The vision of $4- and $3- and even less than $2-a-pound meat, while surely still with us, could be on the decline. Wishful thinking. But at least bulk purchases are down. That’s according to a report from the American Meat Institute and the Food Marketing Institute released this week at the Annual Meat Conference in Dallas.

Funny that there is an actual event with the same name that we give our brother-in-law’s visits. But more important were some of the findings in the report, which asserted that yes, value-shopping for meat is still with us; consumers haven’t all of a sudden given up deal-hunting. But data shows that consumers may have finally begun to realize at long last that they don’t have to find dirt-cheap per-pound prices, they can just buy less at once and thereby save money.

Perhaps it’s the realization that they don’t need to make a Bacon Explosion every night and that sane portions will do (and their kids may even stop that creepy wheezing brought on by the extra pounds they are carrying). Perhaps word has gotten out to the flyover states that the cheaper meat the higher the incidence of animal cruelty and every time they looked at that “$1.99/lb” price tag what they saw was beakless chickens stuffed ten to a cage or cattle specked in their own shit on feed lots.

Alas, the report, dubbed “The Power of Meat” (cue Huey Lewis), doesn’t point to this conclusion. Price per pound is still the determining factor, according to the consumers polled. In fact, they actually want the price-per-pound to drop MORE. Per the report:

“Shoppers who say they are buying less spend nearly $14 less than the national weekly grocery bill average. For retailers, elimination of items rather than substitution is a dangerous development. Shoppers are also less interested in family packs and report that more substantial discounts are needed to prompt them to purchase in bulk.”

They say the couple that butchers together stays together.  If so, the eight years and that Josh and Jessica Applestone have spent together (butchering at their shop Fleisher’s Grass-Fed and Organic Meats in Kingston, NY for six of them) bode well for their future. The two met at a restaurant in Saugerties, NY called New World Home Cooking where Josh was a chef and Jessica a server. They call their shop “an old-fashioned butcher shop offering meat sourced locally, free of hormones or antibiotics, and full of real farm flavor.”

When they first met though, both were vegetarians (though Jessica cops to having caved to the occasional bacon craving). And they formed together an ideology around meat consumption and production that they now share with others both in their shop daily and in classes offered there.

When asked why and how he started eating meat, Josh blames Jessica. “I had a motorcycle accident — before I met Jess,” he says, but explains that he was still limping around after they met. “Jess had gotten tired of it and strongly suggested that I change my diet. I had tried to start eating fish and after some basic research I discovered that the environmental impact of the fishing industry was, and still is, worse then the meat industry’s.  It eventually helped me make the decision that our ‘products’ were going to be ‘cleaner’ than anything I could get elsewhere, so here we are.” He adds, “Also, I tried our bacon — after Fleisher’s had been open for 6 months — and I never looked back.”

Jessica explains, “I was an unhappy vegetarian and I wanted to start eating meat again — just not the stuff that supermarkets were selling, and it was too much for me to buy a side of beef. Farmer’s Markets were only open in the summer so it was out of my need that we opened Fleisher’s so that I could get one perfect fresh lamb chop and the butcher could tell me how to cook it.”

Josh and Jessica have a book (coauthored with Alexandra Zissu) coming out this spring aimed at those who also want to be mindful with the meat they eat, encouragingly a growing segment of the population. “The Butcher’s Guide to Well-Raised Meat: How to Buy, Cut, and Cook Great Beef, Lamb, Pork, Poultry, and More” can be pre-ordered now.

Josh says his goal for the book — as much as he doesn’t want to sound like “a meat hippie” — is for it to teach and, “for people to take lessons or suggestions from the book to ease their minds when handling meat. Not necessarily to eat more meat, but to have the freedom to make choices for themselves rather to have to trust an invisible entity that is telling them this is what they need to eat.” Jessica adds that she’d also like to bust a few myths such as those surrounding “wet aging, portions sizes and the idea that organic HAS to be expensive.”

This is their Butcher Bio

Based: Kingston NY — Hudson Valley, about an hour and a half outside NYC

Ethos: “Eat more veggies” (Josh), ”Eat less meat, just BETTER meat.” (Jessica)

Favorite cut: Sirloin Flap (Josh), Lamb Sirloin (Jessica)

Most under-rated cut: Teres Major (Josh), Lamb neck (Jessica)

Favorite preparation: Raw (Josh), Cooked (Jessica)

Something you really thought would be good but wasn’t: Duck sausage with cherries (Josh), Testicles (Jessica)

Favorite side dish: Potatoes any style as long as there’s salt involved (Josh), Noodles — pasta any type, any kind, any ethnicity — Obviously we are both carb freaks though we usually eat salad as a side dish. (Jessica)

Best offal: Heart (Josh), sweetbreads (Jessica)

Worst offal: Testicles!!!! (both)

Favorite meat/beverage pairing: Beaujolais with any land animal (Josh); Beer with Korean-style short ribs (Jessica)

And now our short answer round

A knife should … cut, hold an edge and be easy to sharpen with a hand steel and be comfortable in your hand in a number of different positions. (Josh) Not be too expensive and NEVER be put in the dishwasher. (Jessica)

The best part of a pig is … the cheeks (Josh), the belly (Jessica)

A hamburger should … be fatty and rare (Josh) … and covered in cheese (Jessica)

You can never have too many ... loyal customers (Josh), turkeys at Thanksgiving (Jess)

The thing most people don’t realize is … the amount of hanger steak per animal is only one (Josh), that dry-aging is a form of controlled rot and that even “natural” nitrites like sea salt and celery juice are still nitrites (Jess)

A farm/supplier we like working with is … Ted Johnson, because we grew up with him in the business. He was the first person who we contacted. He’s shown us a tremendous amount and we will always be grateful to him.

The best part of being a working couple is ... the trust already established — it relieves a lot of stress on one hand.

And the most challenging part is … having Jess not kill me when I come up with another crazy idea (Josh), not killing Josh when he comes up with another “great” idea—it’s so tempting, there are so many knives, a grinder . . . (Jess)

The best advice we ever received ... If you touch a knife to it, then you should be getting a retail price for it.

The best advice we ever gave is … Don’t do it! (Josh), Love what you do, or don’t do it. (Jess)

Now, we assume our readers are a sophisticated and enlightened lot (we also assume we have readers, but that is the least of our delusions) and that you all are well aware of the great many benefits of using fresh lard in cooking vs. using the bricks on supermarket shelves that would outlast Twinkies, etc… so we won’t bore you with all the details here.

Unless you live somewhere olde-timey and home-spun, or, ironically, in New York City, it might be hard to find proper fresh lard in a store. We ran into this problem recently, when, having relocated to Chez Boucher Ouest, we realized we were now roughly 3,500-miles too far from Chelsea Market to run over and pick up a tub (yeah, we make bad jokes; live with it).

The recipe for Pork Rillons in Stéphane Reynaud’s indispensable Pork & Sons, however, called for fresh lard. We briefly considered substituting duck fat, but then heard an old Frenchman’s voice in our heads, one of Stéphane’s cronies. And we can tell you, ladies and gentleman, that he was not saying things repeatable in a family publication such as this. So, out we trudged, in search of lard. To no avail, of course. None was available locally. What was available close-ish, was two pounds of pork fatback. And you know what you can do with that don’t you?

Herewith and henceforth, our recipe and advice for producing your own fresh lard:

The entire process is fairly simple, sort of like juicing a pig, except you can’t do it with one of those contraptions Jack LaLanne sells on late-night TV.

Step One: Find pork fat. This is tougher than it sounds. You’d figure with the mountains of bacon Americans are eating (and even making sculptures out of) that the stuff would be all over the place. Alas is is not. You will, of course, also want to make sure that the fat is coming from a reputable source, a supplier or butcher whom you trust, just as you would any meat you bought. We started with about two pounds of fatback with the intention of producing a bit more than two cups of lard (we did so on the advice of the butcher at the Fatted Calf in the Oxbow Public Market, and we have no reason to believe he’s a liar).

Step Two: Cube the fat. This part is lots of fun. The slightly pinkish slabs of fat make you feel sort of like you are swimming in Mr. Reynaud’s wonderful book. Chopping them is way more fun than it should be. Cut into strips, then divide the strips into cubes. There’s no reason to go nuts. You should end up with a mountain that looks most like are about to host a reading with wine and cheese, but resist the urge to sample as you’ll be sorry. The chopping process has the side effect of making everything — your hands, the knife, the camera with which you are trying to take pictures for your meat blog — feel like it has been slathered in pork fat (and indeed everything basically has). This is why you may notice that we took precautions and poured our beer in a large coffee mug.

Step Three (optional): Buy a fan. Your kitchen will soon be full of a cauldron of bubbling pork fat. Just saying.

Step Four: Start cooking the fat. Heat a large heavy pot over medium-low heat (yeah, decide yourself what that means: it’s a little hot but not so hot that the mess comes to a boil or turns brown), and pour in half a cup or so of water; immediately start to add the cubed fat, until you have at all in there and then give it a good stir with a wooden spoon. Go sit down. Finish beer.

Step Five: Wait. Keep getting up every ten minutes or so to stir the pot and refill your beer. After about two beers the mess should really be sizzling and popping.

Step Six (optional): Refill mug. That’s not really optional. We were just trying to see if you were paying attention, and attempting to make the recipe seem more complicated by adding steps. You’ll also want to stir the pot more frequently, now. The cracklings that are forming (yes, that is the bonus) should be floating to the top.

Step Seven: Cool it down. When the cracklings sink down, that sucker is done. They may not all sink, but you can definitely tell nothing is going on anymore. Turn off the flame and switch the hi-fi to some reggae station.

Step Eight: Strain. Yeah, we don’t mean you should make a great effort (no big ting, mon), but you should line your strainer or colander with some cheesecloth and strain the rendered liquid into a jar or glass bowl (which at this point should look sort of sludgy and yellow). What you have left will be cracklings. Eat, and throw the liquid away.

Step Nine: OK, no, we’re kidding. Put the container in the refrigerator over night and the next day you’ll have some creamy white lard that looks like the hair cream on the cover of that Black Keys’ record. Then you can start to finish your Pork Rillons (which hopefully you’ve not had marinating for 48 hours the way we did, because you, dear reader, are a planner.)

In the interests of globalization we’ve reached across the pond to feature a Briton butcher. Meat fans, please meet Mr. James Morgan of Stilton Butchers. The Morgan family runs a pretty sizable operation over there, 13,500 state-of-the-art sq-feet in Peterborough delivering to the restaurant industry like a UK family of LaFriedas, and direct to consumers via the web and phone straight out of the beautiful countryside in Cambridgeshire county (from where the cheese that is so good crumbled on a filet does not come, fun fact; another fun fact, Stilton Butchers gave away tickets to see the local football club, The Posh).

And if you want to see bacon (and you do, we know you do, we’ve seen the Google search numbers), they’ve got the real stuff. But we admire how they don’t get haughty about it, like some Brits do (they even offer a “streaked bacon” to their customers — and see below where James offers the most decorously magnanimous answer we’ve ever gotten from an Englishman when we’ve asked about American bacon).

Hails from: Peterborough England

Based/ shop located:
Unit 2 Reynolds Industrial Park
Stevern Way Edgerley Drain Road
Peterborough PE1 5EL

Mantra: Quality fresh meat delivered to you door

Favorite cut: Ribeye Steak

Most under-rated cut: Braising Steak

Favourite preparation: French Trim Rack of Lamb

Favourite side dish: Sweet Potato

Best offal: Lambs Liver

Worst offal: Ox Kidney

Favourite meat/beverage pairing: Ribeye Steak and a nice cold Beer

A knife should always be sharp.

The best part of a pig is the shoulder.

The main problem with American bacon is we don’t see it enough in England.

A hamburger should be cooked fully.

You can never have too many spices.

The thing most people don’t realize is that fresh chicken is not always more expensive than frozen, because by the time you take away weight loss from defrosting, the chicken breast will weigh less than when it was frozen.

Everyone should read a book on correctly cooking meat.

The best advice I ever received was, “Never sell something you would not eat yourself.”

The best advice I ever gave was, “Never sell something you would not eat yourself.”

With Memorial Day, the official kickoff to summer barbecuing, right around the corner.  Mark Bittman, writer of the popular Minimalist column for The New York Times, reminded readers of a column he wrote a couple of years ago about grinding your own hamburger meat.

Why bother with such an endeavor? Because, he argues, when you buy pre-ground meat “you have no way of knowing whether the meat came from high- or low-quality animals. It could come from dozens of animals, and they could all be poor-quality animals — old dairy cows, for instance, rather than cattle raised for beef.” Not everyone has access to high quality butchers in this day and age unfortunately, and many end up getting their pre-made patties at the local King Kullen. Of course, Bittman does not expect you to get a meat grinder (although you could). Instead, give the steel blades of your food processor a taste of red meat.

With a 12-cup processor, Bittman says you can do a few pounds at a time. Not bad.

A few of his rules:

Fat equals flavor. “If you start with meat that’s 95 percent lean, you are going to get the filet mignon of burgers: tender, but not especially tasty. If you use chuck or sirloin, with 15 to 20 percent fat — still quite lean by fast-food standards, by the way — you’re going to get meat that is really flavorful, along with the good mouth-feel that a bit of fat brings.”

Take it easy, twitchy. As satisfying as grinding may be,”you want the equivalent of chopped meat, not a meat purée. The finer you grind the meat, the more likely you are to pack it together too tightly, which will make the burger tough.”

Don’t treat it like a piece of meat. “Handle the meat gently. Make the patties with a light hand, and don’t press on them with a spatula, like a hurried short-order cook.”

Spice it up. “The burger is the cousin not only of the steak — which often takes no seasoning beyond salt and pepper — but also of the meatloaf and the meatball, both of which are highly seasoned.” He suggests the basics like minced garlic, onion, parsley and Worcestershire sauce, but encourages experimentation: “It’s hard to go wrong here.”

And now the most exciting part, for rare-meat eaters, at least: “If you grind your own beef, you can make a mixture and taste it raw.” (Salmonella isn’t killed until 160 degrees and rare meat is usually cooked at 125.)

Now all you need is the charcoal.

Welcome to the first in our new series: Butcher Bios — a few questions for our favorite meat jockeys (unless they object to being called that, then we’ll stick to butcher). Our goal is to cast about far and wide and collect a staggering database of butchery knowledge. Failing that, we’d like to have a little fun and find out what beer you all drink with your burgers.

To lead off the series,  we have none other than Mr. Tom Mylan of the Meat Hook in Brooklyn, which, in addition to being one of the only places in the city where you can find chorizo-stuffed duck hearts, is also a swell place to take classes. Some of them — all classes are in partnership with the Brooklyn Kitchen — aren’t even about meat, though the best ones (sample: “Gin and charcuterie pairing“), of course, are.

Based: The Meat Hook, Brooklyn, NY

Ethos: Local, Sustainable, Whole Animal, Hard Working, Hard Drinking, Awesome, Fun

Favorite cut: Bone-in Beef Pin Bone Sirloin

Most under-rated cut: Pork Shanks

Favorite preparation: Beef Sashimi

Something he really thought would be good but wasn’t: Anal

Favorite side dish: Caesar Salad, preferably tableside.

Best offal: Heart, any kind. It’s the gateway drug to offal: Looks wierd, tastes amazing!

Worst offal: Beef Liver, dogs love it. I don’t.

Favorite meat/beverage pairing: Cannibal Sandwich (steak tartare on a burger set-up) and a Pepsi Throwback

Favorite Bands: Lynyrd Skynyrd, Black Moth Super Rainbow

Favorite Book: Fargo Rock City

Favorite Meat Book: The Beef by Moriyasu Tsuneyoshi

Favorite Cookbook: The River Cottage Cookbook

Favorite Movie: Jaws

Favorite TV show: CSI Miami

Favorite whiskey: Wild Turkey Rye

Favorite beer in a can: Busch

A knife should be sharp. Beyond that it should be cheap, good quality and have a comfortable wooden handle. Plastic [handled] knives make me crazy: they’re ugly and dangerous.

The best part of a pig is the skin. You can make so many great things out of it: Ragu, Cotechino, Scrapple, Members Only jackets, Footballs…

A hamburger should be made from mature (25-29 month old) hanging weight (never cryo-ed box beef) 70-30, ground twice through a medium plate and grilled rare. Grinding a little lamb in there is never a bad idea either.

A butcher should be friendly, happy, helpful and excited to sell you something great. That whole surly, condescending butcher thing makes people scared of cooking, afraid of buying meat and leads them right back to getting the crap at the supermarket. If you’re not excited to get out of bed every morning to work hard and love people you should hang up your knives and go work at the Post Office.

A good customer should keep an open mind, not be a recipe slave and listen to their butcher: it’s in his (or her) best interest to make your dinner the best it can possibly be.

A steak should be expensive. Cheap steaks taste weak. Steak should be a special treat, a cellebration, a good time. Get a good one, cook it right and share it with the people who make your life worth living.

You can never have too many meat hooks. Wanna hang a country ham? Meat hook. Wanna hang a plate? Meat hook. Beef Leg? Meat hook. Get that 6-pack of Busch out of the way? Meat hook. It’s not like we named our shop the Meat Hook by accident.

Everyone should read Little House in the Big Woods. The hog butchering section is amazing, it’s like a nose-to-tail how-to book from the days before refrigeration!

A farm I like working with is Kinderhook Farm because Lee cares, he’s the best and he listens.

The best advice I ever received was “There is a reason why they call it a bone saw” -Aaron Lenz

The best advice I ever gave was “Stop cutting towards yourself!”

The question we get asked the most — well, not the most, but enough that we should remark upon it — is, “Where can I get a butcher bra?”

Now we don’t judge. You can wear whatever strikes your fancy under your clothes. Perhaps you are a masochistic version of Ed Wood, who, played by Johnny Depp, loudly proclaimed, “I like to wear women’s clothes! Panties! Brassieres! Sweaters! Pumps!” and you are just itching (no pun intended) to get yourself a chain mail bra. And like the industrious Mr. Wood, why stop there?

Yes, chain mail panties are within your reach, big guy. And practical, too. In the Atlantic story where he introduced the tantalizing specter of the butcher bra, Tom Mylan also warned of the danger of genital mutilation being a job hazard.

They are a couple of ways you can go about this. You might want to make your own garb, for, you know, the sakes of privacy and propriety. There are some pretty thorough tutorials on how to make and assemble pieces of chain mail, but exactly how to turn them into lingerie is up to you. But be creative. Since the untimely passing of Alexander McQueen the fashion world is hungry for fresh talent.

However, you need not do it yourself. As we mentioned previously, German supplier of butcher equipment Stahlnetz makes about every article of clothing out of “chainmesh” you can imagine, and what they don’t have (aforementioned panties and brassieres) they are only too happy to custom make. (Just as the Stahlnetz man seems only too happy to demonstrate how his glove will work.)

Take it from the Stahlnetz man, and be “safe and comfortable from head-to-toe.”

There are many reasons to love Dickson’s Farmstand Meats in Chelsea Market, beside the fact that they have one of the most simply awesome slogans you are likely to come across — Eat Meaty.

In this video made by Liza at Food Curated, proprietor Jake Dickson outlines a few other good reasons to shop at his store. No. 1 probably being that he visits all the farms that he works with to ensure that they live up to his standards (which he outlines), and No. 2 probably being that he describes the taste difference between grass-fed and grain-fed beef like he is a sommelier talking about the difference between two Riesling grapes.

Tune in next week when Dickson’s chef Gabe Ross makes terrine. (No, seriously.)

We’ve always known that the Atlantic Monthly was a fine publication, cutting a large swath through politics, art,  social issues, and even fiction. But it began to lose us when it took a turn for the pulpy and had its pop-culture makeover (turning point — the Leave Britney Alone cover). But this grande dame of print has fully recovered  — at least in our eyes.

Well sort of, since the article that has captured our fancy exists only in online form, so we may not spread it out on the counter and drip our blood on it after we accidentally cut ourselves while attempting simultaneously to read its instruction and slice meat (the piece, incidentally, spends far more time on the former than it does on the latter).

We are speaking, of course, of “How to Wield a Knife” by Mr. Tom Mylan, published by the Atlantic online. Mylan’s method, which he pretty much sums up as “ways to horribly wound yourself,” is, like the renaissance in butchery he helped ignite, a basic-is-best approach.

Mylan is a deft writer, and the short piece, one part instruction, one part memoir, and two parts warning, is a must-read for anyone who has ever spent too much on a knife forged in Japan by the descendant of some ancient swordmaker out of a Tarrantino film, or who just wants learn new ways to slice off pieces of his or her thumb.

“I am an expert,”  writes Mylan. He is not, however, referring to butchery. This declaration follows the subhead “Cutting yourself.” In this section we learn one of the secrets to Mylan’s success: his butcher bra — a chainmail chest piece he wears while working that keeps major arteries safe from sharp blades. (You can get yours through Stahlnetz, a German manufacturer of all sorts of bizarre butcher equipment.) While this piece of equipment might be excessive for the average home cook, most of Mylan’s advice — self-effacing, informative yet not instructive — can be applied to your kitchen.

No doubt, the publication of this story will really piss off Julie Powell (who seems to feel she has some sense of ownership over Mylan, as if he were a  band she ‘discovered’ in high school that now all these assholes are listening to). But we are all for things that piss off Julie Powell, so please read it.

That’s right. The New York Times, our newspaper of choice for cradling fish and chips or mopping up the seepage from a hanger steak (let’s see you do that with a Kindle), has declared that butchers are the hotness of the culinary universe.

Sure chefs are the rock stars, the paper reasons, but they are in the arena windmilling and grinding out cock rock, while the butcher, well, the butcher is in a back room bathed in blood, sulking and flexing his muscles. To hear the Times tell it, butchers are a cross between Danzig and Bright Eyes, while chefs (especially Daniel Boulud) are Def Lepard (and of course Mario Batali is Meat Loaf, but that’s too easy).

They even have this quote from a butcher groupie:

“Think about it. What’s sexy?” said Tia Keenan, the fromager at Casellula Cheese and Wine Café and an unabashed butcher fan. “Dangerous is sometimes sexy, and they are generally big guys with knives who are covered in blood.”

The article (yet again, as if New York magazine wasn’t doing a good enough job of this already) lovingly caresses Marlow & Daughters butcher Tom Mylan, who the paper calls “broody” (maybe he’s Morrisey). But then the writer unearths Ryan Farr, of San Francisco, a, um, rather colorful butcher who calls himself a “producer of porcine pleasure”and gives cutting demonstrations, complete with cocktails. For $30, Farr followers can drink at a local bar while he butchers a pig (and soon, a lamb and a quarter of a steer). And then there’s this fantasy he has about Mylan, which we don’t know quite what to make of:

Mr. Farr has a dream. “I want to throw a 300-pound pig in the middle of a room full of people and just tag-team it with him,” he said. So far, Mr. Mylan hasn’t set a date.