Just What we Need; More Panic

It’s official. I am a meat hoarder.

Today I saw a story that said Tyson Foods, a major chicken supplier, ran a Sunday ad in the New York Times that said all meat would disappear from the earth by Friday.

I may have the details slightly wrong. Let me see.

Okay, they say they’re being forced to close some plants because of C19 outbreaks. They also say “millions” of chickens, cattle, and pigs will have to be killed because farmers have no place to sell them. Does Tyson even sell beef and pork? Isn’t it a chicken company?

My dad used to be the labor attorney for Holly Farms, a poultry company Tyson bought. If I recall correctly, Tyson went with their own in-house counsel, so my family was cut off from its supply of delicious pre-breaded chicken burgers.

Frankly, this looks like an opportunistic self-back-patting ad which contains hysterical predictions that are very unlikely to pan out. An awful lot of the ad basically says, “Tyson wonderful Tyson wonderful.” “Tyson love employees. Tyson very very good.” There aren’t a lot of numbers.

This epidemic has been an incredible PR opportunity for many companies and people.

I doubt the supply will falter severely. Nonetheless, remembering how the toilet paper thing worked, and considering how much I’m enjoying my new propane cooker, I decided this aggression would not stand. I ran out and got like 10 pounds of ground chuck and 7 rib eye steaks.

I know I don’t hoard very well. I could have filled both freezers today. I’m destined to remain an amateur. I felt like other people should get a shot at the precious.

My plan is to freeze 5 of the steaks and turn all of the ground chuck into half-pound patties for freezing. My best guess is that Tyson’s berserker mouth-foaming moment will pass and that we will continue to have a decent supply of meat, perhaps after a couple of weeks of insanity. I bought enough meat to get me through a month of relatively heavy usage, and I left it at that. If the meat supply dries up, I’ll fall back on my pizza skills.

Freezer space limitations should limit meat hoarding. Let’s see. Are freezers selling out? Time to check Best Buy’s site.

Well, I should have seen this coming. The hoarders have bought all the freezers. They’ll be eating frozen stuff through Christmas while the rest of us eat fresh food. They even hoard frozen vegetables. Why? One of the most notable things about the C19 epidemic is the total lack of impact on produce. Vegetarians are sneering at normal people.

People have the dumbest ideas. They really thought the world was ending. Nice job, American journalists.

I belong to a cattle forum, and I just checked. They have some concerns, but no one is panicking. Except Tyson and the people who bought freezers, I guess.

Here’s something to think about: people who run big companies don’t know everything. They make a lot of stupid mistakes. Remember a company called Sears? Remember New Coke? Remember the Edsel? Remember the Pontiac Aztek? Don’t run down the street naked because a chicken executive tried to play prophet. I mean, okay, I ran out and bought steaks, but I don’t expect long-term issues. I was concerned about the effects of his remarks, not the effects of the virus.

The rib eyes I make now with the big propane cooker are mind-blowing. Steakhouse chefs should make pilgrimages to apologize and kiss my unwashed feet. I have never had a high-end steakhouse steak that compared to my own steaks, and they cost three or four times as much. My choice steaks are better than their prime steaks because the preparation is better.

Ground chuck is the best pre-ground burger material available at grocery stores. That’s my opinion, anyway. Sirloin is like dry sawdust, and regular hamburger is made from tonsils and private parts. Okay, it’s probably not, but it has so much fat it sort of disappears when you cook it.

I should try grinding up a rib eye. All other cuts bow to the rib eye.

Anyone who tells you to make burgers from sirloin alone is a bad cook, so there is no point in finishing a recipe that starts with sirloin. It’s astonishing how many chefs who publish online are inept enough to promote sirloin-burger recipes. There are also people who put other types of meat in burgers, and that’s a red flag, too. If you put pork, poultry, or seafood in a burger, you have to cook it well done, and that destroys it.

Rachel Ray makes burgers with pure sirloin. Now I know not to listen to her.

Some chefs recommend grinding short ribs and brisket into burgers. Hmm…a short rib should have the same flavor as a rib eye, shouldn’t it? I’m too lazy to grind meat for burgers. Ground chuck is outstanding, so even if custom grinds are better, I’m not motivated to try.

America’s Test Kitchen recommends grinding sirloin tips with butter. I would never argue with these people. They’re just too good. Butter must make up for the dry texture of the inferior meat.

I don’t know what a sirloin tip is or how to get them.

I like mixing fresh garlic and salt into hamburger and then gas-grilling with super-high temperatures, but in lazy moments, I fry burgers in butter and Worcestershire sauce, and they’re wonderful. I cook them medium, with hot fat running out. I use brioche-style buns, toasted on the inside over the grill.

My gas grill was weak when I got it, so I bought a much bigger regulator, and now it’s not bad at all. If you buy a gas grill for burgers, you may have the same problem. I think they make them weak because of lawyers. It’s literally impossible to prepare a decent burger or steak on the model I bought without hot-rodding it mercilessly.

Gordon Ramsay cooks burgers that appear to be almost an inch and a half thick. Bad idea. A super-thick burger will tend to be raw inside, and you don’t want an overly high ratio of inner meat to outer crust. The flavor is in the crust. It’s also hard to eat a burger that’s too thick. I like burgers 7/8″ to 1″ thick.

I’ll snap a photo from Youtube so you can see a Ramsay burger.

You can’t really eat that like a burger. Your mouth won’t open wide enough. It’s all show and no go. Made for TV, not the table. He cuts his burgers with a knife and fork, which is about what you would expect an untutored foreigner to do.

Lately I’ve been toasting the buns on one half of the grill and then putting them on the other (unlit) side to wait for the burgers. I turn off the flames on the side where the buns are toasted. I flip the buns’ tops and apply cheese. The lingering heat in the grill softens the cheese. This makes it easy to go heavy on the cheese without having melting issues. You may have to put condiments between the cheese and the bun, though. It may resist being pried off so you can put it directly on the meat.

Maybe I should just throw the cheese on the meat and use a propane torch.

I don’t want to get back into cooking, but the constant talk of shortages makes me think of food.

Enough about meat. I also bought famotidine today. I could not resist.

A day or two ago, news organizations started saying famotidine, the drug in Pepcid, showed promise as a coronavirus treatment. What the heck. Can’t hurt me to pick up a couple of bottles. It’s a good thing to have around regardless of whether there’s a pandemic. Heartburn is annoying. When I got to the store today, naturally, most of the famotidine was gone. There must be a hoarder hotline out there. They are fast.

I think I’ve already had coronavirus, and I don’t expect to have it in the future, but it’s fun to feel like you’re doing something that might help.

I got the famotidine at Walgreen’s. They had a hand sanitizer bottle at the register for customers. After I paid, I pumped some out and rubbed my hands with it. It felt luxurious. Like putting caviar on my hands. The smell was invigorating, but that’s normal, because hand sanitizer smells like martinis.

I went to two Walmarts and a Winn-Dixie today. The first Walmart was not in good shape. It was pretty post-hoardery. The second was jammed with goodies. It’s always striking to see how hoarding, which is not guided by reason, varies from location to location.

I saw a lot of paper towels today. Real brands, not just the typical pandemic store brands. “Ekono-Pryce towels, made from real Chinese sawdust!” It’s comforting to know Bounty is back in a big way.

I have cinchona bark on the way. It’s the source of quinine, which is the drug from which chloroquine is descended. As mentioned in an earlier post, I read up on this stuff online, and it got me thinking about gin and tonics. I got some Boodle’s gin and Q tonic water. I couldn’t resist. Q tonic water has almost no quinine in it, so it’s probably not much help when you’re sick, but you can’t read about gin and tonics for two days and not want one. I decided to try the real thing, because people say it’s phenomenal. When the bark arrives, I’ll make some syrup with it. I would guess that the amount of quinine I bought would get me through something like a day and a half of actual treatment, but in practice, it will give me maybe a month of delightful beverages.

I’ve been drinking a gin and tonic almost every other day for quite a while now, and I’m not sick, so that proves it works. No, seriously.

Okay, maybe I’m wrong, but I’m going to continue my arduous regimen. I’m no quitter.

G&T’s with quality tonic are peak-experience-level beverages. I need to have one with my next rib eye.

I have to wonder if quinine is useful for things like colds and the flu. It’s worth a try. Several tries.

It’s for science.

I also wonder why meat plants are especially vulnerable to C19 outbreaks. They’re some of the cleanest places on earth. They hose their equipment with harsh disinfectants all the time. Maybe it’s because they’re cold. C19 does not like heat, humidity, or sunlight. A meat plant is probably a great place to keep the viruses alive on surfaces. They’re also staffed largely by illegals who are not always the cleanest beings in the universe. Maybe their personal habits are spreading C19 at home and overcoming the hygiene measures at the plants.

It shouldn’t take long for plants to recover, especially if they’re hit hard so a lot of employees return at roughly the same time. C19 runs its course in a couple of weeks, and then it leaves you immune and noncontagious. It’s not like meat workers are dying or being hospitalized in large numbers. They’re just having flulike symptoms that pass quickly.

If you wrap and freeze a steak correctly, it will be very good when you thaw it. The quality difference isn’t a huge deal. I don’t know if burgers hold up as well, but I know they’re okay. If it turns out there is no beef shortage, I can always put the burgers in meatloaf and go back to fresh. If not, a B burger, while not an A burger, is well worth cooking.