Quality Fast Food: Kelly’s Roast Beef

On my recent triumphant return to the Chomposaurus breeding grounds of Boston, MA, I visited a mecca of meat that I had strangely neglected during my initial tenure there. Kelly’s Roast Beef has a few locations in the Boston area (for this review we went to the original at Revere Beach), pumping out metric tons of sandwiches, fried foods and chowder to the hungry New England masses. Indeed, my carnivorous companion Wyoming Rose and I were amazed that “Medium Onion Ring” equaled a literal half-a-square-foot cube of deep-fried flaky battered rings. Needless to say we did not finish them, even though they were flaky, fresh and gigantic.

Before I move on to the main attraction, a warning: do not order the large roast beef sandwich unless you have resigned yourself to an early, coronary-propelled grave. Kelly’s Large Roast Beef Sandwich is two solid hockey pucks’ worth of moist meat packed precariously into a buttery yellow bun. I had difficulty putting it into my mouth, and believe me I have a big mouth. Only the use of generous amounts of barbecue sauce as lube allowed for easy digestion. Well, that and the beef was out of this world. It was as though your local Arby’s had gone to the neighborhood deli and gotten their best brisket for their sandwiches. You won’t top Kelly’s for quality of fast food roast beef. I was fortunate in that I needed a lot of it, too, since I was loading up for the Boston Marathon. Not to run it, mind you; but to be able to absorb the six hours of beer that watching it from the street requires.

Rose and I were also impressed with the quality of the service. You see, when the beefsmith taking our order asked what we wanted on our sandwiches, I foolishly said “everything,” figuring this was a Chicago Vienna Dog type situation. He paused and looked up at me. “Really?” He said, “Everything is pretty disgusting.” He listed about 20 items, most of which would not go together. I settled for cheese, onions, pickles and barbecue sauce – a good choice, although horseradish was also tempting. They also had no problem giving us extra buckets of bbq sauce to dip our rings in. Hooray for Yankee kindness.

So if you have a hankering for the best beef you can eat in 10 minutes or less, Kelly’s is your place. And perhaps, finally, I have found someone to help me forget my first true roast beef love, Rax. Although it’s hard to replace lemonade served in a plastic alligator.

A Wagyu Holiday (Sponsored by Costco)

Dear Warren,

You are a great brother-in-law. I hope the lawn gnome business picks up in the new year. I’m sure you’ll be able to pay back all the money you owe the banks… and me. I guess you may be feeling a little down, so here’s a 15 lbs pack of Wagyu Beef from Costco that cost me 2 G’s. Grill some up and find out what success tastes like!

Love,
Chris

P.S. I’m richer than you.

The Offal Truth: Depression Hits The Cows

Apparently, the economic downturn massive depression is forcing some homemakers to look at alternatives to expensive meats.

Retail and food experts say that worry over the high cost of prime meat cuts and the economic downturn have more shoppers checking out supermarket offal offerings. But the return to eating innards was underway even before this year’s financial crisis, as celebrity chefs and restaurateurs have encouraged a return to cooking organs such as liver and kidneys, which once enjoyed a central place in British cooking. (See how farmers around the world prepare their crops for harvest.)

At ASDA, Britain’s second largest supermarket chain and a subsidiary of Wal-Mart, offal sales were up 20% last month compared to November 2007. Sainsbury’s, the country’s third largest supermarket chain, is selling 48% more pig livers, 22% more chicken livers and 8% more pig kidney than it was last year. Overall, sales of offal in the U.K. are expected to reach more than $62 million this year according to industry analysts Mintel.

“It’s price-driven,” says Bob Cotton, CEO of the British Hospitality Association, which represents 60,000 hotels and restaurants in the U.K. “I couldn’t say the British public have suddenly fallen in love with offal. That would be gilding the lily.”

I’m all for using the whole cow! Here are some great offal recipes:
Lamb Fries (aka Cowboy Caviar aka Balls) and Beef Tongue from Confabulist‘

Tripas à modo do Porto – The tripe stew for which Porto is famous (I have had this and it is quite tasty – like lentil soup with meat)

And something a bit more gourmet… Beef Liver with Carmelized Onions and Pecans

Yep, those are balls.

The Grassy LOL (i.e. the Vast Chicken Wing Conspiracy)

Honestly, the title has little to do with this post. But I thought of it and I couldn’t NOT write it.

When I first saw posters for the Grass Fed Party in NYC, I got excited, because I thought I was going to be going to a big beef-eating jamboree. Then I went to their website and got even more excited because I realized it was a political party. From the preamble to their party platform:

The Grass-fed Party believes that it is time in America for a revival of traditional ranching practices to help the smaller communities thrive, to help preserve and enrich range lands, and to help cows eat according to their natural diets while giving them access to clean air and water.

Of course, like any third party, they already have a slightly kooky leader, a rancher from Montana. But as the old saying goes, you can tell a man’s character by the way he treats his beef.

How serious are they? Well, they regularly update their blog, have a weekly drawing for four strip steaks, and have an online action center. Unfortunately they also seem to heavily promote their leader’s own meat products, with a link to his online store. But then again, you can buy Obama beanies on Obama’s site, right?

Know Your Cow: Brisket

Brisket (from the Old Norse “brjōsk”) is cut from the lower chest of the cow, which is frequently called the breast. It’s usually split into a first and second cut, for a total weight of 7 to 9 pounds. As one of the toughest parts of a cow, brisket can’t be grilled like a traditional steak. It takes careful marinating and seasoning to prepare and then has to cook for many hours. It’s especially popular in Texas (sold by the pound or by the sandwich), where rumor has it that two German brothers who owned a meat market began smoking brisket as a way to use their excess meat.

Brisket is cheap. A massive 7 pound block will run you only 30 or 40 dollars. That’s why it’s so popular for BBQ’s: because you can feed a lot of people without spending a fortune. It’s also popular because it’s effing delicious.

Real men smoke their brisket. Not by coincidence, real women also smoke their brisket. You better believe Rachel McAdams smokes her brisket. Mine, too. If you happen to be so unlucky as to not yet own a Big Green Egg (I assume by reading this site, you must be at least aspiring to own one), then you can also slow cook your brisket in an oven or a very large slow cooker. Just make sure you rub it with as much spice as humanly possible first.

To cook a whole brisket, you need to take off most of the fat, leaving just a thin layer for cooking. Your butcher will have no problem doing this for you; not so sure about asking the high school student that works at Safeway.

And don’t forget, it’s great for Hanukkah!

PlaySteak 3

You might not need to watch all two minutes of this, but you have to admit it must mean… something.

Sunday Protein: Buying (Part of) a Cow

An oldie but goodie from the NYTimes Magazine.

Last summer, when our neighbors in Maine invited us to split a quarter of a Belted Galloway cow that had been pasture-raised less than a mile from our house, we enthusiastically chipped in our $250. In exchange we received what amounted to a year’s supply of hamburger meat, some standard-issue steaks and seven or so inscrutable, humpy roasts that I chose to ignore. Eating our cow — and entreating our friends to eat our cow — became our mission.

Review: Australian Meat Pies [dubpies.com]

Here’s the brief Wikipedia definition of the Australian meat pie:

An Australian meat pie is a hand-sized meat pie containing largely minced meat and gravy sometimes with onion and often consumed as a takeaway food snack. It is considered iconic in both Australia and the neighbouring New Zealand. The popular brand Four’N’Twenty produce 50,000 pies per hour and Australians consume an average of 12 meat pies each per year

Twelve seems low; that’s what I could eat in a week of heavy pub-crawling. When I lived in Australia, I was thrilled to discover the meat pie; I stand by my assertion that no food better serves the drunken student masses, with their needs for grease, meat and carbs.

But where could I find them in the U.S.? This weekend, Chomposaurus reviewed four pies from the Brooklyn store and online meatpie outlet dubpies.com; our panel of reviewer’s thoughts lie below.

Know Your Cow: Sweetbreads

After being featured in not one but two dishes on Top Chef last night, sweetbreads are piquing the curiosity of would-be gourmets throughout the reality TV viewing world. So, what exactly is a sweetbread? The answer is possibly less appetizing than you thought.

Most mammals, including humans and cows, have a thymus, a gland that helps produce immune cells, such as T cells. Cows have more than one thymus, in their neck and by their heart. They’re only prominent in young cows, thus they are frequently referred to as “veal sweetbreads.” If someone says “beef sweetbreads” to you then they are either stupid, or are they are Bobby Flay trying to trick you into looking stupid. In either case you should hit them with the nearest mallet.

Preparing sweetbreads involves removing the outer membrane by soaking them in salt water, usually overnight. They can then be poached, braised or straight-up deep fried. Like Lisa said on Top Chef last night, they’re kind of like a big beefy chicken nugget.

Sweetbreads information on the internet seems to vary. Some sites insist that the pancreas is also a sweetbread; others say it is only the thymus. Many sites talk about whether lamb or pork sweetbreads are worth eating – lamb seems to be generally accepted. Explore the interwebs for more info; meanwhile, here’s Stephanie from Top Chef’s veal sweetbreads recipe.

Building a Better Cowreactor

Salon.com’s Green Lantern blog takes a closer look at the reality of making beef in a lab. The article tells us some utterly fascinating details about how labmeat is made to taste more like real cow:

There has also been talk of adding polysaccharide beads to the bioreactors; as the temperature or acidity of the solution changes, these beads would expand or contract, thus providing the necessary workout for the nascent tissue. The beads would likely be made from the exoskeletons of arthropods and are completely nontoxic.

However, it throws cold water on the idea that you’ll be buying artificial wursts in your local Safeway next year:

Despite considerable hubbub over the technology in recent months, we’re still years—or, more likely, decades—away from affordable lab-grown meat. The current experiments are taking place in bioreactors that measure only a few hundred milliliters in volume, and the longest complete muscle tissues are just 2 centimeters long. Researchers are nowhere close to scaling up their production to market-ready levels, to say nothing of market-ready prices. A Dutch team’s lab-grown pork, for example, would cost around $45,000 per pound—assuming they could make an entire pound of the stuff.

But it’s good to dream about having my own portable beef-growing bioreactor in the basement.