Summer is for salads - but also sausages. Sure, you’ll have a chickpea burger, but when will the steak be ready? As the days (and the barbecue grill plates) get hotter, the animal magnetism of, well, animals, increases. But how much do you really know about the meat you’re eating? Hannah Miller Childs is a chef turned butcher, whose Churly’s beer-brewing husband complains she talks to her pig farmer more often than him. Her Auckland-based business is called A Lady Butcher and, as Kim Knight discovers, there’s nothing you can’t ask a lady butcher.
HOW OLD IS TOO OLD?
Realistically, how long can I keep a raw steak in the fridge?
“How long is a piece of string? There are places in Europe that age beef for five years. When you’re properly dry-ageing and controlling temperature and humidity ... we’ve had three-month-old meat on our menu. The characteristics definitely change. It starts to become funky, like parmesan cheese, with a bit more umami. It’s mushroomy and it can be a little bit musty. It’s a flavour profile I really enjoy, but if you’re used to getting your beef from the supermarket, you’re going to notice a big difference.
“Use-by dates err on the cautious side because no one wants to be liable for someone getting sick, but if a steak is vacuum packed, you could keep it for three weeks, maybe four weeks - depending how fresh it was when it was sealed. If you have an idea of where your meat came from and how fresh it is, you can definitely hold onto it for a few weeks in the fridge.”
When cheese goes mouldy, I just cut the green bits off - can I do that with meat?
“Green is not a colour meat should be! Also pale grey. And if it smells like ammonia, you don’t want to eat that.”
Sometimes, when you open those vacuum-sealed bags, that liquid inside smells weird?
“That liquid is called ‘purge’. It’s not blood, it’s the water from the animal’s muscles slowly leaking out. The older it gets, the more liquid. That’s usually what’s causing that smell. Open the bag and if it’s a bit whiffy, take the meat out, put it on a paper towel and let it sit for 10 minutes - that smell should totally dissipate. If it doesn’t, you might not want to eat it.”
You’re only talking red meat, right? What about chicken?
“Chicken is a whole other beast - quite literally. You can’t be too careful with chicken. Three days. I’m not hanging onto chicken for very long at all.”
IS WAGYU MINCE WORTH ITS PREMIUM PRICE?
Wagyu beef is super-expensive, but if it’s just being minced and smooshed into a hamburger patty, what’s the point? Am I being seduced by the marketing?
“I love wagyu. It’s delicious. The fat, the marbling, really does add an extra depth of flavour and I’m happy to pay for it. Where I wouldn’t, perhaps, is at a really casual cafe with middle-of-the-road food. If they have a wagyu burger, the likelihood is it probably doesn’t actually have that much wagyu in it. If you’re at a nicer place that really champions its burgers, then it’s more likely to have a higher percentage. Some places will advertise 100 per cent wagyu, but for cost-savings, you might do 50/50 with Hereford beef. It’s worth it if you’re getting the real thing, but if it’s only 10 per cent wagyu - then it’s potentially not.”
TALK ME THROUGH BLOOD SAUSAGE, AKA “BOUDIN NOIR”.
Where do you get the blood come from? How much blood is really in a blood sausage?
“Quite a bit! In New Zealand, it’s almost always powdered blood. They collect it at slaughter, clean it and powder it. The main thing is the cleaning, because it can get contaminated at slaughter, and also keeping it from coagulating. The old school method is to have someone whose job is just to stir the blood until you’re ready to make the sausage. It’s liquid. It’s so messy, it looks like a scene from a horror film. You add in heaps of spices and usually chunks of back fat, and then you fill the casings and poach them - that’s when you want the blood to coagulate.”
Do they taste like blood?
“I love boudin noir. It’s super high in iron and the nutrients are similar to what you’d get from eating offal. A little bit goes a long way. It’s very rich and it definitely should be enjoyed as a treat. Less filler (like bread) usually means a higher quality product. Some people will add more offal, particularly liver, or sometimes just a little bit of pork. Also, I think people are worried that because it’s blood, they need to overcook it. You really don’t. Just a gentle poach.”
GRASS-FED V GRAIN-FINISHED?
What’s best and does the way an animal is raised affect the quality of the meat?
“In the United States, you’ve got your 100 per cent grain-fed, where the animals are in feedlots and that’s not my preference. The quality is potentially not what I’d be looking for. With grain-finished meat, you have cows that are grass-fed for most of their lives and then people pick how long they’re fed grain - 30 days, 60 days, 100 days - it’s usually supplemental to grass, but the cows love the grain so it’s basically like feeding them candy. If you say to a kid, ‘here’s dinner but you could just eat this whole box of candy instead - they’re going to be like ‘screw dinner!’' So that’s what these cows are like - ‘we could eat grass but why do that when we can just eat grain?’ In some places in New Zealand this happens in a barn, and in others they’re still in the paddock. We have some 100-day grain-finished meat on our menus at Churly’s and it’s just amazing - it’s buttery, creamy, it ages nicely.”
Does grass-fed taste different?
“To be honest, I hadn’t had that much of it before moving to New Zealand and it was a flavour I had to get used to because I thought it kind of tasted boring - so beefy! Now, I really enjoy it. But there’s a huge range - it comes down to breeding and the time of year. When you’re 100 per cent grass-fed there’s nothing to hide behind. How lush was the grass? Was there too much rain? What about the breeding? We’ve had retired, eight-year-old dairy cows that are absolutely amazing and then we’ve had younger cows that are super lean. You can’t really age beef when it has no fat. It just dries out.”
So what’s best?
“It’s all good! It just depends on what you’re looking for, and it’s good to have options because every person has a different price point in mind, and a different amount they’re able to spend.”
WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL WITH BRISKET?
Is it just fancy corned beef?
“It’s totally the same cut! But corned beef is brined and rolled, or cut up into smaller pieces and heaps of the fat is trimmed off. When you’re doing American barbecue, you’re leaving more of that fat on and you’re doing a whole piece. Brisket is basically the creme de la creme of American barbecue. If you can master that, you can do basically anything.”
WHAT’S SAUSAGE SKIN MADE OF?
Is it another animal’s stomach?
“The best natural casings are intestines - usually pork or lamb. You know that really nice, crisp snap when you bite into a sausage? That’s an intestine. If you’re making bigger sausages, you’re using something we call “bung” - that’s from beef or lamb stomach. Well, kind of stomach, because they have a different anatomical structure than us ... "
How about those sausage skins that seem to just melt in the pan?
“They’re going to be probably synthetic casings, and they’re made from either a vegetable protein or animal collagen.”
My dad once told me sausages were full of sawdust ... ?
“It’s not true! They did used to have this breadcrumby stuff that looked like sawdust and all butcher’s shops used to have sawdust on the floor, but no one is purposely putting sawdust into sausages!”
Is a healthy sausage an oxymoron?
“There’s a really big push in the market right now for “flexitarian” sausages. It’s a category in New Zealand Sausage Awards and it requires no more than 50 per cent lean meat. It’s a really good way to get kids to eat veges. They may not eat a green sausage, but you can easily put carrots or beetroot in there. Chef Michael Van de Elzen does a really delicious beetroot and beef burger. It’s so yum. But the answer is not putting less fat in. Do not do that - that just makes for a terribly dry sausage.”
IS CHARCUTERIE WORTH THE HYPE?
How can such a small piece of meat be sooo expensive?
“What? Stop! That’s my baby! Charcuterie has been around since mankind figured out how to preserve hunted meat. The main thing, is that charcuterie is MEAT. This whole thing where people do charcuterie boards that have candy on them, or pickles - what? No! It’s meat. To be a charcutier technically means to be a pork butcher. It’s the art of preserving and curing, primarily pork. When I first came here, the selection was appalling. The first time I had salami in New Zealand it was cooked. I was so confused. You don’t cook salami. It’s fermented and air dried. But it’s definitely a growing industry and something people are getting more interested in. New Zealand is a country of travellers. We go overseas and see things we haven’t had before and we want to eat that here - and that means businesses like mine can survive.”
Does anybody in New Zealand make those huge, expensive hams you see hanging in Spanish bars?
“A company called Salash Delicatessen does some. I’ve made them, but they take a minimum two years, and by the time you put two years of effort into it, I just don’t even know how to decide a price. $1000? Who’s going to pay that?”
So the cost is about time, not ingredients?
“You lose 45 per cent of the meat’s weight through the curing process. If you start with a good product, you end up with an even better product. If you start with a really average piece of meat, you end up with an even more average product. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. You need to start with quality meat, so yeah, the ingredients are expensive. We use organic Marlborough sea salt, spices that are foraged in the South Island - it’s expensive for sure, but you’re also losing basically half. We call it the “angel’s share” like they do for whiskey. Training people and carrying on this tradition is expensive. Often it ends up more a labour of love than anything else.”
What does a charcuterie-purist make of the New Fish company’s Pāua Saucisson?
“It’s super creative - something that’s good for New Zealand and puts us on the map with something quintessentially Kiwi. It’s really technical and really innovative. I enjoy it definitely in moderation because it’s really intense. I actually got told a trade secret - if you lightly blow torch it for two seconds, the pork fat melts a little bit and that really lifts it.”
WHAT DO BUTCHERS DO WITH THE LEFTOVERS?
Brains, bones, eyeballs - are all the gory bits dumped?
“We take the bits that humans don’t necessarily want to eat and mince them all up and dehydrate them and make dog treats. Actually, the eyeballs do get cooked down. They go into our stocks - we put the heads and bones in there and roast everything, and then cook it overnight and have this beautiful stock that we reduce down. That becomes our gravy that goes with our steaks and the base for sauces.”
IS THERE ANY PART OF BUTCHERING THAT IS TRULY “YUCK”?
What was it like, cutting into something for the first time?
“It’s confronting, especially if it’s a whole carcass, because it looks like animal. You see bone structure, ribs, a head. It’s confronting and I really think that if it’s not, maybe there is something wrong with you. I try to stay actively stay sensitised; to be aware that this is a life and to be appreciative and respectful of that.”
And the yuck factor?
“Yes, that exists and that’s mainly because they were living things. Sometimes they’ll have a cyst. It doesn’t hurt the meat, it’s totally fine, it’s just a pocket of pus, but it’s really gross when you cut into one. I had a class a couple of weeks ago and I cut into one while I was teaching. I felt like I was going to be sick.”
IS IT INEVITABLE THAT, EVENTUALLY, A BUTCHER LOSES A FINGER?
Are bad cuts and band aids a given?
“I cut myself this week. I was taking some really hard skin off some pancetta. As I was thinking ‘I should be wearing a glove’ my knife went straight into my thumb and it has finally stopped bleeding three days later. One of my butchers actually cut his finger off and had it sewn back on. That’s a major one. My worst was last year. Christmas time, and we were in the weeds, and I had a butcher out sick and I was boning beef. I was wearing a glove, but only to my wrist. I cut an artery in my forearm and it was spurting blood, like a fountain.”
Is there anything you can’t ask a butcher?
“We tend to be a little bit of a quieter bunch. We work in the cold, in the early mornings and we’re cutting meat! But we do love talking about it. And if you ask us a funny question, you’ll usually get something to talk about for the rest of the day!”
Do you roll your eyes when you read yet another recipe that says “ask your butcher to debone, etc...“?
“No. What is annoying is if a customer has bought their meat somewhere else and then they bring it into you to debone! Generally, we love helping customers, we love getting them excited about meat and cooking and trying new things and if that means we do a little bit more work, that’s all good.”
