Jaccard, the ultimate meat tenderizer

Many years ago, I worked at a meat wholesaler where we had a commercial Jaccard machine, with multiple rows of blades. It was used on lower grade beef rib eyes, they were punched (jaccarded) and marinated, then shaped and frozen and later sliced on a saw while frozen then wrapped to sell. I remember a couple of restaurant buffet steakhouse chains, who served that kind of quality, cheap steak but still tasty from the marinade and tender enough through the use of the machine and a papain based tenderizer.

When we started our store we were the first meat market in the area to offer beef shish-kebobs and we used meat from USDA Choice Beef Sirloin Tips for it. In general this meat was tender enough for the BBQ and as we put a slice of bacon next to the beef the flavor was excellent. But once in a great while we did get a complaint about a piece of meat being chewy. So I remembered the machine from the previous place and looked into it’s cost. We could not afford it! But the salesman at our butcher supply mentioned a hand held model which was affordable. Once we “jaccarded” our beef, our shis-kebob sales went through the roof and we never again had any complaints about tough meat. I remember one year the day before Fourth of July we started with over 100 kebobs made ahead. We had four of us sticking more and one person who just cleaned and cut onions and green peppers. We sold them as fast as we could make them and had customers standing in line waiting for them. “How many?’ “4” “here, thank you”, “How many?’ “3” “here, thank you”, “How many?’ “6” “here, thank you”, “How many?’ “2” “here, thank you”, this went on all day.

Our YouTube video shows you this great gadget as I “jaccard” a Pork sirloin roast for pork kebobs or city chicken.

We gave a few of them as presents to our friends and we know they all use it regularly and would not want to be without it anymore.

We saw this machine quite often with one row of blades, they are usually a bit cheaper but we recommend the one with three rows as this makes the job a lot easier.

If you are interested in buying one of them, the Amazon.com link here has a decent price for a three row Jaccard Tenderizer and clicking on this link to buy it will earn us a small commission which helps to keep this site going.

We rate this machine, besides our knives and cutting boards, as one of the biggest money saver, “must-have” gadgets in our kitchen.

Jaccard update