Son of a Butcher

- [Narrator] Funding for this program was provided in part by the RE Synergy Foundation, content for the Sustainable World.

GNC Foods, quality at every turn.

Pittsburgh Spice and Seasoning Company, making life taste better.

The Allen Family, Robert, Ashley, Carol, and Fred.

And viewers like you.

(light upbeat music) - [AJ] I'm the son of a butcher.

- You might be a son of a butcher, but I'm the original butcher.

- [AJ] Some ask me, what is the meat industry to you?

For me, it starts at a place where my family runs a grocery, butcher shop and a catering business?

I'm sure it's about the business side of things.

But for me at its core, it's a story about relationships.

(light upbeat music) Hey, we're back with this episode of Son of a Butcher.

I'm your host, the son of a butcher.

And today I got a few special guests with me.

We have a lot of hair.

We have some hair and we have no hair.

And so this is my son Brycen O'Neil, and this is my father Gale O'Neil.

And today we're gonna teach you how we're making our award-winning roast beef lunch meat.

So why don't you get us started, dad.

He's going to help walk Brycen through how to tear down this top round.

- First, we're gonna take off all the fat from the fat cap.

Don't cut me and I won't cut you.

That's one piece.

You have a lot of gristle right here on that side.

Okay.

Now we're gonna start from this side.

This is your cap.

You just want to get it down in there.

When you're pulling your cap off, it has a seam there where your fat is.

Basically, we want all the, just the lean meat outta the center.

- So take it and get your knife under it and roll it that way.

Yep, just pull that.

- Yep, there you go.

There you go.

That is what Brycen's pulling off now.

We use that for lot of stir fry, stew meat, Swiss steak, ground round.

This is a top round so you make ground round out of it.

- Yeah, so I'll say, you know, a lot of these value added products are coming from the hind of the beef.

And the reason for that is, the hind of the beef is not as valuable.

You're always looking for different ways to go ahead and market hind.

And so that's where this roast beef has come from, similar to where the jerky's coming from as well.

- Okay, and we'll flip her over here.

We're gonna take all the fat off of it.

And down towards the bottom here, there's a lot of silver side on it.

So you just take that off also.

And you get into this, it just kind of pulls off.

You're getting rid of the fatty tissues out of it.

Then there's this one vein right through here that you gotta pop up.

- [AJ] Just go ahead and finish trimming up that fat there.

- So there you got all the grips pulling the fat out of it.

We cut her in half.

Long way.

So when you're putting it in the deli, you're slicing, you're putting that in your slicer, and you're slicing it across the grain.

- Yes, I mean some of the commercial applications you'll see where they're actually use a bigger portion.

We like to get ours a little smaller portion for slicing on the slicer.

It works a little better.

- And then right here is that piece of that vein.

Come right out of there and pull that off there.

That little bit of gristle right there.

That's silver skin.

It's not really a tough part of it, it's just doesn't look that pretty.

(light upbeat music) There is basically the start of the roast beef.

Soon as he gets his 50 years in, he'll be as fast as me.

Probably faster, actually.

So she's all meat product there.

There's no gristle.

We also use choice top rounds too.

It has a little more marbling in it for tenderness.

You can use cheaper brand but we do not do that.

- All right, so we got our four top rounds all trimmed up here.

And now I'm gonna show you guys the brine I'm gonna mix, and then we'll get ready to inject these, and get 'em ready for some roast beef.

(upbeat entertaining music) Alright, so we're gonna have Brycen help me with mixing the brine that we're gonna inject the roast beef with.

This is our clean version of the roast beef.

We have won awards with this roast beef at a couple different competitions.

This one here, we only have the three ingredients plus the water here.

And yeah, so I wanna talk to you a little bit about that.

So this is gonna be what typically, this ingredient here is a yeast extract, and that's typically what would be a phosphate in a product.

So the idea of this, of having any this yeast extract or to have a phosphate is to help with your water holding capacity, which will increase yields.

It also helps with flavor and tenderness of the product.

So let's go ahead and add this one first, Brycen.

Go ahead and get it mixing first and then add it in.

(whisk thumping) Get that nice and blended.

(light upbeat music) - [Narrator] Spice history spans millennia, beginning with ancient civilizations using them for culinary, medicinal and religious purposes.

The high value of spices like pepper, cinnamon, and cloves fueled a vast trade network.

Most notably the Silk Road, which led to great wealth for empires and was a major driver of the age of exploration.

As European powers sought direct sea routes to the east.

This pursuit of spices played a role in global exploration and colonization as well as the rise and fall of nations.

- All right, the next product we're gonna add, this is our fruit and spice extracts.

This product is gonna help with our pathogen support.

So it's gonna help eliminate any pathogens to help reduce any issues with foodborne illnesses.

So that's what this product is.

Go ahead and mix it, I'll help you get it.

Pour it in there, just nice and easy and steady.

(whisk thumping) You will be able to hear the ice in there.

We made our water 38 degrees.

The colder you can get this product, the colder you can keep all your products throughout.

It's gonna help to enhance the color whenever you're take it to the finished product.

So that's why you'll hear a lot of times I'm mixing my brines and stuff.

You'll hear the ice and stuff moving around in there 'cause we wanna make sure it's as cold as possible.

And then the last product we got here, this is our, this would be our roast beef pump.

This is a basically equivalent of a beef boyan cube.

So this is gonna have our salt in it.

And this is what's gonna bring the flavor.

(whisk thumping) Nice and easy.

All right, thanks Brycen.

You did a great job blending that.

Looks like it's dispersed evenly throughout.

It's well mixed, and now we're gonna take it to the injector and dad's gonna show us injecting the whole muscle, and we're gonna do a 15% injection on it.

(light upbeat music) - [Narrator] Roast beef is considered a national dish of England, and is a popular Sunday meal in many English speaking countries like the UK, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

- And we're back.

We're gonna show you guys the injection process for these top rounds.

Where our target is to put 15% into 'em.

So dad's gonna set that on here.

Once I get the weight set.

740.

So 7.4 times 1.15.

Your finished weight is gonna be 8.51.

- 851.

- You go ahead and begin the injection part.

- Okay, we're gonna start.

Now what we do is once we're injecting it, we kind of go to the bottom and then pour needles up through so it binds up through all the meat.

And we'll run another shot up through here like that.

Okay.

- And what we're trying to do is make sure that he's injecting each piece, and that it's getting cured throughout the whole process.

- [Gale] Here we go.

- You'll see in this clip as well that some of the liquid has ran out of the roast whenever he was trying to do it.

Our next step is gonna be to put it in a tumbler, and we're gonna do similar what we do with our jerkys and some of our other products.

We're gonna pull a vacuum on that product, it's gonna expand the muscles.

And so that way it allows for the rest of the brine to penetrate.

And then as you tumble it, it's gonna tumble it back in, and be able to soak it up.

So we just wanna make sure that we have the correct amount.

So when we figure out my formulations and some products are 20%, some products are 15%, and we gotta make sure that we're not going over on some of our ingredients.

'Cause certain ingredients, especially with the phosphates and at nitrites and that they have maximum levels you can reach.

And so we have to make sure that we're not compromising on those products.

(light upbeat music) - If you don't quite reach it, you're weight, then you go through it again.

So each one that we do, we weigh it, weigh it out, and we dump the juice in.

It's like AJ says it, we'll use that up on the tumbler.

The tumbler will suck that right back into the meat.

You can see that how it raises as you're pumping it.

That's how it gets all your juices flowing through that.

Even inside it right now, it's still separating up through your product.

And there's, it goes, they're like 190s on these needles.

So you got four on the side, so you got 16 holes actually going into this roast beef at one time.

So it pretty much equals out everything on that part of the deal.

And then we'll just dump all the juice right back in.

(light upbeat music) - [Narrator] Roast beef holds cultural meaning for the English dating back to the 1731 ballad, "The Roast Beef of Old England", written by the Englishman Henry Fielding for his play, "The Grub Street Opera".

- Other tips too.

This injector here, it's got two needles and it has multiple holes on it.

They also make this with four needles in one.

So you could do that.

We have a commercial injector that has 16 needles on a conveyor belt.

And so we get that set up, so it's actually injecting 16 needles, and it works it through faster.

You wanna tell 'em since we got that piece of equipment, how much you enjoy that?

- Yeah, back in the old days you had your ham, and we'd buy combos, 2,000 pound combos, and basically everything was done with this.

So before the days over you would wrap your fingers, and that's every time you're shoving that needle in that ham.

You know you're causing this your skin to break open.

And it was rather a good day when we got that machine.

So, and give it a thought.

- You went from 2,000 pounds of hams, you went from, what was it, four to five hours?

- Oh my, if I did a 2,000 pound ham, it was easy six hours on that, and now we're probably backed it down to an hour, hour and a half.

- Yeah, yep.

- Yeah.

- Yeah and typically now we'll do, instead of doing 2,000, we'll do 4,000 and then it goes, you know, much faster.

So it's just as you get the equipment, you're able to streamline that stuff.

But we're trying to show you guys, they also make a hand injector where you would siphon it back into your needle, and then just go pump that.

That's what typically people will have at home.

So if you want to do this, we make a venison roast beef as well.

You can do the same thing.

- Yeah, that's relatively easy on even the venison part of the deal.

It's really good, yeah.

- Alright, now we're gonna take this to the tumbler.

(light upbeat music) (machine humming) - Okay, we're going to, I pulled the meat outta the tumbler.

Basically you can tell it has a little glaze, it's kind of flimsy and that flops it in the tumbler.

And that breaks down the muscles and also kind of makes it a little more floppy, so you can form it a little nicer in the net.

And its get a nice round form to it.

It seems to cook everything more even.

So what we do, we just kind of try to tighten everything up there and make it nice and round.

Not a perfect world.

You'll have a little bit of smaller ends, which will cook a little more, but you know, it's all edible.

I like the way it makes a nice and round out, or it makes a nice looking product in the deli.

And being around like that, it also cooks more even, Got one more of these bad boys to go and this one has a little longer to it.

So you kind of hold on your net there a little bit, and that will cause it to bulk up there a little bit.

So you're getting all your cooking pretty much even.

So they all cook pretty much the same way.

Okay, then after that, we throw two in a cooking bag.

(bag rustling) Cooking bags seem to keep the moisture in a little niter.

(bag rustling) The juice that was in the pan, is since we tumbled it, and pulled a vacuum on it, it is now sucked into the meat, and there is no leftover residue in the tumbler.

So now we have the glaze that we put on top.

It's a roast beef rub we got.

We do the roast beef rub inside or the roast beef pump inside, roast beef rub on the outside.

It's kind of like a heavy slurry.

What we do.

It makes a mess but it tastes good.

(bag rustling) And too, all the flavor stays in the cooking bags a little more than just kind of cooking out in the open.

Kind of makes me hungry just doing this.

(bag rustling) But anyhow, there's what she looks like in the end.

Give that a little shot on there too.

Think she's looking pretty tasty.

We'll do the other one here.

You take a big old handful and slop it all over it.

(bag rustling) We've got a couple awards from Penn State on our roast beef products.

But anyway, there's how she's ready to go in the smoke house and we'll get her cooked up, and then we'll show you once she comes out.

(light upbeat music) - [Narrator] Roast beef originated in medieval England and has been a national dish there for centuries.

Its popularity surged during the 15th century under King Henry VII, leading to the creation of the Sunday roast tradition, and the nickname beef eaters for the royal guards.

- Okay, we're here.

The roast beef is finally finished from our smokehouse.

We are gonna bring it out and put it into an ice bath.

Ice bath will shock it, it will cool it down really fast.

That keeps the moisture in the meat and also the nice color.

So here we go.

(metal rack rattling) Okay, I don't know, very hard to see, but that's still the roast beef in the package now.

What we'll do is keep the liquid in.

Once it gets shocked, it will suck some of that liquid back in to keep everything moist.

(bag rustling) Oh, I'll show you the the temperature on this.

Okay, there it reads 28 degrees.

(bag rustling) We'll get her cooled down there, and once it cools down to temperature, we're going to slice her open for you to see.

And we're gonna make ourself a sandwich, and I think you'll be liking it.

(light upbeat music) - [AJ] And here's our award-winning roast beef.

(light upbeat music) - Hi, I'm a son of a butcher.

- That's right.

(all laughing) (light upbeat music) - That's all folks - [Narrator] Funding for this program was provided in part by the RE Synergy Foundation, Content for the Sustainable World.

GNC Foods, Quality at every turn.

Pittsburgh Spice and Seasoning Company, making life taste better, the Allen family, Robert, Ashley, Carol, and Fred.

And viewers like you.