A Matter of Taste – March 15th, 2009

NARRATOR:  Coming up next – A Matter of Taste – with Rachel and David Michael Cane.

[singing]  A Matter of Taste.  You’re tuning into David Michael Cane

RACHEL:  and Rachel

[singing]  We hope you will enjoy the show.

DAVID: Good morning, and good morning to the last Sunday before spring.  Next Sunday it will be springtime, and that’s very exciting, even though it doesn’t look like spring today.  I want to let everybody know, that the program is brought to you in part by 360 Vodka, the official spirit of A Matter of Taste. 

On the program today, we’re going to be talking about some of the things you might not have thought you would be able to eat.  The politics of veal, which you absolutely can eat.  You will be surprised how good, good for you, and how humanely treated veal is.

RACHEL:  And it’s only worth eating when it’s good.

DAVID:  Yeah, right.  When it’s good, it’s great.  We’re going to be talking to Randy Strauss, from Strauss Free Raised® veal.  We’re also going to be talking to Jane Goldman, she’ll be here.  She’s in charge and runs chow.com. 

First off, I’m very very excited.  We’ve thought, we love veal, the problem is finding it in the politics of where we live.  Finding really good quality veal has been very difficult, but not anymore.  It seems that the Strauss family and Strauss Brands® have a Free Raised® veal.  And, we’re very happy to welcome to A Matter of Taste, Randy Strauss.

How are you, Randy?

RANDY:  Hey, good morning, David, how are you?

DAVID:  We’re well, Rachel and I are delighted, we have big smiles on our faces.  And, I was very, when I heard the story about the Free Raised® veal, I looked at it, and I said, Free Raised® veal, what does that mean in relationship to the words free range – we hear free range chicken, free range whatever, free range children.  And now we hear Free Raised® veal.  Could you maybe explain a little about the Strauss family and Free Raised®?

RANDY:  Absolutely, I’ll be happy to, and Rachel, good morning to you. 

RACHEL:  Good morning to you Randy.

RANDY:  It’s great to be on your show, thanks so much for having me.

RACHEL:  My pleasure.

RANDY:  Free Raised® is really our trademark.  It is free range, technically, but Free Raised® is our program.  It starts with veal, and we’re going it to encompass all meats.  So, soon you’ll see Free Raised® lamb, and you’ll see Free Raised® beef.  And, we’re going to have a complete line available.  We’re really proud of the direction we’re taking our company.

RACHEL:  Well, so many times we have gone to stores to ask for veal, which we love to eat in very different cuts of meat, and people say, oh no, we don’t carry that.  It’s not politically correct, and I don’t understand it.

RANDY:  Well, veal for a long time, veal has been a historical meat, traced back for centuries.  A matter of fact, we’ve traced it back to the fatted calf.  For many, many years it was raised in the pasture alongside its mother, drinking its mother’s milk. 

It wasn’t until industrialized agriculture really took shape here in this country in the mid to late sixties that we decided that, hey, we could better produce animals by putting them some sort of confinement based situation, factory farming it’s known as, as well.  And, you can manage your livestock, and you can do it efficiently. 

What happened though was, people didn’t realize in the sixties that animals had rights, and that they deserved to be treated with respect.  It just was thought of as a meat product, and no one really thought that these animals really deserved anything but to be put in a barn, and grown to be, you know, food on people’s plates.

The animal welfare groups became very vocal, and rightly so.  And, it took them about twenty years to get their message out into the public.  And, they chose veal as their poster child for animal cruelty.  And, rightly so, because these calves were raised inside of a confinement based situation, they were tethered.  But, we did, as an industry, have science and research to support the reasons we were doing this.  And, it was very difficult to try to raise a calf in any other situation than that.

So, about ten years ago, we just, our own family lives a very organic lifestyle.  My children have never had hormones or antibiotics.  We live this very clean and pure life.  And we just thought, you know what, we need to take this, and we need to make this part of our family’s business.  We’ve been, our family’s been in business since 1937, this is, we’re well into our 72nd year.  And, we just wanted to change and feel good about what we were producing. 

So we set out to find a product, a veal product that would be better tasting, and better for you, and raised in the way it should be raised, by mother nature.  You know, we, our company tagline is: Nature Gives.  We Accept.  And, it’s Free Raised®, so nature’s given us the gift of this animal, and we take it how it is, we accept it how it is - no hormones, no antibiotics.

When we finished this program and presented it to United States Department of Agriculture, they weren’t even going to give us a label for it because they said that nothing like this exists.  Veal has always been raised in some confinement based situation, how can you call this veal?  We said that this is what veal was for centuries, and we’re really proud of our final product.

DAVID:  We’ll it’s about time that veal is being handled and treated this way.  Because if it’s raised properly it is, you know, listen, we’re not talking, this isn’t an issue of being a vegetarian or not being a vegetarian and being a carnivore.  It’s an issue of having a high quality product, that us carnivores do want to have, and be able to put into our systems.

And, one of the thing that I’m excited about for you, is that one of the toughest chains of grocery stores to get a meat product in, because they have the toughest protocol happens to be Whole Foods, believe me, I know because I have a line of my products in Whole Foods.  And you now have your veal available throughout Whole Foods stores, and that is actually quite a statement.

How do you, um, how do you take the various cuts of veal, and decide what’s going to be the most popular that people can buy today.

RANDY:  What we’re doing is we’re really having to re-educate the American consumer.  Veal has always been, when you think of formula-fed or milk-replacer veal, or milk-fed veal.  The color of the meat is very pale, and very white, and somewhat flavorless.

DAVID:  Anemic

RANDY:  Anemic, and this program that we have today is natural, it’s authentic, it’s richer in color, it actually has a bit of a flavor.  But, what we’re finding coast to coast is that whenever anyone tries it and puts it in their mouth, they say oh my gosh, I didn’t know that veal could taste this good.  This is the best piece of meat I’ve ever put in my mouth. 

So, in answer to your question, we really designed this program, and we’ve really developed it to be the best that it can possibly be.  We understand that these animals make the ultimate sacrifice for us.  So, we owe it to the animals to give them the best possible quality of life while they’re living. 

So, we thought, in our minds, that Whole Foods, to your point David, has the highest standards.  And, it was an honor and a thrill back in June to formally roll and introduce this product out to the American people at the Whole Foods flagship store in Austin, Texas.  And, what we’re doing now, is we’re going, really pretty much doing a road show.  We’re going from city to city and hitting every single Whole Foods store and we are training and re-training their meat departments. 

We have a video that you can watch at www.freeraised.com.  And, it really tells the story of what we’re trying to accomplish, and what we have accomplished, and, how proud we are of our accomplishment.  But, what we’re trying to do is re-educate the people within – the shoppers that go to Whole Foods, so we have cookings and tastings and we’re cutting and cooking various products.

This veal has the same cuts as a special-fed Holstein program.  The difference between this program and the program that we’ve know for years – the traditional or conventional way of raising calves – that is a Holstein program. 

The breed we’re using here is Limousin.  And, it’s a breed that we’ve traced its heritage back to France.  It’s a very highly sought after breed in France for veal, and, the only thing we’re really doing different here is that we’re allowing these calves to really get their mother’s milk and a little supplemental pasture grass, and that’s what gives it such high nutritional value.

DAVID:  Well, the flavors are good, but I know the people who are listening to this conversation are saying, okay the flavors are good, what do we do with it, how do we cook it?  What cuts do you want to use?  And we’re going to tell our listeners that when we continue.

Straight ahead, on A Matter of Taste here on the green – 960 weekend.  Stick around, Randy.

[singing] Filet mignon, it tastes so good when I get it rare, I like it rare.

DAVID:  Well there’s one cut of meat that you may love if you like tender, delicious flavored meat is a filet mignon.  We had an opportunity to take a couple of unusual cuts.  Well, I think for us, it wasn’t unusual. 

Randy, we last night we ended up cooking a veal breast, a bone-in veal breast.  And, what a phenomenal piece of meat.  It’s not an easy piece of meat to cook because a lot of people don’t understand it.  It takes a lot of browning and then slow-braising to make it really tender.  But, when it’s together, I mean finished, it is really quite a remarkable piece of meat.

But, the veal that is probably the number one cut is not that cut.  What would you say that the Strauss Free Raised® number one cut is?

RANDY:  Well, I would tell you that when most people think of veal they are thinking in terms of either chops or scaloppini.  And, really both products can be cook the same way that you’ve always learned to cook veal, which is pretty much very very short cooking times. 

And, with the scaloppini, we highly, highly recommend that people pound it.  And, if you go, again, to our website, we have a video of just how to pound veal, and how thin you should really pound it.

And the fact that a great dinner could be made, like a veal parmigian or a veal marsala in under five minutes.  That’s what so exciting about veal, it’s just easy to prepare.

RACHEL:  What kind of the meat does the scaloppini come from?

RANDY:  Primarily, it’s a leg slice, from various parts of the leg.  There’s many different muscle groups, and it come from the leg.

DAVID:  Now, we also made a meatloaf with some ground veal, and the flavor profile was absolutely delicious.

RANDY:  Thank you for saying that, too.  We’ve been having huge success with the ground products.  Because, it’s super healthy for you, and if you look at our nutritional profiles on our website, again, the veal is compared to a boneless, skinless chicken breast as far as nutritional content. 

But the moisture of this veal is so fabulous that it can be just used in so many different varieties of center of the plate items, from veal tacos, to toppings on pizzas, to hamburgers.  We’ve been having a lot of success with the sliders, as well. 

It’s just a fun product, this ground, you can do a lot of different things.  People have done things even in tandoori ovens.

RACHEL:  Don’t forget meatball, always my favorite.

RANDY:  Yeah, exactly, meatballs are pretty much the staple of…

RACHEL:  Speaking of meatballs, moving over to another ready to serve and very handy product.  I was totally surprised and loved the veal hot dogs. 

RANDY:  Thank you.

RACHEL:  I have never seen a veal hot dog.

RANDY:  We spent a lot of time making that.  And people have been tasting them and loving them.  And kids love them, and, they’re good for you.  It’s not in terms of, the make up of the hot dog is all really high quality meat, like meat that would normally go into cuts or roasts or something like that.  And, we just made a great tasting hot dog.  And, kids are loving them, and parents are feeling good about feeding them to their kids.

DAVID:  Yeah, it’s called an uncured hot dog, which means it doesn’t have added sodium nitrite or nitrate to it.  It has no, it’s skinless, which means it doesn’t have this tough skin. And you basically put in a pan and it’s fully cooked, it’s ready to eat.  We put it in a pan, sautéed it up, just to give a little color to it. 

RACHEL:  It’s delicious, it was really fun.

DAVID:  We decided, we tasted it straight.  I decided to put the Coleman’s English Mustard on it.  Rachel had the old Golden’s. 

RACHEL:  Yeah, that’s true.

DAVID:  She just decided to do the old classic.

Now, you also have some specialty cuts, the osso buco.  Which is a wonderful dish, and it just takes a little practice to be able to do osso buco.  These cuts are going to be available throughout – they are in the Bay area Whole Foods stores right now, correct?  A lot of these cuts?

RANDY:  Right, they are at the Whole Foods in the Bay area, and we have some foodservice distributors up in the Bay area, that are going to be selling to the local restaurants.

Like I said, it’s kind of a road show right now.  We’re really just in the re-education of letting people know that it’s your permission to try veal again and feel good about it.

RACHEL:  Is the osso buco easy to cook?

RANDY:  Yeah, you know what, osso buco is a great item to prepare.  Because, the longer that you leave it in the oven, unlike the scaloppini that is a very short cooking time, osso buco can be in the oven for two or three hours, and, it just keeps getting more tender, and more tender and more delicious as it goes.

RACHEL:  So basically, what do you do?  You put it in the pan, do you brown it first?

RANDY:  You brown it first, you know, that’s not really my background, cooking, but the longer you do keep it in there, and we do have recipes on our website to support it.

RACHEL:  Well, I see the recipes here, and I know that David is an expert at cooking.  What’s your osso buco favorite recipe?

DAVID:  Well, I basically do, I will seer it and I brown it, and then I’ll end up creating a base with some vegetables and then I’ll also put some wine in it, white wine and then tomatoes. 

RACHEL:  Just let it cook.

DAVID:  Yeah, just let it cook, leave it alone, let it do very little, and then just before I serve it, what I will do is make what’s called a gremolata, and I will take some lemon peel, some diced parsley, and a little bit of chopped up garlic.  And then put it on top, that’s the gremolata and I’ll put it on top of the osso buco, stick it back in the oven for maybe five or ten minutes.  And, the flavor profile’s great, spoon the sauce over it, and then lick my fingers clean.  [laughing]

RANDY:  And, it’s a great dish to prepare the second night too, leftover, it’s even better sometimes.

RACHEL:  It is.

DAVID:  It’s better the second day.

Well, they’re phenomenal products – it’s Strauss Free Raised®.  If you go to Strauss Free-, I’m sorry, just go to freeraised.com. f r e e r a i s e d  dot com.  The story’s there, the products are available at Whole Foods.

RACHEL:  And, in Whole Foods they’re called Meadow Reserve™?

RANDY:  No, Meadow Reserve™ is a proprietary name that Allen Brothers has, if you’re familiar with their catalog.  

RACHEL:  Okay, I’m sorry, I got the wrong name.

RACHEL:  So, what do people look for when they go to the store?

RANDY:  It’s Free Raised®.  Just Strauss Free Raised® veal, and you’re going to keep seeing more about it and hearing more about it, and keep continually looking at our website, there’s constant updates about celebrity chefs are using the product, and what type of success they’re having with it. 

Soon you’ll see some recipe contests online too, we’d love to have people send in different things they’ve done with the product, and you know, just to see what everyone’s doing, and what type of fun they’re having with the product. 

DAVID:  Well I’ve never made a pastrami out of veal yet.  But, who knows, there’s always a first.  [laughing]

RACHEL:  That would be interesting to do.

RANDY:  Love to try, I’d love to try it David.

DAVID:  Randy, thanks so much for joining us on A Matter of Taste.

RANDY:  Thank you all very much.  I really appreciate being on your show, and, everyone have a great day.

RACHEL:  Thanks.

DAVID:  Thank you, you too.