Telling lamb from beef.

T

Taffy Wake

Registered Senior Member
gidday,
i'm convinced that kebab shops sell lamb and call it beef.:( common hearsay states that the lebanese mostly don't use beef in cooking and the taste of kebab meat seems to be like lamb to me.

how can the difference be told at a consumer level? and what should i do about the dodgy operators? :confused: well, that would mean all of them probably...but it bugs me as i loathe lamb and seem to get it whenever i order a kebab.

:mad:

help me...baaaaaaaa
 
Get chicken kebabs, they're about 80 times better anyway.

But then who knows what they're made of? Those sweaty hunks they have spinning on those rods at the back could be made of hog anus for all I know.
 
chicken? yee gods man, have you lost your mind??????

:eek:


never, i say never eat the chicken man!


so, what do you think the 'brown' meat is?

t
 
Could it be that you just don’t like the taste of kebabs? :p

But because I’m incredibly bored, I looked around, and it would seem like your right. Lamb and Beef are used (donor kebabs are always supposed to be lamb, ‘sheep on a stick’ is the apparent translation). http://www.derbyshire.gov.uk/news/newsstory.asp?ID=174 is an interesting article, which shows that a beef kabab is likely to be cow, pig, sheep and bird all in one. The way to complain would be to write to the Trading Standards Officer if your in the uk…
 
do you mean the dark meat of a chicken? It's the short, burst muscle tissue of the bird. Unlike mammels, where the short burst muscle cells and the long steady-state muscle cells are mixed up (which is why we have pink meat), birds, fish, insects, etc, all have their muscle types in specific groupings, the location and shape of which is determined by the need of the animal.

The same reason why a birds legs have dark meat (for those instances where running from bush to bush is imoprtant), and their breast has white meat (for pumping their wings slowly and steadily over a long time period), fish have dark meat in a line along the sides of the body (allowing for the C-start defence; it move the fish out of the attack range of a preditor), and white meat in O-shaped rings along the entire body (for steadyly pushing them foreward through the water)
 
thanks wee bee and river wind.

riverwind, i actually meant what is the dark meat at the kebab shop...ie NOT the chicken.

so, can an infidel off the street tell them apart?
 
Although it's not easy to tell, there's a few things that can help.

Usually in my experience these shops have an upright broiler that turns slowly, with a big piece of meat that they shave slices off with a knife.

When you look at the meat, it's usually one of two things:
1) a bunch of pieces of meat jammed together on a skewer.
2) one big lump of processed-looking stuff.

The processed-looking stuff is (I believe) what they call Donair Meat. Donair meat is a pressed lump of processed or mechanically recovered meat, and in theory can include any kind of meat that is regulated in your home country...

Most often Donair meat is beef, lamb, or goat or some combination of the three. (Internet recipes for making the stuff generally suggest beef - the result that they describe sounds like meat loaf to me.)

If it's pieces of meat all jammed together, then it could be anything, but usually with unprocessed meat it's easier to tell by the flavour what it is.

Hope this helps...
 
ah, sorry, I mis-read your post.


Yeah, it's some pretty uncertain matter on that kabob stick - I believe in the US that if the meat hunk is 51% beef, then they can sell it as proccessed beef (even if the other 49% is, say, pork, and "Pork products" is listed on the ingredients lable. That whole "Natural Flavors" thing has long weirded me out. What flavors are we talking about? Cow urine?). I think that this is the case, but I could be confused with Pet food regulations.

You should look into what's in pet food sometime yuck. At least the kabob shouldn't have any metal or plastic in it.
 
Incidentally, Donair meat is the big popular new pizza topping these days... that's why I looked it up originally 'cause I didn't know what it was.

So, when you order a pizza with Donair meat, you never know what you're really asking for. You always get a surprise!

:eek: Ick.
 
my meat rule is "don't eat it unless it's beef". it keeps me safe and free from food poisoning. donair....*shudder*:eek:
 
you know some places compress dog and cat meat into what would look like beef... no really you never know!

Chicken sucks in any form, I know. But lamb, duck... Keep your tastebuds open, beef may be boring.
 
I usually don't eat any other meat than turkey, and select fish species. I'll eat other meats sometimes, but I stay away from beef whenever possible. I hate beef. And the thing I hate most is processed meat that you can't identify, like hotdogs or fish sticks, yuck!
 
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