One night in the late 1960s, Eugene Gagliardi was lying awake in bed trying to figure out how to save his company. He was thinking about the Philly cheesesteak. Gagliardi ran a family business that sold hamburgers and other meat to restaurant chains in the Philadelphia area. But within the span of a few months, the company had lost several of its biggest customers.
Gagliardi was trying to figure out a way to turn the Philly cheesesteak into something people would want to make at home. But the meat used for the sandwich was, as Gagliardi says, "so tough you couldn't chew through it. "At 3 in the morning, he had an idea. He got up out of bed and went to the plant and tried it.
His idea was complicated — he put the meat through the grinder a bunch of times, then he mixed it, put it in a mold, froze it, then he tempered it, then sliced it — and, finally, he cooked it and ate it to see if it was any good.
"It tasted great," he says.
Gagliardi had just invented Steak-Umm.
And pretty quickly, it blew up. There were TV ads, and people were buying it in grocery stores from Puerto Rico to Hawaii. Eventually, he sold the family business for $20 million. Today Steak-Umm's has become a staple among families in America
Steak-Umm's is a 100% beef item that is sold in the grocery isles rather than in meat departments across the land. As meat cutters and meat executives we kind of rolled-over and gave this 100% beef item up to the grocery department and never looked back. Maybe its time for us meat people to take a second look at this product and come up with something similar to gain back those lost dollars.
To do this we must think-outside-the-box, and "unfortunately big chain stores" will probably not want to get involved. So I am directing this idea to "independents and small chains".
So what actually is Steak-Umm's? I have been in the original plant that made them so I am speaking from a position of first hand knowledge.
Steak-Umm's is a "chopped and formed emulsified meat product that is comprised of 50/50 % beef trimmings. Yep, actually "shop-trim" but from a beef-packer. No doubt steer trim for the taste! The emulsified meat is pressed into a loaf and sliced, frozen and packaged. Not much rocket-science here!
Meat emulsifiers come in all sizes. From table-top to monster machines. We have conventionally referred to a finely chopped meat mixture as a meat emulsion. This is somewhat a misnomer as the so-called meat emulsion consists of solid fat particles blended with lean particles and dispersed in natural liquids in a continuous phase. It might be more appropriate to refer to this mixture as a "meat batter". Continued in Part II. Stay with me now!
