Scoop: Meat-Lovers’ Alert! The Good Butcher Is Coming This Fall
If you're grateful for what the Cheese Shop brought to the Des Moines cheese scene, you'll love what this visionary butcher is doing for the meat scene.
Lucky Sherman Hill! (Well, lucky Des Moines, really!) This autumn, we’re getting one of the most promising food-retail operations to open in Des Moines’s core since the Cheese Shop came to town. Calvin Schnucker, who’s worked as a butcher since he was in college at the University of Iowa, is opening “The Good Butcher”—a shop that will butcher whole animals that have been humanely and sustainably raised, including locally sourced non-GMO and grass-finished options. It will be located in the historic Crescent Chevrolet building, next door to HomeGrown Kitchen.
Oh, and Terry Boston (former long-time chef at The Des Moines Golf and Country Club) is involved as well. Read on!
I sat down last week to get the lowdown from Schnucker. Here’s where he’s been—and where he’s going.
Tiny-Fridge Beginnings
Schnucker started his meat odyssey curing sausage in a little mini-fridge he bought while attending the University of Iowa. He launched his professional career around 16 years ago with a summer job in the meat department of Fareway Supermarket.
After graduation, he worked full-time at Fareway while waiting for his wife to finish her final year in school. But soon, he craved a deeper understanding of animal butchery in general.
“After working there about three years, I knew everything about how to cut meat that came from a box, and I could tell you everything about how to cook with it. Yet I couldn’t have told you where a chuck roast came from on the animal.”
He asked his managers to bring in a side of beef to butcher in house as training opportunity. “All the guys over 50 knew how to do it” he explained, but alas, whole-animal butchery was no longer done in-house.
Around that time, he happened upon a book called The Butcher’s Guide to Well-Raised Meat. “It answered so many of my questions,” he said. “Where does the animal come from? How do we get the most from it? How do we honor this animal by using it ‘nose-to-tail.’”
The book set him on a different course. Having learned all he could from Fareway, Schnucker signed on at Bud’s Custom Meats in Riverside, a meat locker where he learned to butcher whole animals.
“Making His Bones”
As young 20-somethings often do, the couple moved around from there. “The great thing about being a butcher is you can find work just about anywhere,” said Schnucker. With each job, the work grew steadily more in line with the kind of butchering he truly wanted to do.
In Berea, Kentucky, where his wife attended graduate school, he worked with a meat processor that supplied grass-finished beef to Whole Foods. “These guys were influenced by [the author, poet, farmer, and environmental activist] Wendell Berry,” explains Schnucker, adding that they raised their own cattle, which grazed on pastures after horses had had their fill (horses only eat the top layer of grass, while cattle graze more deeply). After the cattle had their fill, in came the chickens to forage on what was left.
From there, Schnucker went to Colorado, where he worked as a butcher for five years for Innovative Foods in Evans—a custom meat processor that butchered livestock provided by local and regional family farms and ranches.
The pandemic, the birth of the couple’s first child, and a desire to be closer to family brought them back to Des Moines, where he butchered at Craft Station Meats in Waukee for three years—from the shop’s debut until last summer.
“By then, I’d ‘made my bones,’ as they say. It was time to open my own shop,” he said.
Autumn Feast: “The Good Butcher"
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Schnucker hopes to open The Good Butcher in October. When I asked him for specifics about the kinds of cuts he’d offer—and when I mentioned I’d kill for a 7-bone pot roast that actually had a 7-bone in it (most are boneless these days)—he said:
“Because we will be starting with whole animals, we will be able to help customers source cuts they can no longer find—like true 7-bone roasts. Starting with whole-animal butchery will give us the opportunity to offer hard-to-find cuts like pork secreto that you don’t often encounter in the U.S.”
A few more initiatives that should turn heads among the local food cognoscenti:
• Schnucker is curing his own line of salami made from meat sourced from Kerns Farms, growers of heirloom-breed Mangalitsa pork (a well-marbled pork I often buy at the Iowa Food Coop). These salamis recently debuted at The Cheese Shop (833 42nd St.).
• The shop will carry as much locally sourced meats as possible—including that wonderfully marbled Mangalitsa pork from Kerns Farms.
• In addition to meats, the Good Butcher will also offer an array of homemade sides. These will be crafted by Terry Boston, former executive chef at The Des Moines Golf & Country Club. “We’re all about doing small-batch, high-quality sides,” said Schnucker, adding that the shop will offer everything you need for a meal.
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See you next week, readers!
Always great to find out about someone teaming their talent with enthusiasm! Thanks for sharing this story
Nice work on them letting you make the sides Terry! They’ll probably let you do dishes too!