SAN FRANCISCO — At a time when people have a bottomless interest in all aspects of their food from farm to table, The Gourmet Butcher has just released a comprehensive set of DVDs that show how to butcher beef, pork and lamb. The butcher is Cole Ward of northern Vermont who has been a teaching butcher for more than 30 years and who was featured as one of America's top 50 butchers in the recent book Primal Cuts: Cooking with America's Best Butchers by Marissa Guggiana.
The DVDs are intended for chefs, home cooks, homesteaders and farmers who may want to butcher, or who may simply want to be more informed on specific cuts of meat and how to utilize them. They provide solid learning for those involved with the artisan food movement, as well as do-it-yourselfers in both urban and rural settings.
Butcher Cole Ward is both genial and authoritative and teams up with Chef Courtney Contos who comes from a family of four-star restaurateurs in Chicago. For example, Ward starts with a side of beef, quarters it, and shows how to create Rib Eye, Sirloin, T-Bone, Porterhouse, Flat Iron and Delmonico Steaks. On this same DVD, Contos uses the Flat Iron cut and demonstrates how to make the classic Steak au Poivre. With a career that started at age 14, Ward has worked for small and large butcher shops, as well as for a variety of celebrities and CBS Studios.
The two-DVD set of The Gourmet Butcher From Farm to Table is available online at www.thegourmetbutcher.com. One DVD covers lamb and pork and the other covers beef. Each DVD has a running time of 2 hours and 10 minutes. The set sells for $29.95.
Butchering, like many culinary "lost arts," is making a comeback. Food enthusiasts are planting vegetable gardens, raising chickens, pickling, canning and foraging. Meat CSAs are springing up and increasing numbers of people want to know the provenance of the meat they are buying. Chefs are buying whole animals and creating nose to tail menus. The Gourmet Butcher adds substance to this movement.
Source: The Gourmet Butcher