I figure I can't be the only one interested in this topic during quarantine.

In the past 1-2 weeks, as rumors of meat shortages have grown, I've noticed a rather odd shift in the meat available at both Costco and several of our local grocery stores. Plenty of meat is still available, but you have to commit to the entire cut. It's not sliced and packaged into steaks like usual. This seems to be true for both pork and beef.

So I'm thinking of buying an entire beef tenderloin, 8-10 total pounds. It's about $6 per pound, choice grade beef. Online tutorials make it appear simple enough...you get a stack of filet mignons but some ends that you can turn into ground beef. But I'm interested in whether anyone here does this regularly and if there are any additional tips or things to think about when buying a piece of meat like this.

There are also some big cuts of pork.

It's weird to see our entire meat counter like this, as well as 90% of the Costco meat section, just these huge hunks of meat. I guess it's better than an actual shortage...just requires me to do more of the labor at home. (Fortunately, at a better price per pound, assuming the weight of the unconsumed part isn't too much.)

Assuming you have the freezer space, sounds like a good deal.

I bet there are a lot of YouTube videos on how to trim large cuts.

Specifically, a Costco whole tenderloin is UNTRIMMED, and there is about 10-16% waste after your trim it because of the silverskin. I try to buy vacuum sealed ones from the center cut for a greater consistency with portion sizing. Have a good, but shorter blade boning knife too (no more than 7 in.)

They're plenty.
Search "Butchering (insert meat here) cuts" and you will find gold.

$6/lb. is a great price for a whole tenderloin. Where I am, it's a minimum $10/lb, and often more.

You don't have to grind the tenderloin trimmings. I think they're great for sauteed 'steak tips', stroganoff, etc.

Your location says "MCI" -- if you look around, you could find a local-ish farmer who would sell you a half a pig, a quarter of a cow, etc.

I did this a few years ago. Paid roughly $2/pound for the half a hog direct to the farmer, then paid a local mom and pop butcher to process it. All in my cost was probably around $4/pound give or take? It all came back to me labeled, vacuum sealed, and packaged based on my request (eg, packages of four pork chops per packet, specific weights of each package for sausage, etc).

I might do this again soon depending on how things shake out with the supply chain. Right now is potentially especially a good time to do it, the reason that there are meat shortages in the store is processing capacity, not supply. Farmers are going to be looking to offload animals that were supposed to end up at slaughterhouses and processing plants.

If you call directly to the butcher they will surly have ranchers they work with a lot and you can just deal directly with them to bring in the animal/butcher it without one less step.

One warning for anyone thinking of this though, once you've bought locally raised meat and had it locally butchered, you're going to have a really hard time going back to store bought. A store bought XXX cut maybe fine by itself, but cook the same cut up with your local one at the same time and you'll be BLOWN away by the difference in quality.

I always thought the butcher department would slice up big pieces for you at no charge. There used to be a button in the meat department to ring them. Or am I just remembering stuff from 20 years ago?

I was a vegetarian for two years, mostly to see if I could do it and if the benefits were worth the trade-offs.

I am cool with not eating meat [or pork, or poultry] for several months to a year. No need to slaughter and dress my own food.

So far...fresh/frozen fish, veggies and big bags of rice are still plentiful and cheap in our "vortex of retail".
I love carne but...

$6 per pound of filet? Something not right about that.

It's not uncommon right now given that demand from restaurants is down near 100%. I used to find full choice and occasionally prime tenderloins at Fairway for $7-10 per pound right after Christmas and Easter. A few times there were further sales on meat (50% or BOGO) that lowered the price to that level.

Wow!

These days I�m buying ca 2.8 kgs of Argentinian cote de boeuf for the family of six. Lasts at least two large meals.

We order our beef/chicken/pork from a ranch directly. It's fantastic quality and the ranchers are great people. Their chicken is a work of art compared to a factory bird.

They'll do half cows or pigs with some notice as well. I'm looking into getting a quarter hog to try my hand at smoking once we get our move out of NYC done over the weekend.

This is so true. We order a whole lamb each year and have it butchered locally. There is no comparison.

It was Choice beef. Prime would be quite a bit higher.

I ended up buying a 7 pound tenderloin. From that, I'd say I got about 4-5 pounds of what you'd consider a nice filet steak, about a pound and a half of chain muscle that we ground up and put in a pasta sauce, and about a pound of gristle and silverskin. There was a portion of the cut where I was unsure if I correctly separated the chain from the center cut but the steaks all tasted great on the grill.

All of the videos show people cutting super-thick filets. I did about half of them that way and the other half as more of a medallion style. I cut the head and tail areas thinner, mainly.

As it turns out, a couple days ago we went in with a couple other families this week to buy an animal for August processing. The ranch and processor are about an hour from our house. That gives us about 3 months to work our way through our freezer to make room for it.