http://www.chicagoreader.com/feature...urants/080228/

The Meat Pushers

A downtown Chicago skyscraper houses a beef-industry brain trust.

By Mike Sula

February 28, 2008

"With ground beef recalls, mad cow scares, and the environmental hazards of
industrial livestock production in the news, it's getting tougher to sell
red meat these days. In 2006 Americans ate an average of 65.8 pounds of
beef, according to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. If that sounds
like a lot, consider that that's down from more than 75 pounds in 1980, and
the trade organization predicts a continuing decline.

But each week in an office suite on the 18th floor of a Michigan Avenue
skyscraper in Chicago, down the hall from a psychotherapy practice and the
Poetry Foundation, the staff at the Beef and Veal Culinary Center goes
through that much meat and then some, trying to figure out ways to keep
people eating it.

The center, which operates under the auspices of the NCBA's marketing arm,
develops some 100 recipes each year for the organization's consumer and
food-service divisions. It also does product testing for manufacturers. One
recent morning several employees were evaluating two commercial marinades
and four rubs on some burgers and steaks they'd grilled in the test kitchen.
A pair of rib eyes that had been steeped in a whiskey-flavored marinade for
15 minutes got the thumbs-down. The meat had an assertive, treacly,
artificial odor, and the marinade had somehow inhibited the Maillard
reaction, a chemical reaction responsible for browning. The steaks looked
sickly and gray next to an unmarinated pair exhibiting a tasty-looking char.

"That's terrible," said Jessica Gordon, the center's senior culinary
manager.

"Flavor companies are in the business to sell flavor," said executive
director Dave Zino. "I think sometimes the attitude is, 'If one is good, ten
's gotta be better.'"

The center was the first tenant to move into 444 N. Michigan back in 1976.
At the time it operated under the auspices of the National Livestock and
Meat Board, which later merged into the NCBA. It's currently funded by the
Beef Checkoff Program, an initiative started under the 1985 Farm Bill that
assesses $1 per every head of cattle sold. In the words of the USDA, the
program is designed "to strengthen the position of beef in the marketplace
and to maintain and expand domestic and foreign markets and uses for beef
and beef products."

Zino, a Kendall College grad, has been the center's director since 2004. He
came on board three years before that, near the beginning of the beef
industry's big push for flatiron steak, a muscle that until then typically
had been ground up with the rest of the chuck. "We basically did a
dog-and-pony show," says Zino, who acted as a chef-spokesman for the
project. "We went to meat packers, steak cutters, retailers, chain
restaurants. My role was basically cooking the steak up, maybe coming up
with some recipe ideas." Many of the dishes the center devised-like
sesame-soy steak stir-fry in wonton cups and mini steak tacos with pico de
gallo-made their way into ads or brochures or onto sealed packages of
supermarket meat. "I probably cooked more of those steaks than any human
being," Zino says.

The center is equipped with both a professional kitchen and a
consumer-oriented test kitchen stocked with supermarket staples, a
microwave, and ordinary gas and electric stoves. Here the staff uses mostly
middle-grade choice cuts (mostly sourced from Jerry's Quality Meats in
Skokie IL) to approximate the average household's cooking and eating habits.

"This is a big country, and not everybody will have Thai curry paste," says
Zino. "So we need to be careful when we're developing consumer recipes to
make sure that they're available basically around the country."

Even bearing that in mind, the staff will occasionally overestimate
consumers' kitchen savvy. Zino tells me about a focus group the center
assembled to evaluate some of its recipes: one participant said he didn't
like the ones that called for dry red wine because he could never find it in
powdered form at the grocery store.

Last month the NCBA launched its latest ad campaign. Created by Leo Burnett,
it features a series of fantastic giant landscapes, or rather "beefscapes,"
like something Homer Simpson would dream about: towering beef mountain peaks
topped by creamy Gorgonzola snowcaps, a river of sauce running over a bed of
mushrooms and lentils between steep tenderloin banks. "Discover the Power of
Protein in the Land of Lean Beef" is the clumsy tagline, delivered in radio
ads by Matthew McConaughey. The campaign was designed to integrate two
themes the NCBA previously used separately-the nutritive qualities of beef
and the American "passion" for it.

In a departure from previous campaigns, Zino and his crew were directed to
develop their recipes after the ads were created rather than before. So for
an image of meat canyons split by a golden brown stream, they came up with
crumb-crusted top sirloin and roasted garlic potatoes with bourbon sauce, a
dish that might sound a little involved for the kitchen novice but in fact
calls for nothing more exotic than prepared mustard and ready-to-serve beef
broth. For a scattering of beef boulders set atop a whole-grain beach, they
developed Moroccan-style beef kebabs with spiced bulgur, which gets its
whiff of the Orient from pumpkin pie spice and golden raisins.

Zino, whose computer alerts him to the arrival of new e-mails with the sound
of a lowing cow, says that despite all the beef he eats on the job he still
eats it when he's not working. But then what else would he say? "I see
myself not only as a chef but as a marketer," he says..."

</>

"Gregory Morrow" > wrote in message
...
>
> http://www.chicagoreader.com/feature...urants/080228/
>
> The Meat Pushers
>
> A downtown Chicago skyscraper houses a beef-industry brain trust.
>
> By Mike Sula
>
> February 28, 2008
>
> But each week in an office suite on the 18th floor of a Michigan Avenue
> skyscraper in Chicago, down the hall from a psychotherapy practice and the
> Poetry Foundation, the staff at the Beef and Veal Culinary Center goes
> through that much meat and then some, trying to figure out ways to keep
> people eating it.
>
>
No need to convince me Tonight we're having bacon-wrapped tenderloin
filets with baked potatoes.

Jill

Gregory Morrow wrote:
>
> one participant said he didn't
> like the ones that called for dry red wine because
> he could never find it in powdered form at the grocery store.

Hmmm . . . there's an idea for a product.
Dehydrated red wine powder labelled "Dry Red Wine".

Give the people what they want, or what they think
they want! :-)

I wonder what other possibilities this marketing
approach would have.

Butter in the shape of cubes for recipes that
call for a "cube" of butter.

Butter in the shape of sticks (with little
protrusions where "leaves" may have been
clipped off) for recipes that call for a
"stick" of butter. Gee, should such a
stick be de-barked?

Blister packages of preground black pepper,
in which each blister is in the shape
of a hyphen, for recipes that call for
a "dash" of pepper.

Mark Thorson wrote:
>
> Butter in the shape of sticks (with little
> protrusions where "leaves" may have been
> clipped off) for recipes that call for a
> "stick" of butter. Gee, should such a
> stick be de-barked?

After giving this some more thought, I think
it should be sold with bark on. The bark would
be formed by dipping in brown butter, then
slicing off the ends to reveal the inner light
butter core. Some intermediate layer might
be provided to make the bark removable if the
consumer wanted to de-bark the butter stick.
The instructions on the package would refer
you to your recipe for whether the stick of
butter should be debarked or not. :-)

Now, I'm wondering whether the "stick" should
have rings inside, and the most effective way
to make those rings. This might allow creating
sub-markets, for older vs. younger sticks
differentiated by diameter and number of rings.

Mark Thorson wrote:

> Mark Thorson wrote:
>>
>> Butter in the shape of sticks (with little
>> protrusions where "leaves" may have been
>> clipped off) for recipes that call for a
>> "stick" of butter. Gee, should such a
>> stick be de-barked?
>
> After giving this some more thought, I think
> it should be sold with bark on. The bark would
> be formed by dipping in brown butter, then
> slicing off the ends to reveal the inner light
> butter core. Some intermediate layer might
> be provided to make the bark removable if the
> consumer wanted to de-bark the butter stick.
> The instructions on the package would refer
> you to your recipe for whether the stick of
> butter should be debarked or not. :-)
>
> Now, I'm wondering whether the "stick" should
> have rings inside, and the most effective way
> to make those rings.

Dip them multiple times, like with candlemaking.


--
Blinky
Killing all posts from Google Groups
The Usenet Improvement Project: http://improve-usenet.org
Blinky: http://blinkynet.net

Blinky the Shark wrote:
>
> Mark Thorson wrote:
>
> > Mark Thorson wrote:
> >>
> >> Butter in the shape of sticks (with little
> >> protrusions where "leaves" may have been
> >> clipped off) for recipes that call for a
> >> "stick" of butter. Gee, should such a
> >> stick be de-barked?
> >
> > After giving this some more thought, I think
> > it should be sold with bark on. The bark would
> > be formed by dipping in brown butter, then
> > slicing off the ends to reveal the inner light
> > butter core. Some intermediate layer might
> > be provided to make the bark removable if the
> > consumer wanted to de-bark the butter stick.
> > The instructions on the package would refer
> > you to your recipe for whether the stick of
> > butter should be debarked or not. :-)
> >
> > Now, I'm wondering whether the "stick" should
> > have rings inside, and the most effective way
> > to make those rings.
>
> Dip them multiple times, like with candlemaking.

With candlemaking, you've got a wick for a central
core. Without a wick, co-extrusion through a
concentric flow head probably makes more sense.
Could do the bark that way, but creating scars
for leaves and branches might be a problem.

Mark Thorson wrote:

> Blinky the Shark wrote:
>>
>> Mark Thorson wrote:
>>
>> > Mark Thorson wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Butter in the shape of sticks (with little protrusions where
>> >> "leaves" may have been clipped off) for recipes that call for a
>> >> "stick" of butter. Gee, should such a stick be de-barked?
>> >
>> > After giving this some more thought, I think it should be sold with
>> > bark on. The bark would be formed by dipping in brown butter, then
>> > slicing off the ends to reveal the inner light butter core. Some
>> > intermediate layer might be provided to make the bark removable if
>> > the consumer wanted to de-bark the butter stick. The instructions on
>> > the package would refer you to your recipe for whether the stick of
>> > butter should be debarked or not. :-)
>> >
>> > Now, I'm wondering whether the "stick" should have rings inside, and
>> > the most effective way to make those rings.
>>
>> Dip them multiple times, like with candlemaking.
>
> With candlemaking, you've got a wick for a central core. Without a
> wick, co-extrusion through a concentric flow head probably makes more
> sense. Could do the bark that way, but creating scars for leaves and
> branches might be a problem.

Sure, I know about the wick.

Do as I recommended and market as an exotic treat from the UK -- name it

Mr. Butterwick's

Furrin always sells.


--
Blinky
Killing all posts from Google Groups
The Usenet Improvement Project: http://improve-usenet.org
Blinky: http://blinkynet.net

And how would you portray the ubiquitous E.V.O.O. ??



On Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:12:33 -0800, Mark Thorson > wrote:

>Gregory Morrow wrote:
>>
>> one participant said he didn't
>> like the ones that called for dry red wine because
>> he could never find it in powdered form at the grocery store.
>
>Hmmm . . . there's an idea for a product.
>Dehydrated red wine powder labelled "Dry Red Wine".
>
>Give the people what they want, or what they think
>they want! :-)
>
>I wonder what other possibilities this marketing
>approach would have.
>
>Butter in the shape of cubes for recipes that
>call for a "cube" of butter.
>
>Butter in the shape of sticks (with little
>protrusions where "leaves" may have been
>clipped off) for recipes that call for a
>"stick" of butter. Gee, should such a
>stick be de-barked?
>
>Blister packages of preground black pepper,
>in which each blister is in the shape
>of a hyphen, for recipes that call for
>a "dash" of pepper.

<rj>

"" wrote:
>
> And how would you portray the ubiquitous E.V.O.O. ??

I'm thinking more along the lines of special bread
for making "sammies". That could be very competitive
against "sandwich bread". If you're making sammies,
you sure wouldn't want to take a chance substituting
else. :-)