Crooked Kitchen

A great way to save money on food is to cook with cuts of meat you wouldn’t usually cook with. Some of the bony, fatty, ugly pieces of meat can be had very cheaply, and surprisingly, they have great potential in the kitchen if you know how to use them. Generally, the cheap meats have a lot of connective tissue, and are tough or hard to eat if you cook them the same way you’d cook an expensive cut.

The trick is braising. To braise a piece of meat is to cook it low and slow for a long time in a covered pot in a relatively small amount of flavorful liquid. The long slow cooking causes all the connective tissue to break down and turn into gelatin, which gives you that fall-off-the-bone consistency and nice savory flavor. Stewing is also an option – just the same method, but with much more liquid. Bony cuts contribute a lot of flavor to a stew’s broth.

Some of my favorites in this category are pork arm roast, beef short ribs, 7-bone roast, and pork neck bones. The roasts are quite meaty, and generally sell in the neighborhood of $1.49/lb for the pork arm roast, and $2.29/lb for the 7-bone chuck roast, when not on sale. 7-bone roasts are perfect for pot roast (which is a classic braise), and pork arm roasts can be braised, cubed and stewed, or even slow-roasted. The pork neck bones are more suited to stewing – a good amount of the weight is bone, but there’s still a lot of meat clinging to it, and a couple pounds of neck bones, cut into 2″ pieces, will make several servings of really good stew. Below I’ll give you a recipe for pozole, a Southwestern stew of pork and hominy. I can usually get pork neck bones for $0.99/lb, making them a very economical choice for meat.

There are also the odd bits of the animal to consider. Organ meats and variety cuts are often considered ethnic delicacies, and for good reason. Chicken gizzards and hearts are often a bargain, and it’s not hard to use them. I recently made a couple of dishes from a package of duck gizzards I picked up. Gizzards have an interesting texture if you cook them quickly – they’re crunchy, almost like water chestnuts, and very un-meat-like. But if you simmer them for an hour or more, the crunch goes away and you’re left with nice little nuggets that taste just like the animal they came from. You wouldn’t even know you were eating gizzards if you weren’t told.

Of course, you should always watch the sales if you’re looking for cheap meat. Whole chickens often go on sale for as little as $0.69/lb; chicken legs for $0.99/lb or less. Once you try it a couple times (and have an adequate knife), turning a whole chicken into parts is easy, and certainly worth the savings over buying parts. Not to mention you have a carcass left over for making stock. There’s a use for every part of a whole chicken.

Other cuts of beef, like London broil or top round, are often fairly cheap, but they lack the fat and connective tissue that make things like chuck roast ideal for braising. Top round is a pretty lean cut, and if you try to braise it, you might not like the result – it can turn dry very easily. I never buy round simply because it turns tough no matter what you do to it. The only use I can think of is to make roast beef, medium-rare. Cook it any further and it’s tough and dry.

As I said, pork neck bones are great for stew, and my favorite way to use them is in pozole. Pozole is a Southwestern/Mexican stew of pork, hominy, and chiles. If you have access to a Hispanic market, you can obtain all of the ingredients very cheaply; if not, it’s still quite economical provided you can obtain the dried chiles.

Pozole Rojo

• 2 Tbsp olive oil
• 3 lbs pork neck bones, cut into 2″ pieces
• 2 large cans white hominy
• 2 ancho chiles, or 1 Tbsp ancho chile powder
• 10 California chiles, or 3 Tbsp California chile powder
• 2 onions, chopped
• 8 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 Tbsp whole cumin
• 1 Tbsp oregano
• salt and pepper
• radishes
• cabbage
• corn tortillas
• tortilla chips
• limes
• onion, chopped
• serrano chiles, chopped
• Mexican oregano
• red pepper flakes
• hot sauce

Heat the olive oil in a large pot (I use a

dutch oven) on medium-high heat. Add the pork neck pieces and brown on all sides. Add the onions and garlic and let them saute with the pork, about 5 minutes. Add 1 Tbsp salt, some freshly ground black pepper, then water to cover, scraping up the brown bits stuck on the bottom of the pot. Bring to a simmer, then turn the heat down to low and cover.

Meanwhile, toast all the dried chiles briefly over an open stove flame. Tear the chiles into pieces and fit them into a spice grinder or food processor, and grind to a fine powder. Add this chile powder to the stew. Next, toast 1 Tbsp whole cumin seeds in a dry pan. When they just start to smell toasty and fragrant, grind them up and add to the stew. Also add 1 Tbsp dried Mexican oregano, crushed in your hands.

Simmer the stew on the stovetop on low heat, or in the oven at 250 degrees, for 2 hours.

Once the pork is tender and falling off the bone, take out all the pieces of bone and any fatty pieces of meat that fell off. Let cool on a plate until you can handle them, then strip all the meat off the bones and return it to the stew. Drain and rinse the two cans of hominy and add them to the stew. Bring back to a simmer, taste, and adjust salt. Simmer another 30 minutes to an hour.

Serve in bowls accompanied by any of the side items listed above. Radishes can be quartered or sliced, cabbage should be shredded, limes should be in wedges for squeezing. Add to the top of your bowl of pozole as you like.

Coming up over the next few days, I’ll write about other ways to eat frugally with cheap starches, supermarket sales, and ethnic markets.