Soup du Jour

New England clam chowda, or French bean with Toulouse sausage and bacon

Marczyk Dictionary

Gnar Slash (noun) nar’-slash - The mark that one leaves behind after one skis gnar.

scene: while riding a lift at lovie, with unshaven, unemployed, mal-vocabularied, “dudes”

sentence: “Dude, that was sick, is that my gnar slash or your gnar slash”

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

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?