Lobel's Culinary Club - Recipes, menu ideas, cooking techniques, meat selection tips, and more from America's #1 family of butchers.

Freshly made cranberry sauce to complement your Thanksgiving turkey is the best! Making a delicious cranberry sauce is very simple—and it’s even easy to put your own personal touch on it with additional ingredients and flavors. Watch as we show you how to make a simple fresh cranberry sauce with cinnamon and orange.

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When it comes to dessert on Thanksgiving Day, everyone has his or her favorite type of pie. You start eying the sweet treats before dinner and strategize which flavor (or flavors!) you will save room for.

And while less traditional pies such as chocolate, coconut cream, blueberry, raspberry, and lemon chiffon—even cheesecake and crostada—are enjoyed on Thanksgiving, four traditional standards still take center-stage when it comes to Thanksgiving desserts: pumpkin, apple, mincemeat, and pecan.

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Mashed potatoes are just fine when simply and classically prepared for the purists among us. However, you can take them off the chart by combining them with some tempting add-ins and just a tad more effort.

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Nowadays, you can cook a turkey just about any way you want. We have the technology and equipment readily at our disposal, from traditional roasting—radiant or convection—to smoking, deep-frying, and even boiling.

But, if your goal is to bathe just about everything on your Thanksgiving dinner plate with a silky rich, light-brown layer of homemade turkey gravy, then you need to narrow your choices and follow tradition: oven-roast the turkey. As a side benefit, your home will fill with the signature aromas of our annual Thanksgiving traditions.

Roasting—particularly roasting a stuffed turkey—melds the varying flavor components of seasonings on and within the turkey and captures them for transformation into the nectar of Thanksgiving dinner.

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Pork belly has been making a bigger blip on the culinary radar in recent months. It’s on menus, in magazine recipes, cooking shows, YouTube videos. The ideas abound. In fact, pork belly is the #1 most-requested product from Lobel’s of New York customers and site visitors.

So, we are very pleased to introduce Lobel’s Berkshire Pork Belly, available in frozen 2-pound slabs.

Given the wild popularity, nay, obsession, fascination, and hype about everything that fuels our craving for bacon, is it any wonder that curious epicureans have discovered, or rediscovered, the joys of fresh pork belly.

After all, bacon is simply pork belly that has been cured and/or smoked.

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The fall season is upon us! The weather is getting colder and sunsets are getting earlier. The days and nights are perfect for cozying up with a hot meal and a comfy blanket!

We’ve asked the Lobel family what their favorite fall ingredients are for cooking at home.

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Though variations of this dish abound throughout Eastern Asia, particularly the many regions of China from Szechuan to Singapore, barbecued pork’s lacquered-mahogany sheen makes it one of the most readily recognizable dishes in the pantheon of Asian cuisine.

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It’s National Pork Month. It’s also October, and in our kitchens that means lots of delicious roast meats paired with the delicious seasonal produce and aromatic herbs and spices. One of the best ways to combine these favorite fall flavors is by pairing your favorite pork roast with a delightful chutney. (more…)

Cheeseburgers are loved for their beefiness, their affinity with a wide assortment of toppings, and their ooey-gooey goodness! Everyone, it seems, has a favorite and will most likely weigh in on the subject eagerly. In honor of National Cheeseburger Day–on September 18–we’ve rounded up our best cheeseburger recipes in one place for easy access. We’ve even included some recipes without cheese so you can add whatever cheese you’d like!

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A really great sauce, stew, or soup takes some time to develop. Think of your favorite spaghetti sauce over a low-and-slow, steady simmer for hours upon hours. On the other hand, a rolling boil on high heat achieves the same objective in a matter of minutes when making a quick stove-top sauce.

Either way, the goal is evaporation. Getting rid of excess water naturally concentrates flavors lending depth and complexity, the foundations of a peak taste experience.

When it comes to beef, evaporation plays a crucial role in the dry-aging process. Over the course of the 6 weeks or so that Lobel’s dry ages its USDA Prime, Natural Prime, and Wagyu Beef, the meat loses about 30% of its weight through water evaporation. During this time, the size of the piece of meat physically shrinks and the flavor of the beef concentrates into the buttery, nutty flavor that is the hallmark of Lobel’s dry-aged beef.

Similarly when you let a big pot of sauce, stock, or soup steam away, you’ll notice that, over time, the volume of liquid shrinks and the surface level gets lower and lower in the pot.

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