Ask Your Butcher This Simple Question For Better Meat

A neighborhood butcher is probably one of the best home cooking resources that a person can have. A good butcher can help you perfect your burger blend, trim and debone your protein, and even do most of the work that turns a bone-in pork loin into a showstopping crown roast. They can also help spark a little creativity and ensure that you're sourcing top product when you ask them to point you to the freshest cuts in stock.

You're likely already at the butcher rather than in, say, your big box store's freezer section, for a couple of reasons. One of them might be because you prioritize freshness over those prepackaged, preservative-packed goods. A great shop will obviously ensure that everything in its case left the farm as recently as possible, but some items will always be newer than others. Simply asking what's fresh is the easiest way to identify them. You also have to be prepared to work with the answer you're given and quickly zag from your poultry plans if beef in one of its many forms happens to be the cut of the day.

You're in luck if your grocery store or supermarket has a proper meat department replete with the professionals to staff it. You can snap up those fresh cuts first and plan your meals around them on the fly. A lot of folks do prefer to pick up perishables last so that they can stay refrigerator-safe for as long as possible, but a cooler bag can help with that. This is, of course, a little more challenging if you patronize an independent butcher shop, but those are also more likely to let you call orders in ahead of time. That will help you know what fresh selections you're getting, do the rest of your shopping accordingly, and pick up your meat on the way home.

A three-part formula can also help you easily plan your dinners around the butcher's best with hardly any planning at all. A protein, a veggie, and a carb will almost always combine to create a comprehensive plate. Heck, if steaks happen to be the freshest bet, all you need is a potato and you have a classically satisfying pair. But you can just as easily combine something like chicken with rice and broccoli, pork with a green salad and garlic bread, and virtually infinite variations all based on your priority for freshness.