Tag: beltex

News

Beltex Meats Closes This December: A Loss for Salt Lake City

Really, really saddened to hear this news. We have so few traditional butcher shops left in Salt Lake. And arguably the best one just announced that after ten years, it’s time to hang up the knives and close up shop, with their last day being December 23rd.

The best way to summarize Beltex Meats’ approach was that they care. They care about where they source their products. They care how those animals are treated. They care about their customers. And they care about the community.

To be clear, this level of care costs money. When you walk into Beltex you need to be prepared to acknowledge that responsibly sourced meats cost more, especially at Beltex’s relatively small scale. I suspect that, like so many other businesses in SLC (and across the country for that matter) they determined the maintaining prices at a reasonable level and still keep the lights on perhaps was no longer possible. But this is speculation on my part.

When I would stop by and buy a cut of beef (my favorite is, and always will be, the flatiron steak) they would take the time to educate me on how to cook it. Sometimes, it’s not complicated, with Phillip telling me one time: “get your grill as hot as it will go, three minutes each side, and you’re done.” Simple. But with good ingredients, most the time simple is the best.

And I would be remiss to not mention their sandwiches, which I regard as some of the best sandwiches I’ve ever eaten. The porchetta was gluttony-on-a-bun, and man was it worth it. And their Saturday special, the cuban, was the best cuban sandwich I have ever eaten. They have ruined me for life for cuban sandwiches. I went to Miami and tried various renditions and remember thinking “none of these holds a candle to what Beltex does in Salt Lake.”

Again, I’m speculating here again, but I always got the impression that Beltex’s owner Philip Grubisa didn’t particularly love the attention that the sandwiches got over their meat selection. The sandwiches were one of those things designed to get people in the door, yet, the sandwiches developed a fame of their own, and I have a hunch that perhaps the distraction they created away from their main mission of providing the best meats in the valley wasn’t always what he had envisioned.

Nevertheless, yet another departure of a storied food business is making the headlines and leaving a deficit in the SLC food scene that will be difficult to replicate. Starting a standalone butcher shop in this day and age was brave enough, and I’m not sure we’ll see anyone else willing to step up and do it again, and that makes me sad for what SLC will be missing out on going forward.

Best wishes to the entire Beltex crew, who were always top-notch. Keeping my greedy fingers crossed that this isn’t the last time Philip Grubisa and his crew make a dent in the SLC food scene.

Recipes

Sous Vide Carnitas

As you may have seen from my Instagram stories, I continue to learn how to cook with the Anova Sous Vide cooker. I was excited to receive the cooker as a Christmas gift, because I’ve been wanting one for a while. Through precise maintenance of the exact cooking temperature, sous vide enables a cook to cook meats (and veggies) at a precisely exact temperature. So, instead of cooking a ribeye on a blazing hot 500 degree flat top or grill and overcooking the outside of the steak in order to get the center up to 135 degrees, with sous vide you just set the water temp at 135, submerge the meat, and the entire steak cooks to a perfect 135. After a few hours, take it out, quickly finish it in a hot skillet to brown the outside, and you’re all set. Perfectly cooked meat, every time.

Learning, like any cooking technique, takes a bit of trial and error. But with help from one of my favorite websites, Serious Eats, I’m finally getting the hang of it.

This weekend’s experiment: sous vide carnitas. There are few foods I enjoy more in life than a taco filled with deliciously crisp, yet tender pork carnitas. The crispy bits add a contrasting texture to the unctuous meat that inches these guys towards near perfection.

For the pork recipe, I used the Serious Eats Sous Vide carnitas recipe. For those that don’t have a sous vide, they also have an oven-roasted recipe as well. If you want any leftovers, you will want to get the full four pounds the recipe calls for. I thought that was too much, and only bought two pounds from local butcher Beltex Meats, and we ended up with hardly any leftovers for two of us. There’s a lot of fat that renders out, and the pork cooks down.

Some other tweaks I made to our version: I did a quick-pickle of some carrots, which added some nice bright contrast to the rich pork. We also topped ours with avocado and some peppadew peppers from Beltex (you can also find them at Harmon’s). Next time I’ll grab some cotija and maybe some crema to throw on top as well.

carnitas-2

photo essay

Beltex Meats

Beltex Meats in Salt Lake City is a rarity along the Wasatch Front. In a world where the majority of consumers get their meats from grocery stores who focus more on their profit and loss statements than they do on the provenance of their products they sell, Beltex meats stands alone as a diamond in the rough.

Beltex is a whole animal butchery, which means they utilize every part of the animal in order to promote responsible consumption and minimize waste. The owners of Beltex saw that as residents in the area become more interested in purchasing humanely-raised, sustainable products, existing suppliers weren’t necessarily able to accommodate the demand. So Beltex stepped in to fill the gap, first at farmers’ markets, and now at their own shop. What does humanely raised mean? According to Beltex it means that their animals are pasture raised, with lots of room. Their products are never treated with antibiotics or hormones. They know each of their suppliers personally.

Beltex was founded by a chef, Philip Grubisa, which makes sense when you see that their cases not only feature meat, but also meat pies, charcuterie platters, sandwiches (Saturdays only), sauces, ready-to-cook meals, and other items not typically found in a butcher shop. Philip cut his butchery teeth while working at Spruce in the Waldorf Astoria in Park City, then moving on to open Talisker on Main with Briar Handly. Prior to opening Beltex, Philip trained at the Rocky Mountain Institute of Meat in Denver to certify in professional butchery.

I stopped by on a Saturday morning while the crew was preparing one of their surprising successes: sandwiches. Beltex offered a cuban sandwich one day, and it was so popular, they now offer a rotation of sandwiches on Saturday only. Despite their sandwich success, they limit their production to 50 sandwiches, and once they sell out, they’re out. “We’re not a sandwich shop. We’re a butcher shop that happens to sell a sandwich,” Grubisa says.

Philip has taken care to create a unique space to sell Beltex products. Their shop is located in a renovated house just across the street from Liberty Park on 9th South. Prior to the renovation, this house was a dilapidated mess, and Grubisa hired Brach Design Architecture to update the space to what you see now.

Beltex is open Monday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm.

511 East, 900 South, Salt Lake City. (801) 532-2641. beltexmeats.com

Click on the photos below to open the gallery.