Meats & Charcuterie
Whole Animal Approach
Receiving exclusively whole carcasses allows us the ability to employ top-down processing when it comes to our approach on any given week: each animal provides us with every muscle group, bone, and array of fat and offal to creatively plan our avenue to fill our cases and freezers with cuts and products to match the season, weather, demand, and any holidays on the horizon.
We break down these whole carcasses week in and week out right in the middle of the shop for full transparency, allowing us to prepare your order while you watch. Decades of combined experience have bestowed upon us the ability to test the anatomy for different applications, which allows us to market a catalogue of muscles that are obscure or largely unknown, so asking us for an overview of any cut you don’t recognize can only provide new colors for your kitchen canvas pallet (and palate).
Getting to know you and your family, your culinary approach and preferences, and your cooking and eating habits better provides us with the ability to cater to your weekly needs so you can put delicious and nutritious food on your family’s table. Letting us in on the plan for your dish is a great way to start a conversation as we can advise the correlating cut and process, and recommend dry goods and other house-made formulations that can only boost the utility of your alimentary experience.
locally-sourced
By building relationships with farms within the state of Virginia, we enhance our local economy and safeguard small businesses while preserving farmland. Benefits include:
Lower fuel emissions incurred through shortening the distance traveled from our farms to our blocks. Smaller vehicles spanning a hop, skip, and a jump are worlds preferable to giant semi trucks blundering laterally across the country.
Farmland preserved by our patronage. Your support for us allows us to support them financially, which protects their operations and therefore their land maintenance. Once farmland is bought and developed…it will never be farmland again, and more natural ground is lost to the concrete jungle.
The tertiary piece to the farm-to-butcher block puzzle is processors (abattoirs, slaughterhouses…same thing). Without farmers providing livestock to be harvested, well…no animals, no processors. No processors, no ability for farming entities to turn their livestock into meat, no meat…you see where this is going. Keeping these businesses employed and operational is a crucial–and little discussed–stepping stone for keeping healthy, nutritious meat in our cold cases, bound for your tables and the mouths of your families.
Prioritizing local economy is ultimately important. Maintenance of fluid financials in our area only helps to build relationships and monetary movement within our counties and state. Cue the “Buy Local” bumper sticker you see every time you hop in your car.
Grass-finished beef
It all starts with care for the ground and the soil, which translates to a rich starting point for high-protein and nutritious grasses to thrive. Without well-balanced, healthy soil and proper rotation, grass—which is what cattle rumen are “designed” to process—cannot thrive and grow properly, which would leave their bovine consumers underfed and malnourished. Our farmers know that the key to delicious, succulent, tender, and well-marbled beef is ground health.
By raising a well-nourished animal, we, in turn, gain their nutritional utility through consumption and support animal welfare as a byproduct. Constant grain-feeding can leave cows bloated and uncomfortable, causing stress and unrest, which is bad news for their psyche as well as for their meat. Raising and finishing beef on grass is much more time-consuming and labor-intensive than grain-feeding, and therefore is inherently more expensive. By supporting this process, we ensure that the farms stay in business, and that farmland is maintained and not developed, which contributes to a cleaner environment and a healthier ozone layer. This is not to mention the nutrition that we derive when we consume well-raised grass-finished beef—conjugated linoleic acids (CLA), docosahexaenoic acids (DHA), beta-carotene, antioxidants, and a host of vitamins and minerals enrich our bodies, contributing to healthier brains, hearts, eyes, guts, and omega balance, to name a mere few. We tend to incur lower cholesterol levels, lower risk of antibiotic resistance, and lower saturated fat levels by choosing our beef with care.
It’s important to note, however, that just because it’s grass-fed and grass-finished doesn’t make it automatically “good” on the plate—and this is where the decades of astute farming knowledge and experience come into play, and why we choose our farming partners diligently and thoughtfully.
SAUSAGE
Our variety repertoire exceeds 100 and extends from classics all the way to exotic and downright crazy. Every batch is crafted in-house by hand with hair-splitting scrutiny to ensure that texture is tight, snappy, and properly emulsified and that flavor is balanced, full, and illustrative of profile intent. Most are made with all pork, but many are blended with beef, lamb, chicken, and duck, and all are stuffed into natural casings. Look for the highly sought-after alpha-gal sausage (packed loose with no casing), made from chicken, turkey, and duck, for those who need to avoid mammalian muscle and fat. Flavor profiles vary based on your requests! Click here to jump to our offerings page to see release dates for this week’s concoctions.
Charcuterie
What is a butcher shop without bacon, pastrami, smoked ham, or pâté? At Stock, the charcuterie lineup is an ever-spinning carousel of delectable cured meat treats whose tendrils extend from breakfast to lunch to dinner and every hunger-phase in between. All products are made in-house from scratch (like everything in the shop) from recipes and processes that we have designed from the bottom up. Click here to see what’s on tap for the week. Look for national award winners like Tasso ham, pâté de campagne, and beef tongue pastrami, or seek other creations such as guanciale cotto, gyro, scrapple, mortadella, and lamb bacon.
Stocks, Broths, Rendered Fats, and Prepared Foods
Stocks and broths are an integral cog in the machine of our whole-animal approach. Bones, fascia, tendon, and connective tissue encompass a considerable percentage of the weight of any animal, and they can be utilized with phenomenal nutritional utility to produce rich, flavorful stocks that dose the recipient with an exhaustive list of vitamins, minerals, and immune-boosting compounds such as DHA, CLA, omega balance, and beta-carotene, to name a few. (Sidenote–this holds true only if the animal from which the stock was made was healthy, well-raised, and well-fed; rest assured, we check all those boxes.) Our stocks and broths offer exponential impact on your cooking and recipe fulfillment, and are extremely useful in the kitchen, offering you the ability to enhance your stews, soups, sauces, bases, gravies, while skipping the workload and mess. Ask us to show you the lineup next time you’re in the shop, and keep an eye out for the “toddy” broths, which are designed for sipping to warm the soul, awaken the palate, boost immunity, and implement heightened gut health.
From lard to tallow to rendered duck fat to schmaltz, rendered fats are extremely useful in your day-to-day cooking. Not only are they integral in dishes such as confit, carnitas, Yorkshire pudding, and a host of baking preparations, they also allow the culinarian to sidestep seed oils and other health concerns while catalyzing flavor explosions and textural luxuries. Show us your meal plan, and we can help you integrate these into your recipes to further your creativity and health prowess, starting with duck fat-roasted potatoes. Good fat can be good for you!
Our ever-expanding line of prepared foods provide you with a quick “out” to thinking through a healthy and satisfying meal for those long days capped off by the kids’ after-school practices, or any time you’re just not feeling it. Check out our frozen section to stock your freezer with heat-and-eat meals or components for the next time the snow hits or you find yourself short on time.
Lasagne / pozole verde / shepherd’s pie / pulled pork / barbacoa / turkey pot pie / birria / turkey & white bean chili
Bolognese / beef stew / turkey tinga / Stock chili / sausage gravy / hot dog chili / turkey soup
Call or stop by for availability!
Dry-aging
All of our beef is dry-aged to some degree. Grass-finished animals are athletic specimens, as they are on their hooves all day roaming and grazing, lifting and dropping their heads and necks all the day through as they nosh healthy pasture. This incurs stronger muscles, tightly formed and abundant with collagen, which results in more dense meat that can be more difficult to chew. We counteract this through the dry-aging process: shoulders and legs age for at least one week, and loin muscles age for approximately three weeks, in a properly cold environment, with moving air and humidity control.
This accomplishes three goals, for the abridged version:
Moisture loss. Meat is 65-75% water by weight, and it is in a constant state of breaking itself down through enzymatic “feeding.” As this happens, water escapes through exposed protein, reducing overall water content of the muscle, therefore concentrating flavor. Think of a reduction bubbling away on the stovetop–less water, more concentration, more flavor.
Tenderization. These enzymes, alive and hungry, are consuming collagen structures that encase muscle fibers and fibrils. Collagen makes chewing more of an activity for our jaw, so these enzymes are our friends, as they break down this collagen, releasing muscle fibers to be more loose and easily masticated.
Umami. As this collagen is broken down by these enzymes, it is transformed into its amino acid building blocks, most of which are key glutamates which initiate a neural response to a pleasure and deliciousness area of our brains when they hit our taste buds.
GRINDS
We extend creativity even to the ground meat category, sometimes incurring wait-lists for the elusive “dry-aged burger blend” and other lip-smacking varieties. We aim to converge lean and fat content to produce an end product that will perform at the top of its class depending on its setting. We match coarseness with lean-to-fat ratios and the number of times passed through our grinder to arrive at the ideal degree of emulsification for the product and application. While not all grinds are available all the time, your special request is all we need to get it on our docket. Give us a call or stop by and we can honor any proclivity.
House grind / dry-aged burger blend / short rib burger blend / bacon burger blend / beef liver grind (beef + beef liver + beef heart) / blamb (beef + lamb) / ground pork / ground lamb / ground turkey / more
OFFAL
With every whole animal we receive comes the correlating offal. These outliers can offer phenomenal boosts to nutrition and diet balance, not to mention the fact that they’re simply scrumptious. Liver, kidney, heart, tail, ear…it’s all on the table. Call or come to see what’s in stock and what’s coming in next week.
alpha-gal
Virginia seems to be ground zero for alpha-gal syndrome, a delayed-onset autoimmune allergy to mammalian protein, caused by bites by the Lonestar tick. Reactions can range from GI discomfort to dermatological issues such as hives to swelling of face, throat, and tongue all the way to anaphylaxis. We recognize this horrific truth, and we have taken initiative to tailor a set of products to this community. Any chicken, duck, turkey and quail products, be they muscle cuts to rendered fats to stocks and broths, or a whole line of alpha-gal-friendly prepared foods, are safe for those with the alpha-gal allergy.
We exercise agonizing care to avoid cross-contamination so that these products never touch a blade nor board that was grazed by anything mammalian. Should you suffer from alpha-gal syndrome, please let us know and we will be more than happy to show you current products and special preparations that can help diversify the way you cook.
