How to isolate staphylococcus aureus from freshmeat?

Answer 1

You could run the meat through a blender, strain out the juice, filter that with something along the lines of a 2 um filter then plate 100 ul aliquots on mannitol salt agar plates, incubate at 37C for 24 hours.

If there is growth you have a Staphylococcus, if the media turns yellow you have a S. aureus.

(That's how I'd approach it without looking anything up specifically in a food microbiology reference.)