Offal - why are less-desirable cuts of meat more expensive?

There was a tripeworks in the town centre in Padiham, Lancashire. It closed around 1997, but the reek was still there ten years later. Awful

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Trackman said:

I asked him how did he make money, firstly he didnt pay for the bones/bit of animals and at the end of the day we would throw them in skip and someone would pick them up, this would be used for fuel, plastics and I am sure he said perfumes.

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The bones and bits would be rendered down using heat and steam to produce fat, gelatin and glycerine.
The solid remains would be powdered and sold as bonemeal or blood & bone as fertiliser or animal feed supplements

Acathater said:

The bones and bits would be rendered down using heat and steam to produce fat, gelatin and glycerine.
The solid remains would be powdered and sold as bonemeal or blood & bone as fertiliser or animal feed supplements

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I am sure one such works was near the Tate & Lyle plant at Silvertown (near Canning Town, London's Royal Docks).
On a good day, the smell of refining sugar wafted along to the Thames Flood Barrier.
On a not-good day, the stench of carcasses being rendered-down, hung in the same air...

We had creative cooks at my school, one of the dishes served was braised ox heart.

Banned since BSE (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy)

philthetube said:

We had creative cooks at my school, one of the dishes served was braised ox heart.

Banned since BSE (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy)

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Not sure about cooking them, but our biology teacher did put in a large order of pigs hearts so we could do some practical anatomy!

There was some fainting and additional toilet trips that lesson. See also: the video where we watched injections happening.

Merle Haggard said:

Whatever happened to the UCP shops?
.

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My Auntie Elsie always said, ‘If UCP on tripe, don’t eat it.’

Merle Haggard said:

Whatever happened to the UCP shops?

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Closed maybe 50+ years ago? Essentially a product of their time.

I'm quite partial to heart, both lamb and ox, apart from around mid way through a 6 week period one mid 00s summer where my mother got a job lot of ox hearts for a very good price and it became Sunday dinner every week. We were all sick of it for a while after that. I find that it makes a fantastic sandwich meat. I recently lamented to my parents that i'd not had roasted heart for years and got a barrage of complaining about the price for my trouble

I used to quite like pigs kidneys as a child but went off them after unknowingly copping a bad one that made me quite ill on the same evening. I can tolerate it in steak & kidney pie (on account of it being my favourite) but can't stomach them otherwise.

The Delia effect seems to apply to most cuts of meat and fish products, in the sense that as soon as a celebrity chef gets their hands on it on the television then you've had it as the price is going to fly up in response to a sudden (however short lived) increase in demand.

Mcr Warrior said:

Closed maybe 50+ years ago? Essentially a product of their time.

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What I thought was interesting was that, from the outside, they looked very stylish and modern. The fascia was shiny self coloured material in paste shades with stainless steel trim. No hint of what they sold - no window display as far as I can recall, just the three initial letters in stainless steel. Could have been bookmakers!

But you're right - the last one I can remember seeing was in Wigan in 1971, somewhere between North Western. and the bus stands (??? bus station).

Time flies when you're old...

When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, mum bought a lot of offal because it was cheap. Liver, kidneys, tongue and heart. Still have a taste for it if you can find it. Local butcher does have liver and kidneys from time to time and can get heart sometimes. Local Morrisons usually has tongue on its deli counter.

cin88 said:

I used to quite like pigs kidneys as a child but went off them after unknowingly copping a bad one that made me quite ill on the same evening. I can tolerate it in steak & kidney pie (on account of it being my favourite) but can't stomach them otherwise.

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I haven't seen kidney in the shops for quite a while, but then again I don't often look for it. One day I saw a big pack of braising steak that was reduced to clear and though that it'd be nice to get some kidney to go with it but I couldn't find any. That was in Aldi, and kidney doesn't seem to be listed on its website.

It would seem that Asda and Tesco stock it, though, so a trip to the latter may be in order soon. I'm very partial to a steak and kidney pie!

I enjoy liver too, and fortunately it still seems to be selling at a fairly reasonable price while the cost of everything else in the meat section seems to have rocketed.

najaB said:

I love oxtail - such a fantastic rich stew - and tongue and heart are super tender meats.

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My other half and I talk about this quite regularly. She's Bajan/Jamaican, and we love Oxtail Stew, but it's become so expensive with it becoming gentrified.

Uk02048 said:

Offal, at least (you'd hope anyway) the stuff destined for direct human consumption, has a shorter shelf life than other animal protein. So likely incremental higher supply chain costs for that reason too - they need to get it and pack/ship it asap / less schedule flex.

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This is a large part of it : offal needs to maintain a core temperature of no more than 3c according to my food hygiene training whilst others can be stored in environs of 5c and the core temperature go up to 8. Add to that the short shelf life and cost of wastage (for each unit of stock destroyed about 5 or more sales have to be made to recoup the cost) and I’m sure you can see why the economics aren’t favourable.
Buying in bulk is likely a different story but it’s one of those things that doesn’t work very well for sales at retail volumes, especially since it’s a more niche product and volumes are likely to be low and unpredictable.

Words are my own, not those of my employer.

_toommm_ said:

My other half and I talk about this quite regularly. She's Bajan/Jamaican, and we love Oxtail Stew, but it's become so expensive with it becoming gentrified.

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I'm an erstwhile fan of oxtail stock, oxtail soup, ox-tongue. In the 1970s + 1980s, my parents often served those up, using proper offcuts from local butcher's.

Liver I quite like - but only in the way I cook it: I merely sear it and I complement it with bacon lardons or black pudding.
In the 1970s and 1980s, my parents cooked liver and kidneys until the offal was black, dry and devoid of taste....

The local butcher used to have steak and kidney on the same tray, it was common to ask for a llb of steak and kidney which would be 75% steak 25% kidney.

I love (almost) all offal, and we are lucky enough to have a farm shop near here that has its own abattoir. When I asked for a couple of lambs kidneys the last time we were there the butcher (who is also the farmer and slaughterman) reached into the cavity of a lamb hanging in the shop, pulled them out and trimmed the suet off them! I hadn't expected that.

School dinners were usually very nice, except that I learned to avoid their braised liver, which was unfortunatley like a sheet of leather. OTOH nowadays strips of fresh liver from "our" butcher just browned and dropped into a pan of sweated onions are a favourite meal. Faggots are another favourite of mine, but when I had Tripoux in the Auvergne - which I thought were liver too - they were too bitter to enjoy: it turns out that they are intestines instead! see https://provenance.kitchen/technique/tripoux-dauvergne However Tripe and onions was a favourite meal in or house during my childhood. I suppose there must be a big difference between tripe (stomach) and intestines.

When we lived in Bristol I never had chitterlings, although they were given out in one city centre pub on a Saturday night... I did try andouiette in a cheap Paris restaurant once and they were absolutely foul!

I have never had brain or sweetbreads (that I am aware of), but I love the marrow in a leg of lamb when it has cooled, also black pudding which is sort-of-using offal, best if you can get a "Bury" one with cubes of fat in... The stuff from Redfern's farm shop at Harpur Hill is unique, being cooked in something spherical, and is probably the best I have ever had.

An unusual thing my dad (in the '60s) did was to get a pigs tail from the butcher and grill it (his dad had a cooked meat shop.) It was like crackling on a stick!

Haggis is another favourite (shout-out to Findlay's of Portobello) and I believe has/should have lungs in it, besides heart and liver, i.e. the whole "pluck." The only other thing which uses lungs to my knowledge is Devonshire - and Cornish? - hogs pudding. It's delicious fried.
My mouth is watering now...