Jacob Brogan talks to D.C. butcher shop owner Nathan Anda about his practice of ethical animal processing.

Read About How This D.C. Butcher Promotes Ethical Eating

Read About How This D.C. Butcher Promotes Ethical Eating

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April 19 2016 5:23 PM
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What’s in Your Sausage? 

A gourmet D.C. butcher breaks down how he brings ethical animal practices from farm to table.

Nathan Anda.
Nathan Anda.

Photo illustration by Slate. Image by Red Apron

We’re posting transcripts of Working, Slate’s podcast about what people do all day, exclusively for Slate Plus members. What follows is the transcript for Season 5, Episode 10. In this episode of Working, Slate’s Jacob Brogan talks to Nathan Anda, a chef, butcher, and restaurant owner, based in Washington, D.C.

Nathan is responsible for the ethically sourced and processed meats he serves both at his Red Apron butcher shop and his newly opened restaurant, EatBar. Want to know where your food comes from and how it should be processed to keep your eating ethical? Keep reading to hear this conscientious chef share the story of how he balances his days between business and butchery.

To learn more about Slate’s Working podcast, click here.

This is a lightly edited transcript and may differ slightly from the edited podcast.

Jacob Brogan: Welcome to Working, Slate’s podcast about what people do all day. I’m Jacob Brogan and I write about technology and culture for Slate. Like a lot of people these days I’ve always been curious about where my food’s from which is part of why I’m so happy that we had the chance to talk with Nathan Anda this week. Anda is a butcher and a chef based here in Washington, D.C. Some of the products that he makes, products that he sources form local farms go directly to customers at his Red Apron shops while others end up on the menu at restaurants throughout the area, including his own space, EatBar.

Though Anda runs a complex large scale operation, he’s still closely involved with the fascinating actual work of butchery. We met with him at EatBar as the newly opened restaurant was setting up for service. He talked to us about how he sources the animals he uses in his butchery, getting into the real meat of farm to table cooking.

Among other things he talked to us about the process of making culatello, a kind of boneless, salty ham that you have to try if you have the chance. And, in a Slate Plus extra, Anda tells us about how he makes his hot dogs which is, I confess, something I did not really realize that you could make without an industrial facility. To try out Slate Plus, visit slate.com/workingplus for a two-week trial.

Brogan: What’s your name and what do you do?

Nathan Anda: My name is Nathan Anda and I work with Red Apron Butchery, which has three butcher shops, three sandwich shops, and three restaurants now.

Brogan: How long have you been working as a butcher?

Anda: I’d say I’ve been butchering animals for about 12 years, but in that time I was also chef of a couple restaurants.

Brogan: Where did you train? How did you get involved with butchery in particular?

Anda: I taught myself. I guess when I started, really, working with the whole animal it was about 2004, 2005, and I wanted to know where my meat was coming from, and I wanted to not have something out of box or a bag. So, it started me going to farmers markets and talking to the farmers about getting their product. And, in order to get the product, I would have to get, you know, a whole side of a pig or a hindquarter of a cow. And then, if it was a side of pig, there was another 150 pounds that I had to figure out what to do with.

Brogan: So, how has this whole animal butchery different from what you were doing before?

Anda: Being a chef you always look to kind of keep moving in a way. You get tired of doing the same thing over and over again. And that is what led Red Apron to have the 400-plus products that we have is because, you get 10 pigs a week—with that I have all my butcher shops covered.

I have to make sausages for the butcher shops plus for the restaurants. I have to make all the meats for the sandwich shops and then also cover the charcuterie for the restaurants. But then, out of all that there’s always 25–30 pounds left which allows me to play around. And that eventually creates another product—which then adds more chaos to my life.

Brogan: So, where are we today? What’s this space that we’re in?

Anda: This is EatBar. It’s in Capitol Hill. Opened a week ago today.

Brogan: And, it seems like it’s still kind of under construction right now. What’s the process there?

Anda: It’s not so much under construction. I think every day after you open your restaurant—it’s beautiful to begin with—and then you start to figure out how we can change the lighting over here and do this and this. And, today they’re just working on dimmers on the lights.

Brogan: How do you balance your butchering work with restaurant management?

Anda: I have an awesome team. I really couldn’t do it without. I have three core people that work with me, which they kind of allow me to be more positioned in the food side of it, and they can oversee the management of running restaurants and butcher shops.

Brogan: How involved are you at this point in the day to day work of butchering?

Anda: I’m there every morning, I make the prep list, I’m in there going through and looking at the animals all the time. I guess with the amount of projects that we have going right now I don’t get to do as much as I’d like—you know, this all started as me wanting to be more focused with meat. And, I’m still totally focused with meat. But, as for opening these concepts I have to be involved with them.

Brogan: So, is there a typical day for you?

Anda: Right now I’d say it’s very hard to have a typical day because this just opened and I spend more time here than I would at one of the existing restaurants. But, it’s anywhere between 8 in the morning, 7:30 a.m., 8 in the morning to, I left here at 1 a.m. on Monday night. Last night, I left here by 9 p.m. Yesterday I was able to hit every single property though, which I haven’t done in a week. So, that was big.

Brogan: On a week when you’re less focused on opening a restaurant, what’s the first thing you do usually?

Anda: I always go to the commissary, production facility, check the inventory. And then, looking at the inventory then and the numbers, and I have to then project what I expect to do in the next week to a month.

And then, that’ll kind of set up how I will go forward with, you know, what will go onto menus: what can be a special, and what has to change, and whatever. So, that usually takes me from 8:30–11 a.m. on a Monday. And then, from 11 a.m. until about 2 p.m. I get to actually work on all the things, like going through with all the cooks and the butchers and everything and telling them exactly how I want some certain things to move forward for the rest of the day and for the week.

And then, I go over the recipes, yields. And then, by 2 p.m. I usually am freed up to start going to the businesses that are open. And then, usually by 6 p.m. I’ll get back to the commissary and do the orders, make sure everything that’s going out to the stores is going out correctly. Talk to my managers there and make sure that we’re ordering all the right stuff.

And then, if it’s Monday—which we’re talking now, it’s Monday—my pigs usually show up at 7:30—between 6:30 and 7:30.

Brogan: P.M.?

Anda: Yep. And, I’ll be there to oversee the getting them off the delivery truck and checking them, and then looking at the invoice, which isn’t that fun. And then, I’ll make the prep list for Tuesday, and then, by that time it’s probably 7:30, 8 p.m. and I’ll probably go back out to one of the restaurants and stay for a couple of hours for service.

Brogan: Where and how do you source the animals that you use?

Anda: We work with the Growing Coop in North Carolina that raises pigs for us. And, we go down every Monday and pick them up and drive them back.

Brogan: How many do you get a week?

Anda: Anywhere between 10 and 20. This week, with opening day being tomorrow, we are selling a ton of sausages and hot dogs. So, that kind of depleted our inventory of stuff. So, next week the plan is to get 20 in and kind of build our inventory back up.

Brogan: Can we talk cost? What is a single pig from this kid of source cost for you? You don’t have to talk about it if you’re not comfortable with it.

Anda: I mean, I’m not uncomfortable, I don’t want anybody out there to go source their pigs from this guys because it’s an awesome price.

Brogan: Yeah. Is there an average cost to the number of animals you bring in a week?

Anda: No. The cost changes if I go for a different size pig. Like, to me I think 250- to 280-pound hog is perfect for us. I’m planning on 20 pigs, that’s going to yield me around 10 to 11,000 pounds. And, that’s what I want next week, because I want 10 to 11,000 pounds.

Brogan: So, you go through 10,000–11,000 pounds of pig meat a week in your restaurants?

Anda: We’ll no, see, that’s production, that’s everything. That’s with a lot of bones. Last week it was 6,000.

Brogan: What state are the animals in when you pick them up?

Anda: North Carolina—Oh, they are dead.

Brogan: I once went to a pig butcher class on a farm and one of the things that surprised me is that the actual slaughtering had to happen offsite in FDA facilities.

Anda: Oh yeah. These pigs are actually delivered on a Thursday to the slaughter facility, and they are put into a kind of holding quarters where they’re actually allowed to—it’s not a cage by any means, it’s a pretty big area—and it’s allows them to get acclimated to the environment, it actually helps them with their slaughter. It’s not a stress slaughter, so it’s pretty nice.

Brogan: So, how do they actually kill the pigs in the facility?

Anda: They’re stunned with a stun gun and then it’s a really fast process. They’re stunned, and then they’re bled out.

Brogan: Is that when they’re hanging them that they bleed them out?

Anda: Yep. So, it’s a really fast process. They go in and—there’s something called a hugger—it hugs them. So, it makes them feel comfortable, and then they can stun it. And, by the time it’s stunned they already have the hose hooked so it can go up and then bled out, so it doesn’t have any chance to feel the pain.

Brogan: Do they take out the entrails and such then, or is that something you do in your facility?

Anda: They do that for us. So, they are slaughtered and hung and scalded, which is removing all the hair. And then, they’re gutted, and all the entrails are removed and they’re picked out. And, they save the ones I want, so I always want the hearts, and the livers, and the kidneys. The also send me the spleens, which I never ask for, but I always manage to get those. And then, the leaf lard, which is the kidney fat wrapped around the tenderloins, which is awesome stuff. And, that’s actually what we have our fryers here at EatBar filled with, leaf lard.

Brogan: So, when you’re actually breaking down a pig, where do you start? What’s the first step?

Anda: We look at it. The first step is to remove the tenderloin. And then, once the tenderloin’s removed we kind of think of what we want to do with it. So, if it’s a week that I need a ton of sausage then we’re still going to break the primals out, remove the shoulder and then the leg. The head’s already been removed for us.

Brogan: What are the primals?

Anda: The shoulder, the belly. Imagine a side of a pig is laid out in front of you, it would be head, shoulder, belly, and loin section, and then you have the leg.

Brogan: What are the most difficult parts of that process?

Anda: For me there’s not a lot of difficult processes there. You get to do so much of it, it becomes very easy. So, a lot of it is like, when you’re thinking utilization you want to follow seams, and you’re very methodical of hitting between the bones correctly. Basically what I want is for it to be the same all the time. Working with foraged pigs nothing is ever the same, but if we’re butchering them the same then I can have the same final product.

So, if I have a 300-pound pig and a 240-pound pig, the loins and the bellies are always going to be different, but once we’re done butchering them, they’ll still be two pounds, three pounds off, but they’ll be cut at the right angles and between the right bones.

Brogan: What kind of tools do you use to take these bones out? Are there special knives, or saws, or other things that you bring to each process?

Anda: I have a lot of really neat tools. The most effective one is a sharp knife. And then, we have a band saw, we have hand saws. I learned a long time ago the bigger the knife the bigger the wound. It’s going to hurt more when it comes down and cuts your finger off. So, I like to do everything with the five to six inch poking knife, is what it’s called. It’s a pointing tip and it can help me kind of zero in on where I want to go. And then, when I find the seam I want to follow through, and if it’s a straight cut I can get a bigger knife and cut down.

Brogan: Do you want your knife to be flexible? Should it be able to bend or should the knife be firm?

Anda: It depends. In certain areas—it’s good to have both, you know. If you have a flexible knife, it can kind of help follow certain things. But it can also slide right off of stuff and kind of go where you don’t want it to.

Brogan: You talked a little bit about following the seams or the lines, what does that mean?

Anda: There’s, like, natural seams to muscles. When you cut something down straight down, you’re losing that seam. If you follow the seam, then you’re following the muscle. So, you’re actually following it to where it ends and then you can peel it out and do what you want with it.

Brogan: How do you work to minimize waste?

Anda: Filling our fryers with lard was one. Basically trying to find uses for byproduct is the best way to work with fixing our yields.

We get a lot of bones, so we can sell stocks. Retail, we sell stocks to all of the restaurants within the Red Apron properties. We can braise in stocks as opposed to starting with water. We can reduce stocks and create glosses, or gels, or whatever. Then, it also creates a really good hamburger.

Brogan: Do you serve those here?

Anda: We have good hamburgers here, yeah.

Brogan: I may come back and order it.

Anda: But, we also do a pork burger here as well. So with the whole animal you can pick out all your prime pieces whether it’s a cow or a pig, and then you’re left with this other pile over here, but, as you’re cleaning everything and your expensive pile, you have expensive trim going into your other pile of trim. You know what I mean? So, it’s like, you’re cleaning tenderloins, part of the tenderloin can go into the grind.

You’re cleaning your New York strip or your sirloin, so that goes into your grind. You know, and then it’s like as you’re looking at it, it could be looking fatty, so you say, OK, well, you have to clean the hind quarter which has more solid muscle, top round, bottom round, and eye of round. And, as you clean those, you’re going to create lean scrap that can go in there. And then, that’s getting to be the 75–25 mix that I want.

Brogan: Are there every any components that you absolutely can’t use when you’re breaking down an animal?

Anda: Yeah, the spleens. I’m just kidding. No. At the end of the week when you get three cows, you get three tongues, three hearts, so, those two products freeze really well, so those can go into the freezer. And, I actually create a stock pile. I’ll wait until I can get 10 hearts and then I’ll make a heart salami. So, at The Partisan we have a smoked heart salami. And then, we also do a pig heart salami. We do pig heart pastrami. And, we corn the tongues. So, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to make these big brines and then, you know, only throw one thing into it. So, I got to wait until they have 10 to 20 things. And then, it can create enough that I can then send it to one restaurant, and then they can run it for a week, and then we’ll start back over and start generating more.

So, a good example of another cool thing that we end up with is chicken wings. So, we do a smoked chicken salad at the other properties. And, you don’t yield a lot of meat off the chicken wing, so we just cut the chicken wings off and then I can set them aside, and then they’re now the chicken wings that are on the menu here. Because I have enough that I can keep up with my inventory and my needs.

Brogan: Can we talk about charcuterie a little bit? What sorts of preserved meats do you sell?

Anda: Name it, I got it. I mean, I do a lot of hams. I got prosciuttos, and we also do culatellos. So, culatello is the hamstrings. It’s a ham that’s ben deboned, and once it’s been deboned it’s actually tied back and then cured. And, over the curing process it kind of solidifies itself back into a nice round beautiful ham.

Brogan: So, what’s the first step when you’re going to make a culatello?

Anda: You got to debone the ham. First of all, you remove the pelvis bone, then you remove the femur.

And then you look for all the little blood pockets and everything and get that out of there. Clean that all up. Cleaning up all the inside, getting rid of all the glands. Clean the fat side. Get all the skin off as well as making sure there’s no blemishes in the fat, and then tying it.

Brogan: Do you apply a cure before you tie it off or after?

Anda: After it’s ties.

Brogan: So, is there any seasoning or anything that goes inside?

Anda: Nope. It’s all just tied up and it’s all natural.

Brogan: What’s the cure?

Anda: Salt. Sea salt.

Brogan: Just straight ordinary sea salt?

Anda: Yep. We use a sea salt from California. It’ll go into a room that is about 38 degrees. It’s about two days per pound. So, it’s usually looking at, 30 days is where we’re looking then.

Brogan: 30 days out—what are you looking for?

Anda: We’re looking for the amount of water that came out of it, the firmness of the muscle. And then, after it’s taken out of cure it’s rinsed with a pool of wine, white wine and water. And then, it’s kind of rinsed and then we stuff it into a bladder, which is then tied up again. And then, we’ll take the weight at that point and then we will put it into our curing room. And then, we’ll just see it in a year or so.

Brogan: So, it takes a year to get it to an edible state?

Anda: Yeah. I mean, you’re looking at water loss at that point then. And, that’s why you take the weight of things beforehand. We’re expecting to lose 35 to 40 percent water. So, I’ll take the weight and then I won’t even look at it before nine months. And preferably I wouldn’t cut it down before a year.

Brogan: So, all total we’re talking 13, 14 months for a project like this.

Anda: Yep.

Brogan: What are the economics of something like that for you as a restauranteur and as a business person?

Anda: Well, one of the things that people recognize with charcuterie is prosciutto or cured ham. So, for us that’s something that’s automatically—before we even look at pricing, people are already expect it to be a little expensive, and that’s just due to the market already being set.

And, that’s coming from companies that do it for a long time and they know the loss and everything. So, basically you have to look at the rent that goes into that ham taking up space in your curing room as well. Like, salamis are nice because they’re three months, but hams … So, I like to do my hams in packs of 15 to 20, so I know when they can go into an area. And then, I will start them again. Twenty of them would last me for a bit, a good amount of time. So, we work in sections and I’m always looking to replace hams when I take them down.

Brogan: Cool. What about making sausages, is that as involved?

Anda: Yeah. Definitely. Sausages are easy, they’re like a gateway drug for making charcuterie. But, they’re also easy to make wrong. You know, and a lot of it comes down to meat to fat ratio and emulsification. So, if the meat is too warm when you’re trying to make a sausage, the fat will smear and it will not make a nice emulsification. Same with if it’s too cold, it won’t give the fat a chance to mix nicely.

Brogan: What is an emulsification in context of a sausage? What are you looking for?

Anda: I guess you’re looking for it to be juicy and not dry. So, if you’re cooking a sausage, you want to be able to bite into it, you want it to be juicy which means the fat would have stayed in throughout the cooking process, bound in within everything. If you’re cooking a sausage and you see all the fat is outside of the sausage, that means the fat separated and it’s going to lead to a drier sausage. Sorry.

Brogan: What steps do you have to take in these various environments that you work in, not just the restaurants but also commissary, to ensure food safety?

Anda: I mean, a lot of it is that you have to worry about cross contamination, temperatures, shelf lives, everything. And, it’s constant. It’s every hour of the day you’re paying attention to it.

Brogan: On your website you stress that your pork comes from animal welfare approved farms, we talked about that a little earlier, but can you say more about what that means and why it’s important to you?

Anda: We want to believe that we’re using a product that—we believe quality instead of quantity. Animal welfare is one of the few organizations that actually sees something from start to finish. Like, they oversee how these animals are bred, raised, and all the way to slaughter. And, we believe that’s a great process.  

Brogan: Is that just for the pork or do you insist on similar standards for the other meats that you use?

Anda: You know, we would love it to be all products, and we’re working towards that right now. We work with a couple different beef farmers that are animal welfare approved, and then we have some that aren’t. And, the goal is to be 100 percent in the future.

Brogan: Is this primarily an ethical issue for you, or is it a culinary one as well?

Anda: Both. A happy animal—you’d want to imagine these animals had a good life. They’re fed right, they’re not held in captivity. They put a ton of pride and passion into raising these amazing animals and our goal is to be able to show them off in the right way.

Brogan: Last question, I asked my girlfriend, I told her that I was interviewing you and I said, do you have any questions for him, and she said, and I quote, “How do they make their sandwiches so f---ing delicious?

Anda: That’s a secret. No. I think we’ve always looked at our sandwiches as an entrée. On an entrée you have a protein, a starch, a veg, and a sauce. So you look at the sandwich and you have the starch, being the bread. So, you want to start with a good piece of bread. The proteins, we’ve gone out of our way to make sure—we take the time and effort to make the quality meats on the inside.

And then the garnish should just be looked upon as just a thing that you put on top. So, that’s awesome that she said that. But, sometimes not a lot of people see it that way.

Brogan: She loves what you do. Well, thank you, thank you so much. And thanks for listening to this episode of Working. I’m Jacob Brogan. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast. Our email address is working@slate.com.

You can listen to all six seasons at slate.com/working. This episode was produced by the tremendously talented Mickey Capper. Our executive producer is Steve Lickteig, and the chief content officer of the Panoply Network is Andy Bowers. In this Slate Plus extra, Nathan Anda tells us how he makes his hot dogs that he sells in some of his restaurants and facilities.

Brogan: What about making a hot dog, how do you do that in house?

Anda: There’s different ways of going about it, but we emulsify it by adding ice with the muscle, which gets it really fine and keeps it at a cold temperature. And then, we add fat to it and it kind of creates a very smooth texture.

Brogan: Is making a hot dog different than making a sausage though?

Anda: A hot dog is a different way of making a sausage. Yes, definitely.

Brogan: What’s different about it?

Anda: I think, texturally sausages are course, and a hot dog is fine. And so, with a sausage you’re mixing ground product. When, with an emulsified sausage you are using the blades to keep on just breaking it down, breaking it down, and making it smooth. And then, it’s stuffed and then we steam the majority of our hot dogs.

Brogan: Is there any other curing process or anything that’s involved there?

Anda: With the hot dog? No. All the spices are added as the machines are running, you know.

Brogan: What are some of the spices that go into your hot dog?

Anda: That, I’ll have to talk to my lawyer. No, I’m just kidding. No, we use a lot of mace in ours. There’s ginger, garlic, coriander, paprika and onion.