Beef

Making your own homemade sausages is fun, and relatively easy. You need a meat grinder, but except for that all ingredients can be found in your grocery store. Here we’re combining leaner meat (boneless beef outside) with slighly fattier meat (veal shoulder) and pure fat (beef tallow) to make tasty beef sausages. This has a relatively neutral flavoring, but it is a good base for further experimenting.

The eye of round is a lean and very symmectrical cut of beef, located on the back of the rear leg. You cook it either by boiling it, or as we do here, by brining and smoking it on low temperature. You don’t want to cook it for too long, it is ready when the inner temperature reaches 130° F. If you cook it longer (or using high temperature) it will be tough and chewy.

Flat Iron Steak is located on the front shoulder blade of a cow. It is a thin cut, well marbled, and with good flavor. Since it is thin it cooks fast, and should still be red/pink in the middle to keep it tender. There is a large tendon that goes through the entire steak, but usually your butcher trims this off before selling it to you. The flat iron steak is relatively similar to a flank steak, but the flat iron steak is less fibrous.

Picanha is a great cut of meat, very common in South America. It has an excellent flavor and it doesn’t need much tinkering with, you more or less cook it as it is. Serve the meat with a chimichurri and a bottle of red wine.

Here’s a mouth watering veal topside, cooked on the grill. It is rather lean, and doesn’t take well to very long cooks, so we treat it like we would a roast beef. Slowly bring it up to temp, then rest, slice and serve. This one is rubbed with a green and red pepper mix.

Veal shoulder refers to the front leg of a calf, and it is fibrous and needs some time to become tender. Here we cook it with somewhat of a Turkish or oriental flavor profile with cinnamon, cardamom, coffee and ginger. Quite different from the ordinary, but it works really well.

Here’s a classic pulled beef, this time made with veal. We’re adding plenty of flavor with the rub, mainly thanks to the allspice and onion powder, but with a bit of sting also.