(Cooking Light)
-- A large herd's worth of beef cattle has passed through the Cooking
Light Test Kitchen over the past 24 years, almost all of it
standard-issue, grain-fed supermarket meat.
But with beef, as with everything in the American diet, change is afoot.
Shoppers
are seeing more and more grass-fed beef in regular grocery stores,
along with meat from breeds marketed as special (like Angus), and meat
from organically raised animals.
The local/sustainable movement
has been singing the praises of the grass-fed cow, while the grain-fed
industry has been under attack by food activists.
The grass-fed
cow, which eats from a pasture and is not "finished" on a diet of grains
and supplements for rapid weight gain, is said by its promoters to be
better for the planet (less energy goes into growing grass than grain);
better for the beef eater (less overall fat, and more omega-3s and other
"good" fats); and better for the cow (critics decry feedlot practices
as inhumane).
In this article, though, we're looking not at meat
politics but at three things that most cooks are acutely interested in:
price, taste, and nutrition.
Price may be the first thing you
have noticed about grass-fed beef: In supermarkets, small-production,
grass-fed meat can be a lot more expensive than your average grain-fed
beef, just as artisanal cheese costs more than industrial cheddar.
Cooking Light: Six ways to save on beef
But
the cook will notice that the meat often looks different, too --
sometimes a lot darker, often with less of the coveted fat-marbling you
see in the highest-grade grain-fed meat.
To dive into the
subject, we bought half a cow. Specifically, we bought half of a
648-pound Brangus cow, pasture-raised by Alabama farmer Melissa
Boutwell, who is pretty local: She works about 175 miles from our main
editorial offices.
Boutwell Farms supplies regional restaurants, which have included James Beard Award-winning Chef Frank Stitt's restaurants in Birmingham.
We
talked to Boutwell about her husbandry. We saw our meat through the
butchering process, took delivery of 243 pounds of meat (plus bones) cut
to our specifications, and conducted blind tastings in our Test
Kitchen.
Cooking Light got 243 pounds of Brangus, cut to order.
We learned that we could dodge supermarket prices by buying in bulk:
Our cost per pound of Boutwell's beef was $5.32, including everything
from ground beef to liver to filet mignon, which made it only marginally
higher than similar quantities of regular grain-fed beef prices in
local supermarkets, and a lot less than we would have paid for premium
grass-fed or grain-fed meat.
As for nutrition, we put
fat-content claims to the test by sending some of our finest grass-fed
steaks for nutritional analysis, along with supermarket and specialty
grain-fed cuts.
And on the matter of taste, we confirmed that
grass-fed beef can be delicious and versatile but, if it comes from a
lean cow like the one we bought, requires careful cooking lest the extra
effort of buying it go to waste on the plate.
(We're still
cooking our way through steaks, ground beef, chuck, roasts, and ribs,
plus bones and organs, and we will provide beef recipes from our
grass-fed project as the year goes on.)
Buying
beef directly from farmers not only is a logical next step in the "buy
local" movement but also hearkens back to the way many of our parents or
grandparents bought meat.
All you need is to do some digging
for local suppliers and buy a good-sized freezer (you'll find our primer
on sourcing and buying online at
CookingLight.com/features).
Some readers are already doing it, as we learned after putting the word out on
Facebook, and one benefit of bulk buying is that it obliges the cook to experiment and enjoy less familiar cuts of meat.
"Purchasing
a quarter cow was very educational," says Cooking Light reader Julie
Lineberger. "I had never even cooked a roast, and now I am comfortable
with roasts, brisket, and all sorts of cuts."
Of course, most
cooks won't want to buy a whole grass-fed cow or even a half-cow. One
option is to "cowpool" with curious friends.
Read the rest of the story and get recipes too!
