Spoils from a cow party

A few months back, I got roped into joining in on a co-op purchase of a whole cow that was estimated to come in at around 600 pounds. It was grass fed, organically raised, and was to be humanely butchered, packaged, and frozen. I made an initial $200 deposit, and this morning I paid the $290.50 balance at what was billed as a “Cow Party”.

Thirteen of the “partners” got together at 11:30am to draw lots to form a line to take turns choosing individual cuts from the cow. Though it was just one entire cow, the butcher threw in some additional tongues, testicles, and other additional offal for us to select from as well.

Here’s what was included in my 18 turns:
1.2 lb New York steak, bone in
1.0 lb New York steak, bone in
1.2 New York steak, bone in
1.4 lb Ribeye, bone in
0.5 lb top sirloin steak
0.5 lb top sirloin steak
2.4 lb bottom round roast
2.5 lb beef tritip large
0.4 lb top sirloin steak
1.9 lb beef short ribs
1.1 lb stew beef
1.1 lb stew beef
1.1 lb stew beef
1.2 lb beef cheek
1.4 lb beef oxtails
0.9 lb beef oxtails
1.4 lb beef testicles
1.3 lb beef fat

Everyone also went home with an additional box of ground beef. Mine contained 16 packages of 1lb each of ground meat as well as 2.2lbs of beef ground with heart and 0.9lbs of beef ground with liver.

This comes out to 41.6 pounds of meat in all and price of roughly $11.78 per pound.

Sadly I missed out on some nice shoulder cuts, some tongue, and I had tried to get some tripe instead of the testicles, but alas, there were apparently other menudo fans in our group.

My freezer is chock full of some serious meat for a while. Most of the cuts are fairly straightforward and I’ve already got a good idea of what I’m going to do with them. I will have to take a peek at what I ought to do for the Rocky Mountain Oysters. I’m leaning toward turning them into some delicious tacos, but I’ll take any suggestions from those who’ve done other variations before.

I do want to make an inventory of the price per pound for individual cuts versus typical markets to see how the pricing works out, as I suspect that some likely did better than others within the “lottery” system this set up. The tough part will be finding local markets that purvey this high a quality of meat for a reasonable comparison.

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Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

4 thoughts on “Spoils from a cow party”

  1. Chris, I only occasionally (a few times a year) ate beef when I was growing up in the West Indies. Small mountainous volcanic islands don’t have the flat land and resources to raise cattle. I ate chiefly fish, chicken, goat and lamb and the fish were almost invariably freshly caught that day. The chicken was always purchased frozen and was imported.
    My wife is a vegetarian. The kids and I are not but we infrequently eat beef outside of the weekend summer burger. And in recent years not even that. My son won’t touch beef so we’ve switched to turkey burgers from the local poultry farm.
    How are you doing to eat that much beef that quickly? How will you prevent freezer burn? Looking forward to seeing your recipes.

    1. I’ve generally been a lot closer to your diet for the past several years and don’t eat much beef except for an occasional hamburger or a dinner out at a high end steakhouse.

      The nice part is that it’s all a much higher quality and healthier than I could purchase at the vast majority of local purveyors. Even with all this meat, I’ve only been thawing and eating something from it once every week and a half, so it may take a while. The haul I got was specially vacuum packed and professionally frozen, so I’m not too concerned about freezer burn. I’ve done a few of the nicer cuts already and done a nice winter stew. I suspect that things will get more creative as I move down the cut list.

      I do remember that Jeremy Cherfas did an episode on frozen beef for Eat This Podcast a while back that I found interesting. You might appreciate it as well as some of his episodes on beer.

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