Mat Valley Meats expands into specialty gourmet products

MAT-SU — Summer in Alaska brings with it favored pastimes for residents and tourists — fishing and big game hunting.

After spending a great deal of time and money planning a trip and buying gear, plus all the work of getting a catch, it’s important to make sure the proper care is taken in the processing of the meat for you and your family’s enjoyment. Mat Valley Meats is an excellent choice for those who want options.

“Steak, roasts, burgers, jalapeño-cheese hotdogs, summer sausage — those are really popular,” owner Nate Burris said. “We make about 10,000 pounds of peppersticks and at least 7,000 pounds of jalapeño-cheese hotdogs (in a season).”

Recently, Mat Valley has added specialty meats, including sausages, salamis and paté through processes not found in any other processing company in the state.

“Even if you go to Seattle, you may find one or two places who will do this,” Burris explained.

He works with chef François Vecchio who moved to the Valley from the San Francisco Bay area in California to produce these dry-cured products.

“There are no schools to learn this, to make these types of dry-cured products. It’s an old European craft,” Burris said.

With help from Vecchio, Mat Valley Meats hosts seminars in the shop to teach people what’s involved in the process.

Recently, in addition to updating the look of the store, Burris brought in a new device to help in the endeavor for great specialty meats, a Celletta shipped to the store directly from Italy. This enclosed drying room pulls double duty in drying and curing meat products for the best results.

Typically, hunters bringing a moose to be processed can expect to a wait of a week to 10 days. During Mat Valley’s busiest time, the end of hunting season, it’s realistic to expect up to a three-week turnaround time. At one point, Burris recalls having 273 tickets waiting in the queue, each with varied processing requests.

Burris said that it’s less that the business is all that busy, but when clients order smoked he also has to accumulate orders for 400 pounds of meat before he fires up the smoker.

Burris said what sets Mat Valley Meats apart from the competition is a combination of a well-equipped facility and services that make game processing as convenient as possible. The business has extensive storage space and during its peak period at the end of moose hunting season processes thousands of pounds of meat a day.

If you are hunting in rural Alaska, getting the meat to Anchorage or the Valley is an issue, especially when you’re talking about a large moose or bear. To make that process easier for hunters, Mat Valley Meats offers a service that will pick up meat at the airport and bring it to the shop for processing. If you are hunting with out-of-state visitors, Mat Valley Meats also will box and ship the meat for you if needed.

“We box, ship, just about any service you can imagine,” Burris said about the processing.

For those more interesting in angling this summer, Mat Valley also processes fish. Options include vacuum packaging, smoking and storage for an additional fee.

As a butcher shop, Mat Valley Meats has a wide selection of Alaska Grown meat products. A big promoter of local agriculture, Burris said he has a very particular selection process for the meat he brings into the shop. He said he looks for the best quality for his customers. In his case, you can find beef, chicken, pork, buffalo and an extensive variety of specialty meats to please any palate.