REO Speedwagon

This is me earlier today taking apart a beef loin. The tenderloin is completely buried in fat and layers of silverskin and age.

What's fascinating is that when most restaurants recieve a tenderloin, it is kryovaced and dripping in blood. All a cook needs to do is remove the final layer of silverskin, tie and portion. Today it took maybe 18-20 minutes to get to this stage. At the Healthy Butcher the beef is hung for 3-4 weeks, so it air dries...ages. I guess what is so different is the lack of blood – plus the smell emanating from the board is sweet not septic, like a skunky sock which sometimes happens in the vac-pac "aging". Being around so much meat just makes me hungry.

In my education as chef I was told that when beef is processed it's turned into the desired cuts and kryovaced or vacpacked to age. This does not make sense to me now. To age meat it has to be exposed to air/bacteria under controlled temperature and humidity. This does two things - it evaporates moisture "concentrating flavours", and it gives the meat a certain -as the french would say- "I don't know what", a hum, or sweetness, or just plain flavour. Conventional methods of meat production go against traditional methods (I'm going to use the term 'conventional' to describe today's current nomal food production technique). Mostly its ethnic butcher shops that still provide this kind of aging but for the large part it is a dying trade in North America. So pretty much every piece of meat you eat is covered in plastic "kryo-aged",

This brings me to start talking of HOMOGINIZATION. I am no hippy, I just think that when food starts to become a mediocre normality something is wrong. Is it all about consistency even if consistency = crap?

Can you remember that summer sweet corn you had 20 years ago? The way the breeze hit you the colour of the sky, the smiles of the company you kept? This may not be a memory for our children. GMO's, farmed salmon, Nickleback.

Just kidding about Nickleback and subsidiaries (I believe they are absolutely fantastic frikin MTVcribbinlisious). I better stop I feel a rant coming on.

Homoginization.