Okay everyone, a quick biology lesson. A cow has 13 ribs. At a butchery, we count these ribs from the front (the head), to see where we start cutting. By cutting between the fifth and six ribs, for example, we can remove the chuck. (That’s the section where we get amazing meat for burgers but also hidden stars like flatiron, denver etc.) Now, here’s where it gets interesting. Most South African butchers will then take the remaining rib section and use the whole thing to cut ribeye steaks (either on or off the bone). We don’t do that at FFMM. Instead, we focus on the ribs six through to nine. That’s our prime rib section. (The rest will be sold as our ribeyes).
So, you want to know more about prime rib. Great. I’m glad you asked.
Firstly, it’s the single cut that we believe benefits most from our dry-aging process. We push prime rib as far as we can. (40 - 50 days). Secondly, it’s got amazing complexity. If we cut them as individual steaks, with the shoulder blade intact, you an get four or five different textures on one piece of meat. That said, we can also trim out the blade and leave you with something much closer to the bone-in ribeye you might be accustomed to. It’ll taste like ribeye, just much better. We can even debone the entire thing and wrap it up in the flap of meat that would normally lie above the blade. So - think of a beautiful cylindrical piece of meat, wrapped in yellow, grass-fed fat. Hello Sunday roast. What’s that? You like roasting with the bone in. Excellent. We’ll do that.
This week we’ve taken it even further by introducing two new cuts from the prime rib. The one is the centre eye of this section. Everything is removed and you’re left with a section that you can portion at home, or we can do it for you. This piece of meat is the most tender piece of the prime rib and should be treated like fillet. (Except, when you cook it next to the guy cooking fillet you can laugh smugly to yourself.) The second thing we’ve done this week is borderline indulgent. We’ve taken the resulting prime rib trim (all of that funkiness that has been left from dry-aging the meat), and ground them into burgers.
I’ll say that again.
Prime.
Rib.
Burgers.
We added some additional fat to keep the meat:fat ratio where we want it and we are happy to just go ahead and say there is no restaurant in Cape Town cooking burgers that will taste better then the ones you’ll make at home, if you buy these (or any of our burgers, for that matter.)
It’s a prime-rib-a-palooza this weekend. Get to any of our stores and celebrate a truly exceptional part of the animal.