The Little, Simple, Forgotten Things - Meat and Fish

I'm in midst of cleaning my room and doing important career stuff (cover letters, resumes, college applications oh my!) so I'm throwing up a blog series I wrote up last weekend. Enjoy!

I'm writing this post to talk about a much confessed love for under utilized cuts of meat and fish. Also a really dumb cut of meat I found that was brought up while reading the school's newspaper the other day.

I consider meat and fish to be two of the best things on earth and its even better when properly cooked and served. A mouthwatering ribeye steak can be just as tasty as a beautifully cooked piece of salmon (wild, Pacific salmon) or a sea scallop. Its the idea of marrying both worlds of land and sea (or really should be body of water) together and learning how to work with them, especially in a seasonal aspect. Poultry, beef, lamb, fish, game, they can all be beautiful and delicious things.

The 1st cut I want to talk about is the cut that was written about in the school paper. A new cut of pork was talked about is "secerto", I guess its popular in Spain but its the meat cut out of pork belly and is to resemble that of a hanger steak. When I had a talk about this with my friend Jesse, we kinda got outraged. Its just the sheer fact its kinda of a really dumb cut. The belly of a pig doesn't contain that much meat anyways so your wasting all that great fat but thats while pork belly is either braised, confit, fried because its tough meat. But personally I like my pork belly the way it is and it seems to much of a waste (and a shame in my opinion) to remove that meat from such a delicious part of the pig.

The 2nd cut I'll talk about is beef cheek. Now most people turn their head had that thought, a cows cheek, you can eat that? Its much like eating pork jowl (similar to another version of pork belly). Of course cows do alot of smackin on grass all day so they use the muscles in their cheeks alot. But once again its all in knowing how to use your product and making it delicious and beautiful. Beef cheek is really suitable for one thing and thats braising. In my opinion making braising is one of the best things, I love braises and a reason one is if you take the time and love, it will be one amazing product in the end. The end result of a great beef cheek braise is a fork tender, moist, melt in your mouth piece of meat. So next time you hit up your local butcher, skip the beef short ribs (though very tasty, beef short ribs have made a huge resurgence in the last couple years) and try beef cheek.

Next blog post we'll keep discussing about beef and move into pork!

-Garrett