A frequent topic (and generator of much hand-wringing and inferiority complex-having) over at the Tribune's food message board is about the lack of a butcher shop in Columbia. After all, New Franklin has one, why not Columbia? Hell, sleepy old Camdenton has one (plus two excellent fish shops to boot). What's going on here?
The answer is more complicated than I'm willing to take on first thing Monday morning, but suffice it to say this article in the new Esquire magazine did not make me yearn less for a dedicated, stand-alone butcher here in Columbia:
You can ask butchers anything and they will deconstruct your need. Ask for a porterhouse and trust that they will pick through the T-bones to get you a good one. Or ask what a porterhouse is and they will take out a T-bone to explain that if the short-loin portion is a good bit thicker than an inch, it's a porterhouse. Or ask if a porterhouse is what you want in the first place. They'll ask how you're cooking it, what you're serving with it, how much room you have on your cooking surface. They'll find the answer. And whether it's the apron or the smudges of blood or the enormous weight of the counter or the sheer mass of the product, you believe a butcher. He knows.
A man should have a butcher.
Hear, freaking hear.
7 comments:
Never been there, but there is a butcher on campus....
A butcher on campus? I had no clue. Do you have any more info about where on campus?
Jeff, I believe you may be talking about something attached to the Ag school. I've heard of that. They raise their own animals and thus, have some capacity to butcher and sell the animals. I'll check into it, and ask about how much experimental "tinkering" is being done on the animals in question.
Regardless, good point and worth looking into.
Yes, that's it. I cannot speak, though, to quality since I've never bought from them. I also don't know if Show Me or Legacy will do butchering beyond what they package.
There's a place in Moberly called Bob's Butcher Shop. The looks are deceiving. It has excellent meat. And they make their own pimiento cheese which I strongly suggest!
That's it. I need to schedule a trip to Moberly.
Mizzou Meat Market does indeed operate as a kind of butcher shop. You can read more at: http://mizzoumeat.missouri.edu/. I'm not a huge hater of technology, but I'd still feel a little uneasy eating animals that could have been experiments.
I called to see if they carry hangar steak, a personal favorite and a request that usually draws blank stares from the supermarket butchers I've asked. They checked around and said they do carry hangar, but call it skirt steak. Skirt and hangar are technically the two components of the animal's diaphragm, and thus different, but related meats.
Anyway, it's a start.
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