Best-value "value" meat

hotcookie101

redfraggle wrote: »

It's great to hear so many of you will only buy free range chicken, they really are grateful!

However, please remember that most cheap pork is reared indoors in poor conditions (essentially battery pigs) and for that reason I only buy free range pork (which Tesco do not sell)

I've no problem with value meat, and would buy value beef or lamb though so please don't think I'm some unrealsistic idiot, it's just a line I draw

I agree, I think intensively farmed pig is just as bad as chicken :mad:
Tesco does sell organic british pork (which by definition is FR) although I am still trying to clear freezer space to get half a pig from a local farm...
To be honest-am really not that fussed about lamb and beef as long as is British (or Irish ) as it is very hard to intensively rear either. (In the US they have horrible massive stockyards that intensively fatten beef on grain only-and they can give them all sort of growth promoting drugs:eek:-yet they banned british beef due to BSE :rolleyes:) If I am buying steak-I do care-it has to have been properly hung but for mince or stew I really don't mind as long as not too fatty :beer:

scottishgal_2

Oh dear.... I'm fast going off my value meat here lol!!!

I wish it was a luxury for us, but having a big-meat-eater dh & ds, it's very hard to persaude them to eat non meat dishes!!! So meat is eaten every day in our household!!

[Deleted User]

I am so lucky where I live our local butcher has just returned his shop to a proper shop instead of the prepacked stuff he had tried for awhile .He now only stocks rare breed meats from Brogdale farmers who farm locally in Kent. My DD bought some beef last week for sunday dinner and it was delicious.
I just never fancy supermarket meat very much it always looks full of dyes to me or maybe its the lighting in there.
The butcher did me a huge ham shank chopped of the leg of pork last week in front of me and only charged me a pound.bargain of the week I think. It must weigh around two and a bit pounds and even with the bone taken out its still a good buy for a quid.
I have frozen it, and will have it later on this month when the weather turns a bit chillier. Cooked in my SC the stock alone will be a great base for HM soup.

naturally_2

I bought a pack of value bacon, which claimed to be the odd bits, looks pretty fatty but for the money I thought I'd fiddle and take the fat and skin etc off...

Got it home and opened it, and I had misunderstood the label! I was expecting slices, maybe not full ones with the odd weird thickness etc. What I got was lots of lumps and no slices! :eek: I diced it and used it in cooking but couldn't use it as I had intended - bacon butties!! :rolleyes:

Pipkin

I've bought value bacon from both A's and Mr T's, and both were ok, A's being the best.. (Mr T's was streaky bacon, not so good as good sized A's rashers).. I've bought the bacon misshapes before in the distant past and didn't like them.

foreign_correspondent

I have to say I prefer meat from the butcher every time, and rarely buy it from the supermarket.

I have also noticed that much of his good quality meat is cheaper than the supermarket. He does cuts like rolled sirloin, which whilst arent cheap at £9 a kg are absolutely delicious (I never liked roast beef much before I tried this) - so I only buy this a couple of times a year, but it is a treat, whereas the expensive steak I recently bought from tescos was rotten, and the replacement fresh steaks were nothing more than mediocre. (This confirmed my recollections of supermarket meat, but I really fancied steak last week, and had none in, so decided to try the finest ones from tesco, will not bother again!!)

In general I don't eat loads of meat, and when I do I buy cheaper cuts and slow cook it.

Shin beef, brisket, mince and liver are all cheap and tasty and I would rather have a cheap cut off a good tasty cow than an expensive piece off a stressed tasteless cow.

misskool

naturally wrote: »

I was about to start a thread on this the other day, having seen a program on disgusting food & why it is disgusting, some chicken breasts that are only 60% chicken featured, and "bangers" that weren't allowed to be called sausages because the meat content wasn't high enough!!

I have to say it put me off sausages, or at least anything but the best sausages, and reminded me not to eat things with MRM on them (mechanically recovered meat)

shudders

I think we were watching the same programme. I had the same initial thought about MRM but after a chat and a think, at the end of the day, it's just being OS. The animal has been killed and the relevant cuts removed for sale, so anything left is to be used up or thrown away.

It doesn't look very pleasant but what is essentially wrong with the same process that an OSer does when using the chicken carcass, boiling it up stock and then picking up all the rest of the meat soup?

Just my 2 p worth.

hotcookie101

misskool wrote: »

I think we were watching the same programme. I had the same initial thought about MRM but after a chat and a think, at the end of the day, it's just being OS. The animal has been killed and the relevant cuts removed for sale, so anything left is to be used up or thrown away.

It doesn't look very pleasant but what is essentially wrong with the same process that an OSer does when using the chicken carcass, boiling it up stock and then picking up all the rest of the meat soup?

Just my 2 p worth.

I reckon different people have different ideas of stuff, but having worked in slaughterhouses and seen the MRM machines it doesn't make me think of chicken stock it makes me think of slurry pits :eek:!

(I didn't see the programme you are talking about-like I said I have experienced it first hand which is why even when I was a student/newly graduated I was always reading labels on food products )

raeble

I only ever buy "free-ranged" if I can verify source of the meat - farmshops or farmers markets. I don't trust the Supermarkets and there have been a fair few undercover documentaries that show that some "free-ranged" animals, chickens aren't any better off than intensively reared animals, chickens etc.

I find value meat mince good for burgers, where you need a bit of fat. Lean mince is too dry.

spankymonkey_2

we as a family eat a lot of beef mince,i normally buy mine from the local butcher. i have since purchased a new freezer and have found that the low fat frozen mince from tesco is very good also reduced as it is being discontinued!