St. Louisans now have a new one-stop shop for gourmet provisions. Butchery Truffles Meat Market, a new Ladue butcher shop and artisan food and wine boutique, is run by Truffles executive chef Brandon Benack. “Brandon wanted to give people the ability to take the Truffles experience home with them,” says Andrew Jennrich, partner in the venture and former chef at Farmhaus.
Newly open this month, the full-range butcher shop sells locally and regionally sourced meats, including pork, beef and chicken. Local meat offers a host of benefits, Jennrich says. “It reduces your carbon footprint, and it allows us to support the local economy,” he says. It also tends to be fresher. “I can call my pig guy and get a pig in two days, which is pretty fresh,” Jennrich says. “If I wanted to get pigs from some farm in Iowa, it’s going to be more like four to five days, and for beef, it’s even longer.”
Jennrich points to Price Family Farms in Troy, Mo., as the kind of quality meat producer he wants to support. “I like their passion and how small their farm is,” he says. “It’s only about 35 acres, so when I stand on the hill where the barn is, I can see the fence line around the property, and they’ve literally got eyes and ears on every cow on the farm.”
Butchery also offers a selection of seafood, sauces, dressings, spice rubs, mustards, jams, chutneys, wines from the Truffles wine list, and a variety of grab-and-go items, including homemade salads and sandwiches. “It’s a lot of things you see at the restaurant—mac and cheese, mashed potatoes, green bean amandine and Truffles’ bread,” Jennrich says.
To produce meat with superior flavor, Butchery is outfitted with a dry-aging room, which has walls lined in pink Himalayan rock salt slabs, Jennrich explains. Over time, the room will become seasoned, similar to a cast-iron pan, adding a unique flavor to the meat. “The salt purifies the air and pulls moisture out of the meat,” he says. “Once the room comes alive, and this is years down the road, we’re going to be able to create a proprietary flavor for our meat.”
The shop also produces in-house charcuterie. “Running our own charcuterie program goes hand-in-hand with having a mostly whole-animal butcher shop,” Jennrich says. “A pig is not a pork chop, and a cow is not a rib-eye. You have to figure out how to use that whole animal, and there are parts of the animal that need more love to enhance the flavor. By offering charcuterie, we can find ways to make use of almost every part.”
Using whole animals also helps Butchery offer meat at all price points. “What keeps our prices extremely competitive for the quality we offer is that we’re buying whole animals and butchering them in-house,” Jennrich says. “When you buy just pieces, the price goes up, and that gets passed along to the consumer. The more we do ourselves, the better we’re able to keep the prices competitive.”
Photo courtesy of Butchery
[Butchery is a full-service butcher shop located at 9208 Clayton Road. For more information, call 314.567.9100 or visit todayattruffles.com.]
