Stop paying for the middle of the meat case.

Nobody tells you anymore

There is no plot in the meat case. I know, because I built the meat case. A diagram came down from an office and I filled it in, and the ribeye went at eye level under the pinkest light in the store, because a man whose whole job is knowing where your eyes go decided that it should.

That is merchandising. It is legal and ordinary and it works on me too, in aisles I know nothing about.

The reason nobody ever told you where the cheap good meat sits is duller than a conspiracy, and sadder. There is no money in it. When the neighborhood shops closed, the man whose job it was to lean over the glass and say take this one, not that one, and here is why closed with them. Nobody hid anything. It just stopped having anybody whose job was to say it out loud.

I am that man, saying it out loud about forty years late, in three books instead of over a counter.

Every method is built the same way

You do not have to read these front to back. Nobody reads a book like this front to back, and I did not write it that way. Every one of the eighty-seven methods runs the same shape, so you can drop into any of them cold:

The honest part is not decoration. A chuck eye is not a ribeye, a marinade travels about an eighth of an inch, and resting a steak is the most oversold five minutes in cooking. I say so in the chapters where it matters, because I would rather you trusted me than were dazzled by me.

What is inside

• The ribeye hiding in the chuck, four steps to the left and about half the money · Book 1, p. 27
• The whole pork shoulder, taken apart along the seams into five different suppers · Book 1, p. 93
• Salt the night before, and the twenty minutes you must stay out of · Book 1, p. 217
• The cut that eats like prime rib for a third of the Christmas bill · Book 1, p. 123
• Grinding your own, and the arithmetic that makes it worth the trouble · Book 1, p. 173
• Sunday sauce: the meats that earn a place in the pot, and the ones that do not · Book 2, p. 12
• Braciole from the top round, pounded, rolled and tied. Never chuck · Book 2, p. 17
• Italian sausage, and the honest word about the dry-cured kind I will not teach you · Book 2, p. 29
• What the label leaves off, and the small words that change how you must cook the meat · Book 3, p. 25
• The exact sentences to say at the counter, and what each one gets you · Book 3, p. 50
• Wrapping, labelling, and why freezer burn is never the freezer's fault · Book 3, p. 85

Sal Petralia

My grandfather came over from a village outside Palermo around 1905, worked the Red Hook piers, and opened a pork store in 1923. My father moved it to 18th Avenue in Bensonhurst in 1949, and I was born two years later. I went behind that counter at twelve and I closed it in 2014.

Not because of a landlord. The customers moved to Staten Island and Jersey, the insurance and the payroll tax kept climbing, and nobody wanted to buy a business where everything is made from scratch. My own two went with them. One of the men who used to come in every Saturday said it to me plain near the end, and I have never gotten it out of my head: we did not leave you, you left us. He had it backwards and he had it exactly right.

I sold a man a chuck eye in about 1986 and told him he would not know the difference from a ribeye. He came back the next Saturday, put the wrapper on my counter, and said he had known at the first bite, and so had his wife.

He was right. I had wanted the sale and rounded a true thing up into a false one. He bought from me for twenty years after that, not because I talked my way out of it, but because I stood there and said I had oversold him, and then told him what a chuck eye actually is: a very good steak that is not the same steak.

That is the whole tone of these books.

Sal Petralia's Pork Store Method

Try it

If it does not hold up, write to me inside of thirty days and I will send your twenty-seven dollars back. Keep the books. I am not going to ask you to prove anything or fill in a form, and I am not going to argue with you about your own kitchen.

Thirty days is longer than most, and that is on purpose. Three days is not enough time to cook anything from a book you just bought.

Straight answers

Will this really save me a thousand dollars a year?

That is arithmetic, not a promise. A family of four that eats beef twice a week gets there and then some. A household of two saves less. The methods are the same either way, and your store is not my store.

Is it a cookbook?

No. There are dishes in it, but it is a method book. A recipe feeds you Tuesday. A method feeds you for good.

I already watch the videos. Is this the same thing?

The videos are where I show one method. These are all of them, in order, with the prices, the limits and the arithmetic written down, plus a good deal that has never been on the channel.

Do I need special equipment?

A thermometer and a knife you keep sharp. Everything else in the sourcing sheet is optional and I tell you which ones to skip.

What is it, exactly?

Three PDF books you download, plus the audio edition. No app, no subscription, no login to forget.