Save 3/4 on Beef Meals The Easy Way

Have you noticed the price of beef lately?

What a silly question.

If you eat (or want to eat) beef then of course you have, but while chicken is much cheaper and pork is often on sale at $1/pound around here in Central PA, they just don't have the satisfying great taste of real beef.

But even most of the beef I buy turns out to have little of the flavor I remember from my youth, and also from my own ranch raised beef of the last decade, so it isn't just the fog of nostalgia.

Beef, like tomatoes, is becoming less flavorful and more expensive every day.

However there is an alternative and I bet your guests and family will never know the difference if you follow my recipe.

WARNING: remember some guests may have religious or medical objections to eating pork so use common sense applying this technique.

Take a pork loin which is a boneless cut some fat often on sale for $1 or $1.50 per pound and that's pure protein minus the fat, no bones or injected liquid which is mainly a trick of the markets to sell you water at beef prices.

(I do this myself, but I don't pay beef prices for the juices I inject in roasts.)

You may wish to do a bit of experimenting and one special ingredient which is easy to find on Amazon and not particularly expensive - more about that below.

You can do this many ways so this is less a recipe than a concept which you can adapt to your tastes and your meal plans.

What I do is this: I cut the loin into one inch medallions and remove most of the fat since I don't want it to taste like pork - nothing wrong with the taste of pork, but if you want to substitute it for $5/pound beef you don't want much flavor from the $1/pound pork.

I then bread and fry the medallions to get some flavors into the otherwise nearly tasteless meat. The breading is important because it will hold a lot of the flavor you add later, much more than unbreaded meat.

Then I mix up some very strong beef broth and marinate the cooked medallions in that for at least overnight.

Then, depending on whether I am making steaks or cutting it up for any dish with noodles or rice into bite sized pieces, I cook the medallions until very tender in the special beef broth.

You can then serve them whole or cut into small pieces for a dish incorporating anything you like such as sour cream for Stroganoff or just mix a good gravy using the the marinade.

The trick to all this is the marinade and it is easy to make but you can't use what they call beef broth in cans, nor can you use bullion cubes. Neither has much flavor and include a lot of artificial ingredients which I always avoid.

I make both beef gravy, the marinade, and also the injectible liquid I use to add flavor to beef roasts or large cust of pork from a restaurant staple which you don't find in most grocery stores.

There are a lot of such restaurant tricks which you won't know about unless you have worked in a good kitchen.

The special ingredient here is a kind of demi-glace, a rich concentrated beef stock made by boiling down standard beef stock until extremely concentrated.

At less than $1/ounce this isn't really expensive since one ounce can make enough gravy for a family of four big eaters.

For the "fake" beef you want to make this very strong but an ounce should be enough to make a cup of marinade which will later be diluted about 2:1 and mixed with flour or some starch to make a great gravy.

Find a link to the Original Beef Base at the bottom of this page.

Don't substitute the products actually marked "demi-glace" or "au jous" concentrates, stick with the Minor's original Beef Base for this use and for an excellent beef gravy.