Is It Rude To Ask Your Butcher To Tenderize Your Meat For You?

As one of the foundational techniques needed to make several meaty dishes, it's a great idea to learn one of the ways to tenderize tough meat at home. However, if you're visiting the butcher shop and want to skip this step entirely, you can do that too; by asking your butcher to tenderize the meat for you. This way, you're all but guaranteed to get a cut that's perfectly prepared for your recipe.

We discussed the etiquette involved in this request with Koji Fujioka, butchery manager at The Local Butcher Shop in Berkeley, California, who said you'll be hard-pressed to find a butcher who won't complete the task for you — if you ask politely. "I sure hope the butchers at your local butcher shop will offer to tenderize the meat if you ask," he said. This tracks with the general consensus regarding good butchers, who are considered to be an excellent resource when it comes to getting the best cut of meat at a butcher shop, answering questions about cooking, and yes, tenderizing your meat if you request it.

Beyond just saving time by not needing to tenderize the meat yourself, asking a butcher to do the task for you can help avoid unnecessary mistakes that might occur without assistance. For example, tenderizing cuts that don't need to be tenderized — or outright shouldn't be tenderized — could lead to a subpar dish. This is one error that will likely be avoided by listening to the advice of a knowledgeable butcher. "You might encounter some weird looks, depending on what cut you are purchasing," Koji Fujioka admitted. "I would be slightly taken aback if a customer asked me to tenderize a filet mignon." 

Alternatively, if you already know that tenderizing is the one step that makes cheap steak so much better, your butcher may have professional equipment that can produce much better results than you could at home. Or, as Fujioka gently reminded us, a professional butcher likely has much more experience than most of us do when it comes to this vital step in preparation. "Your butcher might be much more practiced in a tenderizing method than you are — it might be more efficient to ask them to do it, and the meat might come out more uniformly processed if they do."