Wait a minute! Is this a food blog?!

Picked up a printed copy of Edible Baja Arizona. There is an article about local, small scale meat processing plants, which artisinal beef producers need to use. The big meat processing houses aren't interested in five head of cattle, they need more like 5000 head for a processing run. One of the few small plants happens to be the University of Arizona Food Products and Safety Laboratory, in the UofA agricultural school.

An easily missed photo caption practically gives me whiplash. "On Friday morning, butchers are busy preparing for the UA Meat Sale, every Friday from 3 - 6 pm."  *WHAT!* I gotta find this meat sale and check it out. This is like going to a opthalmology school for an eye exam, or a dental school for dentistry. This is a doggone butcher school, folks. I am so all over this.

I mention this to a friend who is equally intrigued, and agrees to go with me. There's a steady stream in and out of the parking lot and a line at the meat case. As tempted as I am to buy one of everything, I remember my earlier post about "Enough" and restrain my purchases to two beef tenderloin steaks, one grass fed, and the other conventional grain fed. You can also pre-order any cut and quantity of meat from any four footed critter that you want, if you can plan in advance. We are just going to take our chances. Ohh, I have died and gone to butcher heaven. The young students selling the meat cuts told me that the guy who has run the lab for forty years or so loves it when lay people are interested, and will welcome such interested people to sit in on a class. Tucson has just risen waaay up in the hierarchy of places I've visited.

When I was a student at the CCA we were exposed to butchery, but not very much. We had to process a lot of small cuts, but only had one chance to experience the break down of a side of animal, in our case, a goat. (A goat? It must have been cheap.) Sol used to like butchery a lot. His grandfather was a butcher, so he came by his interest  legitimately.  I picked up on this, and have been interested ever since. The money quote from butchery at cooking school?  "Follow the natural separations."

Fast forward to tonight, I decide to cook the grass fed tenderloin steak for dinner. It gets a rest out of its cryovac for about an hour and a half. (Don't worry, food safety purists, its maybe 60 degrees in here if I'm lucky.) The steak, fairly thin, but large in diameter, gets a generous salt and peppering during its rest. The newer school of thought claims that salting a steak in advance is a good thing. No sun dried garlic, I just want to evaluate the pure flavor of the grass fed beef.

Not gonna use a non-stick pan for this, unh,unh, I want the sear. I have a tiny Calphalon saute pan that will do nicely. It is problematic to saute in such a small space, so I can't get the pan quite as hot as I'd like, but it will do. I figure three minutes a side will be a good place to start. Remember, its a room temperature thin steak. The three minutes per side goes by in a blur of activity, adjusting the flame, covering the pan (heresy! but I don't want a thin film of beef fat all over everything), carefully loosening and wiggling the steak free, (condensation from the lid makes it stick, the price I have to pay), and turning it without a splatter.

Its done. Off to another plate to rest. Hmmm, am I going to let that fond in the pan (the brown bits) go to waste? Oh, no not me. A splash of the pinot noir I'm drinking into the saute pan, a nice deglaze, then a pat of butter swirled in to the reduced wine. Too many lumps, so I strained it onto top of the steak.

I was going to eat only half the steak and save the rest for a sandwich, but nope, I ate the whole thing. It was done perfectly, if I do say so myself. Consistently rare to medium rare, one or two bites were truly the purple dark red rare. It was just like I like it. The grass fed flavor was a little different, perhaps slightly gameier, but it had a lot of flavor, a lot of juice. I was very happy. Perhaps I'll go back to eating good steaks that I prepare myself.

Look, done perfectly!  Hungry?