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You walk into Costco on a Saturday morning through the doors, past the long row of gray carts, straight to the back wall where the meat is. You are not there for anything else. You are there for oxtail because Sunday is oxtail.
Frank Miller reveals 7 budget-friendly meat cuts better than oxtail, explaining collagen content, cost savings, and cooking tips.
Key Takeaways
- Oxtail is expensive primarily because of its high bone content and limited supply.
- There are 7 budget-friendly meat cuts that offer similar or better gelatin content than oxtail.
- Collagen is the key ingredient for the rich texture in braises, not the specific cut of meat.
- Understanding meat cuts and collagen content can save significant money while maintaining quality.
- Slow cooking these collagen-rich cuts results in tender meat and flavorful gelatinous sauce.
What the video covers
- Frank Miller, a butcher with 31 years of experience, discusses the high cost and limited supply of oxtail.
- Oxtail is prized for its collagen, which turns into gelatin during slow cooking, creating a rich braise.
- About half the weight of oxtail is bone, making it expensive per edible pound.
- Miller introduces 7 alternative meat cuts that provide more gelatin and meat at a lower cost.
- He explains why many of these cuts are less known due to naming conventions and market decisions.
- The video covers the rising price of oxtail, nearly tripling from 2015 to 2024.
- Miller emphasizes buying collagen-rich cuts that maximize edible meat and minimize bone.
- He provides practical advice on cooking these cuts to achieve the desired gelatinous texture.
- The video includes tips on how to shop smarter at stores like Costco and how to identify these cuts.
- Miller also promotes his book and website for deeper guidance on budget meat shopping.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Shopping for Oxtail at Costco
- 01:28Examining the Cost and Weight of Oxtail
- 02:46Understanding Bone Content and Value
- 04:04Meet Frank Miller: Butcher Expertise
- 05:25What You’re Really Buying: Gelatin, Not Just Meat
- 06:28Anatomy of Oxtail and Collagen Explanation
- 07:42Cost Comparison and Value per Dollar
- 09:05Oxtail Price Trends and Market Insights
- 10:08How to Portion Meat for More Value
- 11:11Cleaning and Preparing Alternative Cuts
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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because it was oxtail in your mother's house and your grandmother's house before that. You stop in front of the case, long open refrigerated case, black rubber mat under your feet, and down at the end where you have to bend to see
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Because it was oxtail in your mother's house and your grandmother's house before that. You stop in front of the case, long open refrigerated case, black rubber mat under your feet, and down at the end where you have to bend to see.
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You stand there. You do not move. You pick the tray up and turn it over and look at the weight because that is what everybody does and this is Costco, so it is not a little tray, 4 and 1/2 lb. $62
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Them, the trays. Clear plastic, the sawed discs of tail lying flat in two rows, white absorbent pad underneath, film pulled tight over the top, yellow label $13.99 a pound.
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going to walk away. You came in for oxtail. Sunday is Sunday. So, you stand there another 10 seconds and you put it in the cart and you feel a little sick about it and you go home. I want to stop
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You stand there. You do not move. You pick the tray up and turn it over and look at the weight because that is what everybody does, and this is Costco, so it is not a little tray, 4 and 1/2 lb. $62.
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animal that give you more of the exact thing you are buying oxtail for and every single one of them costs less than what is in your hand. One of them is $4.99 a pound. I am going to give you
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And change for a pot of stew and you have not bought an onion yet. And here is the part I understand better than anybody because I watched it happen from the other side of that glass for 31 years. You still want it. You are not.
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and it gets made by people like me, Frank Miller, 31 years behind a butcher block. And before we start, one loop I am leaving running. One of these seven is sold in most stores in this country under two different names at two very
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Going to walk away. You came in for oxtail. Sunday is Sunday. So, you stand there another 10 seconds and you put it in the cart and you feel a little sick about it and you go home. I want to stop.
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Now, before the countdown, the one idea this whole video sits on because if you do not have it, none of the seven will make sense.
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You right there, hand on the tray. Because about half of what is in that tray is bone. You just agreed to pay $14 a pound for bone. And there are seven cuts in that same building off that same.
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in threads instead of chunks. You want that sauce to set up like jelly in the refrigerator overnight, so you have to cut it with a spoon the next day. That is the whole experience, and every bit of it comes from one substance,
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Animal that give you more of the exact thing you are buying oxtail for and every single one of them costs less than what is in your hand. One of them is $4.99 a pound. I am going to give you.
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A tail is a hundred small muscles doing constant work around a lot of joint and bone, and joints are where collagen lives.
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All seven counting down and I am going to tell you why almost nobody has heard of most of them, which is the part that is going to annoy some people because it is not an accident. It is a decision.
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tail did. So, the question is not which cut has gelatin in it. Nearly all the cheap ones do.
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And it gets made by people like me, Frank Miller, 31 years behind a butcher block. And before we start, one loop I am leaving running. One of these seven is sold in most stores in this country under two different names at two very.
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And here is the arithmetic nobody says out loud. A steer has exactly one tail, one. It comes off at somewhere between two and four pounds of usable weight, which is less than 1% of the meat on that animal. Meanwhile, that same steer
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Different prices, and it is the identical piece of meat both times. I will tell you which one it is and how to spot the trick when we get there.
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The USDA has only been reporting a wholesale price on oxtail since 2015. And in that first year, it was right around $6 a pound. By the summer of 2024, the average had gone to just over 14. It nearly tripled in under a decade
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Now, before the countdown, the one idea this whole video sits on because if you do not have it, none of the seven will make sense.
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you have emailed me about it, too. How do I actually save money buying meat at Costco? Well, I finally put everything I do into a book, basically the full version. How I choose my cuts, what I stay away from, what I buy instead, and
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You are not buying meat when you buy oxtail. You are buying gelatin. Think about what you actually want out of that pot. You want a braise that coats your lip and sticks to the back of a spoon. You want meat that pulls apart.
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It's the first link in the description, or you can just scan the QR code on your screen. Now, let us get to the meat.
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In threads instead of chunks. You want that sauce to set up like jelly in the refrigerator overnight, so you have to cut it with a spoon the next day. That is the whole experience, and every bit of it comes from one substance.
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where the thick pearly sheet of silver skin laid over one whole face of it.
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Collagen, which is the connective tissue that holds a working muscle together, melting into gelatin over long, slow, wet heat. Oxtail is loaded with it. I am not here to tell you otherwise.
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It is the most collagen dense piece of solid meat you can buy. So, why has nobody heard of it? Two reasons and both are ordinary.
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A tail is a hundred small muscles doing constant work around a lot of joint and bone, and joints are where collagen lives.
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and be done at 9:00 in the morning. Second, and this is the funny one, it has too many names. Heel of round, Pikes Peak Roast, Denver Pot Roast, Gooseneck.
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But collagen is not rare. It is the most ordinary substance on the animal. Every muscle that works for a living is full of it, and a steer has four legs, a neck, a shoulder, and two cheeks that all worked considerably harder than its.
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boneless, which means every ounce you carry out is edible weight. Set that against 14 a pound for something half made of bone and the gap is not close.
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Tail did. So, the question is not which cut has gelatin in it. Nearly all the cheap ones do.
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Honest limit because I am not going to oversell you the cheap one. The heel is lean.
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The question is how much gelatin you are getting per dollar and how much bone you are paying beef prices to carry home.
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couple of strips of bacon in the bottom of the pan. Number six, the beef neck. Neck bones in a tray or boneless neck meat if your store bothers to cut it, which most do not. Look at a neck bone and you are
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And here is the arithmetic nobody says out loud. A steer has exactly one tail, one. It comes off at somewhere between two and four pounds of usable weight, which is less than 1% of the meat on that animal. Meanwhile, that same steer.
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gnaw it. You get your fingers in it. That specific pleasure of working meat off an awkward bone, which is a real part of why people love oxtail and nobody ever admits it out loud, the neck gives you for two to $4 a pound.
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Gives you around 30 pounds of brisket. Supply that small running into demand that big only ever goes one direction.
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Southern kitchens have known this forever. Neck bones and rice, neck bones and gravy, neck bones with greens.
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The USDA has only been reporting a wholesale price on oxtail since 2015. And in that first year, it was right around $6 a pound. By the summer of 2024, the average had gone to just over 14. It nearly tripled in under a decade.
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Braise them until the meat gives up and falls off. Then here is the step almost everybody skips.
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And not one thing about the tail changed. What changed is that everybody found out at once. All right, folks, real quick before we keep going. I've been getting the same question over and over in the comments and quite a few of.
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Now, that tray of oxtail is still sitting in your cart in this story. $62 and about half of it is bone. And we are four cuts away from the one that costs $4.99.
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You have emailed me about it, too. How do I actually save money buying meat at Costco? Well, I finally put everything I do into a book, basically the full version. How I choose my cuts, what I stay away from, what I buy instead, and.
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Number five, the beef navel, and this is the loop. This is the one being sold to you under two names.
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How I portion everything to get a whole lot more meat for my money. If you want to see exactly how I do it, head over to frankmillerbutcher.com.
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It is layered, laminated, almost sheets of meat and sheets of fat alternating the whole way through with connective tissue between them.
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It's the first link in the description, or you can just scan the QR code on your screen. Now, let us get to the meat.
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It is fattier, it is richer, and the old shops used it because it was cheap and it took a cure better than anything else on the animal.
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Number seven, the beef heel. Look at a heel and it does not look like anything you want. It is a big blunt teardrop of very dark lean meat off the back of the round down where the leg meets the hock.
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Sold as beef belly, which has become fashionable or cured and sliced and sold as beef bacon, the same slab off the same animal runs two and three times that money.
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Where the thick pearly sheet of silver skin laid over one whole face of it.
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For your pot, this is not the meat, this is the fat and the richness that the heel and the neck do not have. A pound of navel cut into chunks and put in with any of the other cuts on this list does
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That muscle spent the animal's entire life holding up the back end and pushing it up a hill. It is the toughest lean cut on the carcass and toughest lean means exactly one thing to you and me.
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Number four, beef cheeks. Two per animal. A cheek is a dense flat oval of very dark red meat and when you get one, it is usually still wearing a thick web of silver skin that has to come off.
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It is the most collagen dense piece of solid meat you can buy. So, why has nobody heard of it? Two reasons and both are ordinary.
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Nothing else on the animal does that. So, the collagen in a cheek is not just plentiful, it is arranged differently.
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First, it is awkward. It has that heavy silver skin and a seam through it and cleaning it up properly takes a knife and a few minutes and a store that pays its cutters by the hour would rather push the whole thing into the grinder.
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What comes out of a pot after 3 hours is meat with a texture no other cut on the animal will give you. Silky is the only word for it. It holds together in one piece and then gives way the second a
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And be done at 9:00 in the morning. Second, and this is the funny one, it has too many names. Heel of round, Pikes Peak Roast, Denver Pot Roast, Gooseneck.
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Now, I owe you a story about that. Walt trained me. He came home from Korea in the '50s, took a job cutting meat because somebody's uncle knew somebody and never did another thing for the rest of his life. When I started, cheeks went
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Same muscle, four labels depending on who wrote the sign that day. A cut with four names has no name at all and a cut with no name has no price, so it goes cheap. $4 to $6 a pound and it is.
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and cheeks went into it, and he never once rang it up, and no manager ever asked him a single question about it. He told me a cheek was worth more than a sirloin, and that the difference was that nobody had told anybody yet. $6 to
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Boneless, which means every ounce you carry out is edible weight. Set that against 14 a pound for something half made of bone and the gap is not close.
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cuts on this list before I am done talking. Number three, the shoulder clod. Now, we move from cuts to a whole piece because this is where the real money is.
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Cook it wet and cook it long. 4 hours at 300 with liquid halfway up. It shreds into strings and the pot liquor goes thick and glossy on its own without anybody adding a thing to it.
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Inside it, there are several distinct muscles. Some are genuinely tender, including a small one that eats close to a tenderloin, and some are heavily worked with beautiful thick seams of collagen running through them, which is what you want for the pot. In one piece
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Honest limit because I am not going to oversell you the cheap one. The heel is lean.
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Not with lies. Nobody in the trade lies about what is in the package. It is arranged by what is fast to cut, easy to price, easy to stack, and quick to move.
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There is almost no fat running through it, so it brings you gelatin and it does not bring you richness. Put fat in the pot with it. A piece of navel from number five or a spoon of tallow or a.
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label. The system does not care that there is a steak buried in there. It cares that the package weighs 4 lb and sells before Sunday.
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Couple of strips of bacon in the bottom of the pan. Number six, the beef neck. Neck bones in a tray or boneless neck meat if your store bothers to cut it, which most do not. Look at a neck bone and you are.
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for you. Number two, beef tendon. Now I am going to lose some of you and the ones who stay are going to eat very well.
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Looking at the closest thing on the entire animal to what is in your oxtail tray. A regular knobby bone, meat worked in between the sections, joints and cartilage all through it and marrow inside. It eats the same way, too. You.
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in it at all. It is pure connective tissue and that is precisely the point. Everything I have told you for the last 20 minutes has been about buying collagen. Tendon is collagen with nothing else attached. It is the concentrated form of the exact
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Gnaw it. You get your fingers in it. That specific pleasure of working meat off an awkward bone, which is a real part of why people love oxtail and nobody ever admits it out loud, the neck gives you for two to $4 a pound.
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Here is how to use it and this is not a dish, it is a tool. 1 lb of tendon goes in the pot alongside whatever else you are braising 4 to 6 hours and it needs every one of those hours because it will
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That muscle group holds up a head that weighs as much as a bag of cement all day, every day for the animal's whole life. Nothing on a steer works harder except a cheek and the cheek is coming at number four.
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braise it whole in dim sum. Neither tradition considers this exotic. It is Tuesday. The honest limitation, and it is a real one. Cooked short, tendon is genuinely unpleasant, and I am not going to pretend it is not. Cooked long, it goes
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Southern kitchens have known this forever. Neck bones and rice, neck bones and gravy, neck bones with greens.
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That is the one on this list that a restaurant would rather you never learned. Now, before number one, I want to take something back. I have told people for years that beef shank is oxtail. Same thing, cheaper, buy shank.
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That was not a poverty dish or it was not only that. It was people who understood what a working muscle does in a pot when it is given 4 hours.
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it does not give you is the shape. An oxtail is small bundles of muscle wrapped around joint sections. So, every piece comes out of the pot as its own little round thing with a bone in the middle, and you eat it with your hands.
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Braise them until the meat gives up and falls off. Then here is the step almost everybody skips.
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Same silk, same richness, more of it, but it does not hand you that knuckle to gnaw on.
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Take the bones out, pull every scrap off them with your fingers, put the meat back in the pot and throw the bones away. What you have then is oxtail.
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and I am not going to lie to you and say it does. Neck bones come the closest, which is why they are at number six.
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Number one, beef shank. $4.99 a pound where I saw it this week. The shank is the lower leg, front or back, and the big muscle in a hind shank is the gastrocnemius, which is the calf muscle, the same one you have. Cut across the
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bone into thick discs, which is how you want it. You get exactly what is on your screen.
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Bundles of dark red muscle, each one wrapped in its own white sheath, arranged around a ring of bone with marrow sitting in the middle of it. Look at that cross-section because everything I have said today is visible in it.
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Every one of those white lines is collagen. That is the gelatin sitting there raw, waiting on 4 hours in some liquid. And the marrow in the center is doing what the marrow in an oxtail does, which is melt out into the pot and make
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it rich. That leg carried a 1,200 lb animal around a field for 2 years.
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Nothing works harder for longer, which is the whole reason it is loaded and the whole reason it is cheap. And there is the thing I have been walking you toward for seven cuts. Gelatin is not rarity, gelatin is work. That is the whole
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business in five words. And once you have it, you will never look at a meat case the same way again. The animal did not know it was building a delicacy at one end and a bargain at the other.
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Every muscle that did a job came out full of the same substance. We drew the lines afterward and then we priced the lines.
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And here is the naming business one more time since we are at the end. Call it beef shank and it is $5 a pound in a tray on the bottom shelf. Cross cut it, put it on a menu, and call it osso buco,
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and you know what happens to the number. Same leg, same animal, same white rings of collagen. Different word. How to cook it? Salt it the night before if you have the time. Brown the discs hard in a dry
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heavy pot, both faces, until they are genuinely dark and do not crowd them. Onions in after, then your liquid to about halfway up, never to cover. Lid on, 300°, 3 to 4 hours until a fork twists in it with no resistance at all.
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Then here is the finish that people miss. Take the pot off, let it stand 20 minutes, and lift the marrow out of the center of each bone with the handle of a spoon and stir it into the sauce. That
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is your enrichment, and you already paid for it. Now the part that is not on any list because this is what actually separates people who eat well from people who pay well. Most of these seven are not reliably in a case. Some weeks,
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yes. Most weeks, no, because a case gets built around what moves, and what moves is ground beef, chuck roast, and steaks.
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But every one of these exists in that building. They are inside larger pieces in the cooler in the back, and the person behind the counter can get to them if you know what to ask for.
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Here is how to ask so the answer is yes. Do not ask for the retail name. Ask for the piece it lives in. For shank, you say, "Do you have whole beef shanks in the back and can you cross cut me some
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at an inch and a half?" For the heel, you say, "Do you have a gooseneck round and can you take the heel off it for me?" For the clod, you say, "Do you have a whole shoulder clod in the bag and can I
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buy it uncut?" For navel, you say, "Do you get beef plate in and when?" For cheeks and for tendon, you say, "Can you order these and how much notice do you need?" Two things make this work and both are free. Go on a weekday morning
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before 10:00 because that is when the cutting is happening and the person has time to talk. Saturday afternoon, they are drowning and the answer is no because no is faster. And ask the same person every time and learn their name
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and use it. A cutter who knows your face will put things aside for you that never touch the case at all. That is not a trick. That is how the trade is always run and the reason nobody does it
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anymore is that we stopped talking to the people who handle our food. Nobody paid me to make this. There is no seasoning company, no knife company, no code in the description. I am a retired butcher with opinions.
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Now, let me widen this out because there is a reason I care about it more than a stew deserves. The cattle herd in this country is the smallest it has been since the early 1950s.
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That is a count, not an argument. Fewer cattle, less beef, and the number on that yellow label only travels one direction. And I want to be careful here because oxtail is not a fashion to everybody. For a great many families, it
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is Sunday, it is a grandmother's pot, it is the smell of a particular house. That is not a trend and I am not going to talk about it like one. What happened is that the rest of the country found out
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what those families already knew and the price went where prices go when a lot of people want a thing there is only one of per animal. So, I am not telling you to stop eating oxtail. I am telling you
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what I told my own family. When a thing you have always eaten goes to $14 a pound, you do not give up the dish, you look at the animal again.
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You have not been priced out of beef, you have been priced out of one tail.
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There is one tail on a steer, and there are four shanks, two cheeks, a neck, a heel, and 20 lb of shoulder, and all of it does the same work in the same pot, and most of it does more of it. Here is
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your homework. Ask for beef shank crosscut at an inch and a half. Ask what day the plate comes in. Ask them to order you cheeks and a pound of tendon.
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Go on a weekday morning before 10:00 and learn the name of the person who cuts.
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And tell me in the comments what town you are in and what oxtail costs by the pound at your store this week. Just the town and the number. I read every one of them, and I keep a list because I want
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to see what is actually happening out there, and nobody is going to tell me on the news.
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Next time I am going to show you the pot itself, how to build a braise that sets up like jelly in the refrigerator overnight out of any cut on this list.
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There is exactly one mistake that guarantees it never will, and it happens in the first 20 minutes before the lid ever goes on, and almost everybody makes it. I am going to show you that mistake first, so you never make it again.
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Until then, keep your knives sharp. Buy the muscle, not the name.
Topics:oxtailbudget meatscollagengelatinbutcher tipsFrank MillerCostco meatbraising meatmeat cutsslow cooking
