Beef cheek
cut of beef
Beef cheeks are a cut of beef taken from the heads of beef cattle. Beef cheeks and pig cheeks are both substantial enough to be cut out and sold separately at retail butcher shops and supermarkets. Veal cheeks, taken from a slaughtered calf rather than an adult cow, are smaller, more delicate, and less "meaty" than beef cheeks. Beef or veal cheeks are also known as masseter muscle, and are called joue in French and guancia in Italian (thus to guanciale, salt-cured pork jowl).
Description and uses
Beef cheeks have historically been classified as offal. Beef cheeks are muscle-meat offal (as opposed to the softer organ-meat or viscera offal). Other kinds of muscle-meat offal include oxtail, calf's tongue, and beef heart. The texture of beef cheeks is said to be reminiscent of the texture of tongue or oxtail.
Removing beef or veal cheeks from a whole head entails "using a boning knife...make a cut under the eye to the bone. Keeping your knife on the bone, cut down and around the edge of the mouth to the jawbone to lift off the cheek meat in one piece." According to a 1919 report on the North American meatpacking industry:
Beef cheeks are the heavy muscles of the jaw and head.
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This entry incorporates text from “Beef cheek” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.