As much as I love to cook, I am really not a fan of kitchen gadgets. This is partially out of necessity; our very small kitchen doesn’t have room to store every species of specialized tool for making every conceivable cooking task a breeze. I also have a deep aversion to spending money, so when I walk into the local kitchen store whatever desire I feel is quickly snuffed out by a look at the prices. All that said, I can’t pass up a deal, so when Martha came home from some thrift-shopping with news of old-fashioned, hand-cranked meat grinders for the ridiculous price of $2.00, I made a quick decision: it was time to start grinding my own meat.

“But Tom,” you say, “it’s the twenty-first century. You don’t have to grind your own meat anymore! You can buy it ground in nice little packages from your local grocery. You can even get it pre-pattied for all your hamburger needs!” True, but then how would I get two dollars worth out of this grinder? Besides, there are some real advantages to grinding meat at home. If you’re worried about E. Coli,  grinding in small batches means less chance of mixing in contaminated meat (this always remains a possibility, of course). More importantly for me, by grinding at home I can control what beef gets ground. Specifically, I can grind in a high percentage of beefy, marbled short-ribs. Given the variety of beef cuts available, a grinder can take you way beyond the grocery store options of chuck or sirloin.

Although the pitted cast iron surfaces, wooden handle, and the fact that it was a consumer product made in the USA all suggested to me that my thrift store grinder was quite old, it appears that it was actually in production recently enough to be sold new over the Internet. My particular model was either old and neglected or just neglected enough to require vigorous a scrubbing down.

With a mind to that scrubbing, I fired up the Google to learn about meat grinder care and was surprised and a little disappointed that my meat grinder was actually a Food Chopper — a kind of proto-food processor. The difference seems to be that while meat grinder usually extrude the grind through perforated disks, the Universal Model 2 Food Grinder passes the food through a kind of toothed wheel that screws on to the end of the unit. Different tooth sizes and spacings are used to produce different sized chops. But you can in fact grind meat with a food processor (chill cubes in freezer 30 minutes then pulse), so it stands to reason that its predecessor would work well enough. I set about cleaning it anyway.

With all the parts cleaned and dried, I was excited to cube my beef and get to the business of grinding. For simplicity’s sake I planned to make hamburgers using a beef blend that has worked in the past: about 70% beef short ribs and 30% chuck. For the beef to be caught by the augur of the Universal Model 2, I cut it into 1″ chunks.

The grinding process went very smoothly; I was able to process the 1.5# of beef in under 5 minutes. I did notice two apparent flaws in the design: 1.) the cutting wheel is positioned too close over the base of the grinder, making it difficult to place any kind of tray in a spot where it will collect all of the ground meat and 2.) as I was grinding, I started to notice blood dripping onto the floor out of the place where the handle attached to the augur. Martha acted quickly, putting a plate down to protect our floor, but it seems to me that any blood that is squeezed out by the action of the grinder is blood that’s not going to be making your hamburgers juicy. Still, for a pound and a half of meat, I think we only lost a teaspoon of blood; hardly earth-shattering. This might be remedied in the future by remembering to chill the meat in the freezer before grinding to firm it up. The grind produced by the larger cutting wheel was suitable for hamburgers, though I might have liked it a bit coarser.

How were the burgers? They were good — how could anything involving that much short-rib go wrong? I was pleased not to notice any metallic taste from flaking off rust — we must have done a good enough job scrubbing. Ideally, I would like to do a blind taste-test involving store-ground beef, beef ground in a food processor and the Universal. I am also excited to use the grinder in other applications, especially revisiting my old friend the terrine. Now I just have to figure out where I’m going to put the thing.

Whenever I buy and trim a big ol’ beef chuck roast to make stew,  I am left with big ol’ pile of this:

So what to do with all that fat and gristle?  Throw it out? NO! That’s my fat and gristle! I paid for it! And in these troubled economic times, I need every I you can get. No, the only answer to a big pile of beef fat is to render it.

The first step is to chop it into smaller pieces. When I did this I just used a knife to roughly chop the fat as is, but I would suggest a different method: put the meat in the freezer for a half hour or so to stiffen it up and then chop it, preferably with a food processor. The finer you chop the fat, the more liquid fat you’ll be able to render out.

That’s right, liquid fat. The chopped fat goes in a small saucepan with a little bit of water, over low heat. And then you go do something else, enjoying your brilliant economy and the wonderful beefy odors wafting about your house. This is meat potpourri at its finest.

After a few hours, it will start to look like this:

It’s done once the bits of meat are crispy and brown. In the pork fat rendering world these are known as cracklins. You can eat one once they’ve cooled; I am afraid to say that they are pretty delicious and guarantee an almost instant heart attack.

But enough about the crispy bits, what about that sweet golden fat? Strain/filter it to get rid of as many impurities as possible. I first poured the fat through a mesh strainer to remove the big meat chunks then decanted the fat off of the remaining small flecks of beef. The fat will solidify at room temperature or after a few minutes in the fridge.

And there you have it, beef suet! What to do with the stuff? Basically, you can use it like butter or shortening, or any other fat for that matter. I used some of it to brown the beef chunks for my stew (beef browned in its own fat is a beautiful thing) and the rest I cut into pie dough, which I used to make pasties with the leftover beef stew. And thus the circle of life was complete.

March greeted us in the New York Times with a series of recipes for what to do with cube steak. I found the article inspiring. Cheap?! 3-recipes-in-one!? WOW! Tom, on the other hand, responded, “Do you know what cube steak is? Why yes, sort-of, I did. For I had read about it in the article! Tenderized portions of the cow that may not otherwise be so appetizing are made into cube steak, aptly named after the cube-shaped metal hammers that pound said beef into submission.

I found what was to be OUR cube steak the day after reading the article at our local Rainbow grocer or, as we like to call it (after the in-store brand), Roundy’s. And! It was on sale. When I proudly proclaimed that I’d purchased 2 pounds of beef for $6, Tom replied again unmoved, “Don’t you think there’s something wrong with that?” I settled on one of the three recipes, this one for Bistec de Palomilla. I’ll let you be the judge:

The lime was definitely the best part after a day spent marinating in the fridge. As for the cube steak itself? I’m not sure I’d revisit it. Unlike other readers, I don’t have fond childhood memories of the stuff, and at my command it ended up a bit tough when it reached the table. The rice? Excellent!

You can hardly read anything about food today without running into sous vide. Sous vide, invented by the French, means  ”under vacuum” and is a technique for cooking food, especially proteins, in a vacuum-sealed pouch in a water bath kept at a highly specific temperature. This requires both a vacuum sealer and a piece of lab equipment called an immersion circulator, which allows you to maintain a pool of water at a certain temperature with an exacting degree of precision. The effect of all this is to be able to bring meat to its ideal internal temperature: a piece of chicken sitting in 160° water for 4 hours will be 160° internally, externally, and existentially.  It also allows infinitely long cooking times which can produce some textural effects that would not be possible by traditional methods.

The equipment list makes this technique more suitable for expensive restaurants than for the home cook. A search for immersion circulators shows that one can be had for as little as $100 (or much, much more) though I am not sure how precise these would be. Vacuum sealers cost about $30, plus the various supplies. So, it wouldn’t exactly break the bank, but I have a number of items on my to-buy list for the kitchen that I consider higher priorities. And then you have to store it all. Given its high price and novelty, I was pretty quick to dismiss sous vide.

While it was cheapness that turned me away from sous vide, it was cheapness that brought me back to it all of a sudden this weekend. Cheapness in the form of a chuck steak that I bought for less than $5. There are a lot of problems with chuck steak. It can be fatty and gristly, it doesn’t taste all that beefy, and man oh man does it get tough. Chuck meat is mostly used for hamburger or stews, where mechanical stress or long, slow cooking helps break down connective tissue so your teeth don’t have to. But I had a steak sandwich in mind, and for that I wanted red meat damnit! The lowest my oven goes is around 200°F, a temperature that would after even a short time render my steak brown and grey. The challenge was to cook my steak for a long time to weaken the connective tissue without cooking it beyond 120°, rare. The solution: sous vide?

So, did I run out and buy a vacuum sealer and immersion circulator at my local laboratory supply? No! Inspired by this (somewhat annoying) video of Grant Achatz making thanksgiving dinner, I realized that while it would  be nice to have the fancy equipment, the same effect can be achieved with stuff that I had around. Vacuum sealed bags? That’s basically a Zip-Loc, right? And sure, an immersion circulator would keep water at an exact temperature, but I could do pretty well with a thermometer, a pot of water and a gas stove.

Here’s the steak:

First order of business was to cut out as much fat, cartilage and silverskin as I could, which was quite a lot. It is now sitting in a bag in my freezer, ostensibly for stock or pie but in fact to be thrown out in about a year. Cutting all this out causes the steak to separate into a few pieces, but I was planning on slicing it thin in the end anyway so it wasn’t a problem. I heavily salted and peppered the trimmed steak and threw it in the bag with some butter and then did my best to get all the air out. Then, into the pot of water!

When I first put the steak in the water temperature was actually 140°F since I hadn’t been paying attention while attending to the steak. I figured the introduction of the steak would lower the water temperature, but it didn’t by much. I had to add a few ice cubes to get it into the mid 130s. After about ten minutes I had gotten it into my ideal 120 temperature range. Since it was early in the cooking I didn’t think it would matter too much, but in the future I’ll be sure to watch the initial temperature.

I decided arbitrarily to cook the steak for an hour. My technique was basically to check the water temperature every few minutes and keep it between 120 and 125. Eventually, I established a rhythm where I would bring the water up to 125 and then after about ten minutes it would drop back to 119-120. This pattern was very predictable and ended up being very easy to work with. Of course, an immersion circulator would have done all this checking and adjusting for me.

After the hour passed I took the steak out. As I probed various areas of the steak with my thermapen and got readings all within 120-123 a wide smile broke out on my face—this steak was perfectly rare! The internal temperature was right on. Now to deal with the external appearance.

Obviously, intense direct heat of the kind not afforded by sous vide but rather by more primitive techniques (grilling, for example) does more than just cook the meat through. It also produces a delicious crusty-brown/black exterior that is full of great flavors courtesy of Maillard reactions. Since browning only occurs at higher temperatures, it cannot be achieved through sous vide. So what to do? Well, brown the meat. I used a skillet with smoking hot oil. 

Actually, I would have liked a much crustier, deeper brown crust, but I was worried that since my steak was already right where I wanted it internally a longer time in the skillet might have overcooked parts. And, whatever you might say about the crust, you can’t argue with this cross-section:

Perfectly pink out to the edges! No ring of grey, overcooked meat! One side is not pinker than the other! It made me wish I had used a better steak!

The whole point of this was, of course, to make it tender. According to Harold McGee connective tissue doesn’t actually start to break down into collagen and gelatin until it reaches 160-180°F. Most of the steak never got above 125°. In spite of this, the steak was notably tender. Cutting out a lot of the gristle before hand certainly helps with this as did slicing the steak very thin before eating it. McGee also offers up another explanation:

“One useful ingredient in long-cooked braises can be a prolonged cooking time—an hour or two—during which the cook carefully manages the meat’s temperature rise up to the simmer. The time that the meat spends below 120°F amounts to a period of accelerated aging that weakens the connective tissue and reduces the time needed at fiber-drying temperatures.” (163)

So does this “accelerated aging” explain the tenderness? The steak certainly would have spent a long time near this temperature, although probably more time slightly above than below. In the future, I should try keeping my water temperature below 120°. This would not only better achieve the aging effect but also allow more leeway for browning in the pan.

Perfectly cooked as this might have been, it was still chuck steak, so I went with a pretty heavy dressing of onions, tomatoes and capers and put the whole thing on ciabatta that I had.

In the end you don’t need a lot of fancy equipment to do sous vide (or something like it) as long as you are willing to pay careful attention. That said, I wouldn’t want to watch a pot of warm water for the 6 hours it might take to cook a bigger piece of meat. So I conclude with a word of caution: you can cook sous vide with a pot and a plastic bag, but once you see how perfect that meat looks, you’re going to want an immersion circulator even more.