Big Meat on Campus

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Arts & Culture

UK butcher shop offers local, specialized meat to students and public

Could grass-fed beef and various styles of charcuterie one day replace the late-night pizza and microwavable meals as the food of choice on college campuses?

While that might be a bit of a stretch, the local food movement is nonetheless making inroads into college dining menus across the country, including the University of Kentucky.

The UK College of Agriculture Meats Lab and UK Dining Services over the past few years have developed a program to add more locally produced meats to meals served on campus. This effort has proven so successful, in fact, that the university recently opened a campus butcher shop that specializes in meats produced at the university or by local farmers.

“Basically we are fulfilling two missions with this program,” said Gregg Rentfrow, a meat scientist in the UK Department of Animal and Food Sciences. “We are promoting Kentucky agriculture and at the same time preparing our students for what it’s like in the workplace.”

The butcher shop offers a variety of products that vary according to the time of year and what topic students are studying in their classes. Common items include dry-aged ground beef, chorizo, cured bacon and breakfast sausage.

University officials say the butcher shop grew out of an initiative to use more local meats – particularly pork and beef – in meals served at the university.

Scott Kohn, executive chef and assistant director of dining services at the University of Kentucky, said the university found the most economical way to buy local meats was to purchase whole livestock.

“We found that the prime cuts would move much faster than some of the other cuts – the odds and ends you might call them,” Kohn said. “In order for us to move more weight so we could continue buying whole livestock, we started looking at more value-added production with some of these other meats.”

Kohn said, for example, some of the leftover pork products could be ground up to make charcuterie, which could be sold at campus eateries. Now, such items can also be sold in the butcher shop.

“A big part of the local foods movement involves trying to find uses for all parts of the animal,” Kohn said. “That is where the training and the education really comes into play.”

Kohn teamed up with Rentfrow and the two spent about a year evaluating various processes and looking at the types of equipment that could best utilize the meats with which they were working.

“For a year we weren’t serving anything, we were just asking questions,” Kohn said. “We knew we had some really good products, but we just had to figure out how best to utilize them on a larger scale.”

Rentfrow said the butcher shop was the perfect way to utilize many of the available meats, as well as provide an outstanding teaching environment for the students.

“The butcher shop teaches our students about a lot of different things,” Rentfrow said. “They are learning about the processing of preparing food, but also the economics behind the selling of the meats.”

Because the butcher shop is affiliated with the university, it is operated as a non-profit. Common cuts of meat sold at the butcher shop may not be priced lower than similar items available at local privately owned butcher shops, Rentfrow said.

To avoid such pricing issues, many of the items sold at the UK butcher shop are unique, including a cheeses bratwurst and an apple bratwurst made with locally produced apples. The butcher shop has also produced its own European-style Genoa salami.

Rentfrow said recently students in a class he teaches called “ASC 300: Meat Science” were tasked with making Mexican chorizo and Genoa salami because they were studying the effects of pH levels and water activity on meats. By properly controlling those two factors, meats such as these do not require refrigeration and may be stored at room temperature.

“A lot of people probably aren’t used to seeing meats stored at room temperature, but in the old days that was the only way you could do it,” he said. “Our students were able to learn the science behind it and put it to some good use in the butcher shop.”

In order to ensure availability, the most common meats are supplemented from local processor Marksbury Farm Foods. All meats sold at the butcher shop have to originate in Kentucky and be free of antibiotics, steroids and hormones, also known as A.S.H.-free.

Rentfrow said at any given time typically about 95 percent of the meats available at the butcher shop come from UK farm-raised animals. All proceeds from the butcher shop go toward funding various departmental projects and initiatives.

The butcher shop has been open since August, but Rentfrow and Kohn said an official grand opening will take place on Feb. 8, 2014. The butcher shop is open in the basement of the Garrigus Building every Wednesday and Friday from 1 - 5 p.m.