This one is about butchery so not for the veggies…..

Being from Iowa and American I grew up on hamburger:
– BBQ hamburgers done by my Dad (when he turned them over he would yell 3 minutes)
– Hamburger Helper (when we were saving for a new house – yuck)
– Maidrites (great)
– Sloppy Joes (Maidrites with sauce, even better)

In Dubuque we had a butcher in the back of a small store across the street from a large grocery chain. We always went there after grocery shopping in the chain to buy hamburger, as my Mom always said their hamburger was so good. I never really understood what she meant until I moved to the UK, where the hamburger is called mince. Ya mince, minced: bread, bone, cartilage arse and elbows. This stuff should have a warning on it: “May contain some meat”. It has begun to get better over the last 10 years; at least you can buy lean mince (which is still fatty). By the way lean mince at Waitrose is £7.99 per kilo. So after all that moaning I decided to make my own hamburger/mince.

When Costco has a sale on beef I go and buy a bag of cow.

This one cost £25.76 but it was £5 off so in the end it was 3.4 kg which is about £6 per kg. So now you need some time, it took about 1.5 hours to setup, butcher and clean up. Oh and you need a knife.

And a pair of scissors. I also have two large metal trays that I use because they are easier to clean than the counter top, and a couple of cutting boards dedicated to raw meat. Other than that, make sure you get a free bag when you buy your meat at Costco to put all the extra bits in.

This is the worst part because the cryovac bag is full of blood. So cut a corner off the bag and stick that bit in the drain in the sink. Turn the cold water on softly and then cut another hole in the top of the bag to let the blood drain down the sink. Then use the scissors to open up the bag and rinse the meat with cold water and then pat dry with paper towels. This is the worst bit honest, and it does smell a bit.

Butchery starts with removing the strings around the roast with your scissors. Now you are looking for anything white or shinny. White is fat and needs to be removed to make ultra lean meat. Shinny is usually sinew and unless you are cooking for a long time, has to be removed. The process is find one end and insert you knife under the white/shinny about an inch from the end and then cut towards the end where it will be not shinny/white. Now you have a flap to hold on to. Grab the flap and lift up and insert your knife between the meat and the white/shinny. There are two methods you can employ now. The first is saw which is a forward backward motion using whole knife blade. You will want to tip the knife blade up away from the meat slightly so you are separating the white/shinny away from the meat and not cutting the meat and at the same time lifting the handle using gravity to help the process, this is the one I use most and is favoured if the knife is large. The second is small cuts using only the tip of the knife. But the process of creating the handle and lifting as you cut is the same. You should now have some large sections of beef and some smaller ones as a joint is usually composed of several different muscles, hence the string to make it look like a joint. I take the big sections of beef and make a couple of roasts. The rest I cut into strips for the grinder.

I turned the bag of cow into 2 x 0.5 kg roasts for the Pressure Cooker and 1.5 kg of meat for mince. So I have thrown away about 1 kg of stuff (cannot call it meat) and left 2.5 kg of pure beef, which comes to about £8/kg but my lean roasts and mince are pure beef no fat or sinew.

Enter the Fleischwolf, time to make some mince.

When I used it for the first time the kids and I were dancing around in the kitchen to Judas Priest song “Grinder” whose chorus is:

This machine is amazing. It has so much torque that it jumps off of the counter when you turn it on.

It ground 1.5 kg of beef strips in less than 5 minutes

This mince is almost all beef

Now all I have to do is bag it up and freeze it, oh and grab a monster burger for dinner.

This is 6 x 1/2 lb of mince, which I believe would be two nice burgers each so 12 meals. Each of the roasts would feed 4 people so that is another 8 meals. So all in that is 20 meals for £20, simple math is a £1 a serving and this is quality meat!

After all that work it is time for tea, Golden Arches Supper Club eat your heart out, cause you cannot touch this.

This burger was out of this world and made me go yuuuummmm! I had a grill pan on medium-low heat and cooked it two minutes per side x 4 then I covered it with two slices of cheese and covered the grill pan with a lid for a further two minutes and it was perfect. The sauce on the bun is my own “special sauce” made from