themselves to like get that korma chicken flavor whatever they're doing
you know sticky sauce on they just pre-buy it in and so a lot of those things are probably red flags
so if you go into a butcher shop and you see lots of chicken and sloppy sauces that that they're not
they're almost certainly not homemade and they're probably absolutely riddled with all sorts of
sulfates and nitrates and you know preservatives because they're kind of designed to keep the meat
looking nice in the counter so you so i but but then you just you know just buy a chicken and
then make the sauce yourself you know like it's not it's not that difficult i think that's you
know if there's anything that i want to preach on this podcast is that it's better just to do it
yourself because then you're in control so like go to the butcher and buy the good chicken and also
the the good chicken that they're using is going to be in that sloppy sauce it's just that the
coating on the sloppy sauce is probably not great and um yeah and yes if it is a home what
for the is there things to watch for the chicken as well so like um a chicken i mean
is it a tricky one so so chicken's a tricky one because i i pretty much would only buy organic
chicken but actually it's really hard to buy organic chicken in a butcher shop um because
organic chicken is super expensive i mean like probably you know a two kilo organic chicken in
a butcher shop is probably going to cost you you know pushing 30 quid whereas you know you can get
a barn chicken from audi probably for eight quid you know that's that's a lot of money and so i'd
just rather have beef because like i know that with beef you're kind of a bit more you're a bit
safe like you you know that it's grass-fed you know that it's kind of it's not you know been
pumped full of hormones and this kind of stuff whereas chicken feels like you know if you get
the wrong one um it's going to be quite cheap so i i guess you just have to you know ask them where
are they from like are they you know is it free range because a lot a lot of butchers you i see
you know they'll sell amazing beef the lamb will be great the pork they might you know they might
be a heritage pork might be like an old spot or a british lop or you know whatever you know they
might have a kind of heritage breed to it nice bit of fat on it and then the chicken quite often
it's just barn reared because it's um and it's because people see chicken as cheap and you know
It's like they want to buy a pack of chicken breast probably for a tenner.
You know, they want to get five big chicken breasts for a tenner
and not really think too much about it.
And maybe they feel, I'm buying it for my local butchers,
therefore it's going to be high quality.
And actually, it's probably the same quality that you'd get from the supermarket.
So actually, the chicken is the one thing that, yes, you be careful with the chicken,
but the other meat, especially the beef, is probably...
It's so cheap to produce chicken.
Well, no, it's not so cheap to produce chicken,
but you know you can produce chicken incredibly quickly um and i like we we quite often go on
holiday in france and they'll have their poulet fume which is i think it's like farmyard chicken
and you know essentially it's like a you know these chickens are like they're quite leggy they've got
small breasts they've got big legs and they're quite often sold with the head on and um and you
know this chicken will have been racing around the farmyard and they've got real flavor but us
brits we're just like we don't want to do with them because we're like it's tough like they're
chewy the breasts were sinewy you know like but of course the french cook them you know they do
cocavan you know they they um they cook it for a long sloped time because they know it's you know
this this animal's done a lot of moving and it's not just this kind of super tender thing that you
know that the kids are going to just you know slip down easily and um and you know that's that's where
the you know us the british consumer is used to a kind of a fat chicken that's not done much
movement and is incredibly tender and um and to produce that chicken you kind of you know they're
not caged but they're just you know they're they're in barns they're warm they're fed incredibly
quickly until you know they put on loads of weight and then they're killed pretty quickly you know
it's uh the cycle of a chicken is very very short i think i'll get the days wrong but it's around
about 40 days from like start to finish if you quick i've got a nice butcher shop and they sell
a hundred day chicken and it's more like the french one you're like it's only a hundred days
I mean, that's like a third of a year, you know, whereas you think like a cow minimum, it's like 18 months, two years, you know.
So is that something to ask the butcher then? Like how many days were the chickens alive?
Yeah, it'd be a good one. That might put them on the spot slightly because my experience is most, you know, unless they are really passionate about chicken, most of them.
they'll be like
a lot of butcher's chicken
comes from a company
called Bannam
and they based in Norfolk and I pretty sure they based in Norfolk and they just like they the chicken you see in like I spot the boxes and all the butchers
You go in there, they're like, oh, Bannam chicken, Bannam chicken, Bannam chicken.
And they're just, you know, they're a good, you know, they're a fine chicken.
They're probably, the butchers are probably getting the better quality
than the supermarkets, you know, so they're probably paying a bit of a premium
for the slightly nicer birds.
But they've all come out.
They've all come out the same sausage machine.
yeah so chicken's a tricky one yeah so i'm interested in henry so if you go what do you
tend to order from the butchers do you avoid buying chicken then do you not have as many
yeah i wouldn't i wouldn't buy chicken often from the butcher i mean i would buy occasionally but
not not not too often for me yeah i'd go beef i actually think that uh like minced beef is great
because the nice thing with minced beef is that it um it tends to be you know four quarter stuff
which is just slightly more hardworking muscles, but it's a bit cheaper. It's got more flavor.
The temptation is to go for the really lean stuff, but actually I always ask for a bit of extra fat
because one is it's a bit more flavor. Like when you cook it, it kind of self-lubricates and it's
a bit juicier. But also I'm not afraid of fat. I like a bit of fat in my life. So whether 10 to
20 and particularly if you're making burgers you know a high percentage of fat makes them really
super juicy and um but but also you're getting all that kind of sinew and all that kind of
connective tissue which is all packed full of collagen so it's all good stuff and then because
it's mince it's all broken down so you don't it's not doesn't get stuck in your teeth for chewing it
because it's gone through the mincer so actually it's a really good way to get a kind of you know
mixture of different different proteins different muscle meats bits of sinew bit of connective
tissue, a bit of fat, you know, all mixed in together. And then it's very easy to eat. So you
can make meatballs, you can make, you know, burgers, you make bolognese, all that kind of
stuff. So for me, that's like, you know, probably the one I use the most, you know, it's super
universal. I mean, obviously, Sunday roast, you know, it's nice to have a piece of topside or a
bit of sirloin, but you know, it does cost more money. I used to say things like, you know,
kind of like brisket or ox cheek or opstail were kind of like the cheaper cuts. But sadly, in
recently is they've become quite fashionable so actually even they're quite expensive it's it's um
it's it's hard to find a cheap um a uh a cheap cut probably you know liver is probably still
pretty cheap actually oxart if you can if you can tolerate it and you probably have to prep it
yourself but you can buy a whole oxart for about a fiver and uh in terms of weight they're probably
two kilos now you'll you'll get quite a lot of trim so you need to you know and it's it's quite
gruesome because you've got all of the kind of um the valves and the vents and the you know all the
aortas yeah all those things um so you trim all that off but then you slice it thin into little
steaks and um you'll probably get let's say you know two weeks worth of you know a steak a day
kind of thing and um and you just got to cook it quickly and quite pink rest it it's quite useful
if you if you're frying in a pan to deglaze it with a little bit of sherry vinegar or some red
wine vinegar and some butter and the sherry vinegar just it just it's quite a strong flavor
and so that acidity just helps kind of like mellow the kind of ironiness of it because obviously the
you know it's at the heart's done a lot of pumping it's got quite a kind of irony bloody taste but
actually super delicious and and that is very cheap but but you know i'm not i'm not saying
that everyone's going to run out and start buying there's not going to be a run on auction but but
for me of all of the kind of like kind of cheaper cuts the offals that one's the easiest i i don't
mind liver but you know i've eaten spleen a few times but you know it's not it's not a family
favorite but yeah oxal is quite an easy one yeah my kids would probably prefer when i bought phillips
steak home you know yeah that's it and i i remember on a previous on our christmas podcast you you
gave a great top tip to actually get the turkey legs instead of just the the turkey crown that
was such a good top tip so so if people want to keep their prices down because they want they want
to they want to go to the butchers they want to try and get the better quality meat and you know
they don't want to be fooled by what could be going on at butchers if like you say if the meat
generally comes from the same place unless it is a sort of grass-fed kind of beef what kind of yeah
is there like a a kind of shopping list that you'd go right you could you could go in and ask for this
and this would actually be a good balance between price and good quality meat what what would the
average family go and order well so you know if you're in if you're into you know if you're looking
for steaks um obviously you know your ribeyes your sirloins your fillets you know they're going to be
the most expensive things you can buy because that's the prime cuts and that's where the butcher
makes all their money on um so there are cheaper steaks you can buy so obviously rumps tend to be
bit cheaper a little bit chewier but um but things like skirt steak is a great one or bavette
is the french name it comes from this part here and it's kind of got this kind of long kind of
kind of like strands of protein with the muscle but you as long as you cut against the grain
it's incredibly tender and that'll be you know possibly a third of the price of fillet so it'll
be more priced like like mince mince mince beef so you know kind of 10 pound a kilo or so so that
is a great you know for if you're doing steak sandwiches or steak and chips you know that is a
really good one if you if you can get it hanger steak or anglais is the french name the british
name is known as gut steak which is not very appealing so we'll go with the american or the
french and that is actually an internal it hangs off the the diaphragm diagram diaphragm of the
cow so actually it's classified as offal and so when they pull out all of sorry we're getting
really gruesome here when they when they when they pull out all of the kind of the liver and the
kidneys and all that not kidneys all the um the kind of awfully bits the intestines it's a piece
of muscle that kind of hangs off the diaphragm that holds it all together and so it's classified
as offal um and there's only one per cow and is absolutely delicious you know um so i quite often
order that from the butcher but you they tend to that'd be the kind of thing that if they're not
selling it they could get it in for you and so they would get it from the abattoir it doesn't
get hung because it's it's it's a steak that's kind of it's not on a bone so you can't really
hang it um but actually it's got great flavor and it tends to be pretty cheap they might make you
prep it yourself so you might have to get your knives out and trim off all the fat and sinew
and stuff but that that you know is one of my favorite steaks it's got so much flavor i think
the french used to call it the butcher steak because it was like the one that they didn't
sell they kept it for themselves because it was like the little secret so that's a really good
one but again any kind of you know any you know i think i think mince is great you know actually
long live mince and and um you know when you see supermarket mince and it's in the packet it's all
perfect you open it up and it goes brown really quickly that's because it's they pump the bag
the trays with oxygen so they don't know they pump them with co2 so they don't oxidize sorry
other way around and so they look fresher for longer but actually that mince isn't fresh quite
often in a butcher shop you know they'll quite often mince it for you because there's no point
mincing kilos and kilos and kilos of mince because it will you know it doesn't last very long so
actually you can quite often see them you know take that piece of meat put it into the mincer and
straight into the bag and so you know you're getting good quality fresh meat you know there's
no you know they're not putting all the crap and it hasn't been hanging around for weeks and weeks
in a fridge or in a freezer etc so yeah so i think mince is great i just i buy in bulk and then just
portion into you know half half a culot like um 200 gram bags and then we just you know it's an
easy one to whip it out and then you can cook a quick meal with it so i think yeah i think mince
is a good it's a good shout and then that's good because i think we're made to think that mince
isn't such a healthy option for me aren't we but it's interesting how these things kind of
yeah back around and yeah yeah yeah that's that's that's great i think yeah that's amazing
information i think my stomach has rumbled basically throughout that yeah i haven't
this is a subject i i could go for hours like and i think we can do more and see that we've
talked quite on time but um yeah it's a passionate one of mine i think you know the things i always
live by is you know if you can support your local butcher do because once they're gone they're gone
you know that it's such a it's such a um probably unattractive business model that um not many are
opening though there has been a few opening in kind of bougie parts of town but uh but yeah if
you've got a butcher do support them and uh and also like maybe meat for a treat you know like
if meat is expensive and you you know but you want to you know like try and eat good quality but just
eat it a little bit less you know i mean that would be you know that would be my advice you
know rather than kind of you know just buying kind of cheap chicken or cheap pork actually you know
kind of hold out and have something decent because it does taste nicer and i think you'll you'll enjoy
it more well i think if you think it goes back to the old-fashioned days that's what they used to do
didn't they they used to have good quality beef on a sunday um and they used to kind of try and
save the best meat for that that particular day or maybe a couple times a week but yeah make it
last don't they and um yeah and i think if you do it like that it's um it's a healthier way to get
your protein um and to get your iron levels as well because if you think about it you can get
your iron and failing that you just need to befriend a local butcher or someone who can
butcher up a cow i.e me and um and then go in and buy a whole cow and then uh get yourself a chest
freezer that's probably the cheapest way to do it but uh yeah yeah they're about two thousand
quid and and yeah about 400 kilos so you know you you get you get a lot of meat it'll last you a year
yeah i think i think we should get people's uh feedback see how they got on with their local
visit and um what meat they bought and what things so maybe on another episode henry you
can talk about um some nice recipes to do with some of those more unusual cups that
some of us like myself have never heard of yeah yeah totally yeah no i'd happily happily do that
yeah let's well let's let's do a part two oh great chat to you as always hayley
you