Get Your Juices Flowing with Carnivore: A Butcher’s Secrets for Perfectly Cooked Meats

With 60 inventive recipes and extensive butchery info, this book will get any meat lover’s juices flowing

Butcher, chef, and meat-lover Dominique Rioux lives in Montreal, Canada, home to smoked meat meccas like Schwartz’s Deli and steakhouses like Joe Beef. She earned a diploma in retail butchering from Montreal’s culinary arts school in 2013—where she was the only woman in her class and won an award of excellence. Dominique has a dynamic personality that’s splashed all over her engaging first cookbook, Carnivore. If you’re a fan of porky puns, meaty metaphors, and Wagyu wordplay, you’ll love Dominique’s playful writing style.

Cookbook review

Originally published in French, Carnivore has been translated into English with chapters devoted to Beef, Pork, Lamb, Offal, Veal, Poultry, and Farmed Game, each organized by cut of meat, including helpful buying information and innovative recipes for retail cuts. Each chapter opens with anatomical drawings showing where wholesale and retails cuts come from on the animal, followed by an at-a-glance table that specifies retail cuts within the wholesale cuts and the best cooking methods for each cut.

The recipes call for meat cuts based on French-Canadian artisan butchery, and the terms don’t always match up with US or Canadian English butcher terms. To slice through any confusion, a handy 14-page “Meat Translator” at the back of the book features clear English, Alternate English, Quebec French, and French terms for multiple meat cuts. For instance, gîte de bœuf = beef shank. The translation of these cuts is a standout feature of Carnivore, allowing meat lovers in various countries to understand terms used in other countries and to cook choice cuts that may be less well-known in their home country.

The back of the book also features osteology drawings, showing the bone structure of every animal covered in Carnivore, along with bone names and a helpful guide to meat cuts that are related to bones, such as “blade roast.” If you want to think like a butcher, know the whole animal, and be more conversant at the meat counter—in a couple different languages—this book helps you get there.

Up front, Dominique gamely explains all the meat cookery basics like toughness and tenderness, meat grades, food safety, and cooking methods. A section on tempering meat explains her logic behind using the method: “meat that is at room temperature will sear much more quickly without cooling down the heat source used for cooking. This will give the surface a nice crisp, even crunchy texture.” She goes on to explain the Maillard reaction, meat aging, and how she salts meat before cooking but only adds spice rubs after searing meat to avoid the bitterness of burnt spices. Dominique prefers to rest meat after cooking “to give it time to adjust and find its balance between two states: cooking and non-cooking.” She also explains meat doneness temperatures and carryover cooking.

Beautiful food photography brightens almost every page, including finished plates of food, huge sides of meat, and retail cuts with diagrams and cut marks showing how to butcher various primals and subprimals. It’s very useful info for saving money on meat: buy bigger cuts and butcher them yourself instead of paying your butcher to do it. Various graphs and illustrations also provide details on the best cooking methods for various cuts along with novel recipes.

60 Recipes

Carnivore features 60 original recipes that utilize the meat cuts detailed in the book. Many are destined for the grill or smoker, and some for the stove. Try easier weeknight dishes like Chicken Legs with Roasted Carrots, Pistachios, and Feta or splurge on fancier fare such as Filet Mignon with Bone Marrow, Escargots, and Arugula Pesto. For the adventurous, there are daring dishes like Calf Brain Popcorn with Pesto Parmesan Mayo and Deer Frenched Center Cut Chop with Sea Buckthorn and Bacon Marmalade.

Some of Dominique’s methods and techniques don’t line up perfectly with the Meathead Method used throughout this website, but they still yield excellent results. For instance, when using the Texas Crutch on racks of ribs, we recommend wrapping them for a maximum time of 1 hour. Dominique wraps her ribs for 2 hours, using a 2-2-1 method: smoke for 2 hours, wrap for 2 hours, and then baste with sauce in the smoker for 1 hour. To taste the results, check out her recipe for Spareribs + Baby-Cue Sauce + Apricots, which she generously agreed to share with us.

For juicy smoked brisket, Dominique uses an injection of beef stock, beef tallow, soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce and seasoned vegetable cocktail (V8). She chills the injected brisket overnight, then smokes it between 250 and 275°F to an internal temp of 175°F. Then she sprays it with cola, wraps it in butcher paper with a little more cola and continues smoking it at 275°F to an internal temp of 190°F. Then she lets it rest, wrapped, for about 45 minutes, before unwrapping and slicing. Curious? Try it yourself with her recipe here for Brisket + Smoke + Cholesterol.

Other inventive recipes include beef stew baked in a pumpkin; grilled lamb T-bones with tabouli and garlic yogurt; and a wheel of brie wrapped in thin-sliced beef ribeye that’s seared on the grill in a hot cast-iron skillet with some vegetables, and then served with grilled bread. I might be trying that one over the holidays. And if I really need to impress a devout carnivore, I may be serving Dominique’s whole Thor’s hammer (beef shank) injected, smoked, and served with a wick in the marrow and lit like a candle.

Most recipes have no headnotes, but Dominique includes cheeky Notes, Prep Times, Cooking Times, and Yields, saying things like “Serves 6 reasonable people or 4 unreasonable ones” and “Serves 7 armchair athletes or 4 to 5 football players.” All in all, Carnivore is a lively read with sharp observations and very little extra fat from a celebrated Canadian butcher. The book includes enough creative flavor combinations to motivate any meat lover into the kitchen or out to the grill or smoker to sear up something delicious. And if your carnal cravings accompany a penchant for puns, you and Dominique will get along swimmingly. A solid Gold medal.