Smash and Bash Veal Cutlets

Hi, I'm Josh Ozersky. I'm here on eHow Food working with veal finger meat. Veal finger meat is a term used by butchers to describe the unfringed intercostal meat attached to the bone on a rib veal chop. This rib veal chop is a cut of such surpassing delicacy and succulence and tenderness that it usually costs a fortune, but amazingly, all this meat along here gets cut off by the butcher and sold as stew meat. Well, here's what I like to do. I'm going to cut this intercostal meat off myself. Sometimes you can do it, you know, directly at the butcher and ask them for stew meat but if you're making a veal roast or if you have veal chops, this is how you do it. So I'm going to cut this off here, I'm going to cut down to the bone and then right slide along the bone like so. Okay, so now I have the meat on both sides of the rib. So now I'm going to cut that off there and I'll do the same on the other side and this is going to leave a by no means pretty looking bone but since I don't like Frenched chops, I don't care about that one bit. So what we have here now are two different pieces. This is the finger meat from the top of the rib and these little strips here are from the sides and I take these little strips and what I do with them is I marinate them with beer. In this case Amstel Light and there's some pepper in there and there's some salt in there and there's a little lemon in there and I did all the hard work of marinating and cutting and everything else the night before because no one wants to mess around with that when you're at the game but having it in a zippie, no problem. Okay, so first thing I'm going to do is what I call my smash and bash veal cutlet. That is very easy. I take this piece here, I'm going to put a little bit of lemon this and then the lemon will make it easy for the salt, which I'm going to use in great profusion, as well as a little bit of pepper. Then, comes the smash and bash part. This is already tender but I want to make it a little more spread out, a little more of a cutlet, so, alright. And then that goes on. Now I've got a couple of other ones. I'm going to do the same for them, a little oil, a little lemon, I guess I can salt and pepper them afterwards. So basically I'm getting more surface area out of this, a little extra tenderization, on goes to the fire. You'll note that I have lump hard with charcoal going here, not briquettes, not match light, not a gas fire, not electric coils. I'm using hardwood chunks. I have good meat, salt, olive oil and I want to have good wood, smoke, fire and flavor. Look at how fast that cooks. While these are going, I have these sitting here begging to be taken out and I have to admit, these need no smashing because they're already little and narrow and they've been marinating in beer for at least six hours and in fact I put these in overnight. You've got to be careful. You put them in lengthwise, they are going to cause flareups and flareups are good because flareups make them crunchy. I got the idea for this from a restaurant in Rome called Roschioli that Mario Batali recommended to me and they are literally just crispy veal strips, like you eat them just like candy. They're like a little beer snack. That guy is ready, he's coming off. Let's use his space for another strip. Don't put them sideways, put them lengthwise, otherwise they'll fall. Alright so there it is, I have my crunchy veal strips, I've got my smash and bash cutlets. I'm Josh Ozersky, and this is eHow Food.