Having your meat and eating it too

We all know times are tough, but that doesn’t mean the meat you eat has to be too. Smart shoppers throughout the UK have been hording discount aisles and experimenting with cheaper cuts of meat in recent months to make the household budgets go that much further. There are easy steps everyone can take to tell the difference between cuts of meat and substitute different cuts, without a change in taste or quality.

Joining us in our live webTV show are Julia Bradbury, host of Kill it, Cook it, Eat it, and Keith Fisher an award-winning butcher who will delve into eating meat in today’s difficult environment. From common sense advice on budgeting and finding the best deals to knowing how to pick your meaty bits, Julia and Keith will have all the answers to all your questions.

Those of you who are particularly cash-conscious won't want to miss out on Julia’s top tips and MeatMATTERS delicious suggestions for recipes on a shoestring budget. So for all those and much more, log on the webTV show

Julia Bradbury and Keith Fisher joins us live on Wednesday 30th September at 3:30pm

For more information visit www.meatmatters.com

H: Vicky Letch, host
J: Julia Bradbury, host Kill it, Cook it, Eat it
K: Keith Fisher, butcher

H: Hello and welcome to the Consumer Advice Show, I’m Vicky Letch. Now we all know times are tough, but that doesn't mean the meat that you eat has to be too. Smart shoppers are hording discount aisles and experimenting with cheaper cuts to make the household budgets go that bit further. However if you’re not quite sure how you can make the best use of the variety of different cuts of meat on offer, then do keep watching because I’m joined today by host of Kill it, Cook it, Eat it, Julia Bradbury, and award-winning nonetheless butcher Keith Fisher. Thank you so much for coming in to the both of you

J: Pleasure Vicky, nice to see you

H:We are of course live, so any questions or comments – fears, dreams, woes, to Julia and Keith, pop them in the box on the screen and click submit and we will endeavour to answer as many as we possibly can. So welcome you pair

J: Thank you

H: Let’s just start off – do you think people really know about all the different cuts of meat that are available?

J: I think it’s fallen out of favour certainly. If you go back several generations, our grandparents, who are our parents parents, and even before that, all of these cuts of meats that we’re going to talk about in the next few minutes were commonplace and also growing up there would be a butcher shop on every corner

H: Yes

J: And you would see parts of the animal hanging up, you’d see pig’s trotters and heads and everything else, and that has all changed. The advent of the supermarket and the hypermarket has changed consumer’s shopping experiences and also it’s reduced their exposure really to a lot of foods, and we’re used to getting everything whenever we want as well and not shopping seasonally now, now that’s good and bad, and we’ve evolved but I think we’ve taken a few steps backwards as well, and now people are – their interest has been peaked again into the less well known cuts, and it’s primarily driven now by cost

H: Yes of course. I mean – I remember even – I mean I’m 32 and I remember very – well 32 in January, I should hold onto that – 31

J: You should – 31 yes yes

H: 31. I remember very clearly, it was part of our weekly chores. I would go to the butchers with my mum, and she would then by all the meat for the week, and that was part of what we did

J: And you’d see everything hanging in the butcher’s

H: Yes

J: You’d see the livers and you’d see the kidneys, and you’d see tripe and you’d see all of these things that we’re very sheltered from these days

H: And talking in terms of cost and cheaper cuts, is there really that much more variety that we’re missing out on?

K: Oh absolutely because I mean some of the cheaper cuts, you’re talking about stewing and braising steaks that can be a couple of quid difference between the price per kilo

H: Yes

K: Those and higher price steaks for grilling and frying, and given that you’ve got the time to cook them a little bit more slowly, add seasonal vegetables and the like – you can produce a really good, tasty dish

H: Yes

J: We’re used to certain cuts now aren’t we? We know about chops, we know about the loin and we know about sirloin and we know about fillet, and that’s what we’re used to seeing in the supermarket, and even in the butcher’s in the window these days, but there are all these other – there’s you know – come on

K: Well what’s happened basically is, I mean when we were predominantly all independent retail butchers throughout the country, they all knew exactly what they called their cuts and they taught the consumers what those cuts were called. Over the last 20 years what’s tended to happen is these cuts have been lumped into cooking methods rather than the names of the cuts, so modern day housewives will go and buy braising steak or casserole steak or stewing steak, rather than a piece of chuck, a piece of blade, or a piece of shint for stewing

H: Ok well talking of steak, we’ve got sort of the live version available – sort of

J: Yes. That’s about as live as we want to get –

H: It is

J: Trust me. On Kill it, cook it we kill enough animals, I don’t want any more blood

H: I know I can’t wait. We are going to discuss that in detail. But do you want to point anything out for the people at home of interest?

J: I want to point out the clod –

H: Here

J: because I bet nobody knows what the clod is –

H: No I don’t think I’ve ever heard of the clod. No

J: No, explain – you can see it there –

K: The clod is basically stewing muscles where the humerous bone is in the middle of it, and because it’s a mixture of fat and lean it needs well trimming and it’s a superb cut for stewing

H: Ok

J: It’s one of those meats that’s really good in a casserole, or in a stew or something that you marinate and give it plenty of time so that you can soften it up. The golden rule with meat is that if the muscles haven’t been used, so your sirloin or the rest of it, it – they haven’t then – the meat isn’t full of muscle so it’s nice and soft and tender, that’s what gives you those cuts. But when you’ve got muscles in the legs and the rear and the shoulders that have been used, that’s where it’s tougher, it’s muscle content

H: Oh ok

J: That needs to be broken down and needs to be softened, and that’s the only difference with those cuts. It doesn’t mean that it’s not any better or that the quality is poor, it is simply to do with – with animal, with animal bodyworks

H: Yes

J: And the way we work and the way animals work

H: And therefore it’s knowledge, it’s knowing how to cook these different cuts. I mean –

K: The knowledge comes from how to cut them in the first place to produce them so that we can –

J: That’s back to your butcher

K: Which we can do

H: Yes

K: That’s it, the –

H: Award-winning – did I say that?

J: Yes, yes, yes

H: Award winning yes

K: And it’s really knowing where all the bones are, where the joints are, where to cut. I mean people tend to think of butchers with big cleavers or choppers that break carcases down – and they don’t, they use a knife in the main and a saw when they can’t cut through something

J: And butchery is a real skill

H: Absolutely

J: You know it’s an artisan skill

H: Yes

J: As Keith here will tell you. I mean you – you’re from a generation, generations of butchers

K: Yes

J: And you come from learning how, from the abattoir, learning how to cut the, learning how to kill the animal, learning how to butcher the animal and it’s all about respect and understanding that animal and I think we now, the consumer – we’re becoming more and more aware of that. People care about where their meat comes from. Which farm is it from, has it been hand reared, is it organic

H: Yes

J: All of those things make it different to your taste and to the taste of the meat as well

H: Absolutely. I have to say because obviously we were saying maybe it’s not on the list of your to-dos, visiting your local butcher, there will be some people, perhaps young people that have never even ventured into a butchers before, and it’s ok to go in and be a novice

K: It’s a fantastic –

H: And say I don’t really know what –

K: Experience to go in and talk to them, because they are friendly

H: Yes

K: And they will give you very good advice and help you out, particularly, I mean don’t just leave it to special occasions, go all the time and speak to them

H: Ok

J: Keith was saying that when he was learning his trade and he worked in an abattoir, they used to have schools that would come through and watch the process. School children would come along and watch the process. Now it might sound a bit gruesome and a bit grim, but the reality is if you are a meat eater, it’s – it’s good placement to know that that is where your meat comes from, whatever the animal –

H: Yes

J: Whether it’s a lamb or a bull and you know that’s the cold, hard reality of meat and being a meat eater. It’s coming from an animal. See the animal, respect the animal and then learn and have a knowledge about that to enjoy your cooking. We’re meant to be a nation of foodies, but to be a proper foodie you’ve got to know where the food’s coming from

H: Absolutely, I totally agree with you. And just going back to what you were saying about cooking the meat longer, if it is part of the animal that is used excessively. I think the problem is we’re all so very busy these days, so we’re looking for the quick fix, the frying the steak, whatever –

K: That’s why we pay for that convenience, I mean if you look at the cuts that cook the most quickly, they are the cuts that are the most expensive

H: Yes

K: But –

J: But actually if you’re clever about it you can do a casserole and fit it into your everyday life

H: Yes

J: You know ovens have got these things called timers. It’s amazing. You can pop a casserole dish with your, you know your lovely stewed meat in there with all your seasonal vegetables, you can go to work, you can put the timer on and it can be cooking for you while you’re at work, you come back and ping you’ve got a lovely casserole. So you can work it into busy working life. And then of course you’ve got something that you can use throughout the week as well. You could keep a casserole at least for two or three days, so if you haven’t’ finished it all in one sitting you can have it again the next day. So it’s all about making your food work for you

H: Absolutely

J: A bit longer as well

H: Yes. And slow cookers

J: Slow cookers

H: Where are they these days? I remember I was given a slow cooker from a friend’s parents they received it for their wedding gift some 35 years ago, she said I don’t use this dusty old thing – I love my slow cooker

J: Yes it’s a fantastic – and they’re not that expensive

H: No

J: And it’s a really, really good – sausage machines we were talking about earlier on as well. You can make your own sausages. Really good fun if you have got small kids as well, it’s nice to get involved in this kind of process, and they’re your own, you know exactly what meat’s going into them, you can mince your own meat, you can be sure of the provners, have a bit of fun, and it’s your own lovely sausage that you’ve made, and you can experiment with flavours as well

H: Yes and you can think up fun names. Kids would love that

J: Yes

H: Right let’s go for some questions then. Do keep your questions coming in, because we are live of course. And this one’s from Sharon – thank you Sharon, Sharon says “I’ve recently bought my own place and I’m cooking with fresh ingredients where possible. Why do different meats last longer than others, and are there some general rules I should adopt when storing meat?” Who wants to take that one?

K: Well when – it depends on where you buy meat and how it’s packed. If you buy meat from a butcher you presumably go there because you want your meat to be a little bit fresher for the dish you’re going to prepare either that night or possibly keep it in the fridge for the next day. If you go and buy meat which is packed in controlled atmosphere packs then use it by the use by date

H: Yes

K: If you’re going to put meat in the freezer, in a domestic freezer, you should keep it no more than sort of 3-6 months

H: Ok

J: That’s the rule isn’t it, in your freezer at home, 3-6 months

H: I actually need to – I was thinking oh I need to defrost my freezer, terrible, I’m a terrible person

J: Yes I’ve just had that thought as well, I’ve been away for a while, it probably needs – it’s time for a clearout

H: I think so. Right let’s go for another question, this one’s from Nigel Stevenson, thank you young man, he says “what kinds of marinades and sauces can I create for pork?”

J: Oh gosh, well pork is such a versatile dish, if you go to meatmatters.com there are loads of great recipe ideas actually on there

H: Yes

J: Pork belly is one of these cheaper cuts that we’re talking about

H: Yes

J: Pork belly you see on pretty much every gastro pub menu now

H: Absolutely

J: You go into. So the perception is it’s very expensive, it’s a good quality cut that actually is reasonably priced. You can do all sorts with a lovely pork belly, including lovely pork belly strips, nice Chinese style is lovely

H: Yes

J: It goes beautifully with vegetables, you know as a lovely accompaniment to those pok choy and all the rest of it and –

K: And like you were saying about the apple flavours and so on

J: Yes absolutely and the apples

H: Ok

J: Pork and apple’s great, or make your own sausages, pork and apple

H: Yes experiment. I have to say Julia I watched you on Celebrity Come Dine With Me, and I’m not just saying this, it was by far one of my all-time favourite, favourite episodes of Celebrity Come Dine with Me

J: Is that because I managed to annoy Edwina Currie?

H: You were excellent, I loved it, and I wanted to be sat at that table. I was trying to dive into my TV screen

J: Can I just say the beef, I did a beef dish, it was a lovely – it was a tenderloin of beef

H: Yes

J: It was delicious, it was from a hand-reared farm close to me in Rutland, it was a really, really super bit of meat, I marinated it in just some olive oil and some lemon and a bit of balsamic with some garlic. It was a delicious bit of beef because it always works as an easy recipe. I’m not a fantastic cook. It was lovely, but Edwina, she gave me a 2. She didn’t like the drinking

H: What was wrong with her? She didn’t want to party with the kids

J: No she didn’t like the atmosphere

H: She was not interested at all –

J: No she thought it was very juvenile behaviour. What can I say?

H: It was great

J: Thanks

H: Seriously, I want to come to your house for dinner one night

J: Yes

H: It looked like a lot of fun. Anyway, so you are obviously, we know you are a good cook because we have seen your cooking, we’ve heard the mmm noises

J: Mmmm

H: So do you experiment like that at home?

J: The trouble with me is I travel a lot, I’m away quite a lot, so I tend to stick to the dishes that I know, and although that beef dish is an absolute winner

H: Yes

J: It’s also really easy because it’s about the preparation, and that’s what we’re talking about here with all of these recipes and moving on to these other cuts and experimenting with them. I did the marinade for that in the morning and then went off and did everything I needed to do

H: Yes

J: All afternoon and you know literally then just pan fried it in the evening, and that’s what you can do with these cheaper cuts is experiment and do the stewing, the casserole – throw the vegetables in. And really have a play around with it, and yes that’s what I tend to do, stick to some good old basics and phone my Greek mum when I need help!

H: Oh yes mum, always at the end of the telephone I have to say yes

J: Yes yes always good. They’re the best recipe books aren’t they?

H: It’s so true, so true. Gravy – Sue Letch always on the phone. Steve, thanks Steve. Steve says “hi Julia. What’s the most random animal you have ever cooked with?”

J: Couple actually. Working as I do on Country File and Kill it, Cook it, Eat it I think that one of the more unusual animals that I’ve eaten recently was squirrel, grey squirrel

H: Oh gosh

J: I was with a lovely man in the south downs, we were working his wood forest that he lives off, he literally lives off the land, and he kills squirrel routinely and he’s got two young kids and feeds them routinely on squirrel. He thinks that squirrel being the nuisance that they are

H: Yes

J: Should be – should be managed on a much larger scale and we should have them in supermarkets, that’s what he thinks about squirrel. It was a nibbly little dish, I’ll say that. We cooked it – we pan fried it with some olive oil and some garlic- not a lot of meat. When you think that a saddle of squirrel is no bigger than your two thumbs

H: Yes

J: It’s quite a lot of that – but nevertheless, it wasn’t a hideous flavour, and I wouldn’t go ooh, never try that, so squirrel is the more unusual – only last week I was on the farm in Exeter for Kill it, Cook it, Eat it,

H: Yes

J: The new series, which is going to be on air next year, and we had a lovely chef and he was given the interesting task of trying to make a delicious dish out of pig’s testicles

H: Ooh

J: Pigs testicles which the contestants, the volunteers who took part in this show, had to castrate one pig who was 7 days old

H: Ooh gosh

J: So they were little pig’s testicles and then we had some rather larger pig’s testicles.

H: Sliced?

J: Yes sliced and actually in a beautiful mushroom and shallot delicious, delicious sauce. The sauce was lovely, I’m not a huge fan of pig testicles

H: No. I quite enjoy, whenever people say I tried x, y, z, something unusual, what did it taste like? Chicken.

J: Yes –

H: Every time

J: No it didn’t taste like chicken, no it didn’t taste – one of the other contributors thought that it would taste like something else and it didn’t taste like that either

H: Ok

J: She made some funny comment, oh is it going to taste of – I went no!

H: Excellent

K: That goes to show how versatile pork can be

J: You see yes. My favourite expression from this year’s Kill it, Cook it, Eat it is that the only bit of the pork, the only bit of the pig that you can’t eat is the squeak

H: Excellent, love it

J: And I think we even ate that actually

H: This one’s from Anthony, thank you Anthony, he says “what makes different cuts of meat more expensive than others?”

J: We’ve sort of covered it

K: In a way with the convenience factor, but then when you get cuts from a fore quarter of an animal they tend to be interspersed with layers of fat and so on, so sometimes they don’t look as attractive as they should do and people tend to opt for the leaner, full muscle cuts, and that’s really what makes the difference

H: Ok

J: It’s all –

K: And to do with the – the longer, slower cooking of course

J: It’s also to do with the condition that the animal has been bred and reared in as well, that makes a difference. If you do care, and I’m someone whose passionate about the kind of life that the animal has led, so if hand-reared is important to you, if some form of organic, because organic is a bit of a wishy-washy

H: Yes

J: Message at the moment, but if some part of the organic message is important to you, if you do care about animal welfare then that also has an impact on price because these animals will have been reared and bred in different conditions. So if you’ve got a red ruby cow up in Devon that’s been fed slowly on grass for all its life, two or three years, that’s very different to a bull that would be killed in a larger, intensive process which would die within the year and is fed faster on cereals to make it grow faster, and that has an affect on the meat as well, so that’s where your – that’s what you’re paying for as well, so really think about that and think about those labels as well if you do care about the animal welfare

H: Ok. And Meat Smart, the campaign itself is really making people think about these things and also then experimenting, putting it into practical use and actually experimenting

K: Yes it’s bringing some of the – people would call them old-fashioned cuts that your grandmother used to produce back in to the modern arena, with some of the modern ingredients that are available to us

H: Ok great. Question here from Trevor Elvin, thanks Trevor. He says “cooking for one can be a mission” – I know – “so what can I do which won’t take so long to prepare?”

J: Well you see I would argue that you could put a bit more time into the preparation and cook something that’s going to last for longer, so yes it’s a bit of a mission cooking for one, but if you’re cooking for one and it can feed you for 4 or 5 days and you can get lots of different things out of it

H:Yes

J: Then I would say you know that’s a good idea, and you can go with some of the stews, from a stew you can eventually work that down to a soup

H: Yes

J: So once you’ve had a stew on say a Monday, by the Thursday or the Friday you can turn, make some remains into a stock, add more fresh vegetables, you could do a casserole with that as well, get yourself some lovely beans that you can find, so make that preparation time work for you, it’s all about sort of thinking ahead

H: And planning

J: And planning and it is, if you put a bit more time into your research, into your preparation and your planning you’re going to get a lot more out of your food, and it is worth cooking a delicious meal for one for yourself. It’s satisfying and it’s lovely

H: I agree and it colours your life

J: Well take it to work

H: I can make spag bol last 3 days

J: Share the love. Next day share the love and you know get them to taste your lovely casserole or your stew as well and you know, share the meat, share the love

H: Yes let’s have a big meat party everyone

J: Yes

H: Right we are running out of time, just time to go to this, I think it’s more of a statement from Thomas Charles Whittman, thank you. “Here in Suffolk we have plenty of lovely pigs and cooking with belly can produce such a tasty meal. I entirely recommend it.”

J: well we’ve already touched on that and we’re both big fans of the pork belly and it is one of those less well known cuts so when you go to Meat Matters you’ll find lots of recipes for it, and ideas what to do with those cuts

H: Excellent, anything you want to say, you went like this –

K: Only the belly as well, I mean a lot of people don’t realise it but that’s where the spare ribs that we enjoy from certain restaurants and Chinese restaurants, that’s where they come from, the belly

J: So you’re getting double use there

H: Yes

J: Pork belly and the ribs

H: Brilliant. Thank you so much, award-winning butcher. I know I keep saying it but I’ve never met an award-winning butcher before, it’s exciting for me

J: It’s posher than a butcher

H: You are yes

J: He’s an institute of butchery and everything now. He’s made it, he’s up there

K: Thank you

H: Yes because you haven’t got the apron covered in the blood, that’s a little disappointing. Julia pleasure to meet you

J: It’s nice to meet you as well

H: Thank you so much to both of you. That is all we have time for today but more – for more information and for some great recipe ideas do log on to meatmatters.com and there’s a wily ideas there to beat the credit crunch as well. Thank you very much and I’ll see you next time. Bye bye