The CHEAPEST Cut of Meat Feeds Us Three Times

🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com You are standing at the meat counter and you have done what everybody does. Your eye went along the top shelf where the steaks are, you looked at the number, and you picked up ground beef instead. And two feet to your left, down at the end where the light is not as good, there is a piece of meat at a third of the price that will feed your family three separate times and taste better than the steak would have. Cheap meat is not poor meat. Cheap meat is meat that asks for time instead of money. My grandfather taught me on a butchering day when I was nine or ten, and he did it by letting me choose. The loin and the chops went one way, and the neck and shanks and shoulder went into what the men called the poor pile. I asked why we did not keep more of the good part. He did not answer. That night my grandmother fried a piece of the loin, quick, in a pan, and it was fine. The next day there was a pot on the back of the stove that had been going since morning with the neck in it. Then he asked which of the two I would rather have again. I did not have to think, and I remember being embarrassed, as though I had got it wrong. He told me the loin was easy to cook. The neck was worth cooking. What we go through: Why the price of a cut depends almost entirely on how hard that muscle worked Why connective tissue is not gristle to endure but the thing that makes these cuts worth eating The one rule: fast heat for the muscles that did nothing, slow heat for the muscles that worked The cuts by name on beef, pork, lamb and chicken, so you can walk up to the counter and know what you are looking at Why a chicken thigh tastes of something and a breast wants help Browning first, liquid only partway up, and why this is a braise and not a soup Why it is done when a fork turns in it, not at a time or a temperature Why meat still tough after three hours has been undercooked rather than overcooked Three meals from one piece, and why the third is made from what most houses bin The lean cheap cuts that must never be cooked this way Asking the counter which part of the animal it came off, which answers everything The plain limits. This is not faster. A shoulder wants three or four hours and you must be in the house. What you are trading is money for time. A pot on a Sunday makes three suppers in the week, and that is the way round it. There is no scheme in any of this. The dear cuts are at eye level because they are worth more to the shop, and the cheap ones are down at the end under names that tell you nothing. It is only that nobody makes a living telling you the best pot of food you will eat this month starts with the cheapest thing in the case. This week, go to that counter and do not look at the top shelf at all. Find the chuck, or the shoulder, or the shank, and compare the price per pound with the steak. Then buy one piece of the cheap one and put it in a pot on a day you will be home. Tell me in the comments what the two prices were in your shop. And if you have told me your county before, tell me instead what your mother or grandmother made out of the cheap cuts, because half those dishes are going out of the world unwritten. Everything about the pot came from my wife, because the kitchen is hers and I only carry the wood and the meat to the door. If you want the cooking side of it properly, from her rather than from me repeating it secondhand, we keep a separate channel for exactly that. Amish Cooking. The putting up, the baking, the preserving, and what to do with a shoulder once it comes off the bone. Link below. Next time we go back to the knife, because you cannot carve a shoulder with a dull edge, and there are two tools on this place that matter more and that almost nobody can sharpen any more. I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com. The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #EliasYoder #CheapCuts #Butchering #Frugal #GroceryBudget #SlowCooking #Braising #ChuckRoast #BoneBroth #OldWays #SelfReliance #Homesteading #MeatCounter #SaveMoney #Cooking