Achieving a healthy lifestyle can be challenging. In this informative event presented by Esther Blum, bestselling author and holistic nutritionist, Ryan Fibiger, owner of Craft Butchery and Tommy Baker, owner and master CrossFit coach of Aspire Fitness, you’ll learn how to:

- Eat organic, local and sustainable food in a responsible and affordable manner

- Get in the best shape of your life using just 5 exercises, maximizing your time in & out of the gym

- Eat the way your body was designed to eat while still having fun

… and much more! Spend a few hours with us and walk away with renewed confidence on how you can start making small changes that will have a massive impact on your family’s health and vitality!

Small appetizers from Craft Butchery and samples of Esther’s world famous protein shake will be provided, as well as time to network with others who value health, fitness and feeling awesome just as much as you do.

Please register using the “Buy Now” button. Your registration will help us plan for the correct number of chairs, food and beverage.

Registration closes at midnight on Tuesday, May 14.

Price: $0.00

Quantity:  

In its inaugural year, twenty five teams will battle for the coveted Connecticut Chili Cup as voted by the public and a panel of local restaurant chefs. This outdoor event will feature live music by several local artists and a bonfire. 10% of profits will be donated to a local food-related charity. The Connecticut Chili Classic (CCC) is sure to become Connecticut’s premier chili competition.

Find out more at www.ctchiliclassic.com

Inside the brightly lit storefront of Saugatuck Craft Butchery, Ryan Fibiger stood before an oversized carving table, gripped his bladed knife and sliced into a large section of lamb.

The meat had been picked up from a local farm that morning and David Dreyfuss, a recent convert to the 4-month-old Westport, Conn., establishment, couldn’t wait to taste it.

“I’m taking my meat consumption to the next level,” Dreyfuss, of Westport, said. “They have a real passion for what they do here.”

That passion is on display in every corner of the 920-square-foot market — from the neatly stacked shelves of hard-to-find cuts, to the boldly lettered blackboards boasting pasture-raised stock, to the flannel-clad staff who do all their cutting, grinding and wrapping in full view of customers.

“Some people freak out when they see the animal right there in front of them,” said Fibiger, motioning to the freshly cut lamb spread out on the carving table. “But this is how meat is meant to be prepared.”

Fibiger, who co-owns Saugatuck Craft Butchery with his wife, Katherine, is part of a small, but growing movement of entrepreneurs who are reviving an old-fashioned craft.

Nationwide, more butchers are selling meat from small local farms that raise their animals humanely and sustainably, while offering knowledgeable and personal customer service that is luring in foodies like the scent of braised brisket.

And they’re willing to pay a little more than supermarket prices because they’re getting more than just a phenomenal cross-cut beef shank.

“It’s growing all over the country,” Tom Schneller, associate professor of butchery at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, said. “People want to know where their meat comes from and have a relationship with their butchers, just like the old days.”

At Saugatuck Craft Butchery, that relationship resembles a student-teacher dynamic. Fibiger makes it a point to know and explain the who, what, when, where and how behind every product he sells. He also makes recommendations, which are helpful in navigating the dizzying array of exotic cuts.

Customers can choose from ranch steak, sirloin tip steak, eye-round roast, cross-cut beef shanks and butterflied leg of lamb — items that, in most cases, are foreign to the average supermarket shopper.

Dreyfuss had tried the shop’s rib roast for Christmas and this time wondered what to order.

“How about lamb chops?” suggested Fibiger, who, like most butchers, also dishes out advice on how to prepare the meat (in this case, with a dry rub of rosemary, salt, thyme and black pepper). “It’s going to be incredibly tender.”

But as butchers are quick to point out, a quality meat invariably begins with a quality animal.

Tim Sanders, co-owner of Sanders Meat Market in Ballston Spa, carries a “consistently high-quality product,” whether it’s beef or bison, rabbit or quail. That means animals raised without hormones, steroids or antibiotics — chemicals that Sanders said take away from the true taste of the meat and harm human health.

“Now, there’s a lot more discussion about what is and isn’t good for you. Real foodies are coming around to the idea of knowing where there food comes from.”

Most butchers prefer to get their animals from small farms close to home (Fibiger’s lamb comes from Pine Plains, Dutchess County, a little less than two hours from Westport, while Sanders’ veal comes from Ithaca, Tompkins County, a little more than three hours from his shop). This ensures the freshness of the meat.

The practice is a cut above many chain supermarkets, which buy “boxed meat, pre-cut, from big commercial farms,” Schneller said. Many butchers opened their businesses in reaction to what they describe as a lack of access to locally, humanely and sustainably produced animals.

Steven Ford, owner of Butcher’s Best Market in Newtown, Conn., said he was fed up with the foam-packaged meats that fill the shelves at the supermarkets.

“What exists is an acceptable product and low service,” said Ford, who opened his business three years ago. “We’re focused on giving the best and widest variety of products.”

To that end, butchers follow a nose-to-tail philosophy, meaning that every section of the animal gets used. That’s how Ford comes up with prime short rib, lamb shanks and other rare cuts.

At the same time, juggling customer demand with animal availability can be challenging. Butchers can’t just call their local farm and order an extra steer. So, when they’re out of a certain stock, butchers can take that opportunity to teach customers about new cuts.

Call it quality meat with a side of education.

“It’s so rewarding to see people come in here and ask, ‘What is that?’” Fibiger said. “It’s fun to see people open their eyes and find out that there’s a world beyond just steak.”

[Show as slideshow]

Read more: Time Union: Prime Cuts

Details and logistics:

• Classes are typically in the evening for two hours
• Please wear comfortable clothes and sensible shoes (rubber soles are best) that you don’t mind getting a bit meaty
• You will receive a 10% discount on meat purchased the day of the class
• The cost of the class is $100 per person
• Due to limited class size, tuition must be pre-paid and is non-refundable

Dates and Times

We’re taking a break from classes for the summer! Don’t worry, we’ll be back with a new and improved lineup in the fall. In the meantime, you can always call the store to purchase a Craft Butchery gift card, which can be redeemed for either merchandise or a class.

Butchery 101 classes are offered for pork, beef, lamb and chicken. Each class is two hours long, and emphasizes hands-on participation.

Topics include:

• Craft Butchery philosophies on sourcing and sustainability
• Butchering knife skills
• Basic animal anatomy
• Demonstrations by a Craft Butchery master butcher
• Hands-on butchering experience breaking down a whole animal into retail cuts
• Tasting of samples
• The opportunity to take home freshly butchered meat that you cut yourself!

Details and logistics:

• Classes are typically in the evening for two hours
• Please wear comfortable clothes and sensible shoes (rubber soles are best) that you don’t mind getting a bit meaty
• You will receive a 10% discount on meat purchased the day of the class
• The cost of the class is $100 per person
• Due to limited class size, tuition must be pre-paid and is non-refundable

Dates and Times

We’re taking a break from classes for the summer! Don’t worry, we’ll be back with a new and improved lineup in the fall. In the meantime, you can always call the store to purchase a Craft Butchery gift card, which can be redeemed for either merchandise or a class.

KANSAS CITY, MO. — For Alex Swanstrom, an auditor at a financial firm, cutting into the dead pig wasn’t hard. It was what happened next that made him rethink whether whole-animal butchery was something he was ready to dive into.

Decked out in a black apron on a recent Sunday afternoon, Mr. Swanstrom, 27, slipped a six-inch boning knife into the carcass of a 275-pound Berkshire-Duroc hog that was splayed out in two large hemispheres on a table inside Local Pig, a butcher shop in this city’s industrial East Bottoms area. He was supposed to carve off the front shank, which requires separating the flesh and tendons around the lower shoulder to remove the limb. But even after dislocating a joint — it popped with the shrill squeak of compressed air escaping — the shoulder still hung together fibrously, causing Mr. Swanstrom to have to pull it over the side of the table for better leverage.

“Don’t force it,” said Alex Pope, one of the shop’s owners. “If you are in a spot that feels like it’s not going well, just move the knife around a little bit.”

When the limb detached, Mr. Swanstrom handed it over and took a swig of his beer.

“That was tougher than I thought,” he said.

Hands-on classes in butchering meat, created to give diners carnal familiarity with their food, emerged as a fad in the late 2000s, one confined largely to the coasts. That has since changed, with shops in places like Chicago and Milwaukee inviting students.

Mr. Pope, who opened his shop smack dab in the middle of the heartland a year ago, decided to offer hands-on classes after hearing about another shop that charged customers just to watch a demonstration.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “If you are going to learn to break down a pig, you should be able to actually do it.”

Students at Local Pig pay $100 to trade cuts on a freshly killed pig and take home the spoils: at least 10 pounds of fresh meat, plus recipes for using some of the lesser known vittles.

One of the most surprising things has been Mr. Pope’s clientele. Kansas City is a meat metropolis, both in terms of its famous barbecue and the proximity of ranchers and outdoorsmen more intimately familiar with its source. So rather than attracting just food tourism’s classic archetype, the hipster or yuppie in search of one-off adventure, he often caters to people interested in actually applying his art — everyone from deer hunters to nouveau back-to-the-landers with their own swine.

Mr. Swanstrom, for instance, helps run his family’s 100-head cattle ranch in Iowa, and wanted to tackle a stand-in before culling a lame steer from his herd. Two other attendees that afternoon, Matt Simonitsch, 56, an analyst with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Gary Hoffman, 64, a lawyer at a life insurance company, are members of the Kansas City Barbeque Society, a nationally known group that judges barbecue events. The two men wanted to learn more about what cuts look like in their rawest form.

“I look at it like continuing education,” Mr. Simonitsch said. “We know where certain cuts come from, but this is just to give you more depth.”

In a way, Mr. Pope, 29, offers the basic apprentice program he never had, the kind that was commonplace in the first half of the 20th century. With the rise of packing houses in the 1960s, which shipped pre-boxed cuts of meat directly to supermarkets, the lone artisanal butcher went out of style in much the same way that cobblers did. Eventually whole-animal butchery all but disappeared at some culinary schools.

Mr. Pope belongs to the generation of chefs who missed out; he attended culinary school, but honed his skills working backward from the finished cuts shown in a handbook of the North American Meat Processors.

He has since found great joy teaching others the lost trade. One of his early disciples went on to become the head butcher at City Provisions, a deli in Chicago. Another took Mr. Pope’s first class at Local Pig, volunteered in the shop and worked his way up to general manager.

But his classes are a bit freewheeling, too, even social, to bring people in regardless of whether they will use the skills again. (While the combination of drinking and knife play might seem prickly, Mr. Pope said it helped “lubricate social interaction.”)

The hands-on experience that Mr. Pope cultivates in Kansas City is something that most New York butchers have not embraced. Erik Hassert, an owner of Tiberio Custom Meats on the Lower East Side, does not offer such classes, and neither does Jake Dickson, the owner of Dickson’s Farmstand Meats at Chelsea Market. Both said their customers were unlikely to gain that much from one visceral experience. The liability of handing out knives, and the product waste that happens with slipped cuts, are also deterrents.

“I’ve been to culinary school and the first week we broke down lamb legs and just destroyed everything,” said Michelle Warner, who works for the Brooklyn Kitchen and coordinates classes there with the Meat Hook, a shop in the same building. “By the second week we’d have some usable parts, but even then it’s still not pretty.”

The Meat Hook does offer classes in breaking down a hog, but attendees must live vicariously through the butcher and cannot handle the knives. Unlike their Kansas City counterparts, Meat Hook pupils are probably never going to parcel out their own pig, Ms. Warner said. (The West Coast seems to be more progressive on this score, with D.I.Y. classes held at meat temples like Avedano’s and 4505 Meats in San Francisco.)

Fleisher’s Grass-fed and Organic Meats, however, stands out among its East Coast siblings, going beyond even what Mr. Pope offers in Missouri. For $350, customers can attend the slaughter of an animal on a farm near the shop’s location in Kingston, N.Y., and help scald and dehair it before the demonstration. (Fleisher’s also has a Brooklyn location, but does not slaughter there.)

When it comes to the actual slicing, the price goes up. It’s $1,500 for a three-day class that comes with a Victorinox knife set, scabbard and plenty of pig and lamb deconstruction, or $15,000 for a 12-week apprenticeship that lets students work alongside the pros.

Like Mr. Pope, Fleisher’s has hired some of its best students, and has also trained such professionals as Tom Mylan of the Meat Hook, Ryan Fibiger of Saugatuck Craft Butchery in Connecticut, and Amelia Posada and Erika Nakamura of Lindy & Grundy in Los Angeles.

Learning butchery solo is easier now than when Mr. Pope started. For example, Ryan Farr, who runs 4505 Meats, recently released “Whole Beast Butchery,” a visual guide that shows the step-by-step evisceration of several barnyard animals in 500 pictures. But there remains a place for programs in which students pick up the knife.

As the class at Local Pig was ending, Mr. Swanstrom realized he needed more practice before tackling his own steer, so he asked Mr. Pope if he could volunteer at the shop sometime. Mr. Pope, who recently leased space at a Department of Agriculture plant so he can sell cuts directly to local restaurants, agreed. He is readying a food truck, which he will leave parked beside his shop, for selling sandwiches. And he has created a line of shaving cream made out of rendered beef tallow.

Someone with a little training could be useful, and Mr. Pope said he could use all the help he could get.

Dates, Times & More

• Tues, Nov. 13, 2012 6-8pm
• Cost: $100 per person
• Tuition must be pre-paid via the link at the bottom of this page
• 10% discount on meat the day of the class
• Due to limited class size, tuition must be pre-paid and is non-refundable