Jose butchers the carcasses at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. “I try to learn every day the way to butcher faster and more perfectly. But, I take my time to do it right.” Milk production and the pasturing of animals created these gorgeous, iconic, Upstate New York landscapes. Our dedication to the whole animal has always been intense. In the early days, a farmer would come in during dinner service with an animal and we would spend the night dealing with it. What I like about our meat program is that it’s evolved very organically from a totally unsustainable use of this stuff to an organization that works. A traditional à la carte menu has a somewhat limited capacity to deal with a whole animal. So now we have no menu. You sit down, you get a list of ingredients. We get to divide the animal the way we want. I’m hesitant to talk this way because it presumes that every chef could do this, and they can’t. They don’t have that kind of space. So I don’t like to speak too universally. For us, it became a total unshackling when we just got rid of the menus. Now we’re like free free—freer than you and me. If we had started like that, it would never have worked because we didn’t understand enough. We also have a café and a charcuterie program. Within that matrix we can find a really good home for everything. And now we have this added bang of carbonizing the bones. After we make the stocks, we take the bones and put them through this machine, which is essentially making charcoal out of the bones. Then we use that to grill the meat on. The institutional end really needs to be worked out to thrive because you can’t make money buying whole steers unless there’s an outlet for it that makes a lot of sense. We have these outlets and our waste is very
28