I am no great shakes at recipes, so for the most part, Food Network will do the talking.
This segment of "Foodish" is brought to you by my Facebook page, where each week I focus on a different ag product or commodity. By week I loosely mean I pick a new feature each Wednesday. For this week, I chose pickles and cucumbers.
And as this is the Meatetarian blog, what's one of the best ways to incorporate pickles and cucumbers in meat? In my opinion, that would be a burger.
So check out The Dallas Burger, created by the Grillmaster and Iron Chef himself, Bobby Flay.
Here's some things to note from the recipe:
Flay uses 80/20 ground beef. That means it's 80 percent lean muscle and 20 percent fat. While this is the type of ground beef that imparts the most amount of flavor, if you want a leaner burger, I suggest doing 85/15 or 95/5. If you want to be very extreme, some producers of ground beef make a 97/3 product. NOTE that when cooking leaner beef, since it doesn't have the fat, it is really, really easy to overcook, so watch the burgers closely!
Flay's beef also comes from the chuck area of the beef carcass. This is the area that on a human would be equivalent to the shoulder area. You can also find ground round (from the thigh/rump area) or ground sirloin (from the back) in your meatcase.
And where do pickles fit in? Well, they're on the burger. And if you want to be super inclusive of this week's featured commodity, you can slice up cucumbers super thin and add them to the slaw that's recommended to be served with pickles atop this barbecue-sauce adorned beef beauty.
Part of me thinks History Channel needs to jump on this bandwagon and create a "How It's Made" or "Modern Marvels" episode about Lean Finely Textured Beef and Boneless Lean Beef Trimmings.
That's the thing members of the media and social media activists decided to call "Pink Slime."
I'm sure most of you have heard the story by now: Reuters reported that back in 2002, United States Department of Agriculture scientist Gerald Zirnstein was unhappy USDA approved the use of LFTB and BLBT in ground beef. He referred to the product as "pink slime" in an email to a coworker, but a Freedom of Information Act request brought the email to the attention of the news media, which then shared the moniker with the general public. In 2009, The New York Times had a lengthy article reporting on the concerns various consumers and USDA professionals had with the two products. In April 2011, Jamie Oliver (the Brit formerly known as the Naked Chef) did a segment on his show "Food Revolution" to discuss LFTB and BLBT. By discuss, "butcher" might be a more appropriate — albeit pun intended — way to describe his methodology.
Before you continue reading, you should watch Oliver's video. If you're a concerned consumer or a social media activist, you probably already have. If you're an agriculturalist or a scientist, you might have scoffed at it for being complete absolutely ridiculous. But regardless, this blog is to tell you both sides of the story.
I'm not going to lie, I like what Jamie Oliver's intent is with "Food Revolution." I think it's vitally important for consumers to be aware of agriculture, since most of them are several generations removed from the farm. But there are some serious flaws in his methodology of presenting LFTB. And if you listen closely to the video, he acknowledges it: "This is how I'd imagine it's done," he says, dumping inedible beef into a dryer that acts in his demonstration as a centrifuge.
Here's what Oliver had correct in his video.
Indeed, LTFB and BLBT are produced by further processing beef that before this process wasn't eaten by humans. They are also treated with ammonium hydroxide.
Now here's what is misleading about the segment.
Imagine you're eating a steak. It's a really good, medium-rare ribeye dripping with deliciousness and you are determined to eat every morsel. But there's a bit of fat around the edge you have to trim off because, flavorful as it may be, the intermuscular fat surrounding a cut of meat isn't always the best thing to straight up eat. You trim off that fat, eat the rest of the steak and then notice there's still some bits of beef embedded in the fattrim. Try as you might, you can't cut them out with your steak knife, and it's not exactly the best table manners to pick up the fat and gnaw at the leftover beef.
That's kind of what happens when you harvest a beef animal. The majority of whole muscles are turned into steaks, roasts or specific ground beef (think "ground chuck," "ground round" and "ground sirloin"). With ground beef, the muscle is separated from the fat by hand, and using a lot of mathematical equations, processors determine how much muscle and fat to add together to make an 80/20, 85/15 and so on ground beef mixture. It's an interesting process. Trust me; I've done it.
Now, there are parts of the beef carcass that are like that "meat-stuck-in-the-fat" scenario. America wants lean beef. Processors also don't want to waste beef. Thus, the process of creating LFTB and BLBT was designed.
Trimmings (that's the "meat-stuck-in-the-fat") are warmed to about 100 degrees Fahrenheit inside a centrifuge. That's a machine that looks rather like a large mixing bowl.
The centrifuge spins the trimmings to separate meat from fat, similar to the way milk is separated from cream. The temperature inside the centrifuge melts and liquefies the fat.
Once the meat is separated from the fat, it's 95 percent lean. It can be added to ground beef to create a leaner product desired by lots of American consumers.
The difference between the two is the process used to make them safer. BLBT is treated with food-grade ammonium hydroxide. This is NOT the stuff you find in your run-of-the-mill chemistry lab. This is a type of NH3 that's been, in a better term, watered-down to be safe in extremely small quantities when added to food. LFTB is treated with citric acid.
Why treat the trimmings?
With ammonium hydroxide in particular, these treatments if done correctly reduce the amount of E. coli and Salmonella found in ground beef. Let's be clear here, though. Treating is not what Jamie Oliver's video showed, where the BLBT is dumped into a plastic tub and doused with noxious amounts of household chemicals. Treating is, however, giving the BLBT a puff of ammonium hydroxide to up its pH to an amount thatwill kill off these bacteria. In fact, if you look at the Material Safety Data Sheet for ammonium hydroxide, you'll see that in any amount it's harmful to bacteria, where in humans unless you drink, inhale or rub it on you, there are no harmful effects.
In fact, it's a chemical found naturally in humans. In meat. In baked goods. So when a puff of it is added to a processed beef product, it is used to up the"anti" in anti-bacterial; not to poison schoolchildren who eat NH3-treated hamburgers in their school lunches.
The next big argument against the use of LFTB and BLBT in ground beef is whether or not it should be labeled as an ingredient. Here's the thing. We've established that these are beef. So the meat industry's side of this is that if they are adding beef to beef, then what's the point in making it an ingredient on the label? If I weren't in the agriculture industry, I would see "LFTB" or "BLBT" on a label — or alternatively, a label that said "Does not contain LFTB or BLBT" — and immediately react by saying, "What the Hell is the USDA putting in my ground beef? Ground beef is ground beef! I don't wan't anything IN IT!"
Then I would immediately petition the USDA to stop using confusing abbreviations on ground beef packaging.
Because when you think about it, no packer is going to label ground beef as containing "pink slime," because that's a misnomer.
This is pink slime:
This is "pink slime:"
Let's address another claim Oliver made in his video. The beef that's turned into LFTB and BLBT is inedible and used for pet food. For the record, the only reason it was considered "inedible" is because until these processes were invented, it was inedible in the sense the industry could not get to the meat!
I spent the last 45 minutes trying to find a reliable source that discusses how beef by-products (which are similar to LFTB and BLBT in that they go through various processes to get meat from fat or connective tissue, but are usually of a lower quality than what humans demand) are used in pet food, but honestly, every way I tried to Google anything associated with the "pink slime" issue, I get a bunch of links to blogs and petitions, and no real information. I'll try to do another followup post once this situation's calmed down so there is something tangible you can read.
To sum up, the beef industry isn't hiding anything. LFTB and BLBT are beef. They are treated with ammonium hydroxide. Beef and NH3 already naturally occur in ground beef, so that's why they are not on the labels, according to a conference call National Cattlemen's Beef Association held last week with state cattlemen's associations. The concern with adding unnecessary labels is, as I mentioned before, a slippery slope: If the industry began labeling preventative chemicals, consumers who don't fully understand why these are added would demand they stop being used, the effects of which America saw with "pink slime." To remove these from beef products could affect the price of beef consumers see on the shelves as well as the bacteria found on raw meat.
But at the end of the day, NCBA, USDA and the beef industry as a whole want to provide America with quality, affordable, safe food. And no matter the moniker, that is what these products do for 70 percent of beef purchased in American supermarkets each year.
Much of the information found in this post came from a fact sheet created by the American Meat Institute. To see more resources from the beef industry viewpoint on the "pink slime" issue, check out these links:
comes from the chuck area of the beef carcass. This is the area that on a human would be equivalent to the shoulder area. You can also find ground round (from the thigh/rump area) or ground sirloin (from the back) in your meatcase.
