The price of Steak

Yes i know vegetarianism is all the rage, so i went this morning to buy a treat couple of steaks from the local butcher (done with supermarket meat).

Now I obviously haven’t been for a while. The ribeye steak was…. hold your breath…. £50 a kilo!

Beef Fillet was £67 a kilo!!

Is this normal or am I being had? Fair price for a good product or utter shite and further punishment for living in that silly London place?

Thoughts…

Tom Hixon on line, incredible quality. 40-60kg depending…

Eg 2.5 kg (often theya re a bit bigger) for £70. =28 a kg.
https://www.tomhixson.co.uk/product/hereford-beef-ribeye-508

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2021/11/03/the-price-of-steak-the-year-you-were-born/

About the going rate for zone 1/2 London. You got to remember that a large portion of that is just subsidising their rent. They may not actually make any more profit than a butcher in say Wales.

Now if they are charging that much you may as well go here for what I would class as a bargain in comparison: https://www.fortnumandmason.com/glenarm-salt-aged-cote-de-boeuf-900g 😂

Only other way around is to slice thin and reduce portion sizes.

Yes London effect, someone on here posted fish and chips were 15 quid or similar, 8 quid tops up north. I dont eat much meat but was pleasantly surprised at the aldi organic steak, it was lush.

Seems cheap, center cut fillet at a well-known mail order butcher that’s actually a local would set you back 71.88/kg

Truth be told (and I had one from them last week for a special meal – no where near a kilo) as usual fillet steak is a tender but bland tasteless meat reliant on good seasoning or a sauce.

Give me a t bone or rump or if feeling posh chateaubriand with some fat within to give some flavour -i mean your supposed to disgard the meat the fillet within is cooked between ( for the flavour no less) but its still tasty meat in its own right when I’ve had it

Fillet gets all the glory for being tender but I certainly find the cheaper fattier cuts far nicer

Joe – that’s about the going rate at my local butcher; he knows all the farmers he buys from, they’re all within about 30 miles and he lists them on blackboard outside shop.
I’m nowhere near london.

I use this company as they regularly have 24hr discount offers on various cuts. Their prepared lamb Shawarma is really nice as well. Only thing I have had from them that I wasn’t totally bowled over with was their Burnt Ends.

As a matter of fact I have a few ribeye defrosting for this evening from them, after a deal they worked out at about £4 each

https://jaydmeats.co.uk/

Here you go – £1800 for 3.5kg…
https://www.tomhixson.co.uk/product/kobe-japanese-wagyu-sirloin-a5-bms-8-2044

I don’t usually buy steaks in Kg, how much is that per steak? Dunno, steak is a (regular) treat. I don’t mind paying for quality. After all, a beast has given its life to get in my belly.

I dont eat much meat but was pleasantly surprised at the aldi organic steak, it was lush.

I very rarely buy steak but my daughter buys it more regularly and similarly rates the Aldi organic. I might just have to try some.

I don’t usually buy steaks in Kg, how much is that per steak?

Around 2 or 3.

Ordinary sizes for a fillet for 1 would be 120-150grams.

A sirloin for 1 would be 200-250g. Pending fat content

I find cooking a big steak for 2 and cutting half far easier than 2 individuals -assuming both like their steaks cooked the same way.

Worth noting those who have a pizza oven – steaks done in the pizza oven on a piping hot skillet are significantly closer to what you might get from a steak restaurant. Maybe it’s my hob but I can never get them hot enough to get the crunch that a steak house gets.

Worth noting those who have a pizza oven – steaks done in the pizza oven on a piping hot skillet are significantly closer to what you might get from a steak restaurant.

They’re seriously good.

TBH £/kg is meaningless to most people unless they’re catering for a large number of people.

Anything from £4-7 quid for a decent ribeye seems fair to me, a bit more if it’s come from a posh cow and/or you’re buying from a local butcher not a supermarket chiller.

I can’t help feeling nice bits of moo meat are the sort of thing we should all perhaps get used to having less often, and paying more for when we do.

Well, on the bright side, wine has dropped to only $90 per bottle.

Average Americans are paying as much as $100 to $200 for a single concert ticket, $90 for a bottle of wine, and $5 a gallon for gas. https://t.co/rTciIVOEfn

— MarketWatch (@MarketWatch) November 20, 2021

Meat shrinks when cooked and ribeye by about 25% so for 200gm cooked you’ll be starting with c260gm.
At £50/kg from a local butcher that’ll cost £13 – 14.

67 is a lot. Was it aged and / or a fancy breed?

Butchers down the road is closer to 30 and it’s good quality

TBH £/kg is meaningless to most people unless they’re catering for a large number of people

Not really, especially if you want a joint for a roast

Butchers down the road is closer to 30 and it’s good quality

For fillet ? What noise did it make when it was alive ?

I don’t usually buy steaks in Kg, how much is that per steak?

6-8oz each. Sirloin is about 8oz, sometimes 10oz, and ribeye(off the bone) is between 10-12oz per steak.

It’s really down to thickness. You cant really have a super thick sirloin steak as you would have it blue in the middle but overdone on the outside, so if you want a really big sirloin steak, it needs to be butterflied.

I only ever buy fillet(tournedos), or ribeye. Ribeye is devoid of any fat and done in the oven. I dont like fat on meat.

Love how they are running round like headless chickens at $5 a gallon for petrol.

For fillet ? What noise did it make when it was alive ?

Woof or neigh at £30/kg.

tomhoward – interesting post but wrong thread

Woof or neigh at £30/kg.

Arguably the first steak I had in equatorial guinea tasted like no steak I’ve ever had before or since…..

It possibly went neigh but it was damn tasty

Just been rummaging in our freezer for a joint tomorrow. The sirloins in there are packs of 2 at 550g per pack or so. No price on them we bought direct from a farm shop, but they were no more £15 a pack.

Now I obviously haven’t been for a while. The ribeye steak was…. hold your breath…. £50 a kilo!

AKA £10 a steak.

Supermarket steak passed £5 a a while back, and I got a couple of steaks from our local butcher a few weeks ago, worked out at £15 the pair – and they were lush.

Just been rummaging in our freezer for a joint tomorrow.

Freezing meat is a bad bad idea, as its down to the cells in the muscle.
When you freeze it the ‘water’ in each cell expands and breaks the cell wall, so when it is defrosted all that liquid is where the ‘water’ comes from on the bottom of the plate.

When cooked what you get is a dry product.

For fillet ? What noise did it make when it was alive ?

I’m wrong, I checked, more like 50!

Freezing meat is a bad bad idea, as its down to the cells in the muscle.

It’s not a bad idea to freeze it when you’ve bought it in bulk.

so when it is defrosted all that liquid is where the ‘water’ comes from on the bottom of the plate.

When cooked what you get is a dry product.

This is at least 28 day old steak, there’s not a great deal of water in it and I’ve never cooked a dry steak for years.

I’ve found venison to generally be much cheaper than steak, I can get a couple of steaks locally for around £5 so around half the price of an equivalent quality steak

My dad was a butcher in the 80s he was taught the same school of thought that frozen meat is bad…..

And yet the butcher’s today have no qualms about you freezing stuff.

Never had a dry steak cooked correctly from frozen -and every single bit of meat I had that was imported into Angola had arrived frozen

I’ve found venison to generally be much cheaper than steak, I can get a couple of steaks locally for around £5 so around half the price of an equivalent quality steak

Yep, the only ‘costs’ are hunting/shooting/butchering, no feed, land, vet etc etc.

In fact, we’re having venison tonight.

hunting/shooting/butchering, no feed, land, vet etc etc.

And yet much of what’s availible on a commercial basis is farmed .

Getting it direct from the game keeper is a nice treat though

Never had a dry steak cooked correctly from frozen -and every single bit of meat I had that was imported into Angola had arrived frozen

Yup, some of them in there were bought frozen after being hung, it’s an old claim that doesn’t seem to want go away.

It seems there’s some truth in it but it refers to repeatedly freezing and thawing…..

That’s a universaly bad idea regardless of the foodstuff

Yup exactly.

Yup exactly.

Oh dear heavens.

So muscle hasn’t isn’t made up of cells, and those cells dont rupture when frozen, is what you believe 😕

Interesting take on biology.

But dont take my word for it, go research it for yourself. Google is there and its a very simple question to ask.

So muscle hasn’t isn’t made up of cells, and those cells dont rupture when frozen, is what you believe 😕

Interesting take on biology.

You don’t seem to have taken the reduced moisture content of dry-aged beef specifically into consideration as a factor in whether the same amount of cell rupture will occur.

I did .

It revealed it’s not the end of the world to freeze it once.

You don’t seem to have taken the reduced moisture content of dry-aged beef specifically into consideration as a factor in whether the same amount of cell rupture will occur.

About up to 30% of moisture is lost in dry aging.Thats not all the moisture from the cells, and the cells arent in fact being destroyed by hanging process,only the freezing process
But dry aging isnt normal outside of a butchers shop, and certainly not the case with supermarket beef which is hot boned and vacuum packed. Its the natural enzymes in vacc packed beef that tenderize it.

After slaughter, it gets up to a couple of weeks in a big chill, then goes to wholesale where we would buy it and it would hang in our chill till sold, usually within the week. So ‘dry aged’ in most instances is a bit of a buzz word for the customer. Just hanging it is dry aging. Obviously you’ve paid X amount for the weight of the beef, and its not very sound economic sense to lose money by hanging it for a long time. So in a shop you really want rid of as fast as possible.

The things you see in programs about fancy steak restaurants, with racks of sirloins on the bone sitting there for months at a time getting blacker and blacker is unique to big fancy steak restaurants.

When beef is vacced, after a week or so you can swop it into a fresh bag and repack it. Theres a lot of liquid come up of the muscle while its vacced but this isnt damaged cell walls. because over and above any moisture lost in hanging or vaccing, its the freezing that damages the cells and causes the majority of the further moisture loss.

The things you see in programs about fancy steak restaurants, with racks of sirloins on the bone sitting there for months at a time getting blacker and blacker is unique to big fancy steak restaurants.

It really isn’t. I use to get steak from my butcher friend when he worked, he had a special cut hanging for weeks until it went black, he would sell it to those who knew about meat, the ones that didn’t got the bright red stuff. My current favourite butcher was on the Hairy Bikers the other week if you want to see what they do with theirs.

It would seem to be you’re comparing what you sell to what others do.

However, to appease you I Googled it,

https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/freezing-steak-how-to/