Beef cheek meat for barbacoa, great quality but very expensive

Tongue and cheeks go together for breakfast

We love these beef cheeks. I cook them sous vide at 180F for 13 hours. I use the juice from the sous vide bag to make a pan sauce. it is delishes.

Slow braised for a stew great beefy flavor. These are not trimmed or cleaned of heavy fat. Comes out close in price to chuck after trimming but a much nicer flavor.

There is a lot of scraggly bits that need to be trimmed off. That isn't waste!!! I took the beef cheeks, seasoned them and put them on the smoker. I removed as much of the sinew that I could, then seasoned up the trimmed pieces and put them on the smoker too. After about four hours on the smoker, I took all of it (beef cheeks and trimmings) and put them in two half pans (one for the beef cheeks and one for the trimmings). I braised them with onions, sliced garlic and beef stock. After another four hours in the oven, I took them out. The cheeks were sliced and the trimmings were shredded. I ended up with more barbacoa (by weight) than what the beef cheeks weighed. There is a lot more meat in those trimmings than what you would think. You still will have some sinew to remove after the braising of the trimmings. The rest makes a wonderful barbacoa. When you do it the way I did, there isn't much waste. Even as a percentage of what you start with and what you end up with, you trim off more fat and silver skin off a brisket than what you lose from the beef cheeks. You just have to know the cut of meat you are working with and what to do with what you trim away. I plan on buying another pack (or two) by this weekend.

These cheeks are not trimmed. By the time I was done trimming I had about 50% waste between the fat and sinue. I smoked them and they were just delicious. Would buy again? Just know that you loose aboy half the weight to trimming.

Over half of this was fat and gristle. I expected there to be a good bit of waste, but this was u acceptable. Once trimmed it was too much $ per pound of meat. It was delicious, just too much waste.

I'm familiar with beef cheeks and the need to trim them, but there's so much extraneous trash on these that after trimming them properly, 5 lbs turned into 1-1/2 lbs for $23. Delicious, but hardly a bargain.

I bought a 7+ lb package of the beef cheek meat. There were three main chunks of meat in there. One of them had about 1 to 2 ounces of meat on it and the rest was all skin & fat. The other two had more meat, but not much. After I got it trimmed down to meat with some decent fat on it, I had about 2.5 lbs of meat. Everything else went in the trash. Complete waste of money.

I have seen good and bad beef cheek meat, I think these are the leftovers from the bad one, its really just a bunch of Fat, if you don't have the chance to go and select it by yourself don't order it online as I did because you will get just horrible, hard, thick, white fat...