Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Mess Hall => Topic started by: French G. on November 30, 2017, 09:28:44 PM
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Does your area have any commercial meat products that are not widely known, but should be? I always like to get into regional cuisine, especially if it involves fried meat.
Locally it's Virginia, so we do ham. I am most partial to Turner ham of Fulks Run, VA. Of course many other regions do ham, but so far, not impressed. Got some Missouri ham, it was okay, but not enough to be fistfuls neighbor.
Scrapple is likewise big in the hills here, but I think that is all over the Midwest too.
From other areas, I got on a Taylor ham, or pork roll, kick. I like down market poor people meats a lot and I can find it in a store here. Really good breakfast sandwich. One I cannot find is Arkansas bacon. Thinking of mail order, or possibly mail ordering anything else someone thinks up.
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Scrapple, not so much in Iowa.
Ring bologna is big in Iowa, especially Dutch style, which uses cornmeal for filler. Several lockers throughout the state make it.
Probably in 2nd place in Brats behind Wisconsin, once again every locker has there own style. Everything kicks Johnsonville's ass.
Also pork tenderloin, one that is cut thick, hammered out to the size of a dinner plate, breaded and deep fried. Served on a white bun with ketchup, mustard, pickle and onion. This would be a restaurant type item, do no confuse with a pork fritter.
Bacon was cool here, way before everywhere else.
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Tri-tip is a CA Central Coast and Central Valley thing. There's an ongoing argument whether it started in Santa Maria or Oakland. I side with Santa Maria since it's cowboy country. Everytime I was ever at a big event at Vandenberg AFB that involved DC big wigs, the Air Force guys would always hire the Santa Maria tri-tip guys (VAFB abuts Santa Maria) to show up with the big ass wood grill on the trailer, a few cows worth of meat, and about a barrel of salsa. :laugh:
I use tri-tip a lot when I do steak and eggs for breakfast.
http://www.qn4ubbqhouse.com/index.php/welcome/173-the-history-of-tri-tip.html
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Second tri-tip though there's nothing really special about it. It's not worth making a special effort to get some.
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Dunno, I have driven a long way to Virginia City to get a tri tip sandwich.
Ring bologna, escaped Germans? I am pretty familiar since I spent a lot of my misspent youth in central Pennsylvania where it is quite popular. Nowadays I just wait for someone to bring deer bologna to work.
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Dunno, I have driven a long way to Virginia City to get a tri tip sandwich.
Ring bologna, escaped Germans? I am pretty familiar since I spent a lot of my misspent youth in central Pennsylvania where it is quite popular. Nowadays I just wait for someone to bring deer bologna to work.
My favorite is the original.
http://www.ulrichsmeatmarket.com/buy_online/?ulrichs_genuine_pella_bologna&show=category&productCategoryID=6598&productCategoryIDs=6585,6598
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Salty country hame from NC or VA.
Dry Sausage from Eastern NC.
Eastern NC BBQ (chopped pork with vinegar-based sauce).
Scrapple is not one I ate growing up, but I like it all the same after being introduced to it in my late 20s.
I get my dry sausage and country ham from Nahunta in NC.
Chris
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Sweet Lebanon Bologna from Pennsylvania.
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Salty country hame from NC or VA.
Dry Sausage from Eastern NC.
Eastern NC BBQ (chopped pork with vinegar-based sauce).
Scrapple is not one I ate growing up, but I like it all the same after being introduced to it in my late 20s.
I get my dry sausage and country ham from Nahunta in NC.
Chris
BBQ could make the great cornbread war of 2015 look like a skirmish. I prefer the carolina style myself but the popularity explosion hasn't done us many favors. Cook the meat right, give me sauce on the side and skip all the presentation sideshow.
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Around here it's meat.
Any kind of meat, so long as it's meat and while beef and pork are forever king around here goat has made some inroads.
Grilled, pan fried, deep fired, broiled, smoked, BBQ'd, sausaged...yup, Okies will eat it.
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BBQ could make the great cornbread war of 2015 look like a skirmish. I prefer the carolina style myself but the popularity explosion hasn't done us many favors. Cook the meat right, give me sauce on the side and skip all the presentation sideshow.
Yup. I'm not as serious about it as I was at one point. I generally like any BBQ with the exception of chicken and anything heavily sauced with thick sugary sauces. If the sauce hides the meat physically and flavor-wise, it's no good.
Otherwise, I like and eat it all even though, in my mind, BBQ will always be slow cooked pork with vinegar sauce.
Chris
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goat has made some inroads.
Goat is good. I've liked it every time I've had the opportunity to try it.
Chris
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Also pork tenderloin, one that is cut thick, hammered out to the size of a dinner plate, breaded and deep fried. Served on a white bun with ketchup, mustard, pickle and onion. This would be a restaurant type item, do no confuse with a pork fritter.
Fried Pork Tenderloin, about the only food I miss from the Midwest. You simply cannot get it in Virginia (unless you make it yourself.)
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Also pork tenderloin, one that is cut thick, hammered out to the size of a dinner plate, breaded and deep fried. Served on a white bun with ketchup, mustard, pickle and onion. This would be a restaurant type item, do no confuse with a pork fritter.
That sounds similar to schnitzel. Does it have roots in the kraut community out there? Though we just pound the pork down a little bit to maybe double the size, and don't do the bread and condiments. Though I have been known to Americanize mine with apple sauce (Homer!).
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Growing up in Cincinnati in a German family, we had goetta.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goetta
It's a German sausage, a mix of pork (sometimes beef) with steel-cut oats, onion, and spices. Typically served at breakfast, pan fried.
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That sounds similar to schnitzel. Does it have roots in the kraut community out there? Though we just pound the pork down a little bit to maybe double the size, and don't do the bread and condiments. Though I have been known to Americanize mine with apple sauce (Homer!).
Yes source is schnitzel. Midwest was settled by a shitload of Germans and Dutch.
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Oddly enough, Pennsylvania, or Germansylvania as it really should be known, doesn't really do the fried pork tenderloin.
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Oddly enough, Pennsylvania, or Germansylvania as it really should be known, doesn't really do the fried pork tenderloin.
It is kind of odd that the other Germn states don't have it. It's really an Iowa, Illinois, Indiana thing, with each state having a slight difference on size and how the sandwich is dressed.
It's even regionally in Iowa. Where I grew up, SE Iowa, you ordered a pork tenderloin at a restaurant it was the friend pounded breaded tenderloin. Where I live now NC Iowa, you as asked if you want grilled or fried tenderloin, where as the grilled is a more popular option.
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Growing up in Cincinnati in a German family, we had goetta.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goetta
It's a German sausage, a mix of pork (sometimes beef) with steel-cut oats, onion, and spices. Typically served at breakfast, pan fried.
Pretty neat, I am sure I'd love it. Reading an Ohio thing got me thinking on this, I had never heard of " city chicken" but now I want some. A regional relic of the past when veal was cheaper than chicken. Now chicken is the trash cheap meat and veal is rare due to selective artificial breeding that no longer produces unwanted males in a dairy operation.
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It is kind of odd that the other Germn states don't have it. It's really an Iowa, Illinois, Indiana thing, with each state having a slight difference on size and how the sandwich is dressed.
It's even regionally in Iowa. Where I grew up, SE Iowa, you ordered a pork tenderloin at a restaurant it was the friend pounded breaded tenderloin. Where I live now NC Iowa, you as asked if you want grilled or fried tenderloin, where as the grilled is a more popular option.
We do have something similar in Pennsylvania... the grilled pork chop sandwich. Occasionally I've seen pan fried pork chop sandwiches. I'm really wondering if it had anything to do with industrial hog farming, of which there is very little in Pennsylvania.
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We do have something similar in Pennsylvania... the grilled pork chop sandwich. Occasionally I've seen pan fried pork chop sandwiches. I'm really wondering if it had anything to do with industrial hog farming, of which there is very little in Pennsylvania.
it's been around longer than the modern industrial hog farming, which is really a 1970's thing.
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it's been around longer than the modern industrial hog farming, which is really a 1970's thing.
Yes, I know it's been a thing for a long time. The difference is that hog farms were never really a thing in Pennsylvania like dairy and chicken farms were.
Everyone had some pigs, and they primarily supplied the family's winter meat needs. That's very different from the kind of dedicated, single critter farms that grew up in the midwest starting after the civil war.
By industrial farms, I mean farms that are primarily dedicated to one type of production. Dairy farms are industrial farms, and in both dairy and hog farming, it goes back a LOT longer than the 1970s.
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Yes, I know it's been a thing for a long time. The difference is that hog farms were never really a thing in Pennsylvania like dairy and chicken farms were.
Everyone had some pigs, and they primarily supplied the family's winter meat needs. That's very different from the kind of dedicated, single critter farms that grew up in the midwest starting after the civil war.
By industrial farms, I mean farms that are primarily dedicated to one type of production. Dairy farms are industrial farms, and in both dairy and hog farming, it goes back a LOT longer than the 1970s.
Farms in the Midwest were still pretty diversified until the mid 1960s. Yes we had dedicated dairy farms on the outskirts of the cities/towns, but most farms had a mix of grain and forage, along with 1-3 (beef, pork, lambs) types of livestock for market. Most poultry and eggs for on farm consumption. We did have some that had larger pork production, but you're looking at sales of 2-10 animals at a time to the local auction or meat packers buying station. My mom grew up on a pig farm like that, I think my grandfather may of had a total of 100 hogs at any given time on their 160 acre farm, pasture farrowing, sty fattening, with most of the feed grown on the farm.
I do get what you are saying, but up until the 1960s, animals was a way to store grain on the farm. Easier to put a 100 bu of corn into animals as feed and move it to market then try to sell the grain on the open market. Lending and US Ag policy changed, along with better hybrids, consolidation of packers, end of the industrial worker unions in the packing houses and now we have what we go for Ag. Money has moved from many people and becoming concentrated in a much smaller group.
Also could be Iowa was settled a lot later than the other German areas in the US and pork is quicker and cheaper to raise than beef, and the new German immigrants found pork loin to be similar in texture as the veal used in the old country.
Sorry for the rant, just pissy how government policy (Earl Butz) really screwed up Ag in the Midwest.
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Dude. Hormel.
By the early 1900s Hormel was processing thousands of pigs a year that were raised on dozens of dedicated farms in the midwest.
Other industry processors, such as Swift and Armor, were emulating Hormel to a smaller scale with hogs, but to a far larger degree with beef.
Industrial meat farming in the midwest goes back far earlier than you're giving it credit.
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Dude. Hormel.
By the early 1900s Hormel was processing thousands of pigs a year that were raised on dozens of dedicated farms in the midwest.
Other industry processors, such as Swift and Armor, were emulating Hormel to a smaller scale with hogs, but to a far larger degree with beef.
Industrial meat farming in the midwest goes back far earlier than you're giving it credit.
Oh come now, all them cowboys and cattle drives and stuff fit right in during the sixties...
Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk
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Dude. Hormel.
By the early 1900s Hormel was processing thousands of pigs a year that were raised on dozens of dedicated farms in the midwest.
Other industry processors, such as Swift and Armor, were emulating Hormel to a smaller scale with hogs, but to a far larger degree with beef.
Industrial meat farming in the midwest goes back far earlier than you're giving it credit.
Yes, I know about Hormel, Swift, Morrell, Dubuque, Rath, etc. Probably 10,000s of farms actually involved, not just a few hundred.
It was different though, the packers didn't own the livestock, the farmers did. The packers had to buy the animals on the open market at stock auctions or at buying stations. Hormel still buys hogs direct from the famers, but a much bigger scale. The other guys like Tyson contract grow the livestock. They own the pigs and rations, contract farmers who own the buildings and have to deal with manure disposal. This is what started happening in the 60s. The way I understand it, contract growing started with the poultry industry in the 30s and branched into the other livestock and dairy operations. IBP came along in the 60s, pretty much killed the stockyard industry in Chicago, Sioux City, Omaha and Kansas City. IBP changed how meat was shipped by the half carcass to the butcher and to the now familiar vaccum packed boxed meats. IBP also broke the meat packers unions. Here is article from NY Times when the founder of IBP died, he wasn't a very nice guy. http://www.nytimes.com/1977/02/18/archives/currier-holman-65-beef-processor-dies-cofounded-the-largest.html
Used to be a hard job that paid well, now its a hard job that pays crap and hires refugees.
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I never said that the packers owned the animals or the farms. That's not a requirement for an industrial farming model.
What I am saying is that the meat packing industry drove the development of the industrial farm model in the United States, and there was NOTHING like it on the east coast when it came to pig production.
Having an industrialized farming model doesn't mean that you have to have a large conglomerate controlling it. It means that you're focusing on producing one main product, in this case hogs, for one target audience -- the large meat packers.
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I never said that the packers owned the animals or the farms. That's not a requirement for an industrial farming model.
What I am saying is that the meat packing industry drove the development of the industrial farm model in the United States, and there was NOTHING like it on the east coast when it came to pig production.
Having an industrialized farming model doesn't mean that you have to have a large conglomerate controlling it. It means that you're focusing on producing one main product, in this case hogs, for one target audience -- the large meat packers.
I agree the meat packers drove to create specialized farms, but probably up until the 1920s-1930 almost every farmer had hogs but probably less than a herd of 20. They were a way to convert corn into food, just didn't have the acreage to support a large herd. It's somewhere around 20 bushels of corn to feed a pig for a year and up until hybrid corn the yield averages were about 25 bushels an acre, so you needed about an acre of corn per pig. Most farms were between 40-160 acres, needed to grow hay for your horses and dairy, oats for horses, grain for chickens, pigs and dairy. Also needed pasture for dairy and horses, so actual acreage of corn was a lot smaller than one thinks.
Back when Iowa was started getting settled in the 1830-1840s by German immigrants, you can read stories about having a crate of piglets hanging from the bottom of their wagon. These immigrants usually started in Ohio or Indiana after getting off the boat and riding the train to the end of the tracks, or ending up at relatives houses in those states. How my mom's family got to Iowa, stopped in Ohio at relatives and headed this way.
I still think pork was easy food (and cheaper) to raise compared to beef, had a source of fat to fry in and similar texture to veal.
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I will second the country ham mentioned by mtnbkr. When we still lived in Oregon and traveled to NC on vacation, we'd stop at a grocery store on the way to the airport and stuff our suitcases full of the stuff. City ham was the only kind available in Oregon. When we ran low on country ham, we knew it was time for another NC vacation.
And all NC BBQ is great stuff, whether from the east or west side of the state. Sauce must be served on the side, not slathered over the meat.
SWMBO loves livermush all to heck. Personally, I can't stand the stuff.
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The TSA agent at the airport was probably thinking, "we get the strangest damn smugglers around here...". :D
Chris
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SC does not lay claim to its own style of BBQ, though mustard base sauce seems to be predominant. In my opinion, the only True Q on the east coast is "Carolina Style" (which is really NC style I think?), which is vinegar based, and these days I think typically injected straight into the meat. The very best BBQ i have had did not require any sauce after smoking, as it was so flavorful and juicy. But even a properly done Q can need some additional sauce.
I don't have an opinion on Texas or KC style Q with tomato based sauce. IMO the sauce tends to obscure the flavor of the meat. I'll eat it and gladly but it's not my go-to.
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I never cared much for the vinegar based sauce, nor the mustard based sauce.
I do like the sweeter tomato based sauces.
A new one on me, though, that I first encountered a number of years ago, was Alabama white sauce, which is mayonnaise based. I really enjoy it.
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I think typically injected straight into the meat.
I've never seen that (have cooked a few hogs for BBQ myself). The sauce is typically "mopped" on during cooking, with some additional applied while the meat is being chopped as necessary/desired.
Chris
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I've never seen that (have cooked a few hogs for BBQ myself). The sauce is typically "mopped" on during cooking, with some additional applied while the meat is being chopped as necessary/desired.
Chris
Got a buddy who does whole hogs. He does both. He mixes his rub with 1/2 vinegar, 1/2 water, and injects that into large muscle groups. He then mops throughout the cook. I bet he goes through a gallon of mop sauce for a whole hog. But man, the bark is tasty when he's done.
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In Pennsylvania, BBQ really only just started making inroads within the last 10-15 years or so.
Previously, a pig roast, at least practiced by my church, was a whole roasted hog, but normally stuffed with sauerkraut; no sauce.
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In Pennsylvania, BBQ really only just started making inroads within the last 10-15 years or so.
Previously, a pig roast, at least practiced by my church, was a whole roasted hog, but normally stuffed with sauerkraut; no sauce.
I miss pig roasts/pig pick. They were almost everywhere weekend somewhere growing up, seems to have been replaced by ever present weekend fish fry. Fish fry used to be use a Lenten thing and maybe one big one during the summer.
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They never did fish frys where I grew up. The other big thing, at least for fund raisers, were grilled chickens. LOTS of fire companies and churches do grilled chickens for sale.
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They never did fish frys where I grew up. The other big thing, at least for fund raisers, were grilled chickens. LOTS of fire companies and churches do grilled chickens for sale.
Lions Club are known for annual chicken BBQ in many communities here.
They build up a giant charcoal grill with cinder blocks and grill on big pieces of expanded metal.