Soup du Jour

Polish Sausage and Potato, or Green Garden.

Sandwich: Canadian bacon, Virginia ham, cream cheese, carmalized red onion, onions, bean sprouts on whole grain.

$6.99

Your Christmas roasts are here!

Here at Marczyk’s we take dry aging for granted, but what is it all about? Here’s the beef:

This is an old-world technique all but lost today. In the past, beef was slaughtered in a central area with good proximity to railway (like Denver or Chicago) and then it was shipped around the country whole and hanging to skilled butchers closer to the final point of sale. Remember that there was very limited refrigeration, and meat keeps very well when it’s whole. Anyway, this de facto dry aging was the norm 75 years ago and longer. Two technologies changed all this: sous vide or Cryovacing (Cryovac is like Kleenex—a brand name for the process of removing all air from a plastic bag and sealing it) and refrigeration. Centralized slaughter became centralized meat packing. Now beef is packed in plastic bags and boxed very soon after slaughter (2-4 days) then shipped in trucks and “aged” in the bag, aka “wet-aging”.

In the dry aging process approximately 20-30% of water weight is lost. The result of dry aging is a densely flavored (less water to dilute flavor) extremely beefy and tender piece of meat. In the dry aging process the natural enzymes are able to literally break down the muscle fibers and naturally occurring aerobic beneficial bacteria do their thing (not present in bagged meat—no oxygen). This is the meat you will only find at the very best of the very best steak houses and markets. Dry aged beef should never have been Cryovac-ed and should be cooked slightly differently than fresh or wet-aged beef (less water in the meat so it cooks faster). So there’s the science behind the taste. Dig in!

Colorado Ski Report

Turkey FAQ’s

Do bring a nice bottle of wine to the host’s house. And if they do not use it that evening, don’t take it back with you. No lie a girl I know does this.

Don’t eat the crispy turkey skin when you think no one is looking. A - Some one is always looking. B - Everyone else is doing it and you’ll end up with a bald bird.

Do offer to clean up afterwards.

Don’t call the host the night before with a list of your allergies unless it is an allergy that will kill you. If there is something you are suspect of (oysters in the stuffing?), spread it out on the plate and it looks like you ate some.

If you are doing the cooking and you tell people dinner is at 4:00, then serve dinner at 4:00. If the wine continues to flow and there is no food, you may be looking at a holiday version of “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Turkey FAQ’s:

What’s the difference between Marczyk’s turkeys and conventional?

Annually, the U.S. produces 220 million conventional turkeys that are raised in dark and cramped conditions within high density confinement barns.  They are bred for large breasts and often grow so large in as little as 2 months that their legs buckle under the pressure of their own weight.  They are continuously fed a diet that has an added antibiotic designed to promote “health” within the flocks.  No growth hormones are allowed in the use of poultry production per USDA regulation; however, these added antibiotics can mimic the growth hormone function.  These turkeys are typically injected with water and sodium phosphates to provide flavor and enhance tenderness. Marczyk’s birds are none of the above.

Do they really taste differently?

We say the truth is in the taste, and these birds are no exception. You’ll find Marczyk’s all-natural classic turkeys to be free of the slightly chemically taste of supermarket birds. If you want to go one step further, you can brine the bird in a salt and sugar water mixture.

The heritage birds have a rich, deep turkey flavor, not gamy like a wild bird, but “turkeyer”.

Do I need to cook the Heritage turkeys differently?

Yes. Heritage turkeys are leaner and smaller than broad-breasted whites, so cook them fast at higher temperatures. Heritage turkeys should be cooked at 425-450 degrees F until the internal temperature reaches 140-150 degrees F. Butter or oil can be added under the breast skin to add moisture during roasting. We have also had great success with confiting the legs and roasting the breast, which of course requires taking them apart.

You won’t need to cover the breast with foil to keep it from drying out while the rest of the bird cooks. The smaller breasts on the heritage birds create a better balance between the dark meat and white meat, which means roasting a bird to perfection is much easier since white meat cooks quicker than the dark meat.

Good, safe beef. No shit.

This simple, folks. e.coli 0157, the deadly pathogen recently discovered in ground beef processed in Nebraska, comes from feces. Yup, feces. Eric Schlosser wrote about this in his seminal work: Fast Food Nation, only he didn’t use the word feces. So, how does meat get contaminated, and how do we know our meat is clean?

First, two ways meat gets infected: from feces in entrails which get cut by knives during high-speed processing, or second, from crap attached to the hide not fully cleaned before the animal is killed. Pretty disgusting stuff, especially in light of what we are led to believe when we see mass-produced-factory meat in nice-looking packaging with bucolic farm scenes in the pictures. Why is ground beef usually the suspect? And why aren’t people getting sick from fresh-ground beef? When beef is ground at the slaughterhouse, it can contain contributions from a large number of animals. Much of slaughterhouse grind comes from mechanically separated (i.e. muscle torn from bone by powerful hydraulic machines) meat and inevitably some undesirable bits can get into what we eat. (Ever really wonder why factory ground beef is recommended to be cooked to 165 F?) FYI, Paul and I feed rare beef from Marczyk’s to our sons; beef ground from whole muscle in small shops have a much less likely chance of containing contaminants for obvious reasons…we can see it, and we can smell it. plus, it’s not mechanically separated in the first place. no bits and chunks thrown into a grinder. remember “ground chuck?” that’s what we do here. We grind chuck. If you want, we’ll show them to you.

Here’s the deal: you have a choice. Why wouldn’t you buy hand-ground beef made from whole muscle right in front of you just like your parents and their parents did for years and years? Remember when a hamburger tasted good? You can have that now. Our Butcher’s Choice® ground beef is made at least twice a day; it sells for $3.79 a pound, and we’ll wrap it any way you like–including for freezing. No attitude, no b.s. (literally) and all from sources who NEVER use antibiotics or hormones in the production of their meat. You deserve it. Your kids deserve it. The animals deserve it.

The Land of the Free?

In the U.S. 500,000 people die from smoking each year, 250,000 die from alcohol related causes; the FDA estimates 1 person every 9 years dies from raw milk related causes.  Soft raw-milk cheese is illegal.  Is this really the land of the free?